Word: melishes
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Brooklyn, which is used to fighting words, had a new one: Melish. The battleground was the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, in fashionable Brooklyn Heights...
Holy Trinity's vestrymen have long looked askance at the sayings & doings of their ministers, Rector John Howard Melish, 74, and his son and associate rector, the Rev. William Howard Melish, 38 (TIME, May 3). Son William, a confirmed Communist-liner, is chairman of the Red-fronting National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, and has been associated with at least six other organizations listed as subversive by the Attorney General's office. His father not only tolerates his assistant's political activities, but once referred to them as "the work which the rector himself would have done...
...Consciences Demand. At last, the vestrymen decided to do something about the Melishes. They voted 9 to 1 to petition Long Island's Bishop James Pernette De Wolfe "for separation and dissolution of the pastoral relationship . . ." But spry old Rector Melish was not one to go quietly. He wrote to his congregation telling what the vestry had done...
Last week the battle was in full swing. A "Committee to Retain Our Rector" was busy ringing the doorbells of Holy Trinity's 400-odd voting members, claimed to have 270 signatures already. Though not necessarily agreeing with the Melish political views, the committee's statement said: "We all do agree . . . that they have a right, as we do, to their personal political beliefs, and the further right to engage in such activities, as citizens or as ministers, as their consciences demand...
...Rector Melish stoutly defended his son for "doing the work which the rector himself would have done, had he been 20 years younger." He added: "A free pulpit that utters things that everyone accepts is an absurdity." Father & son issued a joint statement pointing out that an Episcopal minister "is not the employee of the vestry or of a board of trustees. Nor does he speak for the people of his parish in the sense that he must conform to the sentiments of the majority ... To say that he may speak his mind fully in the pulpit, but to deny...