What U.S. Protestant unity needs first of all is some Episcopal unity. Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, president of Manhattan's nondenominational Union Theological Seminary, last week charged the Episcopalians with being notoriously balky on the road to reunion: "All they want to do is talk and pray." Back of the balkiness is the small but powerful Anglo-Catholic wing, the high churchmen who cherish the doctrine of apostolic succession* so devoutly that the only groups they think worth talking to are other apostolic successionists. such as the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches.
Appraising the chances of the plan of church unity proposed by Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and approved by the denomination's General Assembly last month (TIME Cover, May 26), Dr. Van Dusen criticized Episcopal High Churchman John Heuss, rector of Manhattan's old and opulent Trinity Church. The Blake proposal, said Dr. Heuss, "too easily brushes aside the formidable problems involved," notably the need for approval by the decennial Lambeth Conference. But, said Van Dusen, the Lambeth Conference has specifically approved the plan on which the Blake proposal was modeled—the Scheme of Church Union in Ceylon. "Such statements can spring only from lamentable ignorance or from an intention to mislead," scolded Van Dusen. "More than that; they presuppose a view of apostolic succession which large numbers of Episcopal bishops and clergy do not hold." Thus the real issue is whether, in deference to a militant minority, "the great body of that church is still ready to surrender its desire for church union in accordance with principles already approved by world Anglicanism."
As if in reply, the high-church Episcopal executive director of the American Church Union. Canon Albert J. duBois, announced that within a few days "a clear call will go out" from his organization "for Catholic and Orthodox Christians to assume positive leadership of reunion movements." Said he: "The Episcopal Church has achieved a unity with the Old Catholic Churches and the Polish National Catholic Church on the basis of agreement in the truth, and it seems likely that we shall enter into the same type of unity with the great Philippine Independent Catholic Church and, perhaps, with the Lusitanian Church of Portugal and the Spanish Reformed Church." As for the Blake proposal, he placed himself in agreement with the opinion that such a scheme is "not of the holy way of faith and truth but of ecclesiastical organization and political management."
* The theory that every bishop descends, through the physical laying on of hands by his predecessors, from the Apostle Peter himself.