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Chaplain of the Tribe. Johnson goes often to Episcopal churches because Lady Bird, although raised a Methodist, became an Episcopalian after going to St. Mary's, an Episcopal junior college in Dallas. The Johnsons were married in an Episcopal church in San Antonio, and both Luci Baines and Lynda Bird are Episcopalians. At Camp Mystic in Texas, where she spent many summers, Luci often served as chaplain of her tribe because she could "pray so well when called on unexpectedly."
Lynda Bird's engagement to Roman Catholic Bernard Rosenbach is causing an ecclesiastical murmur. The White House refuses to say whether or not she is taking Catholic instruction. The zealous Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State sees the coming marriage as a chance for the Catholic Church to prove the sincerity of its new ecumenical intentions by "permitting Miss Johnson to choose her own clergyman and waiving the traditional Catholic commitment."
Memorial to God? Meanwhile, Johnson has got himself into hot water with some U.S. Protestants. At the presidential prayer breakfast, he remarked that he thought it was too bad that Washington, with its monuments to Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington, did not have a "fitting memorial to the God who made us all."
The Christian Advocate, official biweekly of the Methodist Church, responded by charging that Johnson was "the victim of some faulty theological advice," and called the notion of putting up a memorial to God a "semantic blunder" because it "speaks of God in the past tense." Christianity Today, a conservative Protestant biweekly, said that while it would welcome "a recognition of the historical Christian roots of the nation," the idea of a monument to a generalized God should be dropped.
White House Aide Bill Moyers, who is a Baptist minister, replied that Johnson did not mean a memorial in concrete and stone, but perhaps a place like the prayer room installed in the Senate when he was a Senator. There the proposal died, and Johnson at least came out of it as a man on comfortable and familiar terms with his God.