Episcopalians Prepare to Choose Bishop for L.A. Diocese

Seeking divine guidance through alternate sessions of prayer and politicking, 734 Episcopal clergy and lay delegates will meet Friday to choose a new bishop for the six-county Diocese of Los Angeles.

“This will be one of the most critical days in the life of our diocese,” said the Rev. George Regas, rector of 3,000-member All Saints Church in Pasadena, the largest parish in the Diocese and one of the largest in the country.

“The bishop in the Episcopal church is the leader,” he said. “If that person is competent and skillful and has great leadership qualities, then the diocese will be enriched and we will head in the right direction.”

“It’s also possible to elect people as bishop who do not have the capacity to do that, who do not have the experiences and the leadership strength,” Regas said. “And if we do, then we will pay the price for that.

“It is not an insignificant moment.”

Expected to be a teacher, spokesman, spiritual leader and chief executive officer, answerable for everything from the defense of religious doctrine to the accuracy of marriage registers in each of 150 parishes, the new bishop will not face an easy task.

“The job’s a killer,” said the Rt. Rev. Oliver B. Garver Jr., the suffragan (assistant) who has been running the Los Angeles Diocese since the unexpected death of Bishop Robert C. Rusack at age 60 more than 16 months ago. “If you’re tending to one thing, you’re neglecting another.”

Nevertheless, five priests have answered the call to take up the bishop’s crook in a sprawling domain that includes about 80,000 baptized members from Santa Maria in the north to San Clemente in the south, and from the Pacific Ocean east to Needles on the Arizona border.

Henry VIII’s rift with Rome far behind them, the Episcopalians are meeting in the St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church because their own St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral was torn down eight years ago after suffering earthquake damage.

To this day, they do not have a centrally located church big enough to hold the crowd, Garver said.

“To seat 700 people, you don’t need the largest church in Christendom,” the acting bishop said. But he said that spouses and other church members will be eager to observe the election, a rare event.

Founded in 1895, the Los Angeles Diocese has had only four bishops. Their names are written in gold leaf on a lofty throne that is now stored in the lobby of a modest Los Angeles office building that serves as headquarters for the diocese.

Although the Episcopal Church shares much of the pomp and many of the sacraments of Roman Catholicism, it is part of the Anglican Communion, an alliance of 28 national or regional churches that stem from the Church of England and recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as their spiritual leader.

But the election of bishops in the United States sets it sharply apart from the Catholic Church as well as the Church of England, where bishops are appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the prime minister.

The delegates will meet Friday at 12:30 p.m. for Mass, followed by the formal nomination of four candidates by a nominating committee and the expected nomination of at least one more candidate from the floor.

The delegates will then traipse back and forth across a schoolyard to another building where credentials are checked before they cast their ballots, clergy and lay people separately.

Prayers in the church will alternate with balloting in the school building until one candidate wins a majority of both groups.

If there is no winner by Friday evening, time has been set aside for more voting Saturday, but the Catholics will want their church back by Sunday. If no one has been chosen by that time, the balloting may be held again in a few weeks, or the nominating committee may be instructed to start over with new candidates.

Keeping in Touch

Supporters will be in touch with each candidate by telephone in case the less successful vote-getters decide to throw their support to a front-runner.

“It’s done with pomp and panoply, hymns, prayers and an awful lot of arm-twisting,” one priest said. “I’m watching this very closely, as are a lot of people. Only once or twice in the career of an average priest do you get the chance to elect a bishop. You’re really electing a bishop for life.”

The winner will not be inaugurated until the end of April at the earliest. This is because a majority of the bishops and standing committees of all 118 dioceses in the Episcopal Church also have to approve the choice.

Four of the candidates are from the Eastern Seaboard: the Very Rev. Frederick H. Borsch, 52, dean of the chapel at Princeton University; the Rev. Canon Lloyd S. Casson, 52, sub-dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York; the Rev. Thomas F. Pike, 49, rector of the parish of Calvary, Holy Communion and St. George in New York, and the Rev. James A. Trimble, 56, rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia.

Fifth Candidate Chosen

A fifth candidate chosen by the nominating committee, the Very Rev. Alan W. Jones, 47, dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, dropped out after visiting the diocese late last year. A lay delegate then announced that he will nominate the Rev. Charles E. Bennison Jr., rector of St. Mark’s Church in Upland.

Several clergy and lay people agreed that none of the final candidates stood out, either during a nine-day van tour of the diocese by the original candidates late last year or in videotaped interviews with all but Bennison that were distributed to each parish for viewing after Sunday Mass.

“It’s a slate of what the world would call liberals,” one priest said.

The new bishop will have to deal with “concerns about disharmony and disunity . . . suspicion, anger and frustration about current issues and skepticism about future possibilities for working more closely together,” a recent study found.

The study committee also said that he will face daunting problems of ethnic diversity, geographic spread and a shrinking membership.

Speak Highly of Borsch

Several priests spoke highly of Borsch, former dean at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, a seminary in Berkeley at which many local clergymen studied under him. Borsch, the only candidate to hold a Ph.D., is said to be a favorite among the 230 priestly electors.

“At CDSP (the divinity school), he organized the students and the clergy of the diocese into respective basketball teams and he was out there in cutoffs and T-shirts and we all called him coach, not Dean Borsch,” one former student recalled. “He’s an unprepossessing man of immense spiritual integrity and considerable depth.”

But several lay people said that Borsch’s perception as the priests’ choice may count against him in the voting by lay people.

They said Casson made an impact with his outspoken advocacy of social action, Pike impressed observers with his experience in merging three ancient parishes in Manhattan, and Trimble came across as solid but humorous, “very likeable in person,” according to one parishioner. Bennison, son and grandson of Episcopal bishops, is known as a successful suburban priest. If Casson wins, he will be the first black bishop in the Los Angeles Diocese.

“A lot of prayer goes into this sort of thing,” said Donald E. Stocking, a parishioner at St. Luke’s Church in Monrovia. “So far it’s been difficult for our delegates to find somebody who stands out head and shoulders above the others.”