Church Beats California Institutions to Bequest

By distributing an “authorized version” of a controversial book about Christian Science Church founder Mary Baker Eddy to its 2,500 reading rooms this week, the financially ailing institution stands to gain $92 million left by the book’s author through family wills.

The decision to publish the book--bitterly attacked by critics who accuse church leaders of compromising doctrinal principles for dollars--appears to exclude from the money the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Stanford University, which were to split the bequest if the book wasn’t published and displayed by May, 1993.

Under conditions of the wills of author Bliss Knapp, his wife, Eloise Mabury, and his sister-in-law, Bella Mabury, the church was to publish the book as “authorized” Christian Science literature and display it prominently in “substantially all” Christian Science reading rooms. Otherwise, the money held in trust was to be equally divided between Stanford and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Knapp’s father was a close associate of Eddy. He married the daughter of the wealthy Mabury family of Southern California. The last of the three died in 1973. Under terms of the wills, the church had 20 years to publish the book.

“It’s a compromise of principle for gaining funds necessary to weather the financial crisis provoked by an extreme and ill-conceived plunge into media expansion,” said Stephen Gottschalk, an authority on Christian Science history and a leader in the wave of dissent that has filtered down to local branches of the 150,000-member church. He estimated that church losses in television, radio and magazine enterprises for 1991 could top $80 million.

The five-member board of the First Church of Christ, Scientist of Boston, known as the Mother Church, announced in June that it would publish the book, “Destiny of the Mother Church,” written and first published privately in 1947 by Knapp. The board of directors at that time deemed the book unacceptable for official publication.

Gottschalk and other critics say that the 260-page book comes close to deifying Eddy, who founded Christian Science in 1879 after she became convinced that bodily ills as well as moral ills could be cured by prayer and spiritual understanding rather than through medical treatment.

Eddy never wanted to be viewed as a prophet or a divinity on a par with Jesus, Gottschalk said.

“When she was once asked if she was equivalent to Jesus, she said, ‘Even the question shocked me,’ ” said Gottschalk, formerly a Christian Science publications editor and consultant for 13 years.

But Jack Hoagland, chairman of Monitor Television, the denomination’s cable network, defended the decision to publish the book as part of a current series of 15 biographies of Eddy. Copies of the first three volumes, including Knapp’s book, were shipped to reading rooms this week, he said. Southern California reading rooms had not received copies by Tuesday afternoon.

“We would have published this book whether there was a bequest or not,” said Hoagland, who in the 1980s was manager of the Christian Science Publishing Society, the church’s media arm in Boston.

Hoagland said church officials have “always respected the intellectual integrity and freedom of its authors. Not to publish this book as part of the series would harm the credibility of the series as a whole.”

But Lee Z. Johnson, who had been archivist of the Mother Church in Boston for 30 years until he was fired in March, thinks the opposite is true.

He wrote a seven-page letter to the church board denouncing the Knapp book. Receiving no reply, he wrote to the librarians of all the reading rooms in August, urging them not to sell or display the book.

Johnson told the librarians that a moral issue was involved because a bylaw prohibits “incorrect literature” from being published by the church.

How many librarians will heed Johnson’s plea is uncertain. But if enough boycott “Destiny of the Mother Church,” the Knapp family bequest might pass to the alternative beneficiaries.

“The issue has been blown way out of proportion,” said Gilbert Robinson, senior vice president of Monitor Television. He said trustees of the Knapp trusts had been consulted and appeared satisfied that the church had met the conditions for receiving the bequest.

Harvey W. Wood, chairman of the church’s directors, said the church had not received the funds.

Meanwhile, Carol C. Swenson, senior university counsel at Stanford, said Tuesday that she had a copy of the Knapp family wills and was “monitoring the issue.” Pamela Jenkinson, a spokeswoman for the museum, said, “We are following all aspects of the situation with interest.”