Religion: Priest in Politics

Accompanied by two detectives and a score of newsmen, a plumpish priest in Roman collar and rabat bustled through Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal one afternoon last week. More police were waiting near the platform gate. Two nights before, Rev. Charles Edward Coughlin. radiorator, had whipped a prodigious Hippodrome crowd up into a red-hot frenzy of approval for President Roosevelt's monetary program. He had also stepped on some very important Catholic toes. Now, still parrying newshawks' questions, he swung aboard his train just as it pulled out, settled down for the journey back to Detroit and Royal Oak, Mich, where from his Shrine of the Little Flower he broadcasts Sundays to an estimated 10,000,000.

When Father Coughlin (pronounced Coglin) arrived in Detroit, he quickly got in touch with his burly, bespectacled friend and superior, Bishop Michael James Gallagher. There were matters to be discussed, counsel to be asked. Father Coughlin had got himself into hot water and headlines. Out in the open, where Protestants and Catholics alike could discuss it, was a ruckus which even the Pope at Rome was to hear about.

In April 1931, Orator Coughlin at a Holy Name communion breakfast of New York firemen launched into a spirited eulogy of Mayor "Jimmy'' Walker who was already in bad odor. Soon after, Patrick Cardinal Hayes ruled that no ecclesiastical visitor might address a religious gathering without the Cardinal's permission. Last fortnight the New York archdiocese felt no more kindly toward Father Coughlin when he hustled into Manhattan without bothering to go through the customary formality, as an outside priest, of obtaining permission to speak. Reading of his scheduled address in the newspapers, archdiocesan officials taxed him with the omission. Father Coughlin then asked permission, which was neither granted nor refused. To newsmen last week Father Coughlin offered halting excuses. Saying that he had understood that permission had been obtained by his Hippodrome sponsors, he amended: "I came here with their permission. No. Change that. 'Permission' is not the right word. Say that I came here with their knowledge."

When this apparent discourtesy to his ecclesiastical superiors became known in the archdioceses of Chicago and Philadelphia it was reported that in the future Father Coughlin would be denied permission to speak in either place. Nor would he be welcome in Boston, whose stout-hearted William Henry Cardinal O'Connell flayed Father Coughlin for his "demagogic talk" last year.

Meanwhile statements were flying thick & fast over Spellbinder Coughlin's accusation that Alfred Emanuel Smith, foe of the Roosevelt program, had gone with two Catholic bishops to the House of Morgan to arrange a loan for his Empire State Building. Al Smith warmly denied this, adding: "From boyhood I was taught that a Catholic priest was under the divine injunction to 'teach all nations' the word of God. That includes the divine Commandment: 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.' "