Religion: New P.B.

• Share

At Miami Beach last week 146 bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church elected a new presiding bishop to succeed Boston's Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill who, after almost twelve years in the post, next month reaches the mandatory retirement age of 68. The new "P.B.": the Rt. Rev. Arthur C. Lichtenberger, 58, Bishop of Missouri since 1952.

The new head of 3,000,000 Episcopalians in the U.S. is the son of an Oshkosh grocer, was educated at Ohio's Kenyon College and the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, Mass. He was dean of Trinity Cathedral in Newark from 1941-48, spent the next three years as professor of pastoral theology at Manhattan's General Theological Seminary. Handsome, jovial "Lichty" Lichtenberger, onetime choir boy, football player and still a devoted Milwaukee Braves fan, holds a solid middle ground between high and low church. He is also known as a wheel in the ecumenical movement. When he heard of his election in Miami Beach, Bishop Lichtenberger went for a swim and wryly told his wife that he would like to keep right on swimming—east. Was he reluctant to take up his new post? "Yes. This is not a thing one chooses."