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THE BULLETIN OF THE CATHOLIC LAYMEN'S ASSOCIATION OF GEORGIA
DR. KINSMAN’S CONVERSION
Former Episcopalian Writes Book on the Reasons Which Led Him to Join
the Catholic Church.
(From The Brooklyn Tablet.)
Dr. Frederick J. Kinsman, formerly Episcopalian
Bishop of Delaware, whose reception into the Church
was announced some months ago, now a layman in
the Church, has written the story of his conversion,
entitled “Salve Mater.” It is an “apology” for his
life in which he sketches his Career not only as a
student, layman minister and Bishop, but also un
veils the struggle of mind and the conflicting emo
tions which surged through his soul during a period
which he describes as a “time of perplexity, fluctua
tions of feeling and judgment, inconsistency and par
alysis of the will” involved in his decision.
“During the past year,” writes Dr. Kinsman in the
opening chapter of the book, which is being
sold by Longmans, Green & Co., “I have
had to make three decisions, vitally important to
myself, and significant to friends as indicating aban
donment of convictions which we have long shared
as the basis of our lives. In the first place, it be
came necessary for me to resign my jurisdiction over
the Diocese of Delaware, of which I had been Bishop
for over ten years; in the second, to renounce the
orders of the Episcopal Church; and in the third, its
communion. These decisions were followed by the
recognition of the duty to seek admission into the
communion of the Roman Catholic Church.”
After stating that the decision about jurisdiction
was reached in December, 1918, and the one about
orders in June, 1919, and both carried into effect in
a letter to the Rt. Rev. Daniel Sylvester Tuttle, pre
siding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the
former Bishop of Delaware gives the reasons for
writing the book.
Former Friends.
“I owe some account of myself to two sets of
people,” he says; “first, to my friends in the Epis
copal Church, especially my people in Delaware, and
second, to my pupils of past years, who will wish to
know the reasons which have forced abandonment of
what they knew to have been firmly held convictions.”
That he should explain to his friends in the Episcopal
Church—to laymen, ministers and Bishops why he
should leave the Episcopal Church and join the Ro
man Catholic Church is reasonable from the fact that
Dr. Kinsman himself had often said to his friends that
the Anglicans who were leaders in the Oxford move
ment and who became Catholics 'did not represent
the most sound and stable elements of the English
Church. I contrasted them unfavorably with Keble,
Pusey, Church and Liddon,” says Dr. Kinsman. “My
three stock examples of the kind of men who 'went
to Rome’ were Newman, W. G. Ward and F. W. Faber,
attracted, respectively, by overemphasis on church
authority, by mere logic and by picturesque devo
tions. They were all good and able men, but not
quite normal. I had a string of illustrations of pecu
liarities and of what I considered false judgments, not
collected maliciously or with any conscious unfair
ness, but as evidence that ought not to be disregarded
that these men were not altogether the equals of
those who, in the same situation, stood by the English
Church.”
After having taken such a prejudiced stand against
former Anglican converts to Catholicism, and hav
ing upheld this stand before his friends in the Protes
tant Episcopal Church, and yet to abandon his for
mer convictions, Dr. Kinsman says: “It is therefore
altogether just that my old friends have recently
been questioning my own sanity. How can one, they
have asked, with chances to learn the best life in the
Anglican communion, ever prefer anything else? It
can only be that he has lost his mind or his char
acter; and the former is the more charitable assump
tion. This is all quite fair, as judging me by my
own old standards, but in being relegated to the awk
ward squad of the feeble-minded, it is some comfort
to reflect in what company, on my own showing in
the days of Anglican complacency, I find myself.”
Why He Joined the Church.
“Why have I abandoned the Episcopal Church for
the Roman Catholic and why did it take so long to
see the duty?” Dr. Kinsman says are the two ques
tions which he has undertaken to answer in his apol
ogy. “To answer the first question,” Dr. Kinsman
writes, “It has seemed necessary to give a detailed
account of my religious education, indicating certain
fixed points which have been decisive in the forma
tion of all my ecclesiastical conceptions; to sum
marize also an experience in ministerial work which
induced the feeling that the Episcopal Church fails
to realize ideals which her teaching has made me re
gard as all-important; and to outline various revisions
of judgment in regard to the Roman Catholic Church,
removing prejudice which, until very recently, would
have kept me out of her communion, and bringing
convictions of the Christian life. I have wished to
put myself on record in regard to changes of view
on important matters for the sake of correcting what
I now regard as erroneous in my former teaching.”
The editor of the Catholic paper, “La Croix,” com
ments on the election of M. Millerand as follows.
“We have favored M. Millerand’s election. His atti
tude achieved during the war and particularly in the
course of the last few months, aroused our confidence
on both national and international policies.”