Morehouse Responds to Pope's Death
Diocesan Press Service. June 7, 1963 [XI-19]
NEW YORK, --- Clifford P. Morehouse, president of the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church expressed his grief at the death of Pope John XXIII.
"Never in the history of the Christian Church," he said, "has a Pope been so beloved by men and women outside of his particular household of faith, nor so universally mourned at his death. John XXIII was more than the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church; he was the elder brother in Christ of the faithful of every communion of the Church Universal.
"For us of the Anglican communion, his death brings a special sense of loss. He it was who, for the first time since the Reformation, welcomed the visit of an Archbishop of Canterbury, and who later greeted with brotherly love our own Presiding Bishop."
Mr. Morehouse, who accompanied the Rt. Rev. Arthur Lichtenberger, the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop, to Rome in November, 1961, said:
"We felt ourselves to be in the presence of a holy man, a saintly Christian, and one whose warm human welcome was like a breath of spring. He has indeed transformed the whole ecclesiastical climate of Christendom from the rigors of winter storms to the gentle breezes of springtime."