Heirlooms of UCN History #43
by Will Frank
Gerald FitzPatrick’s April 1937 letter to Frederick May Eliot, upcoming President of the American Unitarian Association, pleading for financial help prompted Eliot to have a report on Norfolk prepared. AUA officer George G. Davis submitted his report on September 2, 1937. It was not encouraging. The Unitarian Church of Norfolk under Harry Lutz, after a promising start, declined to fewer than 20 adults at Sunday worship. Selecting the younger and more dynamic Gerald FitzPatrick as minister did lead to a doubling of attendance. Yet, it being the depths of the Depression, financial insufficiency plagued the church. The AUA subsidy of the minister’s salary would be cut by 10% every year, with the church expected to increase its revenues and make up the difference for an annual salary of $3,500. Yet church and AUA contributions only reached a salary level of $2,700, which FitzPatrick argued was inadequate for his growing family. The AUA periodically sent the Norfolk minister a little money from the Ministerial Aid fund, and the Women’s Alliance sent over $1,000 for building repairs and the AUA funded a new roof. All of these expenditures were in hopes of an increase in congregational participation and therefore church revenues. The AUA had no money to waste. It would not raise the appropriation as FitzPatrick wished, but for 1937 did keep the same appropriation as 1936, thus breaking the understanding with the minister and church that there would be a 10% reduction of AUA subsidy each year.
FitzPatrick remained dissatisfied. His $2,700 salary was for the time actually in the range of other salaries for a church of the level of Norfolk’s and a minister of the experience of FitzPatrick. Other ministers across the denomination had to take serious salary cuts during these economically difficult times. FitzPatrick sought another church that would pay more, but found none. Churches searching for a new minister offered even less.
Meanwhile, Jifka FitzPatrick, who had earlier been unhappy in Norfolk, now had become quite beloved in the church community. She was expecting her second child, and despite bouts of illness, according to the Davis report, “kept the situation on an even keel.” That remark highlighted the problem that Gerald FitzPatrick, who had at first been enthusiastically welcomed in Norfolk, now found it more difficult to keep up his buoyant spirits and congregational support. He helped the church be more prominently known in Norfolk and held special meetings on Sunday evenings to draw more people to Unitarianism. Yet despite the addition of a few more members, the minister’s relations with the congregation quickly soured.
Church leaders now found their minister “too liberal.” Robert and Esther Darden, founding elders of the church, were increasingly alienated by what they saw as “socialistic” tendencies in their minister, especially his support for a Norfolk food co-op. Esther was shocked when the two-year old FitzPatrick son was allowed to play in his playpen in public view without a diaper on. Robert Darden remembered that he became alienated from his minister when they were at an event in the Nansemond Hotel in Ocean View, and “Jerry,” although “a nice fellow” “got really drunk.” Others talked of FitzPatrick “crudities.” Some thought he spent too much time at home with his family and not in the church, and that with a more involved minister the church would grow. Darden, speaking for the socially conservative elders of the church, went to FitzPatrick and suggested that he quietly resign. “But,” Darden remembered, “he would not – he wanted the church to decide.”
In late 1937 the spreading dissension reached the ears of AUA officials who had with such hopes placed FitzPatrick in the Norfolk church three years before. Now the crisis was building to the boiling point.