The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 328

stigma ever since. Those who sought to rise in the church hierarchy had to repudiate his views. Last year, the board disciplined a Christian Science teacher in Oklahoma who described Mrs. Eddy in Knapp-like terms. In 1987, the board initially rejected Oscar-winning actor Robert Duvall as narrator for a video about Mrs.

Eddy because his family included Knapp students. The directors reconsidered and hired Duvall only after other candidates were found wanting. Nevertheless, Knapp's ideas have survived. Former pupils gather each year in a Boston hotel to listen to a reading from his works. While none of the Surfside worshipers studied with Knapp, all revere his memory.

Many have pored over bootleg chapters of Destiny, mimeographed from two copies Knapp gave to the Library of Congress, or have listened to a recording he made in defense of his views shortly before his death. The Surfsiders take solace in Mrs. Eddy's prediction that, by the end of this century, if her followers a peak of 268,000 in 1938 to 150,000, and full-time practitioners have decreased from 11,600 in 1950 to 3,000. Massachusetts has 134 practitioners, down from 474 in 1950. And branch churches are closing at the rate of 300 per decade.

In a hurried and profligate effort to reverse this decline, the Mother Church gambled its future on radio and television and lost. Imbued with the speculative fever of the 1980s, a decade cluttered with instant celebrities and get-rich-quick schemes, church leaders paradoxically sought to revive Christian Science by discarding its traditions. Ultimately, the media empire that they built proved rootless and insubstantial. On April 15, the church stopped live television programming and laid off most of the 400 employees of its 24-hour cable channel, described by an industry expert as one of the "biggest financial failures ever seen in cable." The Monitor Channel is expected to be shut down or sold for a relative pittance by June 15. Those responsible for the debacle have retreated into a bunker mentality.

Contacted directly or through intermediaries, church directors and broadcasting honchos declined to be interviewed. For church officials desperate to save their television kingdom, the last hope was the family fortune of Bliss Knapp's in-laws. Elo-ise Mabury, who died in 1973, and her sister Bella, who died in 1964, left trust funds amounting to $23 million and $75 million, respectively (as of the end of 1991). According to their wills, the church would inherit the money if and when it published Destiny as authorized literature and if the book were displayed in "substantially all" church reading rooms. Eloise's will requires the church to meet these conditions by May 20, 1993 (the 20th anniversary of her death), or forfeit the money, while Bella's bequest has no such immediate deadline.

Even when it was strapped during the 1974 recession, the church had resisted the temptation to publish Knapp's book. Cur demonstrate "fidelity to Truth," every Christian church will practice healing, and "Christendom will be classified as Christian Scientists." They are counting on an environmental catastrophe, such as the greenhouse effect, to revive interest in Mrs. Eddy. Before the church can heal the world, though, it must heal itself. The first step came last year, worshipers in Surfside say, when their longtime adversaries in the Mother Church unexpectedly published Destiny.

"It's an idea whose time has come," says 74-year-old Stanley Larkin, who founded the Surfside church in 1989, four years after the Mother Church excommunicated him for heresy. "Even though those responsible for publishing it are totally against it, it could not be resisted. I see the hand of God." Or the hand of mammon. Over the past half-century, Christian Science's vital signs have weakened. The number of members has dropped from rent board members have been considered resolutely anti-Knapp.

In January 1991, the board of directors withdrew a 1943 statement about Mrs. Eddy's place in biblical prophecy that had been intended to mollify Knapp. That same month, one of the church periodicals belittled the importance of Mrs. Eddy, in the eyes of her admirers, by comparing her to suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Former Christian Science Monitor reporter Julia Malone, who has studied the church's history, says the male-dominated board of directors is "somewhat embarrassed" to acknowledge its debt to a courageous woman who was willing to examine unconventional healing techniques in her search for an understanding of God. "If they accepted her as the woman of prophecy, that would give Mrs. Eddy and her writings all the authority, and leave them with none," says Malone, now the White House correspondent for Cox Newspapers. "And they wanted to establish them- Sandal Sawy at Special Savings! 38.95! (regularly $48) Only Cobbie can give you the style and the comfort you enjoy in great sandals at a terrific value! Hurry in today! Landmark in beige ombre, white leather. -AT you love looking I I I WW 6-10 1 5-10 1 5 12-10 1 6 12-10 Amigo in wheat, white leather.

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