Baylor and denominational leaders, Norris and his church were denied seats at the annual meetings of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1922 and 1923. In his 1926 sermon series "Rum and Romanism," Norris attacked Mayor H. C. Meacham of Fort Worth, whom he accused of misappropriating funds for Roman Catholic causes. That same year, Norris killed lumberman Dexter Elliott Chipps, a friend of Meacham, in Norris's church office. Norris claimed Chipps had threatened his life, and when Norris was tried for murder, he was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. During 1928, Norris campaigned against the election of the Democrat Al Smith to the presidency and voiced anti-Catholic views from the pulpit, his radio station, and his weekly newspaper. Herbert C. Hoover, the Republican nominee, won the election and carried Texas as well, the first member of that party ever to prevail in a Texas general election. In 1935, Norris accepted the pastorate of a second church, Temple Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. By 1946, the combined membership of the two congregations was more than 26,000. For sixteen years, Norris commuted by train and plane between the two churches. Though Norris would presumably have mostly agreed on matters of faith and interpretation with Ben M. Bogard, who in 1924 founded the American Baptist Association, the two were often at odds. Bogard claimed that Norris was vain and prone to exaggerate Norris' ministerial success. Though he accused Norris of failing to preach the fundamentals of the faith, the two in time developed a begrudging friendship. Bogard said, "When I get to heaven I expect to find Frank Norris there in spite of that wicked streak that runs through him." In 1941, Norris faced a $25,000 libel judgment payable to another Baptist minister, R. E. White, because of remarks about White in Norris' Detroit denominational paper, The Fundamentalist. Norris exhausted all appeals to the Texas Supreme Court. The publicity about the suit weakened Norris' hold over his fellow fundamentalists. In September 1947, while on a tour of Europe, Norris secured an audience with Pope Pius XII and declared that the pope was "the last Gibraltar in Europe against Communism." Thereafter, Norris took the position that communism was more dangerous than Catholicism, and some of Norris's erstwhile allies, such as Toronto evangelist T. T. Shields, criticized him for "folly." In the late 1930s, Norris organized a group of independent, premillennial Baptist churches