USA > Massachusetts > Massachusetts Episcopalians 1607-1957 > Part 8
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The dividing line, it was finally agreed, should be at the eastern end of Worcester County, excepting the town of Southborough, where was located St. Mark's School, which was irrevocably tied, financially and otherwise, to Boston. In the matter of financing the new diocese, Bishop Lawrence's talent in such matters soon showed itself. Largely at his suggestion and stimulation, $100,000 was raised for the Episcopal Fund of the new diocese in Eastern Massa- chusetts as a unique gift, and all other diocesan funds, legally alien- able, were allocated to the new diocese, in some proportion to the number of its parishes. These comprised less than a fourth of the parishes and missions of the old diocese, but were scattered over three-fifths of its area. With such generous gifts the parent diocese launched its daughter on its independent career. But, before this was completed, a canon providing for the consecration of suff- ragan bishops was passed by General Convention. Pursuant to the canon, Massachusetts obtained its suffragan in the person of Samuel Gavitt Babcock, a native of Westerly, Rhode Island, the successful rector of Christ Church, Hyde Park, and for some years the full-time archdeacon of the Diocese. Bishop Babcock served in this capacity from 1913 to 1937. Since then Raymond A. Heron and Frederic C. Lawrence have been his successors.
In 1902, the division of the Diocese was completed. Out of 221 parishes and 262 clergy, 48 cures and 54 clergy were handed on to the new Diocese of Western Massachusetts. The following table shows how quickly the old Diocese made up the losses of 1902, and how steadily diocesan growth progressed, up to the retirement of Bishop Lawrence in 1927. The one item in which statistical advance was small was in Church School enrollment. This increased by 10%, whereas communicants had nearly doubled and contributions had risen by about 250%. Perhaps this Church school item accounts in part for a much lessened rate of increase in the thirty years which have elapsed since 1927.
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Statistical Table of the Diocese of Massachusetts 1901 to 1927
1901
- 1903
1909
1915
1927
Parishes and Missions
222
175
188
199
214
Clergy
262
212
225
251
263
Communicants
40,681|
34,681
42,899|
55,202|
64,581
Baptisms
3,641
2,852
3,320
3,721
3,476
Confirmations
2,066|
2,258
2,456
2,973|
3,398
Church School Pupils
23,923
20,202
23,319
23,621
22,022
Contributions
$904,866|
881,242|
909,180|1,169,616|2,201,120
How has Massachusetts, in its two dioceses, compared with the other religious denominations of the area? The State had a population of 3,003,681 in 1900. The religious census of 1906 gave the following figures: Roman Catholics (including all baptized children) 1,080,706; Congregationalists (including only adult mem- bers) 119,116; Baptists (adult members) 80,894; Methodists 65,408; Episcopalians (communicants only) 57,636; all other denominations, including Jews and Orthodox, 216,417. Since the non-Roman religious bodies, on the average, have a constituency 50% larger than the adult membership, the total number of non-Romans, so computed, would be about 800,000. This would have left nearly a third of the State's population without any affiliation, however tenuous, with any religious body. In the last fifty years, Roman Catholics have doubled and Episcopalians, in their little compass, have done almost as well. The larger part of the Episcopal increase has been in the first half of the half century, or in the Lawrence era.
From time to time in his Convention addresses, Bishop Law- rence called attention to the large contribution which the Episcopal Theological Theological School in Cambridge had made to the Church in leadership in various ways. Perhaps we may pause here to list the graduates of E.T.S. who have been consecrated to Epis- copal bishoprics. Bishop Lawrence was the first so consecrated, and was the only one for ten years. In 1904, the General Convention met for the second time in Boston, and was hospitably entertained. One highlight was the election of Logan Herbert Roots (1896) to the missionary jurisdiction of Hankow, where he was destined to play a far-reaching role.
Roots heads a numerous succession of outstanding missionary bishops who got their education and inspiration from the Episcopal Theological School. Following him quickly in the election to the episcopate were Julius Atwood (Class of 1882) of Arizona, Theodore Payne Thurston (1894) of Oklahoma, Louis Childs Sanford (1892) of San Joaquin and Frank Hale Touret (1903) of Western Colorado. In later decades, we may note the elections of Arthur W. Moulton (1900) and Stephen Cutter Clark (1917) to Utah, Herman Page (1891) to Spokane, to be followed by a translation to a notable episcopate in the Diocese of Michigan.
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More recent elections to missionary jurisdictions have been Frederick Bethune Bartlett (Class of 1908) to Idaho, Harry Beal (1911) to the Canal Zone, William Payne Roberts (1914) to Shanghai, Douglas Henry Atwill (1907) to North Dakota, Albert Ervine Swift (1938) to Puerto Rico, and Lyman Cunningham Ogilby (1951) to the Philippines. All but one of these were men of the Brooks-Lawrence tradition. In 1958, Edmund K. Sherrill became Missionary Bishop of Southern Brazil, his father being consecrator.
Suffragans of a long tenure have been Theodore Russell Ludlow (1911) of Newark, John Insley Blair Larned of Long Island, both of the class of 1911, and Donald J. Campbell (1932) of Los Angeles. The Diocese of Massachusetts has also claimed three Cam- bridge men as suffragans, Samuel Gavitt Babcock (1891) who served from 1913 to 1942, Raymond Adams Heron (1916 suffragan from 1938 to 1954, and Frederic Cunningham Lawrence (1924) elected in 1956. Donald Bradshaw Aldrich (1922) was Coadjutor in Michigan for a year, resigning after a heart attack. In 1954, Archie Henry Crowley (1934) became suffragan in Michigan. A second suffragan there was Robert L. DeWitt (1940) elected in Michigan in 1960, as was George B. Millard (1938) in California.
The roll of diocesan bishops, many of them in large Sees, is also impressive. The first of these was James DeWolf Perry (1895) who was elected to Rhode Island in 1911. He was Presiding Bishop from 1930 to 1938. In 1913, Theodore Irving Reese (1897) was chosen bishop in Southern Ohio. In 1919, Edward Lambe Parsons became bishop and a notable figure in the Diocese and State of Cali- fornia. In 1922, Charles Lewis Slattery (1894) was elected co- adjutor in Massachusetts, succeeding Bishop Lawrence in 1927. William Bertrand Stevens (1910) was the long-time Bishop in Los Angeles (1920-47).
After an interval, the procession of bishops, prominent both locally and in the General Church, formed once more. In 1930, Henry Wise Hobson (1920) went to Southern Ohio, and William Scarlett (1909) from the deanship of the Cathedral in St. Louis to its episcopal chair. In the same year Massachusetts took Henry Knox Sherrill from Trinity Church, Boston, to succeed Charles L. Slattery. Sherrill was elected Presiding Bishop in 1947 and finished his statutory term in 1958. Other notable episcopates were those of William Appleton Lawrence (1914) in Western Massachusetts, from 1937 to 1957, and Malcolm Endicott Peabody (1916) of Central New York, who, elected in 1938 as Coadjutor, became Diocesan in 1942, with a term ending by Canon in 1960. The first of these men was the son of Bishop William Lawrence, and the second the son of Endicott Peabody, the famous founder of Groton School. In 1944, Angus Dun (1917) left the deanship of the Cambridge School to begin a notable career in Diocese, General Church and Ecumenical circles as Bishop of Washington. His term ends in 1962. From 1936 to 1953, Lewis Bliss Whittemore (1915) was bishop in Western Michigan.
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In 1946, Richard Stanley Merritt Emrich, also a graduate and professor at Cambridge, went, at the age of thirty-seven, to be suff- ragan and diocesan in the great diocese of Michigan. In 1947, Nor- man Burdett Nash (1915), son of a noted Cambridge professor, Henry Sylvester Nash, and himself long a professor there, was called from the rectorship of St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., to succeed Henry Sherrill in Massachusetts. In 1947 also, Horace William Baden Donegan (1927) became suffragan in New York and shortly thereafter coadjutor and diocesan. In 1951, Arthur Carl Lichten- berger (1925) succeeded Scarlett in Missouri. In 1958, he succeeded Sherrill as Presiding Bishop. In 1956, Anson Phelps Stokes (1932) was elected to follow Nash in Massachusetts. In 1957, Robert McConnell Hatch, son of a noted scholar and professor at Cambridge (W. H. P. Hatch, 1902), succeeded Appleton Lawrence in Western Massachusetts, after six years as suffragan in Connecticut. In 1959, George L. Cadigan followed Lichtenberger in Missouri, and Roger W. Blanchard was Hobson's successor in Southern Ohio.
Elections of Cambridge graduates to smaller dioceses have also been numerous. In 1939, Arthur Raymond Mckinstry (1920) be- came Bishop of Delaware, to be succeeded in 1954 by John Brooke Moseley of the class of 1940. In 1941, Oliver Leland Loring (1930) was elected Bishop of Maine, and, in 1947, his older brother, Richard Tuttle Loring, Jr. (1929) went to a short episcopate in Springfield, Illinois. Both bishops were the sons of Richard Tuttle Loring (1899), for some thirty years rector in Newtonville, and both made the transition from ancestral Evangelicalism to the Catholic tra- dition. In 1943, Herman Riddle Page, son of the E. T. S. Bishop of Michigan, was elected to Northern Michigan. In 1948, Charles Francis Hall (1936) began a notable episcopate in New Hampshire. Charles Asa Clough (1929) in 1948 succeeded Richard Loring in the See of Springfield, a little Episcopal island in a vast lake of Protestantism and Romanism.
These more than fifty bishops, mostly of the Lawrence tradition, have not been all that the Diocese of Massachusetts has given to the American episcopate. The old-time Churchmen and the newer Catholics have made a considerable contribution. As far back as 1812 and 1818, Massachusetts gave South Carolina Theodore Dehon and Nathaniel Bowen. In 1832, John Henry Hopkins and George Washington Doane went to Vermont and New Jersey. Horatio Southgate, in 1844, stayed for a short and fruitless term as mission- ary bishop in the Middle East, serving for a time after his return as rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston. Henry Washington Lee of Iowa (1854), Thomas March Clark of Rhode Island (1854) followed. William Bacon Stevens (1862) went to Pennsylvania, and Mark Anthony DeWolf Howe (1871) went to Central Pennsylvania, now Harrisburg. John Freeman Young became bishop in Florida in 1867 and William Stevens Perry of Iowa in 1876. In 1869, Frederic Dan Huntington went to a long and honorable episcopate in Central New York.
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Besides these men, mostly Evangelicals, others sailed forth to Catholic dioceses or dioceses which became such or partly such under their rule. Such were Cyrus Frederic Knight (1889) of Mil- waukee, Charles Chapman Grafton (1889) of Fond du Lac, Arthur C. A. Hall of Vermont (1894), Robert Codman of Maine (1900), Edward William Osborne of Springfield, Philip Mercer Rhinelander of Pennsylvanie (1912). To these we may add the names of other sorts of Churchmen, such as Alexander Mann, long rector of Trinity, Boston, and of Charles Henry Brent, bishop of the Philippines and of Western New York. Others of only a short stay in Massachusetts, such as Henry Codman Potter of New York, likewise adorned the House of Bishops. In brief, Massachusetts has been largely respon- sible for a tenth of the bishops of the Church, past and present.
The year 1908 marks the fifteenth year of the Lawrence episco- pate. By that year, all the communicant losses involved in the dividing of the Diocese were made up. In the same year the Diocese made Episcopal history by securing the first full-time Director of Christian Education in the Church. This was a precursor of the three full-time workers of the present. By this time likewise, the future organization of the Diocese was complete. There was a full- time archdeacon, Samuel G. Babcock, a preliminary to the three of the present. Only a suffragan bishop was lacking. Archdeacon Babcock was promoted to the office in 1913. Three full-time arch- deacons, besides the suffragan, were to come later.
A brief listing of the various organizations reporting to the Diocesan Convention in 1909 show the wide sweep of the work. First, of course, comes the Diocesan Board of Missions. The Board itself made a long report to which were attached the reports of the three archdeaconries and of Archdeacon Babcock, together with various workers reporting to the Archdeacon directly. Some $15,000 of missionary aid, in amounts of $50 to $400, were given to 22 places in the archdeaconry of Lowell, to 28 in that of New Bedford and to two places in the city and archdeaconry of Boston.
In the archdeaconry of Lowell four new missions were started: in Attleboro, in Brighton, Wilmington and Somerville. Epiphany, Dorchester, had a new church building, as did the united colored missions of St. Martin and St. Augustine, once in the North and West Ends of Boston.
Likewise a church and rectory were abuilding in Franklin, whence the Rev. Guy W. Miner ministered vigorously in neighboring places such as Medway, Medfield and Millis. In this last place, as well as in Norwood and Orient Heights (in East Boston), building lots had been acquired. Orient Heights is now gone, the others have grown. Numerous parishes had extinguished or reduced their mort- gages and had reduced or given up missionary aid.
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Special reports covered the work among students and sailors and longshoremen in Boston, as well as work among prisoners and deaf mutes. Services were conducted in Swedish, Danish and Welsh. Much of the growth of the work could be attributed to the thousands of calls made by the three diocesan parish visitors. Many Epis- copalians have a way of remaining in hiding until some one ferrets them out!
Looking back half a century, one can see the growth, particular- ly in financial strength, of most of the twenty-two missions or aided parishes in the archdeaconry of Lowell. Eleven of the twenty-two have become self-supporting and, in several instances, due primarily to suburban exodus, big parishes. The parishes of the Ascension in East Cambridge and of the Ascension in Waltham have disappeared. Missionary work, without expense to the Diocese, was carried on in fourteen other places by neighboring rectors. Of these fourteen, Stoneham, Rockport and Beverley Farms have developed strong parishes.
In the archdeaconry of New Bedford, twenty-two year-round churches and six summer chapels received diocesan aid, while fifteen others were ministered to by neighboring rectors. Of the twenty- two first mentioned, most have become self-supporting in the last fifty years, and a half dozen have become strong parishes. Three of the summer chapels, Marion, Harwichport and Provincetown are now year-round churches. Of the fifteen chapels ministered to by the neighboring clergy, four have become medium-size parishes, and most of the others have grown.
In the archdeaconry of Boston, comprising the city proper, the story is somewhat different. Social service work among the poor, among sailors and longshoremen loomed large. There were five mission churches, two Sailors Missions, the Church Rescue Mission and Summer Work. The Rev. Frederic B. Allen was for a generation the active head of the Boston City Mission.
The five mission churches, however, have, with population changes, either disappeared or have retrograded. St. Mary's Free Church for Sailors has gone. The sailors and Protestant longshore- men live elsewhere. St. Ansgarius' Church for Swedes on Shawmut Avenue is no more, as Swedish immigration has largely ceased and the younger generation has melted into full American life. St. Stephen's Church on Florence Street, which, under Torbert, Brent, and later, Samuel Drury, attracted many from far and near, has be- come a mere shadow of its former self. The same is true of Grace Church, South Boston. There, also, the Church of the Redeemer has merged with once-flourishing St. Mathew's. The Dorchester parishes and missions were to grow and then to decrease in the course of the next half century.
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In brief, the Church was to increase largely in Boston, as well as in the suburbs, in the episcopate of William Lawrence. After his day the Church in the suburbs was to grow still more, while in Boston the picture was that of slow retreat. Transients, students and communicants from the suburbs now make up a large part of the congregations of the historic churches of Boston. The problem of the urban church is now acute, in Boston as elsewhere.
Coincident with Bishop Lawrence's fifteenth anniversary in 1908 was the raising of a Diocesan Reinforcement Fund of some $93,000 to be given to missions and parishes in matching amounts. Thus, in 1909, St. Peter's, Cambridge, was led to pay off a long- standing debt on its rectory on Clinton Street. Numerous other churches were induced to pay off debts or build new under the same dollar-for-dollar stimulation.
In the year 1908, another new development took place in the Diocese, namely that of the so-called colored work. Up to that time, such enterprise, as we have seen, had been confined to that con- ducted by the Cowley Fathers in the North and West Ends of Boston. In the course of time, the two missions of St. Martin and St. Augustine had been consolidated in a new church bearing both names. Many of the colored folk of that area had been pushed from the northern into the southern end of the city by immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Jews and Italians here followed the negroes instead of being followed by them. So, increasing migration from the West Indies, with its large proportion of Anglicans, led to a new problem. The Church of the Ascension in the South End, a parochial enterprise of wealthy Emmanuel Church in the Back Bay, began to harbor what was felt to be an uncomfortably large proportion of colored members. The case was the same with St. Peter's parish in Cambridge.
In 1907, the Rev. Lyman Eustis from Colorado became rector of St. Peter's. He soon felt parochial pressure to do something about the "colored problem." His solution was to segregate the classes in Sunday School. Immediately about a hundred colored communicants withdrew from St. Peter's parish. Nearby was a small white mission, St. Bartholomew's, which was struggling along under the ministry of theologues from E.T.S. of whom the present writer was the last. Under him, St. Bartholomew's began to change from white to black. When Mr. John S. Brown and a few friends knocked on its doors, they were made welcome. Before long, the congregation had doubled and a class of eleven colored folk was presented to Bishop Lawrence for confirmation. At this time, the Rev. Mr. Maguire, formerly colored archdeacon in Arkansas, but a native of the West Indies, applied to the bishop for work in Massa- chusetts. So the decision was made to let him try his hand at St. Bartholomew's. The white people were not asked to leave, but did so. Eventually, some few were shepherded into St. Peter's and into the still flourishing mission of the Ascension, now defunct, in East
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Cambridge. Father Maguire began his three month's trial with great vigor. From July 1 on he ran both morning and evening ser- vices. In the evening he preached eloquently on the Ten Command- ments. By the time he had arrived at the Seventh, the Wardens were passing the plate on the sidewalks of Columbia Street! The three months' trial resulted in triumph and St. Bartholomew's was launched on a new and glorious career. It is now one of the half dozen large colored parishes of the Episcopal Church.
In the rectorship of Kenneth de Poullain Hughes, beginning in 1940, the parish moved into a large brick, formerly Methodist, church on Broadway, the congregation of which had left and united elsewhere.
In the course of one of the rectorships previous to that of Father Hughes, a rift occurred in the ranks of the parish between the old-timers, negroes long resident, and the newer Churchmen from the West Indies. The ultimate result was the founding of a parish in the South End of Boston, namely, the large and prosperous St. Cyprian's, which reached its height under the long administra- tion of David Leroy Ferguson, a 1904 graduate of E.T.S. With the slow withdrawal of white non-Romans from the city of Boston and the ever increasing influx of colored folk from the South and West Indies, the missionary work of the Archdeaconry of Boston is now headed by a colored Archdeacon, the upstanding John M. Burgess, a graduate of Cambridge. This appointment was one of the last acts of Bishop Nash. In 1960, Mr. Burgess was nearly elected a suffragan in Michigan.
The next ten years of Bishop Lawrence's episcopate, culminat- ing in a diocesan observance of his twenty-fifth anniversary, carry us through World War I. During our brief participation he was head of the Church War Commission. During these years he had also worked on the founding of the Church Pension Fund, which be- gan its beneficent and far-reaching operations in 1917. He was President of it for many years.
The Diocese, in these ten years, as we can see from the fore- going statistical table, was steadily advancing in numbers and financial strength. The Church was still growing somewhat in the city of Boston, and vastly more in most of the rest of the Diocese. Communicant increase was still outrunning that of the population.
Another project, which had interested the Bishop for years, was the securing of a Cathedral. After various more or less am- bitious building projects had been considered, such as the erection of a Cathedral on a new island in the Charles River, the final decision was to make central St. Paul's, Boston, the Cathedral Church. Much money was spent to enlarge its facilities and Dr. Edward S. Rous- maniere was called from Grace Church, Providence, to be the first
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Dean. His congregation grew. Daily noontime services, portico services in summer and classes in personal religion in winter were some of his innovations. For many years St. Paul's continued to be one of the big parishes of the Diocese, but more recently it has counted only 400 out of 1400 communicants once reported. For meetings of Cenvention and for big diocesan gatherings Trinity Church, Boston, continues to be used.
In 1922, Bishop Lawrence, then seventy-two, asked for a Co- adjutor. On October 31, 1922, Charles Lewis Slattery, rector of Grace Church, New York, then one of the four chief parishes of the Church, was so consecrated.
After another five years, Bishop Lawrence resigned and turned over his See to his designated successor. Thirty-four years, great in diocesan achievement and in service to the General Church had passed. Retirement, however, did not mean inactivity. The literary work, which he had begun in his late thirties with a biography of his father, continued. His last ecclesiastical act of moment was to be preacher and chief consecrator at the setting apart of his son, William Appleton Lawrence, to the See of Western Massachusetts, on January 13, 1937. On November 6, 1941, he passed to his rest. With Bishop Brent of the Philippines, one of his former priests, William Lawrence remains one of the two great- est Episcopal bishops of his generation.
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CHAPTER IX. The Episcopate of Charles Lewis Slattery 1927 - 1930 Coadjutor (1922 - 1927)
For five years Bishop Slattery had been the indefatigable and lovable Coadjutor of the Diocese. The qualities which had made him preeminent in Minnesota, Springfield and New York were abundantly manifest in Massachusetts. In three short years he was gone, aged only sixty-two, like Codman of Maine, Booth of Vermont, Vinton and Davies of Western Massachusetts, long before his time.
Charles Lewis Slattery was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, December 9, 1867, where his father, George Slattery, was rector. On his father's side he came from Protestant Irish ancestors inter- married with Rhode Island Yankees; on his mother's side, he came from a long Yankee line, in the State of Maine, of farmers, mer- chants and soldiers .*
Such was the mother of Charles Lewis Slattery, who was to live with him until her death, shortly before his election to the epis- copate in 1922. For his father, George Slattery, had died at fifty- five, a victim of overwork, in his second parish in Pennsylvania, Christ Church, Greensburg. Charles was born in St James rectory in Pittsburg, where his father had labored eleven years. Their great friend in both places was Felix Brunot, a "prince of men, en- gaged in every good work in Pittsburg." Charles Slattery's first book was entitled "Felix Brunot, Radical."
Charles Slattery was only five when his father passed away. His widowed mother continued to live in Greensburg for some years, moving thence to ancestral Maine, where Charles was confirmed at fifteen in St. Paul's parish, Brunswick, under Dr. Harry P. Nichols. The paternal relationship then established became a fraternal one with the years.
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