When Episcopalians Were Better Stewards of Sacred Architecture Than Rome

I was visiting New Jersey this week and had some time to visit St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Burlington. Founded in 1702, St. Mary's is notable not only as the oldest continuously active Episcopal parish in New Jersey, but as a splendid example of 19th century Gothic revivalism (the current "new" church, consecrated in 1854 is considered an exemplar of the style). What I saw inside both impressed and saddened me (all photos mine unless otherwise noted).

I normally don't visit non-Catholic churches; I came across the site at random and was drawn in by its historic churchyard. I meandered up to the church and gave the door a tug and was suprised that it opened. An older woman was in the vestibule. She looked a bit askance at me and asked, "Do you need to be in here?" I responded with a phrase I have learned from experience is helpful to get access to all sorts of places: "I don't know. I'm just a tourist." Her face immediately lit up. "C'mon in!" she said. "I'll give you a tour." She proceeded to usher me into the building and give me a very informative and helpful tour of the place.

I got lucky that day; this woman was the verger of the parish (in the Anglican-Episcopalian tradition, a verger is essentially a Master of Ceremonies) and had been a lifelong parishioner, so she had a deep knowledge of the structure and its history. Upon entering, I was immediately impressed with how "English" the church looked. Episcopalian churches are all over the spectrum in terms of what you can expect from them, so I was pleasantly surprsied to see how much of the English architectural tradition had been preserved in St. Mary's. I felt at once like I was back in one of the stately old parishes of England: the aisle lanterns, choir stalls, altar rails, and woodwork were all reminiscent of the best of England's historic churches. Of particular note was a beautifully ornate wrought-iron rood screen separating the chancel from the nave and dating from 1883. I love rood screens and seeing such a beautiful one here in the states made me happy (my guide was also impressed that I knew the term "rood screen").

Another unique feature of St. Mary's can be found in the lych gate in the churchyard. Lych gates are very rare in the United States but are common in historic English churches. The lych gate traditionally marks the entrance to the churchyard and is the place where the clergy receive the coffin for burial rites, the old English word lych meaning “corpse.” St. Mary's lych gate dates from 1883 and gives the churchyard a very English look.

All of the interior furnishings were of the highest level of craftsmanship as well, from the baptismal font to the ambo. Everything was so splendid, were this a Catholic building it would have been far better suited to Catholic worship than probably half of today's Catholic parishes. I later learned that this was due to the vision of the Episcopalian bishop George Washington Doane, under whose administration the current structure was erected. Doane, who served as bishop from 1832 to 1859, was tasked with replacing the original 1703 "old church" with a newer structure capable of supporting the growing congregation. Doane was an adherent of the Oxford Movement and as such believed church architecture should return to a more traditonal "catholic" expression of Anglicanism. This is reflected in every aspect of St. Mary's design (this actually served as the pro cathedral for the Episcopal diocese of New Jersey for a time prior to the establishment of Trinity Cathedral in Trenton). For the architectural work of St. Mary's, Doane turned to Richard Upjohn, perhaps the most renowned American architect of the Gothic revival. Upjohn is famous for, among other things, his design of Trinity Church on Wall Street and Christ Church in Brooklyn. Also interesting is Doane's boast that his new structure was "correctly" oriented to the east, whereas the older structure (reflecting a more Puritan age) had not been. To this day, the altar is oriented east against the wall and the liturgy is celebrated ad orientem.

After seeing all this, imagine my surprise when my tour guide told me that the roof and most of the interior had been destroyed in a horrific fire in 1976. Almost nothing of Bishop Doane's original interior had survived except the rood screen and a few other odds and ends; all of the stained glass windows save for a few in the south porch and sacristy were also destroyed. Almost everything I was looking at dated from a period of restoration undertaken between 1976 and 1979.

I was stunned; everything from the timber hammerbeam trusses over the nave to the ornate ambo to the art on the windows looked like it was from the 19th century. I marveled at this and asked the verger to about the restoration; being a lifelong parishioner, she was present during the events in question and was able to tell me quite a lot about the vision behind this remarkable restoration. The reconstruction committee decided at the outset that the restoration should reflect continuity with the church's earlier appearance. While this was not possible in every detail (ornate polychrome paintings were not replaced, nor was the historic pipe organ), the committee nevertheless did a remarkable job in what they were able to accomplish. The altar rails are a replica of Upjohn's original design. Liturgical furnishings such as the lectern were period pieces obtained elsewhere and seamlessly integrated into the structure; the encaustic tiles that had suffered heavy damage were painstakingly cleansed one at a time and replaced; the gas wall sconces were restored but converted to electricity; expensive German stone was imported to replace the original flooring.

Perhaps most remarkable were the stained glass windows: aside from the south porch, all stained glass windows were from the late 1970s, the creations of the Willet Studio out of Philadelphia and depicted scenes from the life of Christ and the Blessed Virgin. When I compared the original stained glass windows in the porch with the 1970s restoration, the differences were negligible. I could tell the south porch windows were older just by virtue of wear and tear, but there were no discernible stylistic differences. In the case of the chancel windows, they actually reconstructed the original windows exactly based on old photographs and extant schematics. In the image below (taken from the parish website), the left window is an original from the south porch while the right is an 1970s restoration:

Now, you probably know where I am going with this. Imagine a historic Catholic parish that had been destroyed by a fire in 1976. Imagine a restoration undertaken during the years of 1976 to 1979. We all know how that would have turned out. 

Obviously the Episcopal Church has its problems—lots of them. But one thing the Episcopal Church did not have in 1976 was the dictatorship of an ideological junta intent on uglifying historic churches and imposing a regimen of architectural brutalism upon their people. Catholic leaders didn't even need a destructive fire to justify their wreckovation; perfectly functional churches were simply gutted and uglified for reasons that were purely ideological. I know there have been trends towards architectural uglification within Episcopalianism and other denominations as well, but none so bureaucratically ensconced, none so authoritatively imposed, none so ruthlessly executed as Catholic Chuch's program of modernization in the twenty years after Vatican II. The example of St. Mary's is a painful reminder that nothing that happened to our parishes had to turn out the way it did. Walking through St. Mary's and listening to the verger's account of its history was like stepping into some alternate reality of what modern Catholicism could have looked like had our leadership not collectively lost their minds sixty years ago. This leads us to the supremely ironic conclusion that—from a purely architectural perspective—Episcopalian churches preserved their own tradition through the 70s far better than Catholic churches did. 

What sort of a clown world are we living in when the church that broke away from Rome because Henry VIII had an erection is doing something better than the Church founded by Christ?