Monks of St. Mary

Of the monkish orders of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U. S., oldest is the Society of St. John the Evangelist.* Members of this order are commonly called the Cowley Fathers, after the village near Oxford, England, where the order was founded in 1865--and where Viscount Nuffield first made his Morris Cowley and Morris Oxford cars. Mother house of U. S. Cowley Fathers is the Monastery of St. Mary and St. John, on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.

Last fortnight the U. S. Cowley Fathers got a new black-cassocked, shovel-hatted leader. Rev. Spence Burton, Superior General of the Society since 1924, had resigned to accept the suffragan bishopric of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Elected to succeed him was Rev. Granville Mercer Williams, handsome onetime metallurgical engineer. Last week Father Williams resigned a rectorship which he and his assistant Cowley Fathers had made noteworthy for nine years: St. Mary the Virgin in Manhattan.

Low-church Anglicans call high churchmen "spikes" (for their sharp, uncompromising churchmanship). Under the "merry monks"--as the low-church Episcopal Chronicle called them--St. Mary's became one of the great spike churches of the U. S. It used quantities of incense and holy water, burned vigil lamps in its shrine of Our Lady, reserved the Blessed Sacrament (i.e., kept it on the altar for adoration), bought fancy vestments by the trunkful. It celebrated such rare feasts as the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin. The church was perhaps the only one in the U. S. which maintained an orchestra (until 1938) for High Mass.

Annually St. Mary's was pontifically visited by a Canadian high churchman, Bishop Rocksborough R. Smith of Algoma, Ont., who wore red slippers and episcopal gloves, presided at long and ceremonious services worked up from Fortescue.* A story became current in the Episcopal Church: that New York's Cardinal Hayes, upon learning that a choirboy had fainted during a Mass, had said, "We'd better be careful; the first thing you know they'll be copying that at St. Mary the Virgin." Latest innovation at St. Mary's: the use of a vimpa, a scarf of thin white silk worn around the neck, by which a bishop's mitre and crozier are held, to protect them from the human touch.

Rumor in Manhattan last week was that, along with Father Williams, the other Cowley Fathers would leave St. Mary the Virgin, presumably taking the vimpa with them. In Boston next week Father Williams is to be an attending presbyter at the consecration of his predecessor, Bishop-elect Burton. At this service no vimpas will be used: the consecrator will be the Presiding Bishop of the Church, Henry' St. George Tucker, who has never worn a cope, much less a mitre.

* Most famed others: the white-robed Order of the Holy Cross, whose Father Frederick H. Sill founded and heads Kent School; the grey-robed Order of St. Francis.

* -Rev. Adrian Fortescue's The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described is the most exhaustive work of its kind.

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