St. Peter's Church: Faith in Action for 250 Years

Chapter 6: St. Peter’s and the Oxford Movement

ἀ e gilt cross on the church spire is removed for repair in 1977. ἀ e original cross, placed on the spire in 1842, was the first to grace the spire of an American Episcopal church. It was replaced in the 1960s. (Philadelphia Inquirer) Alan J. Heavens St. Peter’s and the Oxford Movement 6 When the gilt cross went up atop the new steeple at St. Peter’s in 1842, it was a first for an Episcopal church in the United States and represented a fairly significant change from the parish’s eighteenth-century origins. In fact, the cross was approved only when the rector, Dr. William Odenheimer , cast the deciding vote in the vestry. Odenheimer was a “Tractarian,” a member of an Anglican movement that had begun in England but quickly spread to the United States and is today known chiefly as the Oxford movement. Its core belief—that the Anglican Church, with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, was one of the three branches of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church—was expounded in a series of ninety pamphlets titled “Tracts for the Times,” published between 1833 and 1841. ἀ e Oxford movement was triggered by a perception among some English clergy that the British government was trying to secularize the Church of England with the Reform Act of 1832. Beyond that, however, the movement became a reaction to liberalizing tendencies within the English church. ἀ e Oxford movement, by contrast, emphasized the church’s “catholic” roots—stressing the lowercase c to reassure opponents that this didn’t mean Rome—and the bishops’ unbroken line of succession stretching back to the apostles. ἀ e Church of England was neither Roman Catholic nor Orthodox—nor a Protestant denomination—but a separate branch with both protestant and catholic strands. As the English theologian Frederick Denison Maurice wrote, these strands were “at the same time contrary and complementary, both maintaining elements of the true church, but incomplete without the other.” For some adherents, the movement also meant the re-creation of monastic orders, the use of vestments and ritual in worship, and, most 96 St. Peter’s Church: Faith in Action for 250 Years important, replacing preaching with the Eucharist as the central aspect of worship . Odenheimer, rector of St. Peter’s from 1839 to 1859 and later Bishop of New Jersey, manifested his Tractarian beliefs in a number of important ways at St. Peter ’s, besides casting the deciding vote to put the cross atop the spire of the tower. Before 1842, Communion at St. Peter’s was rare; starting that year, the Eucharist was celebrated not only on Sundays but during the week as well. Daily Morning and Evening Prayer also began at this time. Instead of alienating believers, these changes attracted them. Membership at St. Peter’s doubled, from 226 communicants in 1832 to 488 in 1861, two years after Odenheimer left. (As bishop of New Jersey, Odenheimer confirmed 20,000, according to St. Peter’s 1911 yearbook reports.) Odenheimer was shifting to a more catholic approach among the city’s Episcopalians just as Philadelphia was having to accommodate waves of Irish Catholic immigrants, who would soon change the demography of what had been a Protestant and English/German city. ἀ e deep-seated hatred of anything Roman Catholic, primarily by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and other Protestants, resulted in tensions among the working classes. Furthermore, the Irish and free blacks competed for the same lowest-paying jobs, which kept them at one another’s throats. Pitched battles frequently broke out between the groups, including the 1842 Lombard Street Riot, when one thousand members of the black Young Men’s Vigilant Association were attacked by an Irish mob. ἀ ree days of violence followed , ending when the mayor finally called in the militia. As the flow of Irish Catholics increased, Protestant leaders, including Stephen Tyng, the rector of St. Paul’s Church at ἀ ird near Walnut Street, and the Reverend Samuel B. Wylie, vice provost of the University of Pennsylvania, vowed “a war against Popery.” Bishop White distributes Communion. Chapter 6: St. Peter’s and the Oxford Movement 97 When the Catholic bishop, Francis Kendrick, asked that the public schools let Catholic students use their own Bible and be excused from religious instruction in school, Protestants saw it as an affront. ἀ e result was the civil strife known as the nativist riots of 1844. ἀ ey began in Kensington, a neighborhood that Alexander McClure, the...