Shadows of Unity

Huntington’s Quadrilateral and Wattson’s Week of Prayer

Tobias S. Haller, BSG

Submitted to Prof. R. William Franklin May 13, 1996: Rogation Monday

Published in the Winter 1997-98 Issue of S.A. Heritage Volume 4, Number 3

In this paper I will examine two men and the models for church unity they proposed. This is a study in contrasts and shadows. The men themselves are shadows of each other: each perceived in the other a distortion of an ideal; each reacted to the divisions within the Episcopal Church in a different way, one by seeking common ground, the other by escape to higher ground. The models for church unity they proposed reflect their different backgrounds and outlooks, and respectively present an ethos centered in community and an ethos built upon authority. As such they reflect the ongoing tension between koinonía and episkopé that has marked the church from the days of Paul and Peter. The models have changed and been adapted over time by those who have adopted them, but the end of unity for which they were to serve as means seems still as shadowy as ever.

The first part of this paper compares and contrasts the lives and philosophies of the two men: one viewing the strength of the church welling up from the parish, the other looking to the See of Peter as the fons vitae for the health of the body. The second part summarizes the origins and development of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral and the Church Unity Octave. A brief concluding section comments on the current state of ecumenical affairs, and describes one glimmer of hope among the shadows of unity.

Dr. Huntington and Father Paul

In William Reed Huntington and Lewis Thomas Wattson we confront representatives of two very different models of the church. Huntington spent half a century working as a parish priest, earning the sobriquet “first presbyter of the church,” while Wattson “was never quite satisfied with parochial life”⁽¹⁾ and spent only a few unhappy years in several parishes — most of which he left under painful circumstances to find his true home in religions community. Though not contemporaries, Huntington (1838-1909) and Wattson (1863-1940) were both active in the Diocese of New York in a pivotal time in its history, from the early 1880s through 1909. I have not come across any evidence of a direct confrontation between them, but it is not hard to see what they thought of each other on the basis of their public and private statements, particularly in reaction to the deeply held convictions of their “shadow” selves.

It is possible, however, directly to compare what their ecclesiastical superior thought of them, and the comparison is illuminating. Henry Codman Potter, whose episcopate coincides with the period in question (1883-1908) preceded Huntington as rector of Grace Church, and regarded him as a faithful and loyal son of the church. In a letter to Huntington dated May 3, 1887, Bishop Potter wrote:⁽²⁾

The Rector of Grace Church has always been a Trustee of the Cathedral, and I hope he always will be. I do not want to constrain you by any urgency of mine to do anything against your own judgment, but it would be a great help and encouragement to me if you could take my place in the board, now that I am to take that of the late Bishop. I have no Anglican ideas of a political establishment, but I think a large Free Church, in a monumental position, dedicated to worship, and a center of Christian Work and especially of City Mission activities, has a place and use in this enormous and wealthy city, which it might not have elsewhere.

Potter’s relations with Lewis Wattson were less cordial. Wattson’s Ritualist liturgical practices were beginning to grate on the sensibilities of a substantial portion of his congregation at St. John’s, Kingston.⁽³⁾ This led him to venture the foundation of a parochial mission named “Holy Cross” some miles away at the site of a Sunday School he operated, where the liturgy could be more to his liking — and his congregation, depending on individual taste, could avail themselves of services in either parish or mission à la carte. Unfortunately, the site of the new mission was disputed by a neighboring rector, who believed it to lie within his parish boundaries. This same rector had already written to the standing committee of the diocese to protest that “the said Lewis T. Wattson has for some months past assumed clerical charge of a denominational and unchurchly school wherein doctrines have been and are taught not in harmony with those of the Church.”⁽⁴⁾ The bishop was drawn into the controversy concerning the mission, and wrote to Wattson — somewhat revealingly misspelling his name in the salutation. The stricken-out and then reconsidered and rewritten “invading” perhaps also indicates the frame of the judicious bishop’s mind:⁽⁵⁾

The question in regard to your competency to build your proposed chapel is a very simple one. If, . . . the site of your proposed Chapel is within the boundaries . . . of Kingston, you are at entire liberty, so far as I am concerned, to go on and build. If not, not. . . . simply because I will not give my permission to your invading invading in Washburn’s original parish, whatever changes in the civil boundaries may have, since it was constituted, taken place.

This contrast in the bishop’s reaction reflects a fundamental difference in the ethos of unity each man represented: the openness and breadth of a great, free, but unfinished cathedral in which diversity is manifest, contrasted with the particularity of a parochial mission where things were done to suit a specific taste. Yet each man thought himself to be catholic in the most meaningful sense of the word. In examining their lives, we will see these ethics played out like tunes in different keys, and when they overlapped — in the era from 1883 through Huntington’s death in 1909 — producing jarring discords, like the marching bands in a Charles Ives symphony — each playing a different tune.

The rector of Grace: First presbyter of the church

William Reed Huntington represents an ideal with which I have great sympathy. I share his strong sense of a church minimal in dogma but expansive in embrace, with the parish as the center in which that reality finds its human shape. Beyond the shared ideological outlook, there are more tangible connections. I work in the diocesan office on the cathedral close, housed in what was once St. Faith’s Training School for Deaconesses, one of Huntington’s last-realized endeavors; I take part in the bishop’s “house Eucharist” for diocesan staff in St. Ansgar’s Chapel (the Huntington Memorial) on weekday mornings; the ashes of two of the members of my community are interred in the wall just outside that chapel, and my own niche there is secured, with name and birth date — and a waiting blank — already in place.

Early years and Worcester

Huntington was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1838, a somewhat delicate child of a comfortable professional household. A touching note from childhood says something of the direction he would later take. When presented with a Bible at the age of five, he asked the donor, “Is this God’s Bible? Mother told me God put it into the hearts of men and they printed it . . . Uncle sent me a transparent slate and pencil, and I broke the glass the same day. . . Your Bible will not break.”⁽⁶⁾ The family parish, St. Anne’s, was High Church, but early exposure to this wing of the church was balanced in Huntington’s Harvard years as he came under the influence of Frederic Dan Huntington, the college preacher (and later, after his conversion to the Episcopal Church, Bishop of Central New York). This combination of early influences no doubt contributed to the inclusive spirit that marked Huntington’s later career.

It also underscored his sense of call to unity. Huntington would come to feel that the party spirit — High Church versus Low Church, Catholic versus Evangelical — in the Episcopal Church was its greatest weakness. “American Catholicity is certainly a great way off when we, few as we are, cannot keep the peace in our own fold.”⁽⁷⁾ He avoided applying labels to himself whenever possible. As he wrote to the controversial R. Heber Newton in 1874,⁽⁸⁾

I deprecate anything that tends to harden and emphasize the lines that already mark out the various schools of thought in the Church. . . Antagonisms there must always be in the Church, but organized antagonisms ought . . . to be avoided. . . If you do map out four distinct parties, and name them ritualistic, high, low and broad, I am a good deal in doubt where I properly belong. . . I have never called myself a Broad Churchman, pure and simple, for the reason that there are several features of what is commonly known as Broad Church theology, e.g. the contempt for the dogmatic principles and the unconcern for visible unity in the Church, with which I have no sympathy whatever.

Nearly twenty-five years later, he wrote to the editor of The New York Sun:⁽⁹⁾

My whole effort in connection with the doctrinal legislation of the Episcopal Church has been to reduce the required dogma to a minimum, while yet insisting upon that minimum. What has ailed the Church, it seems to me, has been, not the principle of dogma, but the multiplication of dogmas.

If the Broad Church was not to his liking due to perceived doctrinal slackness, neither was Huntington particularly fond of the High Church. Late in life he referred to his early exposure to the High Church style: “Had no other religious influence come into my life than that of St. Anne’s, I fear that long ago I should have gone off into Agnosticism or Pessimism.”⁽¹⁰⁾ He objected to the most stratospheric High Church phenomena (when its advocates crossed over into ritualism) even more strongly, again on doctrinal grounds. He wrote to Bishop Potter in 1890, “In my personal judgment the doings at St. Ignatius and St. Mary the Virgin’s constitute a scandal as much graver than any that can result from the doings at St. George’s as doctrine is more sacred than polity.”⁽¹¹⁾ He hated controversy (though he loved debate!) and found the Eucharistic controversy “especially distasteful.”⁽¹²⁾ Yet even when drawn into controversy he kept his good humor and charity, realizing that from the midst of struggle some unity might yet emerge. When the indomitable Miss Meredith sent him some issues of Father Wattson’s then-new (1903) Anglo-Papalist newsletter, The Lamp, he replied:⁽¹³⁾

Thank you for the “Lamps.” If this were winter and there were a fire burning on the hearth, I should have been tempted to light them. When I shall have read them, or as much of them as I can stand, you shall have an opinion. I suppose the next number, if the Holy Father dies meanwhile, will come out with a black edge . . . [The author is] but tugging at another corner of the great sheet let down from heaven at the opposite corner of which Canon Henson and Mr. Hillis are pulling with equal energy; and what am I, who have given my whole lifetime since I was twenty-one to the subject of Church Unity, that I should find fault with these men who are at the two ends of the sheet because I happen to be pulling in a different direction still? Among us we may get the whole sheet straightened out, with all manner of living creatures playing happily upon it.

Some twenty years after the birth of the Quadrilateral, Huntington would come to see that its first practical use might be in healing the divisions “within our own Communion, rather than in negotiations to be entered upon with other communions.”⁽¹⁴⁾ Though this represents the mature reflection of a seasoned priest, it is easy to see the call to work for unity playing a crucial role at the very beginning of his discernment, leading him to the decision to seek ordination. As early as January 1859, he wrote to his closest friend Frank Abbot: “We are approaching an important point in the history of the American Church. There seems to be a gravitating force at work which promises to draw the broken fragments of the Christian body more closely together than they ever have been . . . Surely the Church calls more loudly to all earnest young men than either of the other professions.”⁽¹⁵⁾

After studying for ordination, he finally was ordained to the diaconate after wrestling with a bishop who held a higher view of the authority of the Articles of Religion than “the one generally accepted by the clergy of the Church.”⁽¹⁶⁾ He was pleased that the Oath of Conformity stressed the Scriptures and the doctrine and worship of the Church, not the Articles of Religion.⁽¹⁷⁾ He looked for the day when the Articles and the other “prolix confessions which the various denominations have inherited from the sixteenth century strifes” might “quietly drop off, leaving all of us standing together on the firm bed-rock of the historic faith as objectively stated in the Creeds.”⁽¹⁸⁾ He agreed with Phillips Brooks that the “Articles in the Prayer Book in America are simply an affair of the book binder”⁽¹⁹⁾ and would later try to downplay them both through Constitutional revision, or by means of a separate title page to fence them off in the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer — neither of which efforts was successful. It would not be until the 1979 revision of the Prayer Book that the Articles would finally be placed in the category of “Historical Documents” — an ambiguous victory for Huntington, since the Quadrilateral would share the same status.⁽²⁰⁾

Huntington was quickly called to All Saints, Worcester, where he was ordained to the priesthood, and where he would remain as rector for as long as the nine previous incumbents combined. Worcester presented great challenges, and Huntington was more than able to meet them. He oversaw the phasing-in of free pews, introduced a choir of men and boys, the custom of a parish year book, an annual report of charities, encouragement of systematic giving, and the foundation of four missions named for the evangelists. He took preaching seriously, but also stressed the sacramental ministry, which provides an insight into the second quadrant of his Quadrilateral. He believed the sacraments spoke for themselves as effective symbols, and that “to administer the sacraments faithfully was more truly the clergyman’s part, than to make them the staple of his preaching. . . The sacraments are acts, and they have a persuasiveness of their own. One of them says ‘Come.’ The other says ‘Abide.’ The pulpit cannot add anything to the power of this sign language.”⁽²¹⁾ Huntington saw the parish through the difficult experience of losing its building to fire in 1874, and oversaw the construction of a new stone structure, all the while affirming, as he noted in his first sermon after the fire, that the church is built upon “the Bible, the pulpit, the font, and the Communion service” which no fire could touch.⁽²²⁾ When the call to Grace Church came in 1883, he left behind a parish of substantial solidity — the upbuilding of which was largely his work — to go to one already ship-shape and which he would ably pilot into the next century.

Ripe fruition in Manhattan

Grace Church, unlike All Saints, Worcester, had been blessed with stability: in fifty years there had only been two rectors, and Huntington would continue the trend proportionally. It was a thriving congregation, with services seven days a week, and a mission chapel on 14th Street. Huntington did not merely maintain the status quo, however, but advanced the program of the church: he repeated the slow transformation from proprietary to free pews that he had accomplished in Worcester, instituted public services to supplement the parochial ones, and organized the first choir school in the country. He also developed the liturgically enriched Grace Church Services that combined music and special readings for the seasons of the church year. He oversaw the expansion of the chapel on 14th Street, and the creation of a summer camp for children and adults.

Beyond the parish, in addition to his work for church unity and his efforts at revision of the Book of Common Prayer, these years saw Huntington bring to realization his ambition to develop a ministry of deaconesses in the Episcopal Church, a goal long hampered by the refusal of the General Convention to deal with deaconesses separately from religious sisterhoods. Before his death, building had begun on the school for deaconesses, within the cathedral close.

The cathedral itself had a special place in Huntington’s heart, and he was a tireless worker for its construction. In the archives of the Diocese of New York are a number of small pocket calendars, carefully marked in Huntington’s hand with contributions towards the building of the cathedral in amounts in the tens and hundreds. Huntington took up the trusteeship of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine within three days of the invitation from Bishop Potter, cited at the beginning of this essay. Both Huntington and Potter were “High Church” when it came to the cathedral — and both placed great stock in what they hoped it might accomplish. Huntington saw it as a particularly apt symbol for church union, combining notes of koinonía and episkopé: “As the Church of the Chair . . . it stands for the principle of authority; as the Church of the whole city, it stands for the principle of comprehensiveness. It is the Bishop’s Church, and it is the People’s Church.”⁽²³⁾ The striking apsidal chapels, one of the highlights of the cathedral, were Huntington’s conception: the seven Chapels of the Tongues set apart for services to be held in representative languages from all over the world. One of them, St. Ansgar’s, is now a memorial to Huntington himself.

Huntington was known by the epithet “First Presbyter of the Church” as early as 1883.⁽²⁴⁾ Though called to numerous episcopates, presidencies (of colleges and the House of Deputies⁽²⁵⁾), and deanships, he resolutely declined them all, serving only in those positions open to a presbyter: deputy to thirteen consecutive General Conventions⁽²⁶⁾ member of the diocesan standing committee, member of several commissions (Deaconesses, Prayer Book, and Amendments to the Constitution and Canons), but most importantly, rector of two parishes for just under half a century.

An architectural detail at All Saints, Worcester, reveals the growth and development of Huntington’s thought. When the church was rebuilt after the fire destroyed the old building, the motto over the chancel was changed to “Mine House shall be called a House of Prayer for all People.”⁽²⁷⁾ In 1868, the motto had read, “There shall be one Fold and One Shepherd.”⁽²⁸⁾ This same text had a very different meaning for one Lewis Thomas Wattson. What had been a point of departure for Huntington was for Wattson as a consummation devoutly to be wished.

The inflexible friar

I have already confessed my connections to Dr. Huntington, and can do no less for Father Paul. As a student at the General Theological Seminary, I sit in the same classrooms in which Lewis Wattson (and in the case of the West Building, his father) sat and studied. My community, the Brotherhood of Saint Gregory, meets four times a year at the Graymoor monasteries (the Friary and Convent) of the Society of the Atonement, and has entered a formal covenant of prayer and work with the Society. At the same time, I must admit to a greater sympathy with the open breadth of Huntington, as opposed to the more sharply focused character of Father Paul, which sometimes bordered on the fanatical. One was a friendly, glowing lamp; the other a penetrating and sometimes blinding beam.

One might say that Lewis Wattson was always a Roman Catholic at heart. He was certainly a High Churchman of the highest sort, regardless of his occasional protests to the contrary. One need only read the essays in the Pulpit of the Cross, the parish magazine of St. John’s, Kingston, or its successor, The Lamp (about which Huntington’s thoughts have already been shared), to see — more clearly than did Wattson himself — the path that lay before him. That he would occasionally protest that he was simply following the Via Media even when supporting what many considered the most extreme positions (mandatory auricular confession and allegiance to papal primacy, for example) is an indication of how convinced he was of the rightness of his position: people rarely label themselves as extremists. Wattson once bristled with anger when the New York Sun predicted he would become a Catholic [meaning, of course, in the popular parlance of then and now, Roman Catholic], “We were baptized into the Holy Catholic Church over thirty years ago, and please God, expect to continue a Catholic until we die.”⁽²⁹⁾ About the time Wattson was nearing his decision to depart to Rome, Huntington (more accurate than the Sun editor) recorded his doubt “that either logic or historical evidence can be counted upon to weigh very much with any one whose face is fairly set Romewards. With nine out of ten, it is a matter not so much of reason as of feeling.”⁽³⁰⁾ Wattson’s Romewards course was charted out in his publications, in his preaching and in his mission work, and we will follow his passage from High Churchmanship, through Ritualism and Romanism, into Anglo-Papalism, and finally across the chilly waters of the Tiber.

Like Father like son: The Wattsons at General

Joseph Newton Wattson converted from the Presbyterian Church and later sought to serve the Episcopal Church as a priest. He enrolled at the General Theological Seminary in 1843, in a time when the Oxford movement was creating no small stir. Rumors of “Jesuits in disguise” were circulating, and a misconceived witticism by young Wattson brought him before the dean and faculty, and he and a classmate were either expelled, dismissed, or asked to leave quietly — depending on whose account one chooses to believe.⁽³¹⁾ Wattson eventually found a sympathetic bishop in Maryland, and he was ordained and called to St. Clement’s in Kent County, a small colonial parish whose Communion Table had been a gift of Queen Anne.⁽³²⁾

Lewis Thomas Wattson was born in January 1863 in this Eastern Shore community, which his father left a few years later to take a parish in Mississippi. He was educated at a secondary school in New Jersey, and entered St. Stephen’s, Annandale, N.Y., which later became Bard College. In 1882, he entered G.T.S. and, conscious of his father’s fate, did not allow any of his High Church leanings to become too visible.⁽³³⁾

Wattson was ordained to the diaconate in 1885, ironically (due to his own bishop’s illness) by Bishop Lee of Delaware, the same man who forty years before had refused to ordain his father. He was given charge of a parish in Port Deposit while still a deacon, his father supplying the sacramental ministry he could not provide. Later, a similar arrangement was worked out at St. John’s Kingston, as the elder Wattson retired and recommended his son, a notably talented preacher, take his place. He was ordained to the priesthood by a special dispensation (he was a year short of the canonical age) and on his father’s death in 1887 he took up the full responsibility for the parish.

Wattson began to elevate the parish in a more ritualist direction. He did away with the quartet and introduced a choir of vested men and boys — as had Huntington in Worcester.⁽³⁴⁾ “Altar candles, vestments and statues followed in rapid succession.”⁽³⁵⁾ In the mission he founded at Holy Cross, even more rarified experiments, using red-flag terms such as “Mass” and “Vespers,” and hardware such as a sanctuary lamp, Sanctus bell, and a confessional were introduced. All of these innovations (or, as Wattson called them, “restorations”) were explained in great detail in the parish magazine, The Pulpit of the Cross, which also urged such practices as the eucharistic fast and auricular confession.

In 1893 he responded to youthful intimations that he was to found a religious order, thinking the present parochial setting might be conducive, and he chose at random three biblical texts that gave him the name: the Society of the Atonement. At the same time, an “interior voice” told him that seven years would pass “before his dream could be realized, and so he went about his parish duties.”⁽³⁶⁾ In 1894 he crossed the ritual Rubicon by introducing incense on Advent Sunday, an event unusual enough to be reported in the New York Times. Though the vestry had assented to the aromatic introduction, they did not represent the views of a substantial segment of the parish members, 106 of whom submitted a petition to a diocesan commission of inquiry in opposition to the “innovations” Wattson had brought to this quiet Protestant Episcopal congregation. The controversy dragged on for some seven months, until Wattson found a face-saving way out by resigning to take on a mission in Omaha, where he hoped to found the religious community towards which he felt called.⁽³⁷⁾

Wattson’s efforts to get the clergy and lay mission workers who served the Omaha Associate Mission to follow what amounted to the horarium “followed by most Roman Catholic religious communities of that time” met with little success, as “the other missioners were adamant in their refusal to become ‘monks.’”⁽³⁸⁾ So Wattson returned to the Hudson Valley in 1897, where he was finally to realize his ideals, but only in leaving behind more than a failed mission. He would renounce his possessions, his church, and his priesthood, in responding to a voice that had been calling him since childhood. Like the little Poor One of Assisi, he would have to pass through physical and spiritual poverty to find the true riches he so earnestly sought.

Genesis and Exodus at Graymoor: Upon this rock, Hudson River style

On his return to the east, Wattson renewed his association with Sister Lurana White, with whom he had discussed his hopes to found an Episcopal religious order.⁽³⁹⁾ In 1898 Wattson had a “Damascus road” experience in which he became utterly convinced of papal primacy as the means to Christian unity — but in spite of the declaration of Apostolicae curae issued two years earlier, he failed — for a full decade — to see the conflict in his own position as an Anglican cleric urging papal authority. For the next ten years, in addition to founding the Society of the Atonement, he preached and taught that Episcopal “corporate reunion” with the Roman Catholic Church was the proper form for church unity to take. His single-minded focus on Petrine unity wrought havoc even in his own struggling community, and all but himself and one other friar (among the male members) left the Society of the Atonement when, in October 1900, Father Paul officially adopted papal infallibility and supremacy, and committed the Society of the Atonement to work for Christian unity centered upon the Chair of Peter as “the divinely constituted center of a reunited Christendom.”⁽⁴⁰⁾ Those who could not affirm this teaching were dropped from membership in the Society — friars, sisters, and tertiaries. Already an oddity in the Episcopal Church, the Society of the Atonement began to be looked upon as an enemy.

Matters reached their head in 1901. An old college friend asked Father Paul to preach at an Evensong preceding a Long Island Archdeaconry meeting. Oblivious to decorum, Father Paul took up his accustomed theme, and referred to Anglicanism as the “lame man outside the temple [in Acts 3]. . . prostrate just beyond the door of entrance into the Catholic Church, its hands always outstretched for alms” and whose only hope was Peter’s successor. He was finally cut off when the angry Archdeacon rose to his feet, strode to the chancel, and loudly — and somewhat ironically — declaimed the offertory sentence.⁽⁴¹⁾ A resolution of the Archdeaconry condemning Wattson was narrowly avoided, but the incident came to national attention, as The Living Church angrily repudiated the actions of the “earnest but erratic priest of Graymoor.”⁽⁴²⁾ Rumors of deposition or at least censure were abroad.

Worse than the outward rumors and criticisms, against which Wattson had steeled himself for years, were the beginnings of inner doubt. He was beginning to realize the logical impossibility of believing in papal supremacy and infallibility and the validity of his own priesthood in the light of Leo XIII’s bull.⁽⁴³⁾ Most importantly, he still failed to see that his beloved idea of corporate reunion was not possible to achieve if Anglican Orders were invalid — he had always hoped that the Episcopal Church might rejoin with Rome in a manner similar to that of the Uniate churches of the East. Perhaps because denying Anglican orders would cut too close to home, he somehow managed to continue living in denial.

The cord of his tenuous conviction was further frayed by the General Convention of 1907's amendment of Canon 19. This “Open Pulpit” amendment would allow ministers of non-Episcopal denominations to preach with the permission of the rector or bishop. This amendment — supported by Huntington as an advance in keeping with the Quadrilateral — was seen by Wattson as nothing less than disastrous, an action which “officially introduced Modernism into the Episcopal Church,”⁽⁴⁴⁾ broke down the defensive hedge protecting the faithful from the predations of Protestantism, and rendered the church “a fountain that is poisoned at its source.”⁽⁴⁵⁾ Wattson wrote:⁽⁴⁶⁾

If the Anglican Communion is not the Catholic Church, and is not even a vineyard securely hedged about, or a garden enclosed, then it is in plain English an Episcopal Commons. . . The Lord’s sheep can look for no adequate protection from the shepherds, who claim to derive from God their authority to rule over and feed them and lead them in the way everlasting. . .

Within a few months, Wattson determined on a plan of action: he would meet the threat to the church with prayer. An English priest, Spencer Jones, had suggested to him that June 29, the feast of St. Peter, might be an appropriate day to focus on the intention of corporate reunion. Wattson, not to be undone, counter-suggested a full octave of prayer, running from the feast of the Chair of Peter (January 18) to the Conversion of Paul (January 25), with the intention “that all may be one.”⁽⁴⁷⁾Thus the Church Unity Octave came into being, and was first observed in 1908.

Wattson, however, was still inwardly torn, still living in denial and unwilling to accept the invalidity of his own orders. It would take the charitable yet pointed direction of Bishop Kinsman of Delaware, Episcopal Visitor to the Society, to whom Father Paul had opened his mind and heart, to settle and decide his future course of action. The bishop advised him:⁽⁴⁸⁾

You accept the whole teaching of the Roman Church save the single detail of the repudiation of Anglican Orders. . . This proposition is an impossible one for a clergyman of our Church. My advice is that, in the interest of single-minded honesty and devotion to duty, you make the choice between the two Churches. You cannot serve either the Papal Church or the Protestant Episcopal Church well if you try to serve both at the same time. Either give up belief in a divinely established Papacy and in Roman dogmas. . . as one must do who is a consistent and contented Anglican; or else give up Anglican Orders, make an unqualified submission to the Latin Church, and be a good Roman Catholic. I have no hesitation in saying that if I were in your position I should choose the latter alternative. This would seem to be the natural outcome of the line of development you have adopted.

This was the push that Father Paul needed, and in 1909, he and the few members of the Society of the Atonement who had remained⁽⁴⁹⁾ were received as a body into the Roman Catholic Church. Wattson, after preparation and study at Dunwoodie, Yonkers, was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood, and went on to live and work another thirty years on his mountain on the Hudson, building a community that thrived and grew,⁽⁵⁰⁾ operating an important mission for homeless men and alcoholics (St. Christopher’s Inn) as well as offering a focal point for the Church Unity Octave. To the end, Father Paul continued to offer his prayers that the Anglican Prodigal would one day return to his Father’s house.⁽⁵¹⁾ As I will note in a postscript, to some extent this prayer was realized, but not in the way Father Paul expected it.

The Square and the Chair: Unity or Union?

. . . not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth. . .

— Collect for Richard Hooker, Lesser Feasts and Fasts

A number of images come to mind when contrasting the models of unity advanced by Dr. Huntington and Father Paul. Compare the image of the four-square, walled city with capacious and inviting gates, to the monarchial porch from which the pope pronounces blessings. Contrast the rich variety promised in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s Chapels of the Tongues with the glorious uniformity of the Latin Mass the same wherever in the world it was celebrated. Compare the public square, the forum of bustling activity and occasional haggling and trade with the decorum and gravity of the throne room, where decrees are uttered with stately and pious formality. Set side by side, if you will, the Sermon on the Plain with the Sermon on the Mount: the one is broad, but people can wander off; the other is high and secure, but with room for only a few hardy souls to stand.

Neither Huntington nor Wattson found the model offered by his opposite particularly attractive. On New Year’s Eve of 1906, Huntington wrote,⁽⁵²⁾

I believe that the papacy has outlived its usefulness and ought to disappear; but I have little doubt that in God’s large plan for the Christianizing of the world, and especially of Western Europe, it has rendered in the past no slight service. What we want is a Catholicity that shall be genuine and workable without being papal.

So much for the Chair of Peter. How did the open and comprehensive Episcopal Church look in the eyes of Father Paul? In February 1908, he published an editorial in The Lamp in response to the Open Pulpit amendment, already cited above. One can almost see the curl of distaste on the zealot’s lips as one reads his diatribe.⁽⁵³⁾

A spurious Catholicity, called Comprehensiveness, has been adopted as a substitute for that genuine Catholicity which Newman, Pusey, Keble, Neale. . . sought to introduce into the Anglican measure of meal until the whole was leavened. In the amendment of Canon 19 our own bishops have “broken down” the Church’s hedge and “all they that go by (may now) pluck off her grapes.” . . . Alas a chorus of [our bishops] are shouting from the very housetops that the glory of Anglicanism is not its unflinching fidelity to Catholic faith and practice but its universal toleration and its all inclusive comprehensiveness.

The battle here joined is the old battle between authority and community, between papal and conciliar models of government. Neither Huntington nor Wattson could settle this debate — nor is it, at this point in the church’s history, clear that anyone ever will — but it is instructive to look more closely at the models for unity which they proposed.

Four walls with open doors: Comprehensiveness for the sake of unity

Huntington, perhaps because of his greater openness, had a clearer sense of the obstacles to unity than Wattson. For Wattson it was simply a matter of submission, an early form of “Just Say Yes.” Huntington saw that the source of division in the church was not the old “traditional rivalries. . . and scores of burning questions which would have been acknowledged burned out, years ago, had not a mistaken sense of duty to our ancestors forbidden it. . .” but the gap between an individualistic and subjective, interior religion and a collectivist and sacramental one. “It is none other than the ancient contrast of Catholic and Puritan — a contrast as old as Christianity. . . ever since the days [Christ] called Peter to baptize and Paul to preach. . . Men and women will be High Church and Low Church to the end of time.”⁽⁵⁴⁾ Huntington was not seeking “a creedless liberalism, for the sake of winning a cheap repute for breadth”⁽⁵⁵⁾ but a church roomy enough “to keep these two sorts of Christians within speaking distance of each other.”⁽⁵⁶⁾

Emergence of a Church Idea

Huntington’s first articulation of the Quadrilateral came in a sermon preached at Worcester, January 30, 1870, and the concept would be fleshed out and expanded in his book of the same year, The Church Idea. The search for a frame on which to hang church unity had been with him for some time. In 1865 he sketched out a “trilateral” consisting of “a simple creed, a varied worship, a generous polity,”⁽⁵⁷⁾ and it has been suggested that his Quadrilateral represents an adaptation of F.D. Maurice’s six “signs of the church.”⁽⁵⁸⁾ Whatever the source, the Quadrilateral was to be built upon the Scriptures, the Creeds, the two Sacraments of the Gospel, and the Episcopate.

Refinement and acceptance

Huntington brought his Quadrilateral to the General Convention of 1886, meeting in Chicago, at which it was adopted by the House of Bishops — adding “Historic” to “Episcopate” — but it failed to be approved by the “senior” House of Deputies, in which Huntington himself served. When the Lambeth Conference was held two years later, Bishop Potter was serving on the Reunion Committee, and the Chicago principles were further adapted, specifically “as a basis for an approach to reunion,”⁽⁵⁹⁾ and several clauses from the Articles of Religion (fortunately ones with which Huntington could live) were engrafted, and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral was adopted.

Huntington then published (1891) a further exposition of the Quadrilateral, The Peace of the Church, in which he characterized the four elements (somewhat mixing his metaphors) as the Archives (Scripture), the Credenda (Creeds), the Signs and Seals (the Sacraments) and Pilotage (the historic episcopate). At the General Convention of the following year, he brought forward his Quadrilateral in its Lambeth form, and it was finally adopted by the House of Deputies. Unfortunately, this time around it was not adopted by the House of Bishops, who seemed to think the matter had been dealt with sufficiently in 1886. This meant that the Quadrilateral had been adopted by both houses, but not in a concurrent form, leaving its exact form in a legally ambiguous position — though the content and principles were acceptable, as the Conventions of 1889, 1892 and 1895 affirmed.⁽⁶⁰⁾ However, when Huntington proposed to the 1895 General Convention that the Quadrilateral be employed in the fashion similar to the earlier Muhlenberg Memorial, allowing a bishop to take any congregation that accepted the Quadrilateral “under his spiritual oversight” the proposal was defeated.⁽⁶¹⁾

Huntington continued his battle for implementation in another volume, where he explored the implications of the Quadrilateral for the foundation of a National Church (1899). He believed that Anglicanism in America, unhampered by the issues of establishment, might provide a basis for reunion, of Protestants, at least. He had never really intended his Quadrilateral for reunion with Rome, since he regarded the acts of Vatican I had “accomplished what the framers of them doubtless meant that they should accomplish,—the utter overthrow of any hopes of ‘peace with Rome’ on grounds other than that of unconditional surrender.”⁽⁶²⁾ He also attempted to get the elements of the Quadrilateral incorporated in the opening article of the Constitution of the church in 1898, and a Preamble in 1907, but these efforts ultimately failed.⁽⁶³⁾ So, during his lifetime at least, the Quadrilateral remained more a matter of principle than practice in the United States.

At the Anglican Communion level, however, the Quadrilateral (in content if not by name) continued to be reaffirmed and applied, at the Lambeth Conferences of 1920, 1948 and 1958. In 1968 an effort to shift from “historic episcopate” to “papal authority in the episcopal college” was defeated,⁽⁶⁴⁾ and the Conference of 1978 reaffirmed the Quadrilateral in its pure 1888 form.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, the General Convention of 1949 endorsed the 1948 Lambeth “exposition” of the Quadrilateral. In 1976, the Convention voted to include the Chicago and Lambeth forms of the Quadrilateral among the Historical Documents of the Church in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, which was ratified in 1979. Finally, in 1982, the Convention adopted a revised and updated “explication” of the Quadrilateral “to guide this Church in its Ecumenical dialogue.”⁽⁶⁵⁾

An uncomfortable seat: Unity without compromise

While Lambeth and General Convention were massaging the Quadrilateral, Father Paul’s Chair of Unity was standing unchanged and firmly planted — and empty. While the Octave was very popular among Roman Catholics, it failed to have much appeal for those “separated brethren” who did not find the Chair of Peter to be a particularly inviting seat.

The Unity Octave as prayer for submission

The earliest intentions of the Church Unity Octave were:⁽⁶⁶⁾ 1) universal recognition of the Chair of Peter as divinely instituted center of unity, and return to the One Fold of all the sheep; 2) the return of the Eastern Churches; 3) the submission of Anglicans to the pope; 4) the recovery of the Lutherans and other Protestants; 5) that all Americans and the English enter into communion with the Vicar of Christ; 6) the return of lapsed Catholics; 7) the conversion of the Jews; and 8) the conversion of the heathen, or the “missionary conquest of the world.” There is no uncertainty or ambiguity in the intentions of this octave of prayer, nor in the understanding of unity called for. The Octave was given papal approval (including indulgences) by Benedict XV in 1916, though Father Paul’s efforts to have the Vatican declare observance of the Octave mandatory throughout the church failed in 1930.⁽⁶⁷⁾

Further clarity as to the nature of unity proposed came in 1927, when its title was altered from “Church Unity Octave” to “Chair of Unity Octave,” the new title lifting it “above any possibility of misunderstanding.”⁽⁶⁸⁾ Numerous other efforts at “church unity” had evolved since the end of the century, and Father Paul and the Vatican wanted it to be perfectly clear that unity, from the Roman Catholic standpoint, meant reunion with Peter.

1934: Couturier widens the circle

Unity of this sort was obviously unacceptable to Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant Christians around the world. Abbé Paul Couturier, who had connections with the Orthodox community in France, first became acquainted with the Octave in 1932. In collaboration with his Orthodox associates, in 1934 he developed the idea of a Universal Week of Prayer for Christian Unity “in the manner best pleasing to Christ.” The popularity of this form was almost instantaneous, and it was formally adopted by the 1940 World Conference on Faith and Order.⁽⁶⁹⁾

The Roman Catholic response was not long in coming. “Insular and defensive, the Roman Church issued a monitum in 1948. . . which warned Roman Catholics that they were forbidden to participate in ‘mixed congresses of Catholics and non-Catholics.’”⁽⁷⁰⁾ This warning came just days before the Amsterdam meeting that was to lead to the World Council of Churches. A December 1949 instruction on the Ecumenical Movement was issued by the Holy Office, affirming:⁽⁷¹⁾

The Catholic Church takes no actual part in “ecumenical” conventions and other assemblies of similar character. . . Bishops will not allow recourse to a perilous mode of speaking which engenders false notions and raises deceitful hopes that can never be fulfilled. Such would be, for example, the allegation that what is in the Encyclical Letters of the Roman Pontiffs about the return of the dissidents to the Church. . . need not be taken seriously.

Pope Pius XII, in Humani Generis of 1950, responded to the Universal Week of Prayer in no uncertain terms:⁽⁷²⁾

There are many who, deploring disagreement among men and intellectual confusion, through an imprudent zeal for souls, are urged by a great and ardent desire to do away with the barrier that divides good and honest men. . . Some through enthusiasm for an imprudent “eirenism” seem to consider as an obstacle to the restoration of fraternal union, tenets founded on the laws and principles given by Christ and likewise of the institutions founded by Him, or which are the defense and support of the integrity of the faith, and the removal of which would bring about the union of all, but only to their destruction. . . They want to reduce to a minimum the meaning of dogmas. . . They cherish the hope that when dogma is stripped of the elements which they hold to be extrinsic to Divine Revelation, it will compare advantageously with the opinions of those who are separated from the unity of the Church. . . Let them not think, indulging in false “eirenics” that the dissident and erring can happily be brought back to the bosom of the Church. . .

In short, it could be stated that, “the only reunion the Catholic Church is interested in is the return of all the ‘other sheep’ to the one Fold of Peter under his Successor who is the Vicar of Christ on earth.”⁽⁷³⁾. It would take an unexpected shift on the part of the Vatican itself to alter the situation.

Peter moves his chair

Father Paul was a true son of the Roman Catholic Church, and he could not wish anything other than what she wished. He lived and died before the warm glow of Vatican II had begun to unbend the rigor of the Roman position. On November 21, 1964, the Council issued its Decree on Ecumenism, which by abandoning the rhetoric of “heretics and schismatics” and “separated brethren” began for the first time to recognize the ecclesial reality of “separated churches.”⁽⁷⁴⁾ Finally, the 1967 Directory on Ecumenism gave formal recognition and mandate to the “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity” — using the name originated by Couturier, not Father Paul, and the old Chair of Unity was quietly moved to the attic, replaced by a more comfortable and collegial seating arrangement.

“Can these bones live?”

The church has clearly come very far in the century since Huntington and Wattson first undertook their respective crusades towards unity. But is the church any closer, in practical terms, to unity? There is some hope on the horizon regarding the Concordat between the Episcopalians and Lutherans (particularly in light of the Porvoo agreement in Europe). But the prospects for Anglican/Roman Catholic dialogue — particularly under the shadow of the Anglican Orders question (in general and as particularly exacerbated, from the Roman perspective, by the ordination of women in most of the Anglican Communion) — seems dim and dark. Ultimately, on a universal scale, I believe that church unity — in terms of institutional structure — will remain an asymptotic goal towards which we can, and must, strive, but which will in all likelihood never be reached.

Convergences and obstacles: The Quadrilateral

A primary convergence in ecumenical relations stemming from the work of the World Council, and within ARCIC, appears to be following the lines mapped out by Huntington, in seeking agreement on minimal essentials. But is “mere Christianity” enough for ecclesial union? And to what extent is agreement achieved? On Baptism it appears that relatively full agreement has been reached, at least by those churches participating in dialogue. The Creeds too appear to be fairly well settled, the last troublesome quibble of the filioque close to a final resolution.

But with the rest of the Quadrilateral problems remain. However close the dialogue appears to come, there still remain the annoying details that prevent full intercommunion. Unwillingness to compromise, or to live in a period of ambiguity, has hampered the Lutheran/Episcopal talks, the stumbling block being the nature of “the historic episcopate.” Similarly, in talks with the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman model of the Eucharist as “sign of union” versus an Anglican vision of the Eucharist as “means to union” has defined the division rather than leading to its closure. The canon of Scripture is still not universally recognized among the churches, nor the appropriate method to interpret it. In short, the Quadrilateral stands not as a sign of unity, but as a summary articulation of the very things that continue to divide the church, and a challenge to continue working on the seemingly intractable problems that remain.

Can we make it on a wing and a week of prayer?

When we look to the Week of Prayer, a bit of hope shines through, though it may be only a false glimmer among the shadows, a spark that flares and dies unless it finds some ready tinder waiting. In 1959, Pope John XXIII wrote to the superior of the Society of the Atonement, “Prayer, in fact, is the first and principal means to be used to bring about this yearned-for unity.”⁽⁷⁵⁾ The Week of Prayer is now a nearly universal observance, supported by national church councils around the world in hundreds of languages. If these prayers can be coupled with deeds of sacrifice and humility, perhaps unity will not be beyond our grasp after all. As Huntington once wrote:⁽⁷⁶⁾

No well-fortified “quadrilateral” will ever make this Church in which you and I believe the reconciling power we long to see her become, until the spirit of sacrifice and sympathy shall possess her as it has never possessed her yet. . . Until Almighty God has disciplined us as a Church out of every slightest remnant of self-sufficiency, we need never hope to win the beatitude of them that make peace. . . ‘He that scattered Israel. . . will gather him, and keep him as a shepherd doth his flock.” Such is the churchmanship of hope.

In 1903, Father Paul wrote, in an issue of The Lamp that Huntington no doubt read (it being among the numbers Miss Meredith sent him):⁽⁷⁷⁾

Is then Christian Unity a visionary dream?. . . Let who will deride or shake their heads in doubt, saying: “. . . The seamless robe of Christ is too much torn to tatters ever to be mended; the reunion of Christendom is utterly out of the question; Rome is too proud and unbending; England is too self-satisfied; the East too orthodox; Protestantism too much enamoured of letting everybody do and think just as they please. . . “ Our answer is, God’s Will is Omnipotent,. . . the prayer of Jesus Christ has got to be answered; the Almighty Father would never refuse the dying request of His Only begotten Son. . . Hope with smiling countenance kneels and prays, being quite happy and content to wait.

If men of such contrasting views as Huntington and Wattson could find room for Hope, and place their faith in God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son of God, the prayer for unity in the Book of Common Prayer may not, after all, be incapable of realization:⁽⁷⁸⁾

For all who believe in you, Lord Christ, that our divisions may cease, and that all may be one as you and the Father are one, we pray to you, O Lord. Lord, have mercy.