It is accepted wisdom that the newly beatified Cardinal John
Henry Newman (1801-1890) and his associates in the Anglo-Catholic
Oxford Movement were influences in the faith formation of members
of the Episcopal Church in the United States, including some who
followed Newman’s path of conversion to Roman Catholicism. Less
appreciated are the stories of made-in-the-USA Anglo-Catholics and
Roman Catholic converts, contemporary or even antecedent to Newman,
and probably influential in the Cardinal’s own spiritual
odyssey.
Though there may not have been a “movement” in America of
scope, celebrity, academic prestige and literary heft to
compare with that of the Oxford divines, there were notable
moves by individuals that deserve their place alongside
Newman’s. To give two clichés some well deserved mangling, not all
of the great 19th-century Crossings of the Tiber took place Across
the Pond.
During the early days of the American Republic, when much
of the Empire State was still frontier territory, Christian clergy
of every church and denomination were pressed to emphasize pastoral
duties above intellectual pursuits. John Henry Hobart (1775-1830),
an Anglo-Catholic and one of the first leaders of the Episcopal
Church following American Independence, was exceptional in his
integration of scholarship with pastoral and charitable endeavor.
As assistant minister at fashionable Trinity Church in lower
Manhattan, he inspired a parishioner, a young society matron named
Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, to deepen her faith and involve herself
in direct care for the poor. Arguably the most startling event
during his tenure at Trinity was Mrs. Seton’s conversion in 1805 to
the humble parish of St. Peter’s, the only Roman Catholic church in
New York City.
As Episcopal Bishop of New York from 1816 until his death,
Hobart became founding dean of the General Theological Seminary in
New York (1817). In 1822, he founded the institution in Geneva, New
York, today known as Hobart College. That same year he gave his
daughter Rebecca’s hand in marriage to Levi Silliman Ives
(1797-1867) and ordained Ives a deacon. In 1824, Bishop Hobart
traveled in Europe, spending several months in England and dining
and conversing with young English churchmen including the
23-year-old Newman, then preparing for his ordination as
deacon.
As a mature Anglican and Oxford Movement leader, Newman in
1839 wrote with warm appreciation of the American Episcopal Church
in general and of Bishop Hobart in particular. Newman was
fascinated with, and sympathetic to, the American Church as a
species of Anglicanism unbound from control by the British Crown
and Parliament.
“We have the proof that the Church, of which
we are,” wrote Newman, “is not the mere creation of the State, but
has an independent life, with a kind of her own, and fruit after
her own kind. …if her daughter can exist, though the State does
not protect, the mother would not cease to be, though she were
protected no longer….It is encouraging to find that the [American]
Church, though deprived of all external aids [is still based on]
… the ground of the consistency, definiteness and stability of
its creed.”
The same year Newman wrote: “Let the American Church take
her place; she is freer than we are; she has but to will and she
can do. Let her… react upon us, according to the light and power
given her. Let her not take our errors and increase them by
copying, but let her be, as it were, our shadow before us—the
prophecy and omen, the mysterious token and the anticipated
fulfillment of those Catholic principles which lie within us, more
or less latent, waiting for the destined hour of their
development.”
By 1842, Newman, and others, were moving decisively away
from the disposition that Anglicanism could provide the Catholic
principles they awaited.
In that year, James Roosevelt Bayley, kinsman of two U.S.
Presidents, nephew of Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, and rector of St.
Peter’s Episcopal Church in Harlem, New York, went to Rome and was
received into the Roman Catholic Church. Unmarried, he was ordained
a Roman Catholic priest two years later. He went on to become the
first bishop of Newark, the eighth archbishop of Baltimore, and
founder of Seton Hall University.
In 1842, John Henry Newman, surely aware of Bayley’s story
as he was of Elizabeth Seton’s, left his prestigious chaplaincy at
Oxford and retreated to what was for Anglicans a strangely
“monastic” community he established in nearby rural Littlemore.
Three years later Newman converted to the Roman Catholic Church,
and a year after that he was ordained a priest in Rome by Cardinal
Giacomo Fransoni and awarded a Doctor of Divinity degree by Pope
Pius IX.
Levi Silliman Ives and his wife came from the same small
circle of New York Episcopalians that had included the Bayleys and
the Setons. He became Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina in 1831,
the prestige of which office was signified when he was awarded an
honorary doctorate of laws from the University of North Carolina in
1834. Explicitly Anglo-Catholic, he acknowledged the influence of
Newman and the Tractarians. In 1842, in a place he named Valle
Crucis in the Appalachians near the Tennessee border, Bishop Ives
established the Society of the Holy Cross, said to have been the
first monastic order in the Anglican Communion since the English
Reformation. In 1848, Bishop Ives was put before an Episcopal
Church tribunal concerned that the monastery and his Romish
practices, including promotion of prayers to the Virgin Mary and
saints and private sacramental confession before a priest, had
crossed the boundaries of heresy. He retained his office after
agreeing to the suppression of the Society of the Holy
Cross.
But his conscience was in agony. In 1852, Ives took a
leave of absence and went with his wife to Rome. There he was
personally received into the Roman Catholic Church by Pius IX. He
was said to have been the first Protestant bishop since the 17th
century to have converted to Rome. A few months later his wife also
converted.
There are many, many dots to connect within the
trans-Atlantic exchange of Anglo-Catholic and Tractarian ideas, and
among the personalities involved. Some of these are connected in a
well researched 1999 article by Larry Crockett, who gives a clue to
his sentiments by referring repeatedly to conversion to Rome as
“secession.” The article is “The
Oxford Movement and the 19th-Century Episcopal
Church: Anglo-Catholic Ecclesiology and the
American Experience,” in the online theological review
Quodlibet Journal.
For those who have just witnessed Pope Benedict’s
beatification of John Henry Newman, a relevant, and heretofore
largely neglected, story is that of Levi and Rebecca Ives. Today
married Anglican and Episcopal clergy converting to Rome frequently
are admitted to the Roman Catholic priesthood. This did not happen
in the 19th century. Today departures of clergy from Canterbury to
Rome are taken graciously by the Anglican side. In 1853, the
General Convention of the Episcopal Church denounced Levi Ives as
an “absconding and apostate delinquent.”
Ives wrote a book-length apologia, The Trials of a
Mind in its Progress to Catholicism, published in 1854 and
now available
in full on the Internet. However, it is not so
much an autobiography as a detailed pronouncement in favor of Roman
Catholic versus Anglican claims.
More details about Levi Ives’s life after 1852 are in an
article, “Once We Knew How to Rescue Poor Kids,” by William J.
Stern, in City Journal, Autumn 1998. Until his death in
1867, Ives devoted himself to scholarship and charity. Encouraged
by Archbishop John Hughes of New York, he became a professor of
rhetoric at what is now Fordham University and taught at other
Catholic institutions. But more significant, according to Stern,
was Ives’s creation and leadership of a highly effective charitable
institution, the New York Catholic Protectory for delinquent
boys.
Read Stern’s
article in full for an appreciation of
Ives’s remarkable work:
Stern quotes Ives’ own memoir about his agonizing decision
at the age of 55 to leave his Tar Heel bishopric and become an
unemployed layman, recalling a feeling of “horror… enhanced by the
self-humiliation with which I saw such a step must cover me, the
absolute deprivation of all mere temporal support which it must
occasion, not only to myself, but to one whom I was bound ‘to love
and cherish until death.’”
Stern writes: “Ives indeed stood to lose the considerable
worldly honor and eminence he had attained within the Episcopal
Church. And Ives was right: what would it do to his wife? Her life
had not been easy after she married him. The Iveses had lost both
their young children to illness, a crushing blow. Rebecca Ives was
frequently ill herself. She found the harshness of North Carolina
and the distance from her family in New York hard to endure. And
her father — Ives’s great, almost fatherly, benefactor — was
before his death … the very embodiment of American
Episcopalianism.”
A certain amount of fame, together with reputations for
what Saint Augustine of Hippo called “heroic virtue,” began the
Vatican processes making Elizabeth Seton a canonized saint and John
Henry Newman a “blessed.”
Would more awareness of the heroic and prophetic lives of
Levi and Rebecca Ives put them on the path toward
canonization?
