Clem’s 150 years on
Ages ago somebody (not at all unorthodox — he ‘went over to Rome’ a few years later and is a priest) warned me about this place (many relics, Latin, obscure old-fashioned practices) so naturally I went! Last week a brother in England, actually the first ‘Clementine’ I ever met, reminded me that 150 years ago today it had its first Sunday service. Bittersweet now that the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Episcopal Church is finished. (No Catholic bishops mean no movement and more important no church.)

Long story short: A mid-19th-century Philadelphian builder decides to hike up the value of his new project by putting a church in the neighbourhood, irreligiously picking a name from one of his relations. So a big brown sort-of Romanesque stone Protestant preaching barn goes up. (Providentially the Romanesqueness and the saint’s name will suit what it will become.) Ten years later an AC priest shows up and starts teaching that religion and nudging the services in that direction. By 1900 it’s a model of American ACism, retrofitted for that kind of worship, and is even run by an English religious order (no longer there and I understand on its last legs in England). Until the mid-early C20 it’s a real neighbourhood parish of working-class folk back when there are such among the Episcopalians in big cities. (Families and thus a Sunday school, now gone, with fully habited nuns teaching it.) Two unrelated things happen about 75-80 years ago: the rector (more), an American, takes it up a notch so it’s like English Anglo-Papalism at the time (Tridentine RC ways: Missal not Prayer Book) and a big new boulevard wipes out the houses that made up the old parish. (There is also an engineering feat when 20th Street is widened: all of S. Clement’s buildings are put on rails and pushed back, landing on new foundations!) With only a hiccup in between — going mainstreamish Episcopal from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s — it’s been a Tridentine AC ‘shrine’, a magnet for YFs and a few others, ever since.

Services are 1951 Roman Rite (as they were before the first big changes in 1955) with a few accommodations for Anglicans such as allowing Communion in the hand (few do it), the chalice for the laity (a minority receive under only one kind) and some use of King James-style English instead of Latin. (Also, after Communism fell, the Leonine prayers after Low Mass are no longer read.) Sunday Vespers and Benediction are in Latin. The full-time clergy are required to be celibate in anticipation of union with Rome.

Been a happy non-communicant part-timer there for nearly six years. My native tradition revved up to square with the Catholic faith, with doses of high culture (classical music) and that AC sense of fun that Huw describes (as did Sir John Betjeman). (I’m barely old enough to have caught the tail end of old-time religion in Anglicanism and have identified as Catholic since I was about 13.)

‘Extreme’ colonial bishops leading us in song...
The fiddle-back vestments a-glitter with morning rays,
Our Lady’s image, in multiple-candled brightness,
The bells and banners — those were the waking days
When Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze.

Labels: Anglicanism, history, Pennsylvania, the Catholic faith