The brotherhood was founded on Holy Cross Day in 1969 when Brother Richard Thomas and a group of companions made first vows in the chapel of the New York convent of a Roman Catholic women’s order, the Sisters of the Visitation. It was recognized more formally by Bishop Horace W.B. Donegan of the Diocese of New York in 1970.

Over six decades of Brother Richard Thomas’s leadership, the BSG’s brothers have carried out a wide variety of ministries in parishes, national church administration, organizational support, diaconal work, as artists and liturgists, and as musicians and spiritual directors. A history of its first 40 years was chronicled by Brother Karekin Madteos Yarian, BSG, in his 2009 In Love and Service Bound, available for free download in PDF.

The community is open to lay and ordained men without regard to marital status who live individually, in small groups, or with their families according to a common Rule. The Rule requires regular reception of the Holy Eucharist, the four Offices of the Book of Common Prayer, meditation, theological study, Embertide reports, a tithe, and participation in the brotherhood’s annual convocation and chapter. The BSG received 501(c)(3) status in 1992 and has administrative offices in Baltimore.

Brother Ciarán Anthony has held several leadership positions during his 36 years as a member of the brotherhood. He is a physician working in family practice in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and a member of the Parish of the Epiphany in nearby Winchester, Massachusetts. The brotherhood is also led by six regional ministers provincial.

Its most recent entry in the Anglican Religious Life Yearbook lists 38 professed members, and a novice. The brotherhood’s postulancy and novitiate periods each last one year, followed by eligibility for profession of annual vows. Life profession may be made after five years in annual vows.

Some years ago, I discovered one of the easiest things about life in the domestic church: to ask children at breakfast what saint is on the calendar hanging in the kitchen today. It makes a simple task out of the morning before school that reminds me what day it is, but gives them a color-coded, vocabulary-boosting snippet of liturgical information to supplement their secular textbooks — and mirabile dictu they actually like it.

But this year, with more than a few options to choose from, the cheerful exploration became a confusion of red, white, green, and purple: the sample size of Episcopal churches in Philadelphia County alone yields not one, not two, but at least five sanctoral designations for any given day: the Roman Martyrology, Lesser Feasts and Fasts, A Great Cloud of Witnesses, the Book of Common Prayer, and Holy Women, Holy Men speak cacophonously from the wall, much as they do in the proliferation of official and independent websites, daily office apps, and diocesan usages available online.

Children enjoy tearing off a page on the first day of each month along with their declarations of Rabbit, rabbit; so the several ordo calendars will stay on the wall for the remainder of this year. But a lesson of mass confusion is being learned by each of us each day: there is not just a legitimate diversity of commemoration, but a profound disorder of what, whom, and when that is not the sequential decency and devotion and learning about holiness in history that I have been hoping to promote at home. Was there any thing by the wit of man so well devised that it had not been corrupted? If a man with four decades of Episcopal Church experience, an advanced degree in church history, some internet chops, and a shelf of calendars cannot determine for his children what saint is commemorated on any given Tuesday, we must ask a question: has the sanctoral calendar machine of the Episcopal Church become a hyperspecialized entity that exists for itself, or does it work within and for a worshiping body of Christians?

In come the Bollandists, the 385-year-old organization that has placed itself in the service of the universal church East and West to offer responsible critical scholarship about Christian saints and their commemoration. This Jesuit-originated society has placed the most advanced skills of linguistics, papyrology, paleography, academic biography, scholarly editing, and self-effacement in the service of exciting holiness over four centuries. Bollandists have endured persecution and excommunication by their church, they have survived revolution and war, and they have always worked on a shoestring. There have been only 70 Bollandists in the society’s entire history, using and creating a library in Belgium of over half a million volumes exclusively about sanctity. They receive no public or centralized funding from any church body. They have a PayPal account.

I set up a standing small donation to the Bollandists and began to tell my friends about them not because I have any illusion about how they might influence the ordo calendars on my kitchen wall in any direct or likely fashion, but because I have some meaningful confidence that the Bollandist hagiographic project is responsible, effective, and scholarly in a way that no democratic process of electing saints in standing committees of a national church convention ever can be.

The digital turn in scholarship and church life has had a slow but now noticeable effect on the Bollandists’ work of hagiography. About one quarter of the Bollandists’ library has now been catalogued online, but the organization’s work of collating indices of calendars, sifting miracle stories, and parsing grammar will always be hardly the stuff that generates headlines or passion. Since 2015 the Bollandists have had a Facebook profile, and some significant portion of their religious labor now appears to be answering emailed inquiries from around the world. There is a new openness as articulated in an America magazine article in 2019, with an awareness that responsible hagiography can be a corrective to “fake news” about the saints and their lives, as well as what they might mean for us.

The Bollandists work within several of the diverse models of how the Christian church has come to discern that any person had heroic holiness worthy of the attention of the faithful within a few doctrinal systems about what sanctity even is, none of which has ever been exclusive to itself: popular acclamation confirmed by regional councils or synods; papal universal canonization; Orthodox glorification with the writing of a service, the creation of an icon, the publishing of a life. They do offer some methodical antidote to the confusion in our kitchen each morning, which itself hearkens to a moment on the floor of General Convention 2018 when my phone began to light up with colleagues asking whether Cyprian of Carthage and Thomas Ken each now had two or three separate feast days, which was somehow momentarily true.

All pedagogies of Christian holiness are complex things from many angles, and it is likewise true that every family, home, parish, diocese, and local or provincial church is a complex thing with diverse needs and duties. It does not praise the Bollandists or condemn the calendar committee of the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to say that they are doing categorically different activities. Polyglot hagiographic scholarship based on documents and verifiable history on one hand and intransigent liberal liturgical activism probably do not overlap except that the individuals doing both also happen to be baptized. My new-this-year monthly PayPal donation is a small gesture of hope that one does more good for more persons over more centuries in more ways than the other through many changes and chances, as in common Christian life we discern which one was a doctor and which was a priest, and which was slain by a fierce, wild beast.

Eleven life-professed CSJB sisters welcome over 2,000 visitors annually to their historic convent in Mendham, New Jersey, sustaining the life of a religious order first begun in England in 1852 by clergy widow Harriett O’Brien Monsell (1811-83). By the time her cofounder, Canon T.T. Carter of Clewer, died in 1901, CSJB had over 300 sisters in 45 houses. Its initial work was primarily among marginalized women of late Victorian society who were dislocated by poverty, single motherhood, human trafficking, and insufficient educational opportunities. “The Clewer Sisters,” as they came to be known, now have their largest presence in the United States.

The order arrived in New York City on February 5, 1874, to open a branch house among poor German-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side centered on the Holy Cross Mission that would give its name to the men’s Order of the Holy Cross. It grew quickly with the support of New York Bishop Horatio Potter, expanding efforts in the United States alongside other women’s religious orders to staff orphanages, hospitals, schools, and parishes.

CSJB’s ministries over its century and a half have broadened to retreat offerings, preaching, and spiritual direction based at its convent in New Jersey — but also since 2003 to support of over 150 children orphaned by AIDS in Cameroon, West Africa. Their ministry at the Good Shepherd Home in Bamenda now includes a school, farm, bakery, and clinic.

The sisters have continued strong associations with parish work in Jersey City, New York (notably and recently at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin), in Navajoland, and in Oregon. A high-profile current ministry is the @nunsenseforthepeople TikTok and social media outreach of superior Sister Monica Clare, reaching in excess of 200,000 followers with a reach of over two million views and interactions. The “Nun” Better Shop on Etsy is another outreach project supporting the order by selling art and jewelry by Sister Mary Lynne and Sister Suzanne Elizabeth.

Sesquicentennial celebrations began with a festal Eucharist on February 6 at Trinity Church Wall Street not far from the lower Manhattan beginnings of the order in America. They continued with a vestment exhibition at Trinity Wall Street curated by textile historians Steven Leavitt and Marianna Garthwaite Klaiman highlighting CSJB sisters’ roles in the transatlantic artistic heritage of 19th- and 20th-century Anglo-Catholicism.

The sisters launched a capital campaign to continue their ministry of presence and sanctuary at the convent and St. Marguerite’s Retreat House in Mendham and to renovate the convent cemetery. A first phase of this campaign has already raised $2.5 million to replace the boilers and septic system of the convent complex and to replace the convent’s roof. Also in connection with CSJB’s stewardship of its venerable tradition, religious life historian Valerie Bonham has published The Second Spring chronicling its history to 2020.

The sesquicentennial culminated in a Commemoration Day on June 15 with retired Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as celebrant and preacher, followed by a festive luncheon. The 26th Presiding Bishop drew deeply on the sisters’ history to bring a message honoring the community’s wide regional and national influence through “the changes and chances of life” that “come to us all”: “snow and hurricanes that block the roads and times the priest can’t get there; fire in old New York buildings; cars that die in difficult weather; broken water pipes; naughty children; injuries and death.” In the face of these challenges, she praised the community for its charism of fearless and “holy crisis management: be not afraid!”

Bishop Jefferts Schori prayed that “the loving faithfulness of the Community of St. John Baptist continue to challenge the world around us” as “a beautiful and holy witness to God’s love in human flesh.”

CSJB’s next anniversary event will be “Monastery in Mendham” on September 28, when the convent will be open to the public for tours from 1 to 5 p.m.

Celebrations in Philadelphia for the 175th anniversary of Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, have included a gala benefit, the international debut of a choral mass setting, the completion and dedication of a console revitalizing its 1936-37 Aeolian-Skinner organ, and a full architectural restoration of its iconic landmark, the Lady Chapel.

The parish, begun with a vestry meeting in 1847 and the laying of its cornerstone on April 25, 1848, was one of the very first in North America to be planned according to the principles of the Tractarian Movement originating at Oxford in 1833. Today, the church is on a steady trend of post-pandemic growth, reporting just over 500 members, 200 average Sunday attendance, and nearly $700,000 annually in plate and pledge support as it welcomes the Rev. David Cobb as interim rector in the first half of this year.

The first major component of the anniversary was the late 2023 installation of a new, four-manual console by Kegg Pipe Organ Builders of Hartville, Ohio, with a large grant from the Wyncote Foundation at the direction of Philadelphia philanthropist Frederick R. Haas.

A sold-out benefit on February 9 at the 23rd Street Armory aimed to raise $175,000 for work with families and children at St. Mark’s. The parish designated 20 percent of funds in support of a thriving educational ministry at St. James School in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Northern Philadelphia.

Bishop Daniel G.P. Gutiérrez of Pennsylvania made a pastoral visitation April 21 with 16 confirmations and receptions during a Pontifical High Mass. He received new Episcopalians prepared by the Rev. Meghan Mazur and the Rev. Dr. Nora Johnson, as well as Servant Year program ministry interns involved directly in weekly catechesis. Several confirmands were members of the renowned parish children’s choir.

Bishop Gutiérrez preached on the Good Shepherd and invited the parish “to hold one another’s hands and journey with one another, and to learn to love one another as he loves us — that transformation of self in friendship with our Lord, that imprinting of how we walk with him, and he walks with us.”

A capstone of the anniversary was the debut of a specially composed St. Mark’s Mass by Dr. David Hurd, director of music at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, during a Solemn High Mass for the Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist on April 25. The Rt. Rev. R. William Franklin, sometime associate priest and longtime friend of the parish, presided.

Hurd’s choral setting in Latin was supported by a gift from the Association of Anglican Musicians and included the full texts of the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. Music of the Mass also included texts and compositions by former St. Mark’s staff Robert McCormick and the Rev. Erika Takacs.

The most extensive and costly effort during the anniversary year was the Lady Chapel preservation effort, funded entirely by an anonymous donor and continuing through 2023 and 2024. This project involved inspecting and improving exterior masonry and foundations, digging a trench to improve drainage, and installing a dry well in the east garden to redirect rainwater from the roof.

Damaged exterior stone on the Cope and Stewardson-designed chapel, built in 1900 and consecrated in 1902, was removed and patched. Missing and damaged sections of the pinnacles on the top of the chapel were replaced with cast stone, and exterior lighting has been improved. This heavy construction project involved scaffolding and disruption to sidewalk traffic, as well as a pause on St. Mark’s gardens. Rogation Sunday, May 5, marked the blessing of refreshed gardens around the Lady Chapel, and a return to a bucolic inner-city setting for resting pedestrians, as well as several productive beehives.

The Lady Chapel at St. Mark’s houses monumental furnishings — most notably the marble altar on a wooden frame encased in a permanent silver front — and stained-glass windows. Rodman Wanamaker (1863-1928) gave them in memory of his wife, Fernanda, who died in 1900.

St. Mark’s has played a key role in American Anglo-Catholic history in addition to its significance for architecture, music, campanology (its bells have legendary stories), and the full inclusion of all persons in all liturgical roles as they have been authorized by the General Convention. Its first rector, Joseph Pere Bell Wilmer (1849-61), became the second Bishop of Louisiana. Eugene Augustus Hoffman, rector from 1869 to 1879, served as dean of the General Theological Seminary in New York from 1879 to 1902 and oversaw careful transitions of both institutions from Tractarianism to fuller Ritualist sympathies.

His successor, Isaac Lea Nicholson, was Bishop of Milwaukee from 1891 to 1906. Rectors Alfred Garnett Mortimer (1892-1912) and Frank Lawrence Vernon (1920-44) exercised national influence with their widely published essays, devotional commentaries, sermons, and books.

The Saint Mark’s complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985.

This year marks the 80th year of uninterrupted intercession in a continuous novena at the Shrine of Our Lady of Clemency at S. Clement’s Church, Philadelphia. Novenas are a common devotional feature of Roman Catholicism, but very uncommon outside of it; they simply mean focused prayer with one intention for the course of nine days or nine weeks. The use of nine days conveys a sense of extreme duration even beyond the more familiar octaves that extend a liturgical observance beyond a week and one day. It is also a patterned imitation of the nine days during which the apostles waited after the Ascension for the descent of the Holy Spirit.

This notable American Anglican Marian shrine takes its name from the 16th-century Litany of Loreto’s invocation “Virgo clemens, ora pro nobis” or “O merciful Virgin, pray for us.” It resonates with the text of the late medieval hymn Salve Regina — which closes with the line “O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria” or “O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary” — and with the dedication of the church, chartered in 1855 and built between 1856 and 1859 by acclaimed American architect John Notman.

The Shrine of Our Lady of Clemency was the brainchild of the towering 20th-century Anglo-Catholic leader Franklin Joiner (1887-1960, rector 1920-55). The New Jersey-born Joiner was educated in Easton, Pennsylvania, and at Nashotah House before ordination in the Diocese of Milwaukee in 1918. He served as superior general of the American branch of the Guild of All Souls from 1924 to 1958 and as a member of the Diocese of Pennsylvania’s Standing Committee for a record 26 years (15 of them as president) during a period of extended high-water marks in Anglo-Catholicism. His work to establish an American Marian shrine corollary to the revived Walsingham took first shape in a 1938 fundraising appeal to his parishioners.

Funds were more than adequate by 1942 to commission a carved wooden image designed by New York architect Wilfred Edward Anthony (1878-1948) of Cram, Goodhue, & Ferguson. It was executed by Italian-American sculptor Enrico Henry Beretta (1889-1975), whose other significant work includes furniture at the Church of the Transfiguration in New York, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Church of Our Saviour in midtown Manhattan. The gilding and polychromy were by Montana-born church artist Robert Robbins (1899-1975), active from the 1930s to the 1960s.

The 25-foot-tall shrine was dedicated and blessed on the Feast of the Annunciation, Thursday, March 25, 1943. The continuous novena, offered initially in connection with war intercessions and prayers for peace, began on Easter Monday, April 10, 1944. Within the first few weeks after the beginning of the novena, more than four dozen requests for intercession had been received from individual parishioners.

The depiction of the Blessed Virgin Mary is somewhat uncommon in Anglicanism in its omission of a representation of her son as an infant, taking instead the scriptural text from John’s Apocalypse as the inspiration for its imagery: “A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev. 12: 1).

Fr. Joiner was keen to explain further the attitude of the virgin: “With the scepter she holds in her right hand, she points us to the altar where her son’s sacramental presence is enshrined. Our Lady’s one thought is to direct us all to her Divine Son. Her answer to our prayer is always, ‘whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.’”

A key aspect of the devotion’s beginnings is the immediate background of the Second World War, and Fr. Joiner’s seeming prescience in fundraising to create a place for permanent intercession just one year before the German invasion of Poland, but several years after the Japanese invasion of China and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. It is clear in hindsight that he saw the imminent eruption of another situation of permanent war footing in which Christians would need a fresh focus for their prayers for peace. The earliest novena intercessions were coupled with an anonymous prayer submitted by “a young lieutenant airman” under an unusual form of address to the Blessed Virgin:

Fairest Mother of Airmen, who from thy throne in the Heavens watches over all thy children, guide this thy son today. Send him wings of courage and strength to do his duty, and at his last flight, merciful Mother, raise him up to heaven in thy loving arms. Holy Mary, Help of the Innocent, protect and pray for the guiltless of all nations who unjustly suffer through the wickedness of the guilty. Holy Mary, Help of Sinners, pray for forgiveness for one who, to serve his country and protect his people, must bring suffering to the innocent as well as to the guilty. Amen.

An overlooked dimension of this shrine’s creation is the urban history of the neighborhood around S. Clement’s Church. The construction of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in emulation of the Champs Elysee in Paris, began in 1917 and culminated in the movement of the church building by 50 feet in 1929 to accommodate the widening of 20th Street. This change caused the loss of 400 families from parish rolls in one decade and a complete reorganization of neighborhood-based parish life. Worship, guilds, societies, and Christian education continued in characteristically robust ways for a center of Anglo-Catholic life still riding the wave of the interwar Congress Movement. Fr. Joiner created a place for devotion centered on unquestionable Christian ideals — peace, clemency, mercy — with the promise of daily, uninterrupted maintenance of prayer. Thousands of interested parties from outside of Philadelphia supported his parish’s devotional life with interest, remote involvement, and donations.

The continuous novena was a fixed feature of newspaper ads for parish worship in The Philadelphia Inquirer from the late 1940s until the 1960s, when it disappeared. It was revived in print in 1980. The novena was also mentioned in a formulaic, small advertisement in The Living Church from its inception more or less regularly until 2011. For several periods, the continuous novena has included controversial intercessions related to the maintenance of catholic faith and order in the Anglican Communion, including petitions against “the Lutheran Concordat” of full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and “for the removal of the scandal of the attempted ordination of women.” These prayers were discontinued in 2014.

The shrine began a formal association with the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in 1960 during the rectorship of the Rev. William Elwell (1901-77, rector 1955-64). Fr. Elwell was largely responsible for the beginnings and propagation of Walsingham devotion in North America. He served at Grace Church, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, from 1929 until his arrival at S. Clement’s and began there in 1951 — at the renamed Our Lady of Grace — an annual pilgrimage that continues to this day. The continuous novena is also linked closely with the appointed intercessory prayers and intentions of the Guild of All Souls, a devotional society founded in 1873 to promote prayer for the faithful departed, and active in the United States since 1889.

Today, the shrine continues to receive petitions for intercessory prayer from far and wide, offered daily without any interruption, and supported formally by a group of 28 guardians (men and women) in the United States, England, and France. The rector of S. Clement’s, the Rev. Richard C. Alton, serves as Master of the Guardians. The Rt. Rev. Rodney Michel is protector, and the Rt. Rev. Martin Warner of Chichester provides a supportive link with Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England.

Guardians process as available in purpose-made blue capes and medals during feasts at S. Clement’s, and they are installed annually according to vacancies on the titular feast of Our Lady of Ransom on September 24. More than 60 supporters of the shrine are remembered in intercessions, generally on their birthdates or personal anniversaries; this group includes Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Byzantine Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Continuing Anglicans. The shrine’s Facebook page was begun in 2012 and now has more than 10,000 followers.