MONKS,
NUNS, AND FRIARS IN THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
--
T. S. Eliot
|
Almost everyone knows that by 1538 the last monasteries and friaries in England had been closed. The monks and nuns who lived in them became pensioners of the government, and all that seemed to bear witness to the fact that they had once been there were (as we see on the right) "bare, ruined choirs". Far fewer people know that that was not all there was to the story. There were a few scattered attempts to revive monasticism during the 17th and 18th centuries (including the famous one at "Little Gidding" memorialized by T. S. Eliot), but it took the social revolution of the 19th century before anything could really happen. When that time came, it was women who were the pioneers. Beginning in the 1840's Christian women, deeply moved by the appalling social conditions of Victorian England, left their comfortable homes to serve the poor as nuns and religious in the hovels and slums of the industrial cities. Many people opposed them, not only on grounds of religion, but also because this new vocation created a role for women that took them outside home and family. Partly because of this, the new idea spread with astonishing speed, and soon reached the United States. There the heroic witness of the Sisters of St. Mary and others during the cholera epidemic of 1878 caused them to be named "the martyrs of Memphis" because they would not leave their patients and died serving them. |
|
Men were slow to follow these women's example, but after several false starts,
Richard Meux Benson founded The
Society of St. John Evangelist at Cowley, outside Oxford in 1865. Fr.
Benson was an important influence on the Order of the Holy Cross during its
early years, but even more influential was the Rev. T. T. Carter and the
sisterhood he helped found, The
Community of St. John the Baptist. The cross worn by life-professed members
of the Order of the Holy Cross today is a copy of the one given to Fr.
Huntington by the Sisters of that community when he was professed in 1884. It
is a reminder of our link to a heroic generation of women and men who tried to
build up "the old waste places" and helped restore the ideal of a
life of consecrated service to the Anglican family of Churches.
You can find out more about the religious life as it exists in the Anglican
Communion today by going to some of the following sites:
Conference of Anglican Religious Orders in the Americas (COROA)
Council for Religious Life
in Southern Africa .
The
Worldwide Anglican Communion
The
Episcopal Church Home Page
What bishops and clergy
should know about Religious Life
The Order of St.
Helena
The Society of the Sacred
Mission
Benedictine
Links
Ecumenical Links
OHC
Links