This post is reproduced with the gracious permission of Br. Stephen, O.Cist. Please note that the church referred to in the article is home to a “broad church” Episcopalian congregation.
 

The very Richardsonian Christ Church, La Crosse.


 
It was a year ago yesterday, long before the announcement of Anglicanorum Coetibus, that I wrote the piece below on what American Catholics might learn from Anglicans.

Much has been written of late about the Anglican patrimony and what it offers to Roman Catholics in terms of liturgy. This piece is a bit broader in that it looks more at what some of us have been referring to as the “Anglican Ethos,” to identify those important intangibles that aren’t as easily cataloged or debated as the more concrete elements of the Anglican Patrimony such as prayers and hymns.

* * *

I was down at the Hermitage for a desert day from Thursday morning until this morning. I left the Abbey after Terce, planning to go to Mass at the Cathedral in La Crosse, take some pictures there and also to get some of the former diocesan seminary chapel before driving on to De Soto.
 

 
I had noticed Christ Episcopal Church on past trips to La Crosse. It’s an inviting Richardsonian Romanesque building in limestone and brown sandstone with an impressive tower just down the street from the Cathedral. Seeing the tower coming up ahead, I decided to park by Christ Church to see if I could get a peek inside. I wasn’t sure what to expect. On the one hand, this is Anglo-Catholic country, known among Episcopalians as the “Biretta Belt.” On the other hand, the style of the church and its obvious prominence made me think it must have at least started life as a Low Church preaching barn.
 

 
The Parish House door was open and I made my way up into the church proper. As I scanned the building from the rear looking for telltale signs of churchmanship, I felt very much at home. It looked as if the church had in fact been built for respectable low church worship, then come up the candle, then gone modern, and now was in the process going back to being somewhat traditional Prayer Book Catholic. (That’s Middle Upper Church for those of you who haven’t been or aren’t still Anglicans.) I later learned from the parish web site that the church had been intended as the Cathedral of a new diocese when it was built in the 1890s, but La Crosse lost out to Eau Claire to be the see city of the new diocese, leaving the parishioners of Christ Church with an impressive building.
 

 
The sanctuary was badly damaged in the early ‘90s when a new organ was installed in the center of the apse and the altar was made free standing. Part of the old communion rail remained intact and it looks as if the current rector may have pushed the free-standing altar back up against the organ case reredos to celebrate the Holy Communion facing God, or it could be that it’s just such a nice job of proportions that there is still actually room to crawl behind the altar without breaking the sight lines.

 

 
In the Comperesque Blessed Sacrament Chapel, which looks quite new, there’s no doubt about facing God. It turns out that the church was open Thursday morning for the mid week Eucharist and Bible study and the people who had begun to gather in the chapel were only too happy to tell me about the church. Leave it to Episcopalians to be genial to a strange man in white robes with a camera and questions about architects.

 

 
The rest of the church is an accreditive hodgepodge that sits together well in that way at which Episcopalians excel: a Connick south window and a Tiffany north; a plump, shiksa Our Lady of Walsingham with a votive candle rack beside an icon of St. George, near what looks to have been an aisle chapel perhaps from when versus populum was more in vogue. The old rector’s stall remained intact while a side altar with a Jacobean tapestry frontal sported a nice newer looking Christus Rex.

 

 
On my way out, I picked up the newsletter, a service sheet and a recent sermon. It was clear that this Church represented a place I had once sojourned and been treated kindly on the long road to the Catholic Church. The service sheet let me know that the service was modern language—all sung—with good hymns. (Not that you have to worry too much about folk music in the Episcopal Church.) The sermon was warm and literate and not so different than something I might have preached in Boston ten years ago.

Am I getting a bit misty-eyed? Perhaps. Having second thoughts? No. Here’s a clip from the parish mission statement I found on their web site:

A broad church orientation allows us to love unreservedly the Anglican rites and rituals but directs us both inward and outward as we celebrate them. We are reminded of Urban Holmes’s wonderful insight that when Anglicanism is at its best “its poetry, its music and its life can create a world of wonder in which it is very easy to fall in love with God.”

That’s mainstream Anglicanism in a nutshell. It’s a beautiful dream that I shared for a time: loving traditional rites while knowing that of course we’re a bit more enlightened all these years on and believing that poetry, music, and sheer zest for life can give us a soteriology and theodicy for this world and an eschatology for the one to come. It’s a beautiful dream, but the practice proves elusive, even though it has a generosity of spirit that is more appealing than the self-congratulating boorishness of more than a few of our Catholic talking heads.

 

 
Now why am I blathering on about this religion I quit quite some time ago?

I do so because there are still important lessons to be learned from Christ Episcopal and places like it.

First, there are the essential concepts of basic good manners and hospitality. I walked into this church unannounced, knowing no one, and rather bizarrely dressed for the year 2009. I found myself being greeted warmly by people who were happy to help me and asked me to stay to share their Eucharist. That has never happened to me in a Catholic parish. Never. Period. Yet this is my consistent experience of the Episcopal Church, whether it be at a small parish in the South, a summer chapel on the Maine Coast, or one of the great urban incense dens.

Second, there is much to be learned from this building and those who have cared for it about the practice of a lived hermeneutic of continuity and a due regard for craftsmanship. Christ Church looks as if it has been rare for more than a decade in its history to pass without something being done to it, but the somethings done (with the exception of that organ-cum-reredos) showed consideration for the rest of the fabric and fittings and pretty much everything is of good workmanship though not generally extravagant or exorbitantly costly. I’m willing to bet that there are several hundred, if not thousands, of catalog resin statues in Catholic Churches around this country that cost more than Christ Church’s statue of Our Lady of Walsingham. (And bonus points for real votive candles.) This building is a work of 110 years of gradualism. Its success is a rebuke to the blind ideology of all too many reck-o-vations of the last 40 years and more than a few of the attempted restorations of the last ten. Patience, restraint, and understatement rarely go wrong in governing the creative impulse.

 

 
Third, these folks understand reverence. I am fairly certain that on Sunday morning people go to communion at this parish believing in transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and Zwinglian memorialism, but all of the above worship with reverence. How many Catholic parishes sang the Our Father this Sunday? How many also sang a recognizable Mass setting and threw in some good hymns to boot? How many parishes in the American Catholic Church, where we’re supposed to believe unreservedly that the tabernacle holds the Body of Christ, have built a Blessed Sacrament chapel anything like the one I saw at Christ Church in the last thirty years?

I got back to the Abbey today to see over at A Conservative Blog for Peace that things continue to erode in the Anglican Communion. Closer to home, the Diocese of Eau Claire is facing a merger with its neighbor to stay afloat. I’ve never been a cheerleader for an Anglican Uniate Rite and I’m not personally inclined toward the Anglican Use—certainly not that I’m against it—but Christ Episcopal reminded me of some good things I had forgotten about the Episcopal Church and the Anglican heritage. I hope to live to see these practical Anglican Uses become more general in American Catholicism.

A few more photos can be found here.