Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Fond du Lac & Ecumenist
August 30 · d. 1912
also known as Charles Grafton
Charles Chapman Grafton (1830-1912) was an American Anglo-Catholic bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who gave his life to two convictions: that the Anglican church was truly part of the one Catholic Church, and that the divided churches were meant to be visibly one. He helped found the first Anglican religious order for men since the Reformation, and at the consecration of his coadjutor in 1900 he gathered Anglican, Old Catholic, and Russian Orthodox bishops in a single sanctuary, decades ahead of his time.
Charles Chapman Grafton was an American who gave his life to two convictions: that the Anglican church was truly a part of the one Catholic Church, and that the broken churches of Christendom were meant to be one. He was born in Boston in 1830, trained first as a lawyer, then for the priesthood, and crossed the Atlantic to England, where the Oxford Movement had reawakened the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism, to learn that older way of being a Christian at its source.
There he did a thing that had not been done in the English church for three hundred years. With Richard Benson and another priest he founded, at Cowley near Oxford in 1866, a religious community for men, the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, the first stable order of monks the Anglican church had raised up since the Reformation swept the monasteries away. In the cholera that struck London that same year he carried the sacrament to the dying in the slums of the East End. The Cowley Fathers endured, and with them the conviction that the vowed religious life belonged in the Anglican church as fully as in any other.
He returned to America and in time was made bishop of Fond du Lac, a small diocese in Wisconsin, and he made it a stronghold of Catholic faith and worship in the American Midwest, with full ceremonial and a cathedral ordered like an English one. He was a controversial man; plainer Protestants thought him half a Roman, and said so.
His boldest act came in 1900. When he consecrated a new assistant bishop for his diocese, Grafton invited to stand with him not only his fellow Anglican bishops in their full vestments but a Russian Orthodox bishop, Tikhon, who would one day be Patriarch of Moscow and a canonized saint of his own church, and an Old Catholic bishop besides. A photograph was taken of the whole company in their copes and mitres, Anglican and Orthodox and Old Catholic together, and the Protestant press jeered at it as the Fond du Lac Circus. But Grafton had meant exactly what the picture showed, that these were not three rival firms but parts of one church that ought to be visibly one, and his gesture reached across a divide that few in his day thought worth crossing.
He died in 1912, still bishop of his small Wisconsin see. The order he had helped found went on; the friendship between Anglicans and Orthodox that he had so dramatically advanced grew, over the century after him, into real and lasting dialogue; and the religious communities he believed in took permanent root across the Anglican world. The man the newspapers had laughed at had simply seen further than they had. He had spent himself on the wholeness of the church, and a good deal of what he longed for has, slowly, come to pass.
Grafton is a well-documented figure of the modern church, attested by his own published Works, including the autobiography A Journey Godward, by the records of his diocese and of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, by the Anglo-Catholic press of his day, and by the famous photograph of 1900. He was born in Boston in 1830, was ordained, and went to England, where with Richard Meux Benson and Simeon Wilberforce O'Neill he founded the Society of Saint John the Evangelist at Cowley in 1866, the first enduring religious order for men in the Anglican Communion since the Reformation. He served in the London cholera epidemic of that year under the influence of E. B. Pusey.
Returning to the United States, he was for years rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston, a center of the Catholic revival in American Anglicanism, and in 1888 was elected Bishop of Fond du Lac in Wisconsin, which he led until his death. The event for which he is most remembered is the consecration of his coadjutor, Reginald Weller, on 8 November 1900 at the cathedral in Fond du Lac, attended by Bishop Tikhon of the Aleutians and Alaska, later Patriarch of Moscow and a glorified saint of the Orthodox Church, and by the Old Catholic bishop Anthony Kozlowski; the gathering of so many traditionally vested bishops drew the mocking nickname the Fond du Lac Circus, and stands as an early and striking moment in the modern movement toward Anglican-Orthodox understanding. Grafton died on 30 August 1912.
Charles Chapman Grafton is commemorated on 30 August, the day of his death, in the calendar of the Anglican Church; his liturgical color is white. He is honored in Anglo-Catholic circles as a champion of the Catholic faith and order of Anglicanism, of the vowed religious life, and of the visible unity of the church across the divisions of history.
His legacy is carried in the things he planted. The Society of Saint John the Evangelist, which he helped to found, continues on both sides of the Atlantic as a living religious community. The Diocese of Fond du Lac long kept the Catholic stamp he gave it. And the cause he served most dramatically, friendship and eventual understanding between the Anglican and the Orthodox churches, became, in the century after him, one of the most fruitful of all ecumenical conversations, so that the Fond du Lac Circus looks now less like a folly than like a photograph taken before its time.
A Journey Godward of a Servant of Jesus Christ, and the collected Works(English, c. 1910)
Grafton's autobiography and collected writings, the fullest record of his mind and his aims, freely readable at Project Canterbury.
Public domain: The Works of Bishop Grafton (Project Canterbury)
Further reading. Grafton's own autobiography, A Journey Godward of a Servant of Jesus Christ, is the most direct way into the man, and his collected Works gather his theological and devotional writing.
Online resources. Grafton's Works, including A Journey Godward, are freely readable in full at Project Canterbury, the online library of Anglican history.
Almighty God, we give you thanks for the ministry of Charles Chapman Grafton, who labored that the Church of Jesus Christ might be one: Grant that we, instructed by his teaching and example, and knit together in unity by your Spirit, may ever stand firm upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Tikhon /ˈtiː.kɒn/
Readings for an Ecumenist
Ezekiel 34:11–16Psalm 133Ephesians 3:14–21John 17:10–26