The Contentious Conferences of 1924: A Study of the Proceedings of the Anglo-Catholic Priests’ Convention and the Thirty-Eighth Episcopal Church Congress

The Anglo-Catholic movement in America can be traced back to the early 1840s, when the increasing interest in Catholic thought and liturgical expression inspired by the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in England crossed the Atlantic.1 Concurrently, cultural influences pervading American society, such as the Romantic era of art and literature, the Gothic revival of architecture, and the arts and crafts movement, compounded this interest in Catholic aesthetic and liturgical expression, arguably aiding in the demand for and prominence of Anglo-Catholic incarnational sacramentality and liturgical expression.2 This division on the acceptance or rejection of Catholic influences would polarize and militarize Episcopal Church parties, causing at least twenty-nine priests and deacons, and, notably, Bishop Levi Silliman Ives of North Carolina to convert to Roman Catholicism between 1840-1870/ This ritualist controversy escalated further in the 1860s and 1870s, eventually causing George David Cummins, the assistant bishop of Kentucky, and Charles E. Cheney to lead an evangelical group of eight clergy and nineteen laypersons to secede from the Episcopal Church and form the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1873.4 This schism was the climactic event that demonstrated the greater need for unity amidst theological and liturgical differences in the late-nineteenth century. [...]the General Convention of 1874 passed a resolution that gave bishops and their Standing Committees authority to stop rituals and practices considered divergent from Episcopal liturgy and doctrine.7 In turn, Anglo-Catholics proposed at nearly every General Convention from 1877 well into the twentieth century a name change to omit the word "Protestant" from the Episcopal Church's official name; every such attempt had failed.8 Furthermore, Edward Hawks, an Episcopal defector to Roman Catholicism after the open pulpit controversy,9 reported that what he called the "Broad or Modernist party" and the Anglo-Catholics were often set "at daggers' points," especially concerning the trial of the Rev. Algernon Crapsey.10 Even still in 1928, the House of Bishops felt the need to issue a pastoral letter specifically addressing the hostilities between Anglo-Catholics and lower-church Episcopalians, admitting openly that the "tension is at times severe. To be sure, although Anglo-Catholics were in the numerical minority of the Episcopal Church, their presence, influence, and international connections were clearly felt an