St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral and the Diocesan House for West Tennessee, seen looking across Poplar Avenue near downtown Memphis, Tennessee.
St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, located near downtown Memphis, Tennessee, is the cathedral church of the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee and the former cathedral of the old statewide Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee.
History:
Original cathedral building c. 1898
St. Mary's was founded as a "North Memphis" mission chapel by the Ladies' Educational and Missionary Society of Calvary Church (the city's first Episcopal parish) with oversight from Calvary's rector, Charles Quintard, who later became the second bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee. Quintard led the chapel's first service on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1857. An item in the Memphis Appeal, dated November 29, describes the occasion:
Unlike its mother church, Calvary, this new parish would not have designated family pews or charge rent for them, enabling less affluent Memphian's to regularly attend Episcopal services for the first time.
Sisters' Chapel and St. Mary's School, 1900
| |
| Monastery information | |
|---|---|
| Other names | St. Mary's School for Girls, Church Home |
| Order | Community of St. Mary (Episcopal) founded in New York, NY, 1865 as the "Sisterhood of St. Mary" |
| Established | 1873, at request of Bishop Charles Quintard |
| Disestablished | 1910, when the sisters formally moved to St. Mary's on the Mountain Convent,Sewanee, Tennessee |
| Mother house | Mount St. Gabriel Convent,Peerskill, New York |
| Diocese | Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee |
| People | |
| Founder(s) | Sister Constance, superior at Memphis; Sister Harriet, founder and mother superior, Sisterhood of St. Mary |
| Important associated figures | Constance and her Companions (yellow fever martyrs listed in the Episcopal Calendar of Saints) |
| Site | |
| Location | On the close of St. Mary's Cathedral, Memphis, Tennessee |
| Visible remains | Sisters' Chapel (on the cathedral close), group grave marker of yellow fever martyrs at Elmwood Cemetery |
St. Mary's was officially consecrated as a parish church on Ascension Day, May 13, 1858, by the Rt. Rev. James Hervey Otey, the first Bishop of Tennessee, with assistance from the rectors of Calvary and Grace (Memphis), St. Luke's (Jackson), St. Mary's (Covington), St. James (Bolivar), and by the new parish's own rector, Richard Hines, who would remain there until 1871.
First Episcopal Cathedral In The South:
Thirteen years after its founding, St. Mary's became the first Episcopal cathedral in the American South. While the 1866 Journal of the Proceedings of the Diocese of Tennessee's 34th convention and the national Episcopal Church's 1868 Journal of the General Convention both list St. Mary's as a cathedral church, the official transition from parish to "bishop's church" was January 1, 1871.
At the time, only a handful of Episcopal dioceses had adopted the English-style cathedral system, mostly in the Midwest and the western frontier, where semi-itinerant bishops required more tangible ecclesiastical bases from which to administer sparse, but expansive, new dioceses and missionary territories. While the Episcopal Church was once a part of the Church of England, the American dioceses were slow to designate official cathedrals in keeping with the Protestant or Reformed character of its members. But as the Oxford Movement's “high church” or Roman Catholic-style liturgy began to take root in the United States, Episcopal cathedrals began to appear. With a devoted high churchman as its bishop (Quintard), the Diocese of Tennessee became an early adopter of this trend.
Martyrs And The Cathedral:
St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral is closely associated with two episodes of self-sacrifice or martyrdom known throughout the world. Both episodes dramatically reduced the size of St. Mary's congregation, either through death or controversy.
Constance And Her Companions:
Memphis suffered periodic epidemics of yellow fever, a mosquito-borne hemorrhagic viral infection (related to dengue fever and Ebola) throughout the 19th century. The worst of the epidemics occurred in the summer of 1878, when 5,150 Memphian's died and the fast-growing city lost its charter due to depopulation. Five years earlier, a group of Episcopal nuns from the recently formed Sisters of St. Mary (now the Community of St. Mary) were invited by Bishop Quintard to take over operation of the St. Mary's School for Girls, now called St. Mary's Episcopal School, which was relocated to the cathedral site. When the 1878 epidemic struck, a number of priests and nuns (both Protestant and Catholic), doctors—and even a bordello owner, Annie Cook—stayed behind to tend to the sick and dying, despite the high risk of contracting the disease, which often resulted in a painful death. The Episcopal nuns' superior, Sister Constance, three other Episcopal nuns, and two Episcopal priests are known throughout the Anglican Communion as "Constance and Her Companions" or, informally, the "Martyrs of Memphis". Added to the Episcopal Church's Lesser Feasts and Fasts in 1981, their feast day (September 9) commemorates their sacrifices.
A traditional Anglican prayer memorializes the martyrs in this way:
Episcopal Nuns And Priests Who Died From The Epidemic:- Sister Constance (née Caroline Louise Darling, born Medway, Massachusetts, 1846), superior of the work at Memphis, headmistress of St. Mary’s School for Girls.
- Sister Thecla, sacristan of St. Mary’s Cathedral and its school chapel, instructor in music and grammar (English and Latin)
- Sister Ruth, nurse at Trinity Infirmary, New York
- Sister Frances, a newly professed nun given charge of the Church Home orphanage
- The Rev. Charles Carroll Parsons, rector of Grace Church, Memphis; former U.S. Army artillery commander, West Point alumnus and professor; served with classmate Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in Kansas, defense counsel in Custer's 1867 court-martial trial.
- The Rev. Louis S. Schuyler, newly ordained assistant rector at Parsons' prior parish, Holy Innocents Episcopal Church, Hoboken, New Jersey
Martin Luther King Jr.:
The second historic/tragic event that St. Mary's Cathedral attempted to mitigate was the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The day after King's death, Memphis clergy from many churches and synagogues met at the cathedral. In an impromptu move, Dean William Dimmick (later Bishop of Northern Michigan and co-author of certain rites in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer) took up the cathedral's processional cross and led the assembled ministers down Poplar Avenue to City Hall to petition Mayor Henry C. Loeb to end the labor standoff that King was in town to help negotiate. (The sanitation workers were protesting unsafe conditions, abusive white supervisors, low wages and the city government's refusal to recognize their union). Nearly half of the cathedral's membership eventually left in protest of Dimmick's gesture of racial unity.
King Memorial At Westminister Abbey
Like Constance and her companions, King was added to the Episcopal Church's Calendar of Saints, where he is venerated on January 15. Elsewhere in the Anglican Communion, King is memorialized with a statue over the western entrance of Westminster Abbey, along with nine other 20th-century martyrs.
"New" Cathedral Building:
Construction of its present Gothic Revival structure began in 1898 and was completed in 1926, when the parenthetical phrase "(Gailor Memorial)" was appended to the cathedral's formal name in honor of the Rt. Rev. Thomas Frank Gailor, Bishop of Tennessee and president of the National Council of the Episcopal Church.
Source: wikipedia.com