Charles Chapman Grafton

Grafton, Charles Chapman (12 Apr. 1830-30 Aug. 1912), Episcopal bishop, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph Grafton, a surveyor, and Ann Maria Gurley. Grafton grew up in prosperous circumstances and attended fine private schools until an eye problem forced him to study at home with a private tutor. He soon began to attend the Episcopal Church of the Advent and conceived the idea of becoming a priest. Despite this religious inclination, he studied law at Harvard, graduating with an LL.B. in 1853.

After graduation Grafton decided to pursue a career in the ministry and moved to Maryland, where he placed himself under the jurisdiction of Bishop William R. Whittingham, who shared Grafton's positive evaluation of ritual in religious services. Whittingham ordained Grafton as deacon in 1855 and as priest in 1858. After a brief period as chaplain to a house of deaconesses, Grafton served as the curate at Saint Paul's in Baltimore, remaining there until 1864. Throughout this period he felt a growing desire for monastic life, culminating in his decision to study the religious life in England. At that time no religious orders for men existed in the Episcopal church.

Grafton spent his time in England studying monastic foundations and conferring with ecclesiastical leaders. On 27 December 1866 he joined with a small group of English and American priests to take religious vows, thus beginning the Society of Mission Priests of Saint John the Evangelist, also known as the Cowley Fathers. This small group lived as a community until Grafton left England in 1872, under the auspices of the society, to become rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston. Some of the Sisters of Saint Margaret, a related order for women, accompanied him and participated in his parochial work. Problems soon arose, however, due to the divided loyalties of the American members of the society. They owed loyalty to their diocesan bishops but had also sworn obedience to their superior, Father Richard Benson, in England. By 1882 such conflicts had led the American members of the society to withdraw and Benson to release them from their vows of obedience. For the next several years Grafton tried to begin a new religious community for men but failed. He was more successful at starting a new sisterhood, using the members of the Sisters of Saint Margaret who had stayed with him after the break as the nucleus of the Sisters of the Holy Nativity. Although he never lived in a religious community again, Grafton remained faithful to his vows of poverty and chastity and always considered himself to be a religious.

Grafton continued as rector at the Church of the Advent until 1888, when he moved to Providence to direct the Sisters of the Holy Nativity. Within the year he received word of his election as the second bishop of Fond du Lac, a small and poor diocese in Wisconsin. Although confirmation of his election took several months, he was finally confirmed in March of the following year and consecrated at the Cathedral of Fond du Lac on 25 April 1889.

Grafton had two primary tasks as bishop of Fond du Lac. First he needed to build up a weak diocese by recruiting more clergy, opening new churches, and putting the diocese on a sounder financial footing. Second he wanted to develop the Catholic principles of the Episcopal church by stressing various ritual elements of the worship service. He succeeded in the first task through his determined leadership and by making large financial contributions from his personal fortune as well as by soliciting funds from friends in the East. For the second task he stressed the following ritual practices: the use of clerical vestments, incense, and candles in the service; standing to the East of the altar to celebrate the Eucharist; reservation of the sacrament after celebrating the Eucharist for the purposes of further devotion to it as the true body and blood of Christ; and mixing water and wine in the eucharistic chalice. Grafton believed that incorporating these historical practices increased the beauty of the worship service and reinforced the devotional mood of the participants by emphasizing the presence of God, and he insisted that they be featured in worship services throughout the diocese of Fond du Lac.

Grafton's efforts to emphasize the Catholic nature of the Episcopal church through its liturgy aroused opposition on a variety of fronts and resulted in tension between him and some of the laypeople and clergy in his diocese. Most famous, however, was the national reaction to a picture of the bishops who participated in the consecration of Reginald Weller as coadjutor bishop of the diocese in 1900. Seventy by then, Grafton could no longer handle the full responsibility of the diocese, particularly the necessary task of visiting all the parishes, and Weller was consecrated to help him. Ten bishops participated in the consecration ceremony; among them were a Russian Orthodox bishop and a bishop from the Old Catholic church, a group who had broken from the Roman Catholic church in the nineteenth century. A picture of the bishops seated together in full ecclesiastical garb elicited widespread criticism of Grafton and his ritualism as tending to papistry and clerical arrogance. The reaction did not lead to a formal trial, but the opposition he aroused around the country probably set back the cause of the Catholic party within the Episcopal church.

Throughout this period, Grafton worked for the advancement of Catholic truth. Within the Episcopal church he criticized the Broad Church party, those who wanted to downplay historical doctrines and practices in order to accommodate modern ideas and to promote ecumenical unity, seeing them as Episcopalian Unitarians willing to sacrifice Christian truth. He criticized both the usurpations of Roman Catholicism and the schism of Protestantism. On the positive side, he strongly defended what he saw as Catholic truth, and he sought some form of reunion or at least recognition from the Eastern Orthodox churches and from the Old Catholics. He did so on the basis of the Catholic truth of the Episcopal church as revealed in its liturgy, in its maintenance of the apostolic succession, and in its ongoing life in the Holy Spirit. Until his death in Fond du Lac, Grafton remained one of the most controversial and outspoken leaders of the Catholic party in the Episcopal church.

Bibliography

The diocese of Fond du Lac has the manuscripts of some of Grafton's writings, including his journals and correspondence for the period of his episcopate. The best source for his life is his autobiography, A Journey Godward; it is part of the eight-volume collection of his writings, The Works of Charles Chapman Grafton, ed. Talbot Rogers (1914). Scholars have written little on Grafton. John Mark Kinney, "C.C. Fond du Lac: The Life of Charles Chapman Grafton, Second Bishop of Fond du Lac" (master's thesis, Nashotah House, 1967), tells the story of Grafton's life and has a good bibliography of works, including contemporary newspaper articles, that make reference to him. For Grafton's family background see Henry Wyckoff Belknap, The Grafton Family of Salem (1928). Ernest C. Miller, "Bishop Grafton of Fond du Lac and the Orthodox Church," Sobernost 4 (1982): 38-48, treats his attitude toward the Orthodox church. E. Clowes Chorley, in Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (1961), and George E. Demille, in The Catholic Movement in the American Episcopal Church (1950), place Grafton's work in the context of the Episcopal church as a whole. An obituary is in Churchman 106 (Sept. 1912).

Harvey Hill

Back to the top

Citation:

Harvey Hill. "Grafton, Charles Chapman";

http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-00569.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 15:08:46 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)

Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.