Showing 308 results

Authority record

Advisory Commission on Ecclesiastical Relations

  • Corporate body
  • 1931-1939

The Advisory Commission on Ecclesiastical Relations was created by the authority of the General Convention in 1931 in its revision of Canon 59(v)(v). The National Council subsequently added the Advisory Commission to its bylaws to replace the earlier Committee on Ecclesiastical Relations, that had been set up in 1927 to consider matters of expanding ecumenical relationships.

By 1935, reduced budgets made it necessary to discontinue the salaried officer. A 1937 revision to Canon 59 dropped the Commission and left oversight of this work to the Presiding Bishop and Council. The Commission and an unsalaried officer were continued with a small budget allocation. The broader ecumenical purview of the Commission was extended by Bishop Tucker in 1939, who renamed the body as the Advisory Council on Ecclesiastical Relations.

Torok, John

  • Person
  • 1890-1955

John Torok, born in Hungary in 1890 to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, arrived in the United States in 1920 and received into the Episcopal priesthood by Diocese of Maryland Bishop Murray on June 9, 1921.

In 1923, a group of Uniate churches in Pittsburgh elected Torok as their bishop, with the idea that he would lead them out of the Roman Catholic communion and into The Episcopal Church. Torok was consecrated on October 19, 1924 at the Serbian Legation Chapel in Vienna by Bishop Gorazd and Bishop Dositej, both Orthodox bishops. Upon Torok’s return, he found that due to other plans regarding intercommunion being carried out at the same time, any exercise of his episcopal privilege would likely result in a split in the Church.

To mitigate potential discord, Torok retired to secular life. However, several years later a renewal of interest in intercommunion brought him back to Church life. After much canvassing on his behalf by Bishop Frank Wilson of Eau Claire, Torok was elected Suffragan Bishop of that diocese in May of 1934. His primary focus was foreign language work among the Uniate peoples in Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland, but Bishop Wilson could get neither firm approval nor firm disapproval for this work from the rest of the Church. Furthermore, General Convention declined to confirm Torok’s consecration.

Torok returned to secular employment until 1946, when he took up parish work, first in Mexico and later in Puerto Rico. From 1947 to 1950 he served Grace Church in Brooklyn.

John Torok died in 1955.

Putnam, Katharine

  • Person
  • 1889- c.1970

Katharine Putnam was born on September 10, 1889, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Upon completing her studies at the Philadelphia Church Training and Deaconess House in 1917, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society appointed her to the Shanghai District. Putnam arrived in China on August 18, 1917 and taught English at St. Faith’s School and Mahan Boys School in Yangchow. She was set apart as a deaconess on May 23, 1920 and continued teaching until a furlough in 1928.

Upon her return, she was appointed Diocesan Religious Education Director and made supervisor of the women’s work in Shanghai. As part of these duties, Putnam prepared educational religious material, held short-term school appointments at country stations, and helped to train women evangelists. After another furlough in 1934, Putnam returned to St. Faith’s School in Yangchow. From 1937 until 1939, she served as secretary to Bishop Graves. After the Bishop’s retirement Putnam worked in the diocesan office and at St. Elizabeth Hospital until the Japanese placed the missionaries under house arrest in 1942. On February 25, 1943, Katharine Putnam joined other missionaries who had been placed in an internment camp until her release as part of a prisoner exchange on September 20, 1943.

After going back and forth between the United States and China several more times over the next seven years, she returned to the U.S. permanently in 1950 where she worked in various roles within the Church, supporting the training and education of women. After 41 years of service, Katharine Putnam retired from the Episcopal Church in 1958.

Department of Finance

  • Corporate body
  • 1919-

The Department of Finance was centered in the office of the Treasurer (a continuation of the office with the DFMS). As an administrative unit, it was a creation of the National Council in 1919, and continued until 1965 when the Executive Council reorganized. The department was charged with administering funds received by the National Council and the expenditure of funds as authorized by General Convention and the Council. It was in this capacity that the department worked with the foreign missions.

Forrester, Henry

  • Person
  • unknown-1904

Henry Forrester was ordained to the diaconate in 1870 and to the priesthood in 1872. He served as a missionary in the Missionary District of New Mexico and Arizona beginning in 1874. Together with the new bishop of the district, William Forbes Adams, he performed the first Episcopal worship service at the Exchange Hotel on the Plaza in Albuquerque on March 4, 1875. After Bishop Adams’s retirement several months later, Forrester took on ecclesiastical oversight of the Missionary District and established St. Paul’s in Las Vegas as the ecclesiastical center. He continued to travel widely around the territory, establishing missionary outposts in 15 towns.

In 1880, George Kelly Dunlop was elected to fill the vacancy left by Adams’ retirement. That same year, the first convention of the Missionary District was held. Dunlop appointed Forrester priest to the congregation in Albuquerque. Forrester continued to travel across the territory, encouraging the missions he had established in the district. He reported in 1882 that “land has been purchased at 4th and Silver” for $5,000 and in November the first service in St. John’s Church was attended by 33 people.

At the General Convention of 1892 the Board of Missions appointed Forrester to succeed the Rev. W. B. Gordon as the Presiding Bishop’s resident representative to the Mexican Episcopal Church, a position he held until his death in 1904.

Shoemaker, Samuel Moor

  • Person
  • 1893-1963

Samuel Moor Shoemaker was born on December 27, 1893, to a wealthy Episcopalian family with deep roots in Maryland high society. He attended Princeton University where he was involved with the Philadelphian Society that shaped much of his early ministry. After graduation, he moved to Beijing to teach and do missionary work. While there Shoemaker met Frank N. D. Buchman, a Pietist Lutheran preacher and activist who would go on to found the Oxford Group that evolved into the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement.

Shoemaker was ordained to the diaconate in 1920 and to the priesthood in 1921. In 1925 he accepted a call to serve as rector of Calvary Church, New York City.

In 1926, Shoemaker began hosting weekly evening meetings geared toward training working people to witness their faith and convert others in their workplaces. He traveled the country in 1932, sermonizing to combat what he saw as the spiritual decay brought on by the Great Depression. His establishment of a rescue mission on New York City’s Lower East Side led him to minister to men struggling with addiction, including William Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Shoemaker continued to pursue those ministries at Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, where he became rector in 1952. He also sought to win converts through his writing. He published frequently in the parish newsletter The Calvary Evangel and later independently as the renamed magazine Faith at Work. Failing health forced Shoemaker to resign from active ministry in 1962.

Samuel Moor Shoemaker died in Baltimore on October 30, 1963.

Committee on Observance of the Nation's Bicentennial

  • Corporate body
  • 1973-1976

The Committee on the Observance of the Nation's Bicentennial was appointed by Presiding Bishop John E. Hines in May 1973. The Committee was established by Executive Council and funded by an appropriation from Trust Fund 779, the Julia A. Gallaher Memorial Fund.

The Bicentennial Committee, as it was often called, was formed to assist the Church in its participation in nationwide activities commemorating the bicentennial anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and more broadly of the founding of the United States of America as a nation and state. It directly initiated or cooperatively sponsored special issues of Anglican Theological Review and the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church; a Church Bicentennial newsletter; a liturgy that was specially designed for the three phases of celebration; a curriculum aid for religious education; a filmstrip set; and a 16 mm moving picture film. In addition, the Committee was responsible for special programming for the General Convention 1976.

Committee on World Relief and Inter-Church Aid

  • Corporate body
  • 1950-1967

Due to the initial success of the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief (PBFWR) in the 1940s, the scope of the program was expanded over the course of 1949 and 1950. At the request of the Presiding Bishop, National Council expanded the purview of the PBFWR to encompass not only world relief, but also “church cooperation,” generally expanding the scope of its grant-funded projects and specifically enabling it to finance the costs of The Episcopal Church’s participation in the World Council of Churches. Consequently, the Presiding Bishop’s Committee on World Relief and Church Cooperation was authorized in April 1950 to make appropriations within the terms of the budget item for world relief and church cooperation.

The Presiding Bishop's Committee on World Relief and Church Cooperation formulated policy and approved grants and appropriations; however, formal grant criteria were not introduced until the 1970s. The Department of Christian Social Relations administered the operation of approved programs, which included humanitarian efforts, particularly aid to refugees, parish development, and ecumenical programs. At the February 1959 National Council meeting, it was resolved that the Committee on World Relief and Church Cooperation be renamed the Committee on World Relief and Inter-Church Aid.

One year later, in February 1960, the Committee on World Relief and Inter-Church Aid recommended to the National Council that the operational activities of the Committee become a Division of World Relief and Inter-Church Aid within the structure of the Department of Christian Social Relations.

In 1968, as the Executive Council sought to develop more efficient working structures, the Department of Christian Social Relations was dissolved, effectively ending the work of the Committee on World Relief and Inter-Church Aid.

China Mission

  • Corporate body
  • 1834-1950

At its annual Board of Directors meeting in 1834, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society passed a resolution to establish a mission in China, and appointed its first missionaries the following year. Over the next decade, the missionaries worked to establish schools to include religious training, all while continuing their own study of the people they wished to serve.

After the appointment of the Rev. William J. Boone in 1844 as the first Bishop of China, the American Church Mission at Shanghai was established. Education remained the main focus. A boys' school was founded in 1846 followed by one for girls a short time later.

Over the next several decades, the Missionary District of China would be served by four additional Bishops and witness the establishment of several medical institutions including St. Luke's Hospital and St. Elizabeth's Hospital, both in Shanghai, as well as what would become St. John's University, later the most influential higher educational institution in China.

Soon after the end of the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, which attempted to purge China of Western influences but spared the Episcopal missions from serious harm, the General Convention restructured the Mission by defining the coastal Province of Kiangsu as the Missionary District of Shanghai, while the rest of the original missionary territory became the Missionary District of Hankow. Growth dictated yet another division in 1910, and the Missionary District of Wuhu (later renamed Anking) was created, comprising the Province of Anwhei and the northern portion of Kiangsi.

After many years of political conflict, the Communist Party, headed by Mao Zedong, won control of China in 1949, ushering in atheist policies and anti-American sentiment that prompted the foreign Episcopal missionaries to gradually vacate their stations. The National Council formally recalled all its workers from China in December 1950 at the same time that the United States made it illegal to send money to China, rendering it impossible for the General Convention to fund the China missions.

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