St. Mary Magdalene Equal to the Apostles is a new congregation of the Diocese of Colorado, founded in 2023. It is a biritual parish, meaning it uses the Book of Common Prayer twice a month and a Byzantine rite twice a month.
The Rev. Chrysostom Frank had been forced out of his biritual Catholic parish in 2016, as Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila did not approve of a married priest leading a Latin rite community. Some people who knew him asked him to start celebrating home Masses.
But Frank quickly realized that celebrating home Masses was not tenable. “Communities can become turned in on themselves with no one to correct them. The nature of church is relationship and communion. Some people said you don’t need hierarchy, and I said you do,” Frank said.
He approached the Union of Utrecht of the Old Catholic Churches, which advised him to approach the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado.
Frank asked Bishop Kimberly Lucas if she would be willing to receive a biritual community, and she said yes. “I was really surprised by it,” Frank said. Lucas expected the Western Rite community to switch from the ordinary form of the Roman Rite to Rite II of the Book of Common Prayer (1979).
“The prayer book is better than the Novus Ordo, and Anglicans have been praying in English for hundreds of years,” Frank said.
The Eastern Rite community was permitted to continue using liturgical materials developed by the New Skete monastery in Cambridge, New York. This is one of the few Orthodox liturgies that has been influenced by the liturgical reforms of the 20th century, such as adding Old Testament readings.
A biritual community that offers a shared service, rather than separate services, is unusual. “One of the great tasks is to bring people together from two different traditions,” he said. Frank works to preserve the liturgical heritages of both rites. What keeps parishioners together is a shared commitment to the Eucharist. “We’re here, we’re doing our thing, we’re trying to be Christians,” he said.
He wants to provide a home for Christians who want community that is both spiritually rigorous and a socially progressive. “The church is bifurcated right now. If you’re credally orthodox, you’re not interested in social justice issues, and if you’re interested in social justice, you’re not interested in liturgy,” he said.
His small, primarily older congregation (average Sunday attendance is 23) wants to do as much outreach as is feasible. Parishioners collected money and items for a local shelter for Advent, and did the same for Lent, as well as volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. “This community is very committed to social justice,” he said.
St. Mary Magdalene’s shares space with St. Peter and St. Mary Episcopal Church, a small historic congregation in the city’s Baker neighborhood.
Evangelism is an uphill battle in a place like Colorado, which is significantly less religious than the national average. “A lot of people in this country want nothing to do with religion of any kind. They’re ‘spiritual but not religious,’” Frank said. It’s also difficult for people who grew up Catholic. “They’ve never had to do anything like this—promote themselves.”
But he thinks the parish has something unique to offer. “The spiritual tradition of the Christian East is very important,” Frank said. He said many Anglicans, including Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, have an affection for Eastern Christianity.
But he believes there may not be another Anglican church like St. Mary’s Magdalene. “We’re an anomaly. Anglicans have full access to the sacramental celebration of the East with us. That is something new,” he said. While Byzantine Rite Protestantism exists in Europe, it is within Lutheran churches that are not in communion with Anglicanism.
He wants to encourage confession and fasting while trying to avoid legalism, which he believes harmed many of his formerly Catholic parishioners. This is where he thinks the different view of the East is useful. “I don’t want to pound people,” he said. “The teachings have to be freely received.”
Frank greatly appreciates the Anglo-Catholic strain within the Western liturgical tradition, but he also appreciates the liturgical reforms of the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century, and wants to have a blend of both for the parish’s prayer book service.
Frank is returning to his roots. He worshiped at an Episcopal church in Pennsylvania as a teenager. “I was always an Anglo-Catholic, from the time I was a child, even though I didn’t know what that was,” he said.
He began seminary studies as a Lutheran and spent a year as a pastoral intern in the Church of Sweden’s Diocese of Gothenburg. Swedish Lutherans suggested he finish his studies at Nashotah House, and that he should be ordained by an Episcopal bishop, as Lutherans in the United States did not have bishops then.
The late 1970s was a challenging time for the Episcopal Church, and Frank was troubled by the deep divisions over the ordination of women. He postponed ordination and attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland to study the Caroline Divines, where he became interested in Orthodoxy. “Orthodoxy seemed like a way of avoiding things in the Episcopal Church I didn’t know how to handle.”
A new name came with his entry into the Orthodox Church. “When I was chrismated in the Orthodox Church, the priest asked me which name I wanted. My legal name is Gary. I said Anskar for all the historical reasons linked to my life up to that point and to my Swedish family connection. His response was, ‘I don’t know who that is. We will call you Chrysostom,’” he said.
He went to South Africa to teach theology and was ordained there as a priest of the Greek Orthodox Church in 1985. He founded the first multiracial Orthodox church in South Africa, St. Nicholas of Japan, in Johannesburg, the next year. This put him on the wrong side of the Orthodox hierarchy, which supported apartheid then.
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Pretoria, a former Anglican priest, invited Frank to join his diocese. In 1999, he accepted a job offer to be a professor at St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver. He later received permission to start an Eastern Rite worshiping community within the context of a Latin Rite parish, which would be part of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver and not an Eastern Rite eparchy.
Frank is happy to return to the church he grew up in. “I’m doing what I’d wanted to do for a long time: return to the Episcopal Church,” he said. “I simply realized I’ve always been Anglican. The reception is much better than I expected.”
The Catholic Archdiocese of Denver did not respond to a request for comment.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
