After the merger of the dioceses of Fond du Lac, Eau Claire, and Milwaukee into the Diocese of Wisconsin last year, we lost one of the last institutional connections to one of the Episcopal Church’s most divisive episodes. It was 125 years ago that controversy stirred for months over the consecration of a coadjutor bishop for Fond du Lac, capturing Christian and secular headlines—largely as the result of The Living Church and the personalities behind it. A peculiarity from an exceptional moment in American Anglicanism, what has come to be called the Fond du Lac Circus remains a high-water mark in the debate over ritualism among Episcopalians.
By the time of Reginald Heber Weller’s consecration at St. Paul’s Cathedral on November 8, 1900, the Episcopal Church was already several decades into the ritualism wars that defined much of global Anglicanism in the Oxford Movement’s wake. The Episcopal Church in Wisconsin embraced ritualist practices, exporting its revival of Catholic forms through books published in Milwaukee under the auspices of The Young Churchman publishing house and its magazine, The Living Church.
Coming in as its new editor in 1900, F.C. Morehouse pushed TLC’s already strong Anglo-Catholic outlook further. For the faithful of Fond du Lac who eagerly packed the pews to witness Weller’s elevation to the episcopate, it came as no surprise that incense wafted from censers and clergy were vested in golden copes as they processed toward the altar. More foreign, however, were the bearded and miter-less Russians who also processed.
Reporting from the days after the consecration captured the fanfare. The evening edition of Oshkosh’s The Daily Northwestern on the day of consecration reported that a warning was issued to prevent the attending throngs from creating a crush, and described the multitude of banners, bunting, and flowers that decorated the cathedral for the liturgy.
The November 17 edition of TLC carried a glowing multipage account, saying that “Seldom—perhaps never—has our communion in this country witnessed so magnificent a function.” Among the participants listed as consecrators and witnesses of Weller’s elevation were six Episcopal bishops from the Great Lakes and one from Nebraska.
Also present was the Polish National Catholic Bishop of Chicago, Antony Kozłowski (whose vestments mirrored those of the Anglicans), alongside three Russian Orthodox clergymen: Tikhon, the Bishop of the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, and his chaplains, John Kochurov and Sevastijan Dabović. Tikhon would later become the Patriarch of Moscow, and all three Russians are now venerated as saints in their church.
The Orthodox and Polish Catholic clergy were invited by Fond du Lac’s diocesan bishop, Charles Grafton, a committed ecumenist, who also had backed numerous ventures to minister to the Eastern and Southern Europeans coming to the Midwest in large numbers. In his enthusiasm for gathering a congregation that would bolster his diocese’s catholic claims, Grafton even sent an invitation to the Roman Catholic archabbot of Monte Cassino, who was visiting Chicago at the time; the abbot politely declined. Seats were also reserved for the city of Fond du Lac’s Protestant clergy.
A photo of Weller, the seven other Episcopal bishops, Kozłowski, and the Russians in episcopal regalia was first published two days after the service by Milwaukee’s Evening Wisconsin. TLC published it the next week (November 17) as a two-page supplement, on higher-quality paper, reflecting Morehouse’s interest in expanded use of photography in the magazine’s pages. In the ensuing crisis, TLC got all the blame.
Oshkosh’s The Daily Northwestern ran a sketch of the image under this incredulous headline: “This Is Not a Scene in St. Peter’s at Rome, or the Cathedral at Seville, but a Brilliant Ecclesiastical Function at Fond Du Lac.” TLC also provided it to The Church Standard, a low-church Philadelphia weekly edited by John Fulton, one of TLC’s founders in 1878, who used a series of editorials to sharply criticize the image and the trends in Episcopal Church life it represented. The photo was reprinted in numerous secular newspapers, including The New York Tribune, whose editorial compared Bishop Grafton to the Bible’s King Rehoboam.
Evangelicals within the Episcopal Church lambasted the consecration, proclaiming it the “Fond du Lac Circus.” Fulton called the cope and miter “Roman Catholic costumes,” which “violated every canon of ecclesiastical comity and good taste.” Morehouse shot back by publishing a photograph of The Church Standard’s masthead, which included a miter. “This dangerous ornament has been a part of the insignia of The Church Standard each week for many years past,” Morehouse dryly commented.
He also mentioned that 24 of the official seals of the church’s 32 dioceses depicted the offending headgear. “Can it be that 75% of the Dioceses in question would give such prominence to the mitre if it is illegal?” he asked. “I think the greater part of this hostility arises from prejudice and ignorance.”
At a moment when anxiety was high among the nation’s Protestant elite about social changes resulting from mass immigration, some criticism inevitably reverted to cultural stereotyping. “The Anglo-Saxon face is not suited to this sort of costume,” wrote “A New-York Churchman” in a letter to the editor of The New York Tribune. A Washington, Iowa, newspaper carried a couple of the “least offensive” lines from one critical poem. The verse refers to two popular comic musicals of the day set in Asia, Wang and Panjandrum, which played pompous displays by peculiar foreigners for laughs.
How they dusted off their miters!
Shook the moth balls from each cope!
Polished up their rusted crosiers
With the best of silver soap!
And Wang and great Panjandrum,—
Each his robe case on his,—
With a shout of Hallelujah!
Took the train to Fond du Lac.
There were numerous calls for an ecclesiastical trial of the eight bishops depicted in the photograph, and five months after the service, they made a joint reply to Presiding Bishop Thomas Clark, who had criticized it in a public letter. “We cannot recognize you … as holding any archepiscopal or judicial relation to our action,” the bishops said.
No charges were ever filed, but the 1901 General Convention enacted a series of canons clarifying the Presiding Bishop’s role. Further canons passed three years later said that the bishop presiding at a consecration had authority over its ceremonial. Grafton’s long-desired hope that the Protestant Episcopal Church be renamed as the American Catholic Church also suffered amid the controversy. The Church Standard editor quipped that the photograph “will do more toward retaining the present name than a hundred speeches in Convention.”
Anxieties over the rancor that the image drew seemed to have not long bothered Weller or Morehouse. The anniversary of Weller’s consecration became an occasion for celebration in the diocese: the events for the 15th anniversary saw Weller’s close friend and fellow Anglo-Catholic William Walter Webb, the Bishop of Milwaukee, preaching at a morning service in the cathedral, followed by a reception featuring a full banquet and speeches. Morehouse’s persuasions were not dissuaded, and his ardent support of the consecration secured his status as an Anglo-Catholic hero.
Morehouse would play a leading role in a 1925 Anglo-Catholic push to deemphasize the Thirty-nine Articles in the Episcopal Church’s canons. Beyond his theological misgivings over the Articles, he asserted that the 19th article’s proclamation that the churches of “Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred” created a barrier to ecumenism with Eastern churches. The 1917 execution of consecration participant Kochurov during Russia’s Civil War, and continued persecutions of Russian clergy at the hands of Bolsheviks, certainly weighed heavily upon Morehouse.
The use of episcopal regalia was never again seriously challenged in the Episcopal Church, and similar photos taken after the consecration of Episcopalian bishops these days hardly raise eyebrows (though they also lack Orthodox participants). The Fond du Lac Circus remains one of the best-known images of Episcopal Church history, a symbol of the high-water mark of the Catholic revival, projecting a confidence that the wider church could not ignore. It shows a church aiming its vision beyond its cultural and class origins and embracing the call to unity decades before the ecumenical movement’s official beginning.
Patrick Britti is a freelance writer based in Virginia.
