By Peter J. Wooley

A mercurial man, an unusual conservative, a community activist, an Anglo-Catholic, and a supporter of Nashotah House, the Rev. Arthur E. Woolley, Jr., died in Lake Ridge, Virginia, earlier this year. He was two months shy of 90.

He was raised a practical agnostic but converted after being a paid singer in an Episcopal church’s boy-choir in Brooklyn. He continued to attend the historic church of St. Luke and St. Matthew after his voice broke, turned pages for the organist, and served on the altar. He was determined as a senior in high school to go to seminary. (His agnostic father, an Army engineer, finally converted at age 77, and Woolley attended his confirmation.)

He studied history at Queens College of the City University of New York, and entered Nashotah House in 1953. But four years earlier, he had met Alma Schelle. She graduated from Cornell University in 1953 at the same time he graduated from Queens and, not willing to wait indefinitely, insisted on marrying. They did so after his first year of seminary, and therein lay the problem. Nashotah House had no housing for married students. He could not return.

Instead, he finished up at Philadelphia Divinity School, now defunct, to get his M. Div. cum laude and had the first of four children, Mariel, now grown with her own children. 

He was ordained to the priesthood a year later, in November 1957. His subsequent career would be a mirror opposite to trends in the national Episcopal Church over the next five decades. Mariel was there to see to all. 

“He could never stop being a priest,” she said. “He had no other identity. No other mission.”

His first parish, St. Alban the Martyr in the Jamaica section of Queens, New York (1957-1961), consisted primarily of first generation West Indian immigrants in a rapidly changing neighborhood. Woolley mobilized his Anglo-Catholic congregation and their neighbors against the “block-busting” of real estate agents who fanned racial prejudice in order to get more houses on the market for sale.

His next parish of St. Barnabas in Philadelphia (1962-1969) was a remnant of elderly caucasian people in a huge stone church building they could no longer afford to maintain in a neighborhood dominated by brick row houses and a solidly Roman Catholic population. But Woolley merged the dying parish with a black congregation of Episcopalians who had lost their building to an urban redevelopment scheme. 

“All they have of their former neighborhood associations is their Church,” wrote Woolley to the editor of the Church News. “They are scattered throughout the edge of West Philadelphia. Life-long friendships and fellowship can only be maintained as they travel on Sundays back to their Mission Church Building located in a no-man’s-land.” 

The merger with St. Cyprian’s Mission, with its 119 communicants and a budget of $8,000 per year, re-invigorated St. Barnabas with younger, able, enthusiastic, black congregants in an Italian working-class neighborhood. “Different traditions must be united, customs exchanged, and frictions lived with and conquered,” the two rectors wrote to their new congregation. “What is true of an earthly family is also true of the Family of God, the Church.”

Woolley also ran day camps in the rough and tumble west Philly neighborhood, bringing black children to play side by side with neighborhood Italian kids in sweltering city summers. The camp sponsored day trips to city and suburban pools where he and his staff of councilors gave swimming lessons to youngsters, of both races, most of whom had never before been in a swimming pool or, much less, learned to swim. All four of the rector’s children attended, along with more than 100 other youngsters. “The day camp was all day, five days a week, for four weeks—just city kids and city heat,” said daughter Mariel. “And everyone loved it.”

And while some Episcopal bishops at the time made headlines for their public opposition to the Vietnam War and poverty, Woolley found himself, a lone Episcopal priest, defending the war, yet making house calls to high-rise housing projects where elevators often did not work and stairwells were blocked by refuse and drug addicts. St. Barnabas, which was about to close its doors when he arrived in 1962, had a building full of congregants and money in the bank when Woolley left in 1969.

He moved to Wildwood on the New Jersey shore where the affluent Episcopal parish of St. Simeon’s By-the-Sea had little to offer the huge summertime population of vacationers and bar hoppers. But, along with a Roman Catholic priest, a Congregational minister, and a rabbi, he won grants from the state and federal government and founded Operation Junction, a clinic that provided testing for sexually transmitted diseases, as well as drug counseling and intervention. Some city leaders found it unseemly that clergy would support drug and sex counseling, and did so in what they wished was a family vacation destination. But the clergy argued that ignoring the problems of the young partiers and the new age would be worse.

“Those were my own teenage years,” said Mariel. “And they were really, really hard, being a PK. He would at Sunday communion give me a fraction of the priest’s host, as if to say ‘you are really special.’ He did that for people he knew might need that. I will never again be able to receive it without seeing his hands holding it and putting it into my hand.”

Around the same time, Woolley began offering the Eucharist in Spanish to migrant workers, driving up to two hours on a summer’s night to join their camps scattered across southern New Jersey where they cultivated the fruits and vegetables of the Garden State. But when he embraced the new 1979 Book of Common Prayer, he alienated many conservative friends and allies. About the same time, by rejecting the ordination of women, he assured he had few friends among liberal activists and clergy. He never changed his position on the issue.

“This is a guy who wore black socks and shoes to the beach,” said Mariel. “But he also got transportation for the migrant workers to have a day off and tickets to the amusement rides for them.”

Woolley left New Jersey in 1980 to follow his wife, Alma, who made her career as a nursing educator and had been appointed Director of the School of Nursing at Illinois Wesleyan University.  Becoming vicar of two rural missions in Princeton and Tiskilwa in Illinois, the priest from New York City took pleasure in blessing the fields and crops, and raised enough money for his neighboring but rival congregations to construct a new parish building together. Woolley returned to city life when his wife became Dean of the School of Nursing at Georgetown University in 1986.

“He could not have been more proud of her,” said Mariel. “And he would tell anyone in the first five seconds how proud he was.”

He retired in 1996 to live in Catonsville, Maryland, near All Saints Convent, one of the rare, and last, Anglican convents in the United States, and he soon found himself in demand by poor or estranged parishes in the Baltimore area. He took no money for his services as a supply priest or interim rector. His reputation as a stalwart and sometimes short-tempered, conservative did not stop priests in struggling Baltimore parishes from asking him to cover for them, or fill in for weeks - or even months.

“I don’t know that there was anything he liked more than saying mass,” added Mariel. “He would do it for whoever was willing to participate, and whenever. And if there was no one else, he might just do it with the archangels and all the company of heaven.”

In 2000, he became interim rector of Mount Calvary in downtown Baltimore, with a small, ultra-conservative white congregation that survived only because of its prodigious financial endowment. Woolley mended fences between the parish and the diocese, persuaded the vestry to pay its diocesan assessments, and sent parochial delegates to diocesan meetings for the first time in years. He retired a second time in 2001. The parish left the Episcopal Church for the Roman Catholic a few years later.

In 2003, he agreed to become interim rector of St. Timothy’s, Catonsville, outside of Baltimore. St. Timothy’s former rector had taken two-thirds of the congregation out of the Episcopal Church to set up a rival parish in the same town after Episcopal bishops agreed to the consecration of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire. Woolley tried to mend the parish though he too opposed ordaining openly gay priests or bishops.

Woolley managed to keep the devastated parish going for two years along with its majority African-American and Latino elementary school which had 120 students in kindergarten through the eighth grade. He also invited a Spanish-speaking congregation which had no building to use St. Timothy’s, share its English language Sunday school, and celebrate the great festivals of Christmas and Easter in both English and Spanish. He retired a third time in 2006, a month after Alma, his wife of 51 years, died. The rector who followed Woolley closed St. Timothy’s elementary school, insisted on separate Spanish and English Sunday schools and liturgies, and eventually took the parish out of the Episcopal Church.

Woolley too thought many times about leaving the Episcopal Church during his career but, unlike many other conservatives, chose to continue and to air his views. He contended that the zeitgeist should not be confused with the Holy Spirit. In his frustration he would paraphrase Paul writing to the Romans that, “nothing can separate me from the love of Christ, not height, nor depth, not anything in creation, not even the General Conventions and foolishness of the Episcopal Church.” In the same vein, he loved his Nashotah House sweatshirt with its mock Latin motto, “Nolite Illegitimos Conterere Vos.”

Nonetheless, after his wife (a faithful Episcopalian) passed away, he joined a break-away Anglican Catholic Church. At age 75, he became priest-in-charge and then rector of St. Michael the Archangel in Frederick, Maryland, until he retired a fourth time in 2013.

He moved to Lakewood, Virginia, to be near his younger daughter and youngest child, but he could not stop, joined a small ACC parish, Church of the Ascension, made pastoral visits, attended synods, preached regularly, led retreats, instructed postulants for ordination, and taught adult education classes weekly. 

“To his dying day, he never traveled in his car without his pix and his stole,” said Mariel. “He also never stopped correcting clergy and bishops on canon law. And, after offering one last adult ed. class, he went home to die.”

Woolley’s successes in urban work and community involvement bucked suburbanizing trends in the Episcopal Church and contrasted to the high-minded resolutions of diocesan conventions which did little to grow or diversify church membership. As readers know, the Episcopal Church (like its splinters) historically held little appeal for African-Americans. Moreover, as congregants and money migrated to the suburbs in the last half of the twentieth century, the churches closed and sold off buildings in poor, inner-city neighborhoods. So, as precious few Episcopal priests could claim, Woolley was rector of two black, inner-city parishes.

Moreover, his congregations thrived while membership in the national Episcopal Church steadily declined. When Woolley was rector of his first parish in 1960, national membership in the Episcopal Church was nearly 3.5 million. It declined by a third to 2.3 million by the year 2000, when he retired for the first time. During the same four decades, the number of ordained clergy increased by more than half to over 14,000 from 9,000 in 1960.

He kept ties to Nashotah House throughout his life. Though he was not a graduate, he regularly contributed as if he were. He also made the trip several times to take professional development courses or show his family the campus. “Unfortunately,” says Mariel, “one of my father’s memories of Nashotah includes me telling the dean after Sunday Mass, ‘you don’t know how to say mass right. My father needs to teach you.’”

Noli illegitimis conterere eum, et lux perpetua luceat ei.