The Rev. Arthur E. Woolley, 1931-2021
An outspoken Episcopal priest and community activist, the Rev. Arthur E. Woolley, Jr. died in Lake Ridge, Virginia, of natural causes. He was 89.
Ordained in 1957, Fr. Woolley’s ministry in urban work and community involvement reflected an Anglo-Catholic reverence of the Anglican tradition. He was rector of two predominantly African-American parishes in New York City and Philadelphia. Fr. Woolley was also committed to making regular visits to the sick, elderly, and dying.
His congregations thrived even while membership in many churches saw steady decline. His first parish of St. Alban the Martyr in the Jamaica section of Queens, N.Y., consisted primarily of first generation West Indian immigrants in a rapidly changing neighborhood. Woolley mobilized his congregation and neighbors against the “block-busting” of real estate agents that threatened the community.
His next parish of St. Barnabas in Philadelphia was a tiny remnant of elderly in a huge stone church building they could no longer afford to maintain. But Woolley merged the dying parish with an African-American congregation, St. Cyprian’s, who had lost their building to an urban redevelopment. The merger re-invigorated St. Barnabas with younger, able, enthusiastic congregants. Woolley ran day camps in the rough and tumble west Philly neighborhood, bringing children to play side by side with local kids in the sweltering city summer. The camp sponsored day trips to city and suburban pools where he and the counselors provided swimming lessons to youngsters of all races.
Fr. Woolley found himself a lone Episcopal priest, defending the Vietnam War and making house calls to high-rise housing projects where elevators often did not work and stairwells were routinely blocked by people who did not care for the presence of a priest. The parish that was about to close its doors when he arrived in 1964 enjoyed a building full of congregants and was financially sound 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. 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, drug counseling, and interventions. Some of the city’s leaders found it unseemly that its clergy would support counseling, but the clergy argued that ignoring the problems of the new age would only make things worse.
At the same time, he 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 that replaced the 1928 prayer book, he alienated many friends and allies.
The Rev. A.E. Woolley at a baptism at St. Alban the Martyr, in Jamaica in Queens, New York, in 1957.
Fr. Woolley left New Jersey in 1980 in order to follow his wife, Alma, who made her career as a nursing educator and had been appointed as 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 congregations to construct a new parish building together. Fr. Woolley returned to city life when his wife became Dean of the School of Nursing at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1986.
He retired in 1996 to live in Catonsville, Maryland, near All Saints Convent, one of the rare Anglican convents in the United States, and he soon found himself in demand by poor or estranged parishes in the Baltimore area. He received no stipend 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 in summer, or fill in for weeks, or even months.
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 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.
In 2003, he agreed to become interim rector of St. Timothy’s, Catonsville, outside of Baltimore. Woolley managed to keep the devastated parish going for two years, along with its majority non-white elementary school which had 120 students in K through eighth grade. He also invited a Spanish-speaking congregation with no building to use St. Timothy’s building, share its English-language Sunday school, and celebrate 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.
He soon joined the Anglican Catholic Church. At age 75, he became priest-in-charge and later rector of St. Michael the Archangel in Frederick, Maryland, until he retired a fourth time in 2013.
The son of an army officer and engineer, Woolley was born in Bronxville, New York, grew up in the Bronx, Hastings-on-Hudson, Brooklyn, and then Dayton, Ohio, and Brooklyn again and then Queens. He attended Brooklyn Technical High from 1945 to 1947 and graduated from Andrew Jackson High School in 1949. In 1953 he earned a B.A. in history from Queens College of the City University of New York. He attended Nashotah House and the Philadelphia Divinity School, where he received the degree of master of divinity with honors. He was ordained to the diaconate of the Episcopal Church in April 1957 and to the priesthood in November 1957.
Woolley was raised as a practical agnostic but converted after serving as a paid singer for several years in an Episcopal church’s boy’s choir in Brooklyn. He was determined as a senior in high school to go to seminary. His own father converted at age 77, and Woolley was happy to attend his confirmation.
He married the former Alma Schelle in 1954, who predeceased him in 2005. He is survived by four children, eleven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.