Arthur E. Woolley

Woolley, Arthur E. Conservative Anglo-Catholic (Episcopal) Priest and Activist: July 27, 1931-May 29, 2021 An outspoken Episcopal priest and community activist pegged as an arch-conservative, the Rev. Arthur E. Woolley, Jr. died in Lake Ridge, Virginia of natural causes. He was 89. Ordained in 1957, Woolley's career was a mirror opposite to events in the national Episcopal Church over five decades. His successes in urban work and community involvement bucked suburbanizing trends in the national church and seemed to mock grandiloquent pronouncements by the socially liberal bishops he often reported to. An Anglo-Catholic, Woolley preferred formal liturgy with "smells and bells" and Elizabethan English, yet worship was becoming less formal, more contemporary, and strayed more and more from the Book of Common Prayer. He was rector of two predominantly black, inner-city parishes in New York City and Philadelphia but the denomination historically held little appeal for African-Americans and for decades closed and sold off church buildings in poor, inner-city neighborhoods. Woolley also emphasized regular visits to the sick, elderly and dying even while more and more rectors were handing over such chores to lay ministers or leaving it for hospital chaplains. His congregations thrived even 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, and declined 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 more than 50 percent to over 14,000 from 9000 in 1960. His first parish of St. Alban the Martyr in the Jamaica section of Queens, N.Y.(1957-1961), 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 who fanned racial prejudice in order to get more houses on the market for sale. His next parish of St. Barnabas in Philadelphia (1964-1969) was a tiny remnant of elderly whites in a huge stone church building they could no longer afford to maintain in a neighborhood overtaken by brick row houses and a solidly Roman Catholic population. But Woolley merged the dying white parish with a black congregation of Episcopalians who had lost their building, St. Cyprian's, to an urban redevelopment scheme that, paradoxically, attracted whites to the new housing. The merger re-invigorated St. Barnabas with younger, able, enthusiastic, black congregants in a white, Italian working-class neighborhood. Woolley ran day camps in the rough and tumble west Philly neighborhood, bringing black children to play side by side with local Italian kids in the sweltering city summer. The camp sponsored day trips to city and suburban pools where he and the councilors gave swimming lessons to youngsters, white and black, who had never before swum and were frightened of water. While the Episcopal bishops at the time famously took headlines and cultivated admirers 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. The parish which was about to close its doors when he arrived in 1964, 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 from the cities. 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 of the city's leaders found it unseemly that its clergy would support drug and sex counseling, but the clergy argued that ignoring the problems of the new age would be 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, which replaced the 1928 Prayer Book, 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. 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 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 Washington, D.C. in 1986. As rector of St Luke's, Bladensburg (1986-96), just outside the District, he gained notoriety by canceling Sunday services when the female Suffragan Bishop of his diocese insisted on visiting the parish, despite earlier assurances from church leaders that official visits by the new women bishops would never be imposed on conscientious objectors. He was threatened with deposition as a priest for insubordination, but held his ground and the threats came to nothing. He retired in 1996 to live in Catonsville, MD, 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 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 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. 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 Episcopalian 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 non-white elementary school which had 120 students in K through 8th 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 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 new rector who followed Woolley closed St. Timothy's elementary school and insisted on separate Spanish and English Sunday schools and liturgies. Woolley 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 notably that the zeitgeist, or spirit or the age, should not be confused with the Holy Spirit. He concluded in his frustration a paraphrase of Paul the Apostle 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." Nonetheless, his faithful Episcopalian wife dead, he joined a breakaway denomination, the Anglican Catholic Church. At age 75, he became priest-in-charge and later rector of St. Michael the Archangel in Frederick, MD until he retired a fourth time in 2013. The son of an army officer and engineer, Woolley was born in Bronxville, NY 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 1945-47 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 Theological Seminary in Wisconsin and the Philadelphia Divinity School, where he received the degree of master of divinity with honors. He was ordained to the deaconate of the Episcopal Church in April 1957 and to the priesthood in November 1957. Woolley was raised as a practical agnostic but converted after being a paid singer for several years in an Episcopal church's boy-choir in Brooklyn. He 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, 11 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Lux perpetua luceat ei. Please sign the Guestbook at www.legacy.com/washingtontimes