Remembering Father Ritchie

With all the craziness last week of celebrating our first female presiding bishop, the hoopla over Corpus Christi, the benefit for Christ Church, Slidell, praying for Gilberto's ticker and trying to decide which type of pigeon spikes to order, I forgot to wish a happy 157th birthday to Fr. Arthur Ritchie, our second rector. He was born June 22, 1849, in Philadelphia. He graduated from General Seminary and thereafter worked at Church of the Advent in Boston and briefly at St. Clement's Philly before becoming rector of Church of the Ascension, Chicago. He soon got into trouble with Bp. McLaren in Chicago over his reservation of the Sacrament and the so-called non-communicating high mass. He stood his ground and continued his catholic practices with the full approval of the parish until he accepted the call to become rector of St. Ignatius in early 1884. It wasn't long before he had introduced at St. Ignatius a much more advanced catholic ritual than Dr. Ewer had done and incurred the disapproval of fellow New York clergy and Bp. Potter with his use of vestments, candles, incense, holy water, confessionals and reservation of the Sacrament as well as Benediction (believed to be the first American use of this service, then called Adoration). Fr. Ritchie was rector for 30 years and made St. Ignatius a stronghold of Anglocatholicism with his superb preaching and his unswerving devotion to the catholic faith and traditions.

We have him to thank for our current marvelous church building and its furnishings. In 1900 he and Charles Frederic Zabriskie, then senior warden and also recently moved to the neighborhood, scouted out the frontier property of the Upper West Side and found a nice plot of land at 552 West End Avenue. Thanks to the generosity of Zabriskie and other vestrymen, they were able to build quite a nice little church.

Fr. Ritchie died on July 9, 1921, and is buried in the St. Ignatius section of Rockland Cemetery near Nyack. We are planning a trip to the cemetery on July 16, which the Parish at Fr. Ritchie's suggestion purchased in 1891 and in which any parishioner may be buried at no cost for the plot. We need to figure out how many plots there are left and make the parish more aware of its existence. We haven't paid a visit in several years, since Fr. Weatherby, our seventh rector, was buried there about 10 years ago.

Neither Fr. Ritchie nor Fr. Weatherby would have approved of the new presiding bishop, I'm sure. They wouldn't have approved of me being "on the altar" either, but I trust we will not see evidence of them turned over in their graves on either count. As for all the bitter defeatists, I wish they would just get over it already. As one button at the Convention said, "God is not a boy's name."