William Paret was elected Bishop of Maryland to succeed the late William Pinkney and was consecrated January 8, 1885. The new bishop spoke at the African American Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin at a special missionary service only twelve days after his consecration, and the next day attended a conference of laity and clergy to consider “Church Work Among the Colored People.”
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Because all of Bishop John Gardner Murray’s correspondence was destroyed in 1936, there are many details about him which remain unknown. The titillating phrase in Bishop Helfenstein’s letter asking permission of the Chancellor to destroy Murray’s papers, “many things would be unearthed which had just as well be forgotten” does make us wonder what ideas or actions were thought best hidden from view.
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Did you know that the Episcopal Church established a War Commission during the First World War? The address was 14 Wall Street, New York, and the coadjutor bishop of Southern Ohio, the Right Rev. Theodore Irving Reese, held the job of chairman of the executive committee. He wrote to the Rev. Benjamin N. Bird, serving as a civilian chaplain at Camp Meade, Maryland, on October 3, 1918, about resources available during the influenza epidemic.
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Many of us may be wondering how the church is ever going to “get back to normal” when this pandemic crisis finally comes to an end. It may ease our minds a little if we think back to even bleaker times and discover the resilience of the people of God, the Church, when faced with seemingly unsurmountable odds against survival.
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“We have stored away in cupboards great quantities of Bishop Paret’s correspondence and all of Bishop Murray’s and all of mine as Archdeacon. To my mind, all this correspondence is without any value whatsoever. …No one, even should a history of the Diocese of Maryland be written, would have time to go through all such correspondence.
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