Religion: Cowley Fathers

Last week on the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, a little group of devout U. S. Anglo-Catholics gathered on Memorial Drive by the River Charles in Cambridge, Mass. There for a decade a Romanesque monastery has been intermittently under construction, the U. S. mother house of the Society of St. John the Evangelist (Cowley Fathers), oldest (1865) order of priests in the Anglican communion. Present last week to lay the cornerstone of a chapel dedicated to St. Mary, Mother of God, were Episcopal Suffragan Bishop Samuel Gavitt Babcock of Massachusetts, pious Architect Ralph Adams Cram, Glassman Charles Jay Connick, able Organist Everett Titcomb, and Rev. Spence Burton, U. S. superior of the black-cassocked Cowley Fathers.

The St. Mary chapel is to be a memorial to Father Burton’s mother, Mrs. Caspar Burton of Cincinnati, who long ago gave the land for it. The main unit of the monastery, in Architect Cram’s finest medieval style, will be in memory of Father Burton’s brother Caspar, who died of War wounds. With this and a cloister under construction, the whole will eventually cost $500,000. But to Boston the most interesting donor to the Cowley Fathers monastery was their late patron ess, a terrifying little woman who gave the $25,000 St. Francis House in which the Fathers have been living. She was Mrs. John Lowell (“Mrs. Jack”) Gardner.

A daughter of a rich Manhattan importer named David Stewart, Isabella Stewart married into a proud Boston family. She delighted, scandalized and tyrannized Back Bay from the early 1860’s until her death in 1924. Small, exuberant, handsome, Mrs. Gardner was first painted by John Singer Sargent at 30 in a black shawl. The portrait caused so much talk that she had it put away. That was about the only time she ever bowed to public opinion. She traveled abroad more than anyone else in Boston, bought more dazzling gowns, had more servants and footmen, consorted with actors, artists, musicians, acquired matched pearls by the pint and wore one string around her waist. Once, asked for a subscription to the Charitable Eye & Ear Infirmary, she replied that she had not known there was a charitable eye or ear in Boston. She drank beer at “Pop” concerts at Symphony Hall when ladies were furtively sipping sherry in the parlor. She walked down Tremont Street with a lion on a leash. Once when she missed a rendezvous with a coaching party she chartered a locomotive which she drove herself at 80 m.p.h. to overtake it. She was supposed to have paid Pianist Paderewski $3,000 to play for her and one guest at tea. When Mascagni conducted at the opening of an opera season, Mrs. Gardner did not let a broken leg keep her away. She sat in her box with the leg in a cast, her back to the stage.

An art enthusiast, Mrs. Gardner had finally bought enough treasures by the turn of the century to require a vast Italian palazzo in what were then marshes outside Boston. When the architect suggested steel girders for “Fenway Court,’ Mrs. Gardner shook her determined head, said the stone had to hold itself together without modern props. Daily she went to Fenway, with her luncheon in a tin pail, to scramble over scaffoldings, show the workmen how she wanted things done. A cornetist went along to blow one toot when Mrs. Gardner wanted the master steamfitter, two when she wanted the stone mason and so on. When Fenway Court was ready for its grand opening on New Year’s Night 1903, Boston found “Mrs. Jack” ready to exact the utmost from it. Guests, old and young, had to climb a flight of steps to greet their hostess on a tiny platform, turn around, climb back down. Shortly thereafter Fenway Court with its excellent collection of Italian paintings was opened to the public. Mrs. Gardner never tired of it. Once she spied an old lady examining its treasures, poking each fussily with a cane. Exclaimed Mrs. Jack Gardner: “Jesus Christ, madam, this is no menagerie!”

Busy all her life with spectacular people, Mrs. Gardner had relatively little time for the Church. But once, in a Lenten access of humble piety, she scrubbed the steps of Boston’s Church of the Advent. In Fenway Court she built a Spanish chapel, had it privately opened with a midnight Christmas Mass. Mrs. Gardner did not live to see the guest house she gave the Cowley Fathers. But before she died at 84 they were to be seen, with their flapping black cloaks and black shovel hats, around Fenway Court, and afterwards in the Spanish chapel where their patron’s small body lay on a velvet pall, with a crucifix at her feet, tapers at her head, and nuns praying for three days and three nights.