The Chicago singer Ian Fisher, an alumnus of Saint Thomas Choir School, has published an excoriating article on the abandonment of the music heritage in the Episcopal church. Here’s the beginning:
It is hardly a novel observation that the Episcopal Church is in freefall — its once-immense cultural influence reduced to a mere whisper, its ancient liturgies now little more than quaint relics in a world that has long ceased to value the transcendent.
The leadership, having spent decades more preoccupied with virtue-signaling on fashionable social justice causes, identity politics, and the moral imperative of appeasing the ever-changing winds of political correctness, now finds itself on the brink of irrelevance. It is as though the church decided to exchange its eternal spiritual heritage for the transient concerns of modernity, only to discover, with a bemused shrug, that the transaction has rendered it hollow.
The ecclesiastical train wreck, long in the making, may be regarded as inevitable, but even in this context, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue’s decision to dismantle its eponymous choir school — a treasure that has stood as the pinnacle of Anglican choral excellence for over 100 years — is nothing short of an affront to the senses. Were the Episcopal Church a sinking ship, St. Thomas might be imagined as its last remaining lifeboat — staunch, dignified, and afloat in a sea of mediocrity. Yet, in its infinite wisdom, the church is now preparing to hurl that lifeboat overboard in favor of something less majestic. If this is what the “preservation” of an institution looks like, perhaps we should welcome a shipwreck.
St. Thomas Church, founded in 1823, was once the epitome of ecclesiastical grandeur in New York City, a sanctuary where the Anglican tradition flourished in all its solemnity and beauty. Its walls have resonated with some of the finest sacred music in the Western canon, and its pews were once filled with captains of industry, statesmen, artists, and patrons of the arts. To enter St. Thomas was to be drawn into an august world, an intersection of the sacred and the sublime, a place that radiated a sense of purpose and permanence that has all but vanished from modern life….
Read on here.
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