When St. Mark’s, an Anglo-Catholic parish in Philadelphia, was built in 1848, much of the land in its Rittenhouse Square neighborhood was empty. Empty, too, was the church’s bell tower, looming over Locust Street on the southern side of the nave. By 1876, when the rector, Eugene Hoffman, organized the purchase of new bells from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, the neighborhood around the parish had grown significantly. New, luxurious townhouses filled the neighborhood, many rising to meet the height of St. Mark’s tower. 

The reaction to the installation of the bells, which was mixed to say the least, began a full six months before they were delivered and installed. On January 4th, twenty Locust Street residents signed a letter to the church’s rector, wardens, and vestry, expressing “profound regret” about the prospect of ringing bells, citing concerns for their health and property values. On June 26th, the day after the bells were rung for the first time, MacGregor J. Mitcheson, an attorney and neighbor, wrote to complain specifically of the earliest Sunday bell, which rang for 15 minutes preceding a service at seven. Mitcheson complained both of being woken from sleep and of having an ensuing headache, going so far as to claim that the bells, rather than encouraging him to worship, had actually prevented his religious observance of the day because of the pain they caused him.

In November, many of the affluent residents of the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood returned from spending the summer outside of the city, and the row over St. Mark’s bells escalated dramatically, ending in a 1879 ruling by Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas that forbade the ringing of the bells. The decision that was immediately appealed, but ultimately upheld with minor qualifications. The widely publicized case, which produced a much-contested wooden model of the neighborhood and a nearly five-hundred-page report, complete with testimonials and a color-coded map, created significant discord among Philadelphia’s elite. A later report remembered that “Philadelphia society was rent in twain,” and “matrons had to select dinner guests, all of whom either favored or opposed the bells of St. Mark’s.” 

As Isaac Weiner, professor of religion and culture, notes in his book, Religion Out Loud, the saga of St. Mark’s bells is a multi-faceted one. The story encapsulates a rapidly changing urban religious landscape, an American public reassessing its relationship to the dominance of mainline Protestantism, a divide between rural expressions of piety and life in ever-growing and ever-noisier cities, new medical and pseudo-medical understandings of sound’s relation to the human body, and the importance of both the symbolical and practical functions of ecclesiastical architecture. But the story of Harrison et al v. The Rector, Church-Wardens and Vestry of St. Mark’s is also a story about class and the church’s relationship to the poor. 

`Although the neighborhood of Rittenhouse Square was filled with the townhouses of affluent Philadelphians throughout the mid-19th century, many of whom were Episcopalian, the congregation of St. Mark’s lavish, incense-rich services were by no means attended only by the wealthy. Of the parish’s four Sunday services, the early morning and evening rites were filled by servants and the working poor, due to the demands of work schedules and because, unlike services later on Sunday morning, early and late services did not rent out their pews. Reverend Hoffman went so far as to describe the church as having “two distinct congregations” distinguished by wealth. Weiner writes that “most of St. Mark’s closest [and most affluent] neighbors were low or broad church Episcopalians who attended other nearby churches,” and that the Anglo-Catholic St. Mark’s, on the other hand, maintained a rigorous outreach to the poor, who, when the matter arose, would be disproportionally affected by the suspension of bell ringing, church leaders feared.

Throughout early America and until the wide-spread availability of economical time-telling devices, public clock towers and bells served the crucial function of regulating time. Church bells not only called the public to worship but also marked the beginning and end of workdays – a critical service for the working poor. It is doubtless that the leadership of St. Mark’s, who employed a robust schedule of ringing for services both on Sunday and on weekdays, had in mind the double utility of the bells in calling the faithful to worship and regulating the public conception of time, especially for the church’s working-class members and neighbors. The wealthy, who were more likely to own clocks and pocket watches, did not have the same need and were more likely to view the bells as an unnecessary nuance. 

The Philadelphia Times suggested that it was exactly this disparity that motivated the lawsuit. They wrote sarcastically that the leadership of St. Mark’s “should have considered…that the church on Rittenhouse Square has no need of a bell to summon its select congregation of Sunday worshippers, and that a church which throws open its pew-doors to a miscellaneous congregation in the early morning offends sufficiently against the dignity of the neighborhood without the added injury of chiming bells.” The satirist suggests, in other words, that the affluent complainants of the lawsuit may not have been upset so much by sound of the bells but by the congregation of poor and working class people they called together. 

Poverty, as well as anti-immigrant sentiment, also played a role in deciding whose testimony was brought to, and respected by, the court. While the Reverend Hoffman, St. Mark’s rector, sought out and included statements from servants and other working-class residents of the neighborhood, opponents of the bells dismissed these testimonies as being from “obscure people living in side streets and alleys.” In his oral arguments, William Henry Rawle openly dismissed the testimony of immigrant neighbors, associating the enjoyment and utility of bells with the Irish poor, “a class having placid lymphatic temperaments, with which is usually combined with a lower degree of intellectual development.” 

The saga of St. Mark’s, and its tenuous relationship with its wealthy neighbors and outreach to impoverished people in the immediate vicinity of the church, is but a chapter in a much longer history of Anglo-Catholic, or “high church,” parishes’ particular expression of Christian piety. Throughout the later decades of the 19th century, congregations and religious communities of the Oxford Movement committed themselves to a localized form of charity with particular emphasis on relieving the physical needs of the poor. 

The historian John Shelton Reed notes that many Anglo-Catholic congregations of the Victorian period in England were mission churches within London parishes, located almost entirely in poor neighborhoods. These mission congregations were, in part, an experiment to offer poor and working-class Londoners, who were notoriously irregular church goers, a liturgical alternative to the urban parishes they had long ignored. But these Anglo-Catholic missions were also manifestations of a particular concern for the poor, and thus, centers of robust ministry. Reed writes that at “St. Stephen’s, Haggerston, where the Sisters of St. Margaret were active…[an] ambitious welfare program was undertaken: free dinners for the unemployed, half-penny dinners for school children, dinners sent out to the sick, doctor’s prescriptions compounded and sold at cost, tickets given out for food and fuel, employment found for women.” In nearby Shoreditch, St. Michael’s Church was regularly denounced by the evangelical Church Association for its “ritualist” tendencies and commitment to extensive social work, where “the poor who are relieved are not even asked to come to church.” The popular BBC series Call the Midwife is a fictionalized adaptation of the ministry of the Community of St. John the Divine in the East End, and serves as a modern testimony to the important work of Anglo-Catholic religious communities throughout the mid-twentieth century, many of which existed to serve the urban poor. While many evangelical Anglicans were focused on policy change and moral reform, Anglo-Catholic parishes often exhibited a very different expression of Christian piety, one that focused on the relief of physical needs in ones own neighborhood. 

Across the Atlantic, St. Mark’s, Philadelphia was by no means the only Anglo-Catholic community to continue the tradition of a particularly localized social outreach. The work of deaconesses at St. Hilda’s House of Christ Church, New Haven, and of the Order of the Holy Cross among the poor in the mountains of East Tennessee, are testaments to this heritage and the legacy that continues today. Particularly remarkable is the martyrdom of Sr. Constance and her companions, four nuns of the Community of St. Mary, who traveled to Memphis during an outbreak of yellow fever to care for the sick, dying, and orphaned among the thousands of residents who, unlike many wealthy citizens of the city, could not afford to leave. All four nuns as well as two priests succumbed to yellow fever after weeks of nursing day and night. Shortly before he died, one of the nun’s priest companions described the sisters as “brave, unshrinking daughters of Divine Love.”