Key Questions Remain Unasked About Copley Square's Trinity Church

The recent Boston Globe article on the new rectory of Trinity Church, Copley Square, was very ill judged.

Trinity is hardly to be blamed for the fact that to buy a rectory in its neighborhood requires the expenditure of millions of dollars. Unless, that is, the rector is to be forbidden to live near the church and encouraged to move to another less fashionable neighborhood.

A more pertinent argument against the purchase might have been to ask why it would not have sufficed for the rector and his wife to have an apartment above the church offices now in the old rectory on Clarendon Street, the gracious first floor of which has been left furnished for parish entertaining. Even bishops have rejoiced to live this way. When I knew Bishop Paul Moore of New York in the mid 1990s, he lived in such an apartment over the diocesan offices that had been introduced into the lower floors of the original Bishop's residence next to his cathedral.

Trinity's huge investment in social ministry is well known, of course; quite beyond reproach. However, a topic that might have been raised is one that was central to a Trinity parishioner of a century ago, Vida Dutton Scudder.

Scudder was herself confirmed by Trinity’s famous rector, Phillips Brooks, and since canonized (her feast day is October 10). Scudder was a leader in the American settlement house movement, a cardinal principle of which was that living with the poor in some sense was key to ministering to them. Though Scudder herself remained in the Back Bay with her elderly mother, her co-worker at Dennison House in the South End, Emily Balch -- later a Nobel Prize winner -- followed that rule. So too, by the way, years later did Bishop Moore himself. An immensely wealthy man, he and his wife famously welcomed even the homeless into their "open rectory" in his days as a rector in New Jersey.

Taking a different tack, an even more pointed article might have been written about whether or not Trinity's huge expenditure on social ministry is disproportionate to other traditional uses of parish funds, whether given by past donors in the endowment or by present parishioners in their pledges. For example, Trinity is the Episcopal church in Boston that like St Thomas Fifth Avenue in New York one might have expected to have a choir school, a ministry that focuses on the churches primary purpose, worship.

Trinity doesn't have such a school, of course. It has a respectable music program that includes children, but its music program-- which includes only one weekday musical service a week-- reflects the fact that, uniquely in my experience in the U.S. among major wealthy downtown parishes, Trinity has virtually no daily worship whatever. Whereas St Bartholomew's Church, Park Avenue, New York, traditionally thought of as Trinity's sister parish theologically, offers two services every day, Trinity between Monday and Saturday offers two services a week..

It is important to affirm in this connection that there is no conflict between social ministry and worship, just the expectation that the first commandment about God should come first and the second about one's neighbor come in its wake. A choir school, for instance, does not just enrich worship. It also offers many possibilities for social ministry.

But the energy at Trinity is almost solely on the social ministry side. Not just worship is scanted. There is also the parishes world famous art and architecture, a priceless treasure it does not properly care for. The parishes willingness to spend north of three million dollars on housing its rector is in striking contrast to its refusal to spend a dime on finishing the task of restoring the dirty deteriorating murals of its interior -- famous murals, which Trinity charges tourists (over 100,000 a year) hefty prices to see, murals the primary purpose of which it is not beside the point at all to point out were designed to encourage what is -- again -- the primary task of the Church,  in the teaching of the Episcopal Church, worship.

 I should stress that many people have many hopes in all these respects but  it has been many years since daily worship was effectively discontinued at Trinity, there never has been any public discussion of establishing a choir school, and there is no announced commitment at all to the restoration of the churches deteriorating murals more than a decade after the end  of the last project to address the matter. Clearly, the new rectory purchase has been given priority over them all, and the expense of the purchase surely makes other expenditures less not more likely.

Of course the treasurer would undoubtedly point out that it would be not nearly so wise an expenditure compared to Beacon Hill real estate because there would be no comparable return on investment in spending the money on church art. He would say that with a straight face, of course, and with no sense of what an indictment that is of the values of Trinity Church, values so evident in its meager worship opportunities.

Douglass Shand-Tucci is an historian of American art and architecture and Boston studies currently at work for MIT on a guide to its architecture. A resident of the Back Bay and parishioner of Trinity, he has written widely about the history and architecture of the church.