Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit

Perhaps even this, one day, will be a happy memory. Aeneid 1.203

So said the white coffee mug, branded black and white with a woodcut. “The College of St. Thomas More,” it continued. The vessel would be used for coffee hour after Sunday Mass, in a warmly lit single-story house that had been converted into something of a modest refectory and academic hall. The kids would play in the courtyard next to the statue of Mary, under the Texas sky.

The school was originally Anglo-Cath (or perhaps Cath-Anglo), and Oxfordian in style. A few old houses and a barn of a building comprised the campus, which straddled an alleyway patrolled by TCU meter readers. One could see the occasional black academic gown larping about between classes.

It was purely a Liberal Arts school. The Chancellor started it some time after the departure of the legendary Drs. Cowan from the University of Dallas. UD had drifted from its liberal arts core to embrace other majors, and the Chancellor, as I understand it, saw this as displacing Theology and Philosophy from their rightful places as Queen and Handmaid of the Sciences.

The heart of the sciences, perhaps, was not Theology or Philosophy, but literature. The most beloved of the professors was Dr. S., a student of Louise Cowan. Genres, heroes, and the artists’ portraits of the human condition taught many classes just what it meant to be a person.

Over the course of a couple decades, the school trundled along. By some, it was seen as the renegade stepchild of UD. By others, it was seen as the Chancellor’s attempts to retain the classics in a mad world.

It was far from a perfect school. The buildings were falling apart. Scholarships were given to students, sometimes more liberally, perhaps, than should have been. Through various years, discipline would wax and wane.

Through this generosity, however, the school managed to attract a diverse student body. Anglo-Caths and some students from the SSPX and more traditionally-minded backgrounds made the school their home, enticed by the promise of a purer Liberal Arts program and cheaper tuition at an accredited school. The school appealed to the marginalized, and where the students were receptive, their faith was strengthened greatly.

The Chapel

If nothing else from the school were to last, the Chancellor wanted to build a proper Chapel. A retired and pious priest, nearly deaf, would say Mass in a converted garage; but it was nowhere near large enough for visitors, the portion of students who attended Mass, and the small prep school. This Chapel would be the center of the community, and allow the College to center their lives around prayer. The Chapel was the nexus of any rejuvenation of the College: sketches for future capital campaigns had it as the focal point of the whole campus.

There were a couple problems. For one, the Chancellor was not much of a fundraiser, nor was he getting any younger. For another, the College never had much money to begin with. Yes, there was a small endowment, and the value of the land was a very small fortune; but these couldn’t be canibalized for a project like this.

Nevertheless, the chapel was built. Chairs were dedicated. A small loft was constructed, and a Johannus digital organ was put in. At the center of the church was a beautiful Mexican crucifix atop an arched beam, forming something like a rood above the faculty choir stalls at the entrance of the sanctuary. The tabernacle was set in a wall designed to be reredos.

It was an Oxford-style sanctuary for an Oxford-style school, in Oxford-style Fort Worth, Texas. At least, that’s what the liturgical traditionalists of the diocese gravitated towards. Spared from the wreckovations in Dallas, the Fort Worth Cathedral had, for years, been a paragon of liturgy, with Mozart and Haydn Masses. When that started changing, some parishioners began frequenting St. Mary the Virgin in Arlington, which had converted en masse in the 90’s. I was a newborn when its pastor, the delightfully English Fr. H., was re-ordained in the Cathedral.

In those days, to be liturgically traditionalist in the diocese meant to lean Anglo-Cath: to love the liturgy, and choral singing, and sound scriptural exegesis, with a healthy dose of patristics. SMV’s pastor was far from the only convert in the days before the Ordinariate: the diocesan chancellor, too, was a former Episcopalian and disciple of the Oxford Movement; as was the gracious pastor of St. Mary of the Assumption, where the Fort Worth Latin Mass (also composed largely of cathedral expats) had its slightly ghettoed time slot. In any case, this is the environment which encouraged the Chancellor to build the chapel in this style.

The chapel was dedicated by the previous bishop, Bp. V., who has since renovated the Crystal Cathedral in OC. We sang Durufle’s Ubi Caritas, and Tallis’ If Ye Love Me. Masses were regularly said by the aforementioned diocesan chancellor. The music was lovely, directed at times by a former parishioner of St. John Cantius in Chicago, and at other times by the secretary for the CMAA.

The Legacy of the Chapel

In the end, the two factors which led to the chapel’s demolishing were financial and philosophical. I don’t know why the TCU chaplaincy didn’t take over the chapel. I suspect it would have cost too much. If the building of the chapel was a last-ditch effort to begin renovations of the larger campus, the selling of the property to TCU was practically inevitable.

Philosophically, however, the chapel’s exit was precipitated by its patron’s. The Chancellor disagreed with the President and a member of the Board, both over the balance sheet, as well as the image of the school. The Anglo-Cath nature of the school was disorganized, and the leadership believed that the school’s image would have more appeal with a strongly Roman Catholic image.

Ultimately, I wish the Catholic portions of the school’s Anglo-Cath heritage had been considered more fully; but the school was also a product of a little bubble in Fort Worth, a diocese at the epicenter (epicentre?) of the Ordinariate’s growth. It was difficult for anyone coming from outside Fort Worth to realize what the school could have been; and the prior mismanagement of the school did not give them much reason to believe that preserving this identity would stablize the situation.

There are other things to be written. The history of how that all went down has faded a little bit from my mind, six years on; and that phase of the College’s history was nowhere near as tragic or complicated as the next. There is also more, I think, to the question of Anglo-Catholicism in general, especially as it relates to the textualism in both traditionalist catholicism and, perhaps, American constitutionalism among conservative Catholics. More on that another time, perhaps.

What I do not want to do is increase the scope of this chapel’s vignette to the character of those involved. There are plenty of people who weren’t there for the time I was (and plenty of people who were there long before me), and unfortunately it’s very easy to gain a following just by calumniating people about things you didn’t even see first hand. Special circles in hell, and all that. (Perhaps “Abandon all hope” would be more apropros.) I hope I’ve been balanced in my assessment, but I hope the right people who were there will reach out to me if I haven’t.

In any event, the story of the chapel’s construction is a testament to the hard work and faith of the Chancellor and the rest of the College from that era. It is also important historical context for the radical change which occurred just afterwards. But that’s a story for another time.