Anglican Notables at St. John's - Teaching Note for November 2, 2025

        The Roman Catholic Church has a very detailed system for discerning whether someone should be declared and venerated as a saint of the church, someone who has led a life of heroic virtue and whose manner of life is worth emulating, and whose intercession for us is efficacious.

      The Episcopal Church and the larger Anglican Communion does not have such a thorough system.  The closest we have in the Episcopal Church in the USA is those added to the calendar and recorded for us in what is known as the book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts.  People are proposed for inclusion in the list to a committee of the Triennial General Convention and if recommended they have a three year trial use while feedback is solicited from the wider church.  Some recent additions are noteworthy for what they have done to glorify God in their lives: CS Lewis, and the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, to name just two.  Others have been proposed and removed.

    There are three members of that august list that have a connection to St. John’s!  Bishop Jackson Kemper was the great missionary bishop to the Midwest and founder of Nashotah House Seminary.  He preached here in 1860, and returned again in 1866 to consecrate our first Rector as his successor in the Diocese of Wisconsin.  Fr. James Lloyd Breck was the first dean of Nashotah House, founder of two more seminaries/schools, and missionary to California.  He preached here in the 1860s to raise money for his seminary in Minnesota.  Fr. James DeKoven preached here twice.  The first time was to raise money for Racine College, an Episcopal school in Wisconsin where he was Dean after being on faculty at Nashotah House.  He returned in 1873 to preach the funeral sermon for our first Rector/second Bishop of Wisconsin William Armitage.  DeKoven was elected Bishop Armitage’s successor in Wisconsin but his election blocked by the larger church because of his promotion of the doctrines of the ancient universal church as found in the Anglo-catholic movement.    

    Bishop Kemper is commemorated the church calendar on May 24, Fr. Breck on April 2, and Fr. DeKoven on March 22.    Their hagiography (holy biography) is read at the weekday Masses on those days at the Holy Communion Service.