The Diocese of New Jersey was home to many white supremacists during the early-to-mid twentieth century, and the long serving rector of St. Wilfrid’s Episcopal Church in Camden, New Jersey, the Rev. Dr. William Ridgeway, appears to have been among them. Ridgeway began his tenure at St. Wilfrid’s in 1930,[1] when the church and surrounding neighborhood were White. Early in his tenure he made a point of promoting a speaking engagement for a fellow priest, Rev. O. Steward Michael, who was promoting Hitler’s regime and Nazi actions. Details of the visit were covered by local newspapers.[2] Ridgeway allowed Michael to preside and preach at St. Wilfrid’s on many occasions and eventually conducted Michael’s funeral in 1942.[3]
Ridgeway also managed to run St. Wilfrid’s nearly into the ground. Over the course of his three-decade career, church governance was lax, and accounting practices were remiss.[4] His own family took the offerings home with them “to count,”[5] but then insisted regularly that the church was not taking in enough to pay the rector’s salary fully. Ridgeway ruled the church with an authoritarian approach, excommunicating those who disagreed with him, and installing his own family members in most positions of authority. Eventually the financial irregularities and sclerotic disfunction overcame Ridgeway’s attempts at control, and upon his death in 1962 resulted in lawsuits and recriminations. The diocese instituted a financial housecleaning and covered key elements of the financial obligations that had been contentious; not however before the church received a great deal of bad press.[6] These difficult events did not, however, ultimately determine the destiny of the church.
As this challenging period of reckoning with financial irregularities was occurring during the 1960s, White flight from Camden was in full swing. Even though the parish had essentially corrected its finances by the end of the 1960s, in the ensuing decades most of the remaining White parishioners left St. Wilfrid’s and the city, though those who stayed integrated the church and ministered to the homeless. Changes in the church during Father Martin Gutwein’s tenure from 1983-1992 are indicative: “When he arrived, St. Wilfrid’s vestry was headed by a white man, [Bill Granahan, and] when he left the vestry leader was a black woman, [Enid Massias].”[7] In an interview with Father Gutwein about his time with the congregation he said:
The Episcopal Churches in Camden were all changing as a response to the transformation in the city… Individuals were moving from one church to another, looking for a place that felt comfortable to them. Race and class played a role in where people felt welcome. Both Island Blacks and the American Blacks were moving to St. Wilfrid’s. There was a gentle shift happening, it was a lovely close-knit congregation, and they got along… [The preexisting White leadership that remained] was welcoming to the newer folks but, the parish was not financially self-sufficient, and members didn’t seem to think it was their job to fix that.[8]
Ultimately, what had begun as an exclusively White church in an exclusively White neighborhood had briefly become a racially integrated church ministering in a racially integrated neighborhood, and was then identified by the diocese as a “Black church” in the late 1980s.[9] Now largely consisting of Jamaican families ministering in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood,[10] St. Wilfrid’s has persisted as a congregation even as systemically pervasive racism in housing and employment made life brutally difficult for many remaining Camden residents.[11]
In spite of its difficult history, the St. Wilfrid’s community ministers faithfully in Camden to this day, and continues to provide a vital support to those in need: to those experiencing food insecurity through its critical food bank ministry, and to those needing health care through its regular clinic. Stephanie Fanjul’s parish history, written in 2019, is a poignant, and truly moving account.
[1] Much of this history is documented in a master’s thesis by Stephanie Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church: Fragments of the Soul of an Urban Church,” Capstone Project (2019), MSS held at Rubenstein Library, Duke University, and https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18575 (last accessed 1.10.24).
[2] Including the Courier-Post Newspaper on September 30, 1938.
[3] The Morning Post, May 12, 1942.
[4] According to statements by Senator Cowgill, lawyer for the diocese, recorded in the Vestry minutes of 1962-64, presented in Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 112-13.
[5] Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 104-5.
[6] E.g. Harry M. Potter, “Widow, Family Called ‘Squatters’ in Rectory, Are Ordered to Move,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 22, 1964. See also Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 113.
[7] Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 129.
[8] As recorded in Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 131.
[9] Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 152.
[10] The neighborhood of Dudley, as of 2010 had become approximately 70% Hispanic. Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 191.
[11] See Howard Gillette, Jr., Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 38-94; and Fanjul, “St. Wilfrid’s Church,” 136-139.
