Frederick Kinsman

A visitor to my old blog brought a fascinating figure in Anglican and Catholic history to my attention, Frederick Kinsman, and he's very kindly sent me copies of Kinsman's books as he's located them. According to Wikipedia,

Frederick Joseph Kinsman (September 27, 1868, Warren, Ohio - June 18, 1944, Lewiston, Maine) was an American Roman Catholic church historian who had formerly been a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church. From 1908 to 1919 he was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware.

However,

On May 14, 1919, Kinsman announced his intention to resign as Episcopal Bishop of Delaware the following October. He subsequently became a Roman Catholic. He was appointed professor of modern church history at The Catholic University of America.

The photo above is apparently his formal portrait as Episcopal Bishop of Delaware. I haven't been able to find any other photos of him, though they must certainly exist. If anyone can locate any others, I'd greatly appreciate learnimg of them. He wrote an apologia for his conversion to Catholicism in Salve Mater, published in 1920, and several other important books, including Americanism and Catholicism (1924), The Failure of Anglicanism (1929), and Reveries of a Hermit (1936).

The visitor recently sent me a copy of Reveries of a Hermit. The title is at least in one sense misleading. Following his resignation as Bishop of Delaware, he appears to have lived largely in seclusion at a rural estate in Maine, which could make him a hermit -- the question of whether he was also a canonical hermit in the Catholic Church remains open. But the book is anything but reveries, which I take to mean desultory and detached daydreams. Instead, it's tightly reasoned apologetics, not the same as Chesterton or Belloc, but in many ways superior.

Before he was Bishop of Delaware, he was a professor of Church history at Berkeley Divinity School and General Theological Seminary. His erudition is manifest in his later books. I think that, with other figures like Ferdinand Lundberg and John Steinbeck, he's one of the underrated writers of the 20th century. Certainly the Roman Catholic Church had a profound thinker whose writings it should have consulted before it promulgated Anglicanorum coetibus.

In subsequent posts, I want to go over some of his writings and insights into Church history and what they say about the clear failure of the Anglicanorum coetibus project -- and how an Anglican bishop on a distant planet could become such a figure of fun in a madcap comedy. I think Kinsman anticipated this in a way that other figures like James Pike did not.