The Episcopal Church is in collapse, its once-immensive social impact being reduced to a whisper, and its historic liturgies becoming little more than lovely relics in a globe that has long lost interest in the transcendent.
The authority, having spent years more concerned with virtue-signaling on popular social justice causes, personality politics, and the moral imperative of appeasing the ever-changing winds of social accuracy, now finds itself on the verge of indifference. It seems as though the church made the decision to swap its eternal spiritual history for contemporary concerns, only to uncover, with a bewildered shrug, that the arrangement has rendered it dull.
St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue’s determination to destroy its namesake choir school, which has stood as the pinnacle of Anglican musical excellence for over 100 years, is nothing short of an affront to the senses. The religious train wreck, which has been much in the making, perhaps be viewed as expected. Were the Episcopal Church a sinking ship, St. Thomas might be imagined as its last remaining lifeboat — staunch, dignified, and afloat in a sea of mediocrity. The church is now preparing to throw that lifeboat overboard in favor of something less majestic in its infinite wisdom. If this is what the “preservation” of an institution looks like, perhaps we should welcome a shipwreck.  ,
St. Thomas Church, which was established in 1823, was once the epitome of ecclesiastical grandeur in New York City, a sanctuary where the Anglican tradition flourished in all its solemnity and beauty. Its walls have resonated with some of the finest sacred music in the Western canon, and its pews were once filled with captains of industry, statesmen, artists, and patrons of the arts. A place with a sense of purpose and permanence that has all but vanished from modern life was the place where one was drawn into an august world, an intersection of the sacred and the sublime.  ,
This legacy owes much to the generosity of Charles Steele ( 1857-1939 ), a partner at J. P. Morgan and the choir school’s principal benefactor, who sought to uphold the highest standards of cultural and spiritual education. Through a series of endowments, Steele enabled the choir school to thrive as an institution of excellence, integrating faith, academics, and music to shape young men into torchbearers of Anglican tradition. It is a betrayal of Steele’s legacy and the ideals he sought to preserve that such an institution is now being destroyed by a vestry that appears bent on expediency over vision.
However, when I recently questioned the vestry wardens, Gregory Zaffiro and Lloyd Stanford, what makes St. Thomas unique, they managed to nip at a slew of clichés, musing about the beauty of the place, and the people’s friendliness. The two lay parishioners find the reference to” the Anglican tradition and our unique choral heritage” to be a mere afterthought at best.
No mention of the choral heritage. No reverence for the institution’s towering liturgical contributions. No sense of duty to a task that goes beyond the pleasant ones. St. Thomas appears to be more of a quaint meeting place where Sunday’s sermon appears on the social calendar than a venerable institution where heaven and earth interlude in song and liturgy.  ,
St. Thomas has remained an emblem of continuity and purpose despite a time when few institutions even aspire to uphold such high values. Under the Orwellian guise of “preservation”, the vestry has recently announced its intention to dismantle the choir school’s integrated academic model by” collaborating” with the Professional Children’s School (PCS), a secular institution with no liturgical foundation.
Choristers will be transported across Manhattan for their academic studies, transforming the choir school into a rundown boarding facility without an academic program, according to the plan. Such doublespeak would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic, as Orwell noted, political language often serves to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. Here, the vestry’s language does precisely that, invoking “preservation” to mask the wholesale abandonment of the choir school’s raison d ‘être.  ,
The Plan’s Absurdity
Take a look at the real absurdities that underlie this farce. The choir school, since its founding in 1919 by Dr. T. Tertius Noble, has existed to preserve the Anglican choral tradition by offering a place where music, academics, and faith are integrated into a seamless whole, ensuring that boys are not only trained in song but are nurtured in character and intellect. However, the vestry’s choice will turn it into a skeletal object where boys can sing but not study.
Meanwhile, the rector himself, Carl Turner, lives in a rectory purchased in 2018 for close to$ 8 million — a substantial asset that, were it sold and the proceeds reinvested, could provide the choir school with a stream of funding to offset operating costs. Should the finances be as bad as the claims are, is there any compelling reason the rector himself couldn’t move into one of the vacant choir school apartments? Apparently, he finds it much more objectionable to step down to a more modest living space than the complete destruction of a century-old institution that has long been the jewel of the Anglican choral tradition on this side of the Atlantic.  ,
Fiscal Hypocrisy and Moral Cowardice
This dishonest behavior goes beyond fiscal hypocrisy to pure obfuscation. Nowhere in vestry communications do we find information on how much money the PCS model will actually save in comparison to a “retain” model with a scaled-back “retain” model. When I inquired with the chief advancement officer, Bruce Smith, I was told the decision wasn’t driven” strictly” by finances but by a lack of “appetite” for a scaled-down school. So, is it about finances or not? The vestry oscillates between” collaboration” and fiscal alarmism, revealing either a glaring lack of transparency or a fundamental misinterpretation of their own priorities.
The disparaging don’t end here. The vestry has appointed the rector’s wife as the” Interim Director of Transition,” a move that would be laughable if it weren’t so barbarous. This was a unilateral choice made without the consent of those directly responsible for the choir school’s day-to-day operations. This is not government; rather, it is a coup, an intentional institution-wide reshaping involving nepotistic appointments and euphemistically appointed staff.
Outpost of Tradition in a Culture of Flux ,
St. Thomas Choir School has long represented a bastion of excellence, a place where beauty, faith, and intellectual rigor coexist in a harmonious and, yes, costly endeavor. It is not just a regular school; instead, it is a crucible where young boys are immersed in a tradition that is both a sacred duty and a cultural treasure. Here, the boys are taught to carry the torch of a heritage that goes beyond the common and is grounded in the conviction that music is a gateway to the divine. The choir school influences both lives and voices.
St. Thomas Choir School, along with Escolania de Montserrat in Barcelona and Westminster Abbey Choir School in London, is one of only three of these organizations still active today. These three institutions, which uphold the tradition of choral education integrated with faith, are the last of their kind. The proposed model, which separates academics from the liturgical framework, unquestionably betrays the school’s history and irrevocably destroys a tradition that has endured for centuries. The loss of this model, once gone, cannot be recreated.
The choir school’s influence is felt in concentric circles. It forms at its core young men who later excel in both academic and personal endeavors, frequently enrolling in the nation’s most prestigious boarding schools. Beyond them, the entire St. Thomas parish, casual visitors, and an international audience of listeners are all enriched by the school’s work. The academic component of the choir school is to be removed, thereby familarizing a legacy that extends far beyond Fifth Avenue.
Furthermore, St. Thomas Choir School occupies a unique place in the Anglican cosmos, the singular “major league” institution that sets the standard for choral music nationwide. Each year, choirmasters and organists flock to St. Thomas, eager to observe and emulate its methods. In a world that is becoming less and less tolerant of tradition, this influence becomes even more important. That this model — traditional, exclusive, unapologetically all-boys — could now be deemed anachronistic is precisely why it must be preserved. This remnant of permanence will be lost forever if we don’t lose it right away.  ,
Expensive, But So Is Anything Worth Keeping ,
Indeed, the choir school is costly. What, however, is not true value? Some institutions must endure in a culture that values the disposable over mere necessity. The choir school’s expenses are not a waste but an investment in permanence, so to speak of them as if they were frivolous luxuries is to misunderstand how valuable they are.
Let’s not forget that the church recently funded extensive restoration of its stained-glass windows and the replacement of the choir school’s entire organ, which is likely to require a large portion of the$ 50 million it has suggested would be required to bolster the choir school’s endowment. Meanwhile, seven clergy are maintained even as Sunday attendance steadily wanes. Here is a selective fiscal prudence, if ever there was one.  ,
The Façade of Fiscal Responsibility ,
We are told, in tones of utmost gravitas, that the choir school’s$ 4 million annual operating cost is an insurmountable burden, yet this figure is shrouded in ambiguity. One might speculate that the ledger’s opening would reveal a more malleable financial landscape than the vestry’s suggestion.
But instead of exploring creative solutions or inviting dialogue, the vestry has chosen the path of least resistance: cut out the heart, outsource the soul, and sanctimoniously declare the choir school “preserved”. This is not stewardship, it is fiscal cowardice masked in high-minded jargon.  ,
Adding a final twist of hypocrisy, the vestry insists on urgency in restructuring the choir school while failing to seriously consider selling other assets, such as the multimillion-dollar rectory. One is left to wonder: Is the urgency truly financial, or does it stem from a deeper lack of vision and resolve? After all, the vestry has acknowledged that finances were not the only or even primary reason, rather it appears that the vestry simply lacks the desire to operate a smaller version of the choir school. What a display of capitulation carried out under the guise of authority.  ,
A Call to Conscience ,
The dismantling of the St. Thomas Choir School is not merely a governance decision, it is an act of cultural desecration. It is a tragic example of a school giving in to mediocrity and expediency, which is representative of the wider Episcopal Church’s retreat from meaning and purpose. All who understand the necessity of protecting institutions that uphold faith, rigor, and beauty should be in the same boat as Fifth Avenue.  ,
The choir school has served as a rare bastion of permanence, a place that is immune to fads and ephemera, in a wider Episcopal Church that has frequently surrendered to the tide of cultural triviality. One of the last ties to a tradition that our culture, which is lacking in depth, can neither create nor replace, is to be cut off.  ,
If we allow this legacy to be destroyed, we will have conceded to a society that has forgotten the meaning of permanence, beauty, and the sacred. Conserving the choir school intact is more important than just saving a school or choir; it is also a defense of values that uphold life’s best ideals.  ,
Let us not fail in that defense.
Ian Fisher graduated from Saint Thomas Choir School in 1995 and studied music at Yale. He sings in the choir at Saint James Cathedral in Chicago along with his wife and their two children in Kenilworth, Illinois, where he is a private market investor.
