Roman Catholic priest Episcopal clergyman and founder of the Society of the Atonement Roman Catholic founder
He was born in Millington, Kent County, Maryland. Christened Lewis Thomas Wattson, he was the youngest of three sons of the Rev. Joseph Newton and Mary Electa (Gregory) Wattson. His mother had earlier been twice widowed, and the family included an older half-sister. The elder Wattson, an Episcopal clergyman, had found his career severely circumscribed by his Anglo-Catholic leanings.
In 1843, when he entered the General Theological Seminary in New York City, he had been a recent convert from Presbyterianism, but he soon became a sympathizer with the current Oxford Movement in the Church of England.
Though he was exonerated from this charge, he was dismissed from the seminary, and only after much difficulty was he able to become ordained and find a rectorate.
Young Wattson attended first a local rural school, then St. Mary's Hall, a private church school in Burlington, New Jersey.
After preparatory and college studies at St. Stephen's (later Bard) College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, from which he received the B. A. and M. A. degrees in 1882 and 1885 respectively, he completed the three-year course at General Theological Seminary, graduating in 1885 and receiving the B. D. degree in 1887 after his ordination to the priesthood.
Interest among the seminarians so alarmed the faculty that Joseph Wattson was at one point seriously suspected of being "a Jesuit in disguise. " Though he was exonerated from this charge, he was dismissed from the seminary, and only after much difficulty was he able to become ordained and find a rectorate.
His first parish, after his ordination as deacon on May 30, 1885, was in Port Deposit, Maryland. That fall he became rector of St. John's Episcopal Church at Kingston, New York, where he remained for ten years.
In 1894 Wattson began to publish a parish bulletin, The Pulpit of the Cross. His strongly Anglo-Catholic views soon evoked comment.
In 1895 he became the superior of an Episcopal mission in Omaha, Nebr. , thereby hoping to come a step nearer to the preaching order he had long dreamed of establishing.
The year 1896 marked a turning point. Wattson received a letter from a young woman of Warwick, New York, Lurana Mary White. Already a member of an Episcopal sisterhood, she was seeking a community of Episcopal nuns vowed to corporate poverty.
Their ideas accorded, and in 1898 she and Wattson acquired a deserted chapel and adjacent property at Graymoor, near Garrison, New York, and established the Society of the Atonement--"at-one-ment" symbolizing Wattson's zeal for Christian unity--to consist of a sisterhood and a body of friars. Meanwhile Wattson had entered the Episcopal Order of the Holy Cross at Westminster, Maryland, to prepare for his work as a religious founder.
In the summer of 1900 he was professed a monk of the newly established Society of the Atonement and took the name of Paul James Francis, the last name symbolizing the Franciscan rule of life on which the Society was based.
By 1900 the dominant theme in Father Paul's preaching was corporate reunion of the Anglican Communion with the Church of Rome. (He was opposed to individual conversions. ) Since he was now seldom invited to preach to Episcopalians, he began in 1903 to publish a magazine, The Lamp.
In 1907, when the Episcopal Church adopted a law authorizing bishops to permit ministers of other sects to preach in the church, Father Paul, deploring such tendencies, joined a group of Episcopal ministers and laymen in organizing the Anglo-Roman Union. In the same year he collaborated with an English clergyman, Spencer Jones, in writing The Prince of the Apostles, which emphasized the divine-right character of the primacy of the Holy See.
In 1909 the Society of the Atonement requested corporate submission to the Holy See and was accepted; and Father Paul, Mother Lurana, and their little band of fifteen followers became Roman Catholics. He himself entered St. Joseph's Seminary, Yonkers, New York, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in June 1910.
In spite of many difficulties the Society grew. New buildings were erected at Graymoor, including a community chapel and a seminary. A major seminary was established in Washington, D. C. , in 1925.
Several houses of the Society were established for mission work in the southern and southwestern United States among the Negroes and Mexicans, in British Columbia among the Japanese, and in northern Alberta among the Ukrainians. From his earliest days at Graymoor Father Paul had given shelter to homeless men.
At the time of his death St. Christopher's Inn at Graymoor could accommodate up to two hundred wayfarers. These "Brothers Chistopher, " as they were called, often helped with building projects.
He died at Graymoor of a heart attack and was buried there in the crypt of the National Shrine of St. Anthony.
In 1908 he founded the Church Unity Octave, an eight-day period of prayer for Christian reunion. By this time Father Paul had begun to doubt the validity of Anglican orders, which had been declared invalid by the Pope in 1896. A tireless fund-raiser, Father Paul appealed constantly in The Lamp for funds for mission work, especially for the Union-That-Nothing-Be-Lost, a missionary society which he founded, and for the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, of which he was co-founder (1924).
His High Church leanings and admiration for many Catholic practices undoubtedly influenced his son, who early resolved to become a clergyman and to found in the Episcopal Church a preaching order like the Catholic Paulists.
His strongly Anglo-Catholic views soon evoked comment.
A man of restless energy, an eloquent speaker and writer, Father Paul had a deep faith in his mission in life. As a militant and controversial figure he was sometimes uncharitably viewed by Catholics as well as by Protestants, but his gentle humility won him many friends.
