Like all genuine eccentrics, John Cyril Hawes was a blend of genius and madness. His fantastical, eclectic architecture captures the contradictions of the man: traditional, but modern; romantic but gritty and down-to-earth; artistic but tough; cantankerous but compassionate to the poor. He was a solitary hermit who became famous.

Author Peter Anson—himself a convert to the Catholic faith from Anglicanism—cornered the market on a particular niche: eccentric Anglicans.

Anson wrote Building Up the Waste Places—the authoritative work on the nineteenth-century attempt to revive monasticism in the Church of England—and he compiled Bishops At Large, which collected the stories of episcopi vagans (wandering bishops). Also among his thirty-six books, he wrote on monasticism, ecclesiastical history, fishing folklore, maritime art, and church architecture.

Combining two of Anson’s special interests is The Hermit of Cat Island—his biography of the eccentric convert priest John Cyril Hawes. Born in Richmond, Surrey, in 1876, into a prosperous Evangelical Anglican family,  young Hawes showed an early gift for drawing and an instinctive interest in church buildings. After school, under pressure from his father, he trained as an architect under the Arts-and-Crafts disciples of John Bentham and Edward Schroeder Prior. In 1897, the twenty-one-year-old travelled to Italy to sketch Byzantine and Romanesque churches and caught “Roman fever.”

The Anglican ministry, however, was less likely to rock the family boat, so he pursued that calling first, being ordained an Anglican priest in 1903. Hawes went to the Bahamas as a missionary priest and designed some churches there before being received into the Catholic Church in 1911, and finally being ordained as a Catholic priest in 1915. He was attracted to the Franciscan life, but was eventually ordained as a secular priest. Architecture, he decided, would no longer be an end in itself but a tool for missionary work.

After brief curacies in England, Hawes volunteered for the remote Diocese of Geraldton in Western Australia. For almost 25 years, he rode thousands of miles on horseback across the Murchison goldfields, saying Mass in shearing sheds and building churches and chapels with his own hands. Anson recounts Hawes’ colorful adventures, mishaps, and hardships among the hardscrabble Irish immigrants, aboriginal people, and out-of- place Methodists and Anglican missionaries.

He slept rough and worked hard as a poor missionary priest, but his architectural training was not wasted. His churches in the outback are in a quirky, eclectic style totally his own. They range from the Spanish Mission-style Cathedral of St Francis Xavier in Geraldton to the Romanesque chapel chapel of St John the Baptist at Tardun and a hermitage at Perenjori, where Hawes first tried living the eremitical life.

By 1938, exhausted by his tough ascetical regime, impatient with diocesan politics, and longing for the solitary life, he accepted the invitation of the Bishop of Nassau to return to the Bahamas.

Arriving at the remote settlement of New Bight, he purchased 4½ acres on the island’s highest point, which he renamed Mount Alvernia after St Francis’s mountain in Assisi. Between 1939 and 1947, with the help of two or three local laborers and a donkey named Kate, he quarried limestone blocks from the hillside itself and erected the Hermitage, which features a barrel-vaulted oratory just 16 × 10 feet, with a rose window and a dome only 9 feet in diameter, a three-story bell-tower with external stairs, a tiny living cell containing a stone bed, fireplace, and desk, and a series of rock-hewn paths and grottoes for the Stations of the Cross leading up the slope. The entire complex is built without right angles, following the natural contours of the rock.

Despite his desire for solitude, Monsignor Hawes kept busy for seventeen years, building churches and designing Catholic schools, convents, and monasteries. Much of the local building work he did himself with volunteer labor. He also designed and built the church furnishings and fittings. All this he combined with an incredibly tough monastic discipline—rising in the wee hours to recite Matins and Lauds, celebrating his daily Mass before dawn, and hiking rough paths barefoot, or sailing his dinghy over turbulent seas to minister to his far-flung island flock.

In addition to about forty churches in Australia and dozens of other ecclesial structures, Hawes left three delightful churches on Cat Island and Long Island in the Bahamas: St Peter’s, Fernandez Bay, a simple coral-stone chapel; twin-towered St Augustine’s, Clarence Town, Long Island; and his last church, finished when he was seventy-one years old, Holy Redeemer, New Bight. He celebrated his final Mass at the Hermitage on Easter Sunday 1956, suffered a stroke the next day, and died in a Miami hospital on 26 June, aged 79. He was buried, as he requested, in a rock-hewn tomb beneath the chapel floor on Mount Alvernia.

Like all genuine eccentrics, the hermit of Cat Island was a blend of genius and madness. His fantastical, eclectic architecture captures the contradictions of the man: traditional, but modern; romantic but gritty and down-to-earth; artistic but tough; cantankerous but compassionate to the poor; an architecturally passionate priest, yet impatient with ecclesiastical fuss; a solitary hermit who became famous.

His resting place is also his memorial. Today the Mount Alvernia Hermitage is the highest point in the Bahamas and one of the country’s most visited historic sites. Pilgrims, tourists, and architecture students climb the steep path to see the little dome, the tower, and the tiny hermit’s cell. Mount Alvernia is also a symbol of the army of convert clergy from Anglicanism: men (often from an Evangelical background) who journey to the Catholic Church and carve out their own legacy, as Hawes carved his hermitage out of rock.

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The featured image, uploaded by Shane.torgerson, is a photograph, “View of the Hermitage on the top of Mount Alvernia on Cat Island, Bahamas.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The image of John Hawes This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.