Why St Mary's?

As we've seen, dozens of parishes have left the ACA in the past few years. The whole idea behind the ACA and other "continuing Anglican" denominations was to make it possible for parishes to leave a particular denomination without that denomination making an issue of property ownership and causing lawsuits -- the original experience of St Mary's leaving The Episcopal Church in the 1970s was a pioneering case that served as a model for "continuing Anglicans", although it was never St Mary's intent to wind up in that sort of limbo.

So what is it about St Mary's that led the ACA to sue to keep the parish, when it had let so many others go with little fuss? There are probably several reasons, none of them good, but the main one was expressed by ACA Presiding Bishop Marsh when asked just that question by a parishioner during his late-night visit to the siege: "it's about money." The ACA is collapsing, as we've been seeing here, along with the rest of the TAC. The ACA is running out of money -- it has about 25 parishes in good standing, which is to say, parishes that send tithes to their diocese. The other 40-odd are missions, which is to say, parishes that don't. That's not enough to fund junkets to the Greek islands or ecumenical trips to Florida. With the reputation the ACA has, there's little chance it will attract new parishes, either.

St Mary's occupies less than half of a parcel of prime real estate that it owns in Los Feliz, an affluent section of Hollywood. The rest of the parcel is occupied by a bank branch and a parking lot. The bank pays about $20,000 a month in rent; use of the parking lot after hours brings in another $1000 a month. Plate and pledge pale in comparison. Exactly what the property is worth is hard to say in this real estate market, but it's probably several million, with the impediment that the building is a historic landmark, so there are restrictions on what can be done with it.

Bishops Strawn and Marsh have never been completely clear on what they mean to do with their prize, assuming they win all the appeals. It's worth pointing out that they won most of the initial legal actions on the basis of their argument that the ACA's position on who controls the property is an ecclesiastical matter, and the US First Amendment prevents the courts from getting involved. Among other things, the court can't even rule on whether the ACA has followed its own canons over matters like removing vestry members -- and the ACA in fact has followed neither its own canons nor California law, but that basically doesn't matter as far as the court is concerned. By the same reasoning, of course, a church could declare someone a heretic and order him burned at the stake, and it could claim that was a First Amendment issue, too -- there's something wrong with the court's decision, in my view, but that may or may not ever be sorted out.

The ACA needs money. It needs money to fund its bishops, clearly: Bishop Marsh took retired Bishop Langberg on a couple of junkets in 2012, and I suspect this purchased Langberg's support in the House of Bishops at critical times. I also suspect that he'll need to bring money to the table in the merger talks that are ongoing with the Anglican Province of America -- I can't avoid the impression that the cruise to the Greek isles made by the head honchos of the two little splinter groups last May was basically flash. The ACA will have to be putting up more of this to seem in earnest.

That St Mary's is, or was, a parish, and indeed, a parish that had clearly expressed a wish no longer to be part of the ACA, has nothing to do with any of this. St Mary's is a source of ready money. As far as I can see, there are several paths to realizing this money: one strategy, which Bishop Strawn has already attempted at St Stephen's Athens TX, is to declare that the parish is a mission and simply take it over. At that point, the budget and the checkbook belong to him. St Stephen's was able to stop this by pointing out that this would violate the ACA canons and Texas law, suggesting that the parish's insurance would cover the costs of defending the case. Strawn backed off in Texas. The California court, on the other hand, has said it simply can't get involved, which would give Strawn, who has made it clear that he don't need no stinkin' canons, a free hand.

Another strategy would be simply to sell the parish property. Potential obstacles would include the building's status as a historic landmark and the possibility that the transaction might bring further attention from the authorities -- depending on how far Strawn, Marsh, Morello, and their stooges bend the rules, we could be getting into a criminal conspiracy. Marsh has told me in an e-mail that "we have no current plans to sell the property", but this means nothing. A potential buyer that would provide the least complication would be the Church of Scientology, which has been picking up Hollywood properties for years and which would probably maintain the building as something like a church. St Mary's would then wind up its corporate business and transfer the proceeds to a deserving non-profit like, oh, say, the Anglican Church in America, the Most Rev Brian Marsh, proprietor. The vestry having long since been packed with compliant stooges, there'd be no problem in doing this.

A thief can get off on a technicality, but that doesn't mean he isn't a thief. A theft can go undetected, but that doesn't mean it's not stealing. The clerics who seem to be mooting transactions like these are utterly corrupt. The clerics who support them in the ACA and the TAC, as well as the Standing Committees who tolerate this conduct, are complicit. This thing smells. It's not just Morello, Strawn, and Marsh who will have this to deal with in this life and in the hereafter.

It's worth pointing out, though, that from what we've already seen, Strawn and Morello are simply incompetent. Pulling off this kind of heist is almost certainly beyond them. Brian Marsh is basically a high school drama teacher, and I don't think he's equipped for the kind of mission they have in mind, either. We'll see what develops, but I strongly suspect that in the end, the ACA will get very little for its efforts, although the future for St Mary's as a parish has already been destroyed.

I'll be out of town on family business for the rest of the week; I won't be posting until I get back.

Incongruities

Fr Anthony Chadwick makes an interesting point in his post from yesterday, that it's hard to find news on the collapse of the "Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion". Some of his commenters agree that collapse is what's taking place. (I appreciate his kind remarks about this blog, but visitors should keep in mind the clarification I make there; I'm an amateur blogger and occasional semi-pro writer, but no more a "journalist" than it would seem Stephen Smuts is a "priest", at least outside his tiny denomination.)

But you can't hold any blogger to "professional" standards, and those standards aren't what we're getting in any case. Consider just how bloggers like David Virtue have missed the actual size of the "Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion": with a few hours work, I came up with an estimate of the ACA's current size at about 2,300. An Australian estimate for the ACCA is 400. I haven't seen a figure for the Southern African franchise, but a tour of parish web sites at the ACSA page (all 14 of them) suggests 400 might be a comparable number there as well. The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada lists 20 parishes and missions scattered across that vast country. The web site of the Anglican Church in India is so poorly done (in a country that normally does high-tech very well) that it's hard to give that branch much credibility at all. It seems to me that the size of the "Worldwide TAC", or the lack of it, is a story even the bloggers have missed.

The second story that everyone's missed is its corruption. Bishop Michael Gill is notable almost entirely for his bad faith in signing the Portsmouth Letter and then disavowing his signature. Bishop Stephen Strawn is noted for his utter disregard of his own canons and his appointment of a Canon to the Ordinary who left The Episcopal Church following a scandal. The former Primate ordained a politician to the priesthood, apparently in hopes of gaining political favor, but the move backfired into its own scandal. Yet the remaining bishops expelled the Primate in a kangaroo proceeding that, if anything, served to damage the reputation of the denomination further.

Instead, the bloggers have focused on three TAC figures, ex-Primate John Hepworth, former Bishop David Moyer, and Fr Christopher Kelley, as stereotypical buffoons -- the sort of thing new media types have denounced the old media for doing. Hepworth, Moyer, and Kelley are very different people. Hepworth, it seems to me, is deeply flawed, although figures from Noah to Jacob to David to St Augustine to Martin Luther King Jr were deeply flawed as well. To his credit, he appears to have made a realistic assessment of the "Worldwide TAC"'s future and set up a path for its most respectable elements to leave it -- and in the process was a prime mover behind Anglicanorum coetibus. It's hard to avoid concluding that the bitter opposition to this move that arose within the TAC is a response among the corrupt, complacent, and self-deluded to a dose of plain reality -- the TAC is collapsing. Best face facts and make a plan.

Moyer strikes me as both complex and deeply flawed as well, but he also seems to have come down on the side opposed to corruption and complacency at several important moments in his career. His opponent in The Episcopal Church, Bishop of Pennsylvania Charles Bennison Jr, is probably as representative of the current complacency and corruption in that denomination as Alexander Borja was among the Renaissance Popes. He may have lost his particular legal battle against Bennison, but I'm not sure if the Diocese of Pennsylvania could finally have forced Bennison's exit without the work Moyer did to expose him. Moyer then acted on Hepworth's behalf in protecting ACA parishes from reprisals when they simply took the denomination's leaders at their earlier word and wished to enter the US Ordinariate. This was good work, too.

Kelley is the hardest one to figure. His parish, St Mary of the Angels, was interested in Anglicanorum coetibus from the start, and naturally it became the immediate target of reprisals from Bishop Daren Williams (who showed the same bad faith as Bishop Gill in signing the Portsmouth Letter and then reversing himself). This almost certainly then served to encourage the small anti-Ordinariate faction within the parish. But unlike Hepworth, he's made no reckless allegations of decades-old clerical abuse; unlike Moyer, there's been no out-of-control litigation. He focused instead on the complicated job of taking his parish through a political minefield, and while he's not perfect either, and has made no claims of perfection, he's probably as good an example as any of the old saw that no good deed goes unpunished.

More recently, Kelley has been the target of uncanonical kangaroo proceedings similar to those against Hepworth, brought by a bishop whose seminary was unaccredited and has since closed because it couldn't get accreditation, and whose reputation for intrigue and uncanonical actions had previously driven other parishes out of the ACA. The Canon to the Ordinary whom he appointed to drive Kelley out claims academic credentials, from bachelor's to MDiv to PhD, that nobody has been able to verify, runs questionable businesses on the side, and left The Episcopal Church following a scandal. Yet Kelley is portrayed as the buffoon, and the likes of David Virtue are simply incurious.

The bloggers are doing us no favors.

You Know Who Else I Think Is Hinky?

Fr Stephen Smuts, the TAC blogger-priest in South Africa. Here's why: In both Anglicanism and Catholicism, there are three orders of ordained clergy, deacons, priests, and bishops. There are then two kinds of deacons, vocational and transitional. Vocational deacons are permanently ordained to the diaconate as their vocation -- deacons perform a limited role in the mass and have traditionally cared for the sick. Transitional deacons are ordained to the diaconate as a kind of final probationary period before they are ordained to the priesthood. This probationary period lasts around six months (at least in The Episcopal Church) and is then followed by an ordination to the priesthood.

But the process of ordination is long and complex. In The Episcopal Church and the more respectable continuing Anglican denominations, a candidate for the priesthood becomes a postulant for holy orders and has many interactions with the bishop and various committees. Then the postulant goes off to an accredited seminary, typically a three-year residential program equivalent to any other post-graduate study like law or medicine. (Even Episcopal programs for commuting students are rigorous.) Only then, following further background checks, exams, and review, does the candidate for the full priesthood reach ordination as a transitional deacon.

A major benefit of this extended process is it ensures that enough different pairs of eyes fall on a candidate to weed out the marginal people. One cause of the Catholic child sexual abuse scandal was insufficient supervision of priestly formation and an unwillngness to weed out marginal candidates, and this must certainly have been a factor in the discussion with Archbishop Daniel that Bishop Gill found so unsatisfactory in yesterday's post -- the Catholic Church must take every precaution in evaluating any candidate for the priesthood. Why should Gill find this disturbing?

On the other hand, we already know the Traditional Anglican Communion has ordained priests on the fly, so to speak -- look at the controversy over Peter Slipper, the alcoholic gay sexual harasser whom John Hepworth ordained to the priesthood apparently because it seemed like a good idea at the time. (Why, by the way, if Bishop Gill is anti-Hepworth, should he nevertheless think it's OK for the TAC to ordain priests willy-nilly?)

But via the blog of the same Fr Smuts, we get a picture, however faint, of the way ordinations go in the TAC Diocese of Pretoria and Southern Africa:

After a considerable time of waiting, sustained teaching and visitations back and forth by Fr Francis Ward, our Director of Studies, it gives me great pleasure to announce that the Ordinations of Deacons and Priests will take place at two venues this year. . . . Those being Ordained in Kimberley will be Philip Simelane (St James Botshabelo), Denzil Philander (St Marks, Koffiefontein), Angelo Eriksen (Christ the King, Kimberley), Lennox Busani (St Francis, East London) and Siyabonga Thambo (Kirkwood, Eastern Cape) The service will begin at 09h30. All are engaged in sudies [sic] that will need to be completed before they progress any further. Zwelidumile Kama (St Mary the Virgin, Port Elizabeth) has asked that his Ordination be delayed as he feels he needs more time to prepare himself – an admirable decision.

Let me see -- for starters, it doesn't seem as though these candidates have been to any recognized seminary; they just get sustained teaching and visitations from a "Director of Studies". If my assumption here (or anywhere else in this matter) is incorrect, I see that Fr Smuts has resumed blogging, and he's free to offer evidence that will correct me. And in mainstream Anglican denominations, you're ordained a deacon after you've finished seminary and passed additional checks and exams. But we see that of this group (and it's not clear if they're all deacons, priests, or what) these need to complete additional "sudies" before they progress any further, whatever that means. No wonder Archbishop Daniel seemed a little nervous!

On the matter of Fr Smuts himself, though, while I don't even find an equivalent announcement of his own ordination as a priest, I do find the following for his ordination as a deacon in 2004:

ON SUNDAY 15th February, lay readers Stephen Smuts and Peter Wood were made Deacons in the parish of Christ the King, Brackenfell, Cape Town. The ordination service was held in the school hall of the Bastian Primary School, Brackenfell, and was conducted by the Rt Revd Trevor Rhodes.

Again, it wouldn't happen in The Episcopal Church, and likely not in the ACNA, that anyone would be ordained as a transitional deacon (which Smuts clearly was, since he's now "Fr" Smuts) straight out of lay reader -- there'd be three years of residential seminary in between (more for a commuting student), and it likely would not be at his home parish -- he'd have been called to another parish out of seminary, another instance of how worthwhile it is to have multiple pairs of eyes on a candidate.

On top of that, we find on the parish site of The Curch of the Holy Cross -- Pretoria that "Fr Stephen Smuts of Cape Town spent three months with the parish". Was this part of the additional studies that priests apparently need to complete after ordination, at least as this goes in the Diocese of Pretoria and Southern Africa? We don't know. All I can surmise is that this bothers Archbishop Daniel, too, and that in turn bothers Bishop Gill, to the point of apparently turning him anti-Catholic.

All I can say is that in the US, if someone calls himself a doctor and practices medicine, I assume he's completed medical school and a residency, and he has a license. By the same token, if someone calls himself an Episcopal or Catholic priest, I can assume he's completed at least three years of seminary, has passed all relevant reviews, background checks, and exams, has served a probationary period as a transitional deacon, and has been properly ordained. The question arises whether this happens all the time in the TAC. The Catholic Church, as part of Anglicanorum coetibus reserved the right to double-check this, and frankly, it makes me feel real, real comfortable. For Bishop Gill, not so much.

Some of Fr Smuts's on line conduct has, frankly, made me wonder from time to time how much of a priest he really is, notwithstanding what he claims to be. When I've called him on it in the comments on his blog, it's clearly been a sore point. All I can say is that the Catholic Church has said there are no plans for an Ordinariate in Southern Africa, so there's little chance that it will ever need to review Fr Smuts's qualifications. Has he had three years of seminary training?

A Master of Divinity program, required for ordination as an Episcopal priest in the US, consists of 60-63 units of work in the basic subject areas of theological education. (Naturally, this would follow a four-year bachelor's program at an accredited college or university.) Semester-long courses are 3 units each. Full-time study at most residential seminaries represents a load of 12 units (four courses) per semester. How has Fr Smuts's priestly formation corresponded with that requirement?

I have some concern -- which Archbishop Daniel apparently shares -- that people ordained as "priests" in some parts of the TAC may feel entitled to call themselves "priests", when people elsewhere in the world may be assuming their qualifications are more than what they actually are. Since people anywhere in the world want to see a consistent product when they see a Catholic priest, it's clear that the Catholic Church is entitled to review carefully the qualificaitons of any priest from an Anglican denomination who wants to go into an Ordinariate (notwithstanding Bishop Gill's objections). Following review, the US Ordinariate has certainly ordained Episcopal priests who've had the priestly formation outlined here, as well as TAC/ACA priests with the equivalent.

Fr Smuts will almost certainly never have to face such a review, although from his public remarks, his bishop doesn't seem at all certain that his priests would pass it. It seems to me that Fr Smuts needs to face this truth-in-labeling issue when he identifies himself as a "TAC priest". There are times, frankly, when reading his blog I've questioned whether his frequent use of the chi-rho sign to identify himself is a case of taking the Lord's name in vain.

Bishop Gill's Motives Are Difficult To Fathom

After all, since he knows the Catholic Church has no plans for an Ordinariate in South Africa, he's never been under the direct threat that his US colleagues have seen, with parishes (and much of a diocese) leaving the denomination. All he has to do is sit tight, and nothing's going to change within his see.

Yet in November 2011, Gill spoke to a world conference of Anglican continuers in Brockton, MA. Clearly Ordinariates were on his mind.

The Rt. Rev. Michael Gill, Bishop of Pretoria and Southern Africa, told his listeners that trouble makers who come in to destabilize parishes, those who proselytize from other churches, and the Pope's offer of Anglicanorum Coetibus were little more than "cunning plans" that "never won a single soul for the Lord Jesus Christ nor did it add one soul to the Kingdom of God."

The bishop shredded the Pope's offer saying, "We are all aware of the furor it has created in Anglican circles and of the people who have been polarized by the various, and usually naïve interpretations given to the document. The blogs have been the most hysterical and creative by far, with some fascinating views on the future liturgies that will be used and just who the Ordinaries will be."

Gill said the offer was little more than an attempt by Rome for Anglican Christians to "swap allegiance" and join the Roman Catholic Church - to "convert" as individuals or groups and become Roman Catholics.

"That the arrangement is entirely on Rome's terms should have hardly been a surprise to anyone who has read any Church History."

The only thing we seem to be missing here is Jesuits plotting behind curtains! But as I said yesterday, I simply can't understand why he's so exercised that things would be "entirely on Rome's terms". That was the whole point of the Portsmouth Letter, which he signed after all, and notwithstanding any blue-sky estimate by John Hepworth of 500,000 in the TAC, he must surely have recognized that even half a million wouldn't be an inducement to the Pope, much less 5,000. The Pope has the Orthodox in his sights, then the Lutherans. Somehow I've got to wonder if Gill is way above his paygrade here, and that even has me wondering about his mental balance.

But let's go farther into Gill's motives (though as someone remarked about someone else in a different context, "Who would want to?"). From the same Brockton meeting:

Gill said he had a face to face meeting around Anglicanorum Coetibus with Roman Catholic Archbishop George Daniel who is in charge of Anglican/Roman Catholic dialogue in Southern Africa. Gill was told that not only would there be no Ordinariate in Southern Africa, but that the conversion to Roman Catholicism required, would in many cases, go back "as far as Baptism" depending on the original church background of the convert.

"This was fizzed over by the blogging community. Archbishop Daniel (a former Anglican) is a highly sophisticated man, someone I have known and respected for more than 20 years, and he was as gentle as possible in breaking the news that we (all the Continuing Anglicans in Southern Africa) were an immature lot, and a long way away from the levels of theological education expected for acceptance as Roman clergy.

His real objection -- though again, it's theoretical, since there's no Ordinariate planned for South Africa -- is that some priests aren't going to make the grade. Perhaps by extension too, nobody's going to be grandfathered in as a bishop. And I don't know why he should be disturbed that care would be taken with conversions: Catholics in the US who want to become Episcopalians or any other Anglican flavor still have to take the Anglican confirmation class and be "received" by an Anglican bishop. Why would he expect Catholics to be less punctilious with Anglicans?

Considering the style of baptism that may possibly have occurred in rural parts of Africa, if it wasn't done with the correct elements or in the name of the Trinity, it might indeed need to be redone. For heaven's sake, this is the 21st century, and people who grew up in Scientology or as Unitarians or whatever else in the US are baptized as adults into Christian denominations every week with no qualms at all. For that matter, a very snooty Los Angeles Episcopal parish put an ad in the paper saying they'd baptize all comers at the Easter Vigil "no questions asked" -- would a Catholic bishop be correct in accepting even that baptism? Where is Gill's problem here?

He doesn't even have a dog in this fight. No South African Ordinariate means he doesn't need to bother his head aobut this stuff. He remains a bishop, his priests stay priests, his parishioners stay baptized no matter what. So why is he going to Massachusetts -- to buck up his fellow TAC bishops, Strawn and Marsh, who do have a dog in this fight? In that case, he's simply stirring up trouble. He may well have felt insulted on behalf of his colleague Strawn in particular, whose formation at an unaccredited seminary would certainly disqualify him for the Catholic priesthood.

It may well be, too, that he's simply bristling at the implied comparison between the Catholic Church and the TAC -- as we've been seeing here, the TAC is tiny, its priests and bishops are almost always marginal and sometimes just disreputable, and the prognosis for its continued survival is not good. It's a bad sign that he seems to be so lacking in humility or simply realism that he should become so defensive and upset about the situation. On the other hand, he's not unique within the TAC.

Who Is The Rt Rev Michael Gill?

TAC Bishop of Pretoria and Southern Africa Michael Gill is a hard one to track. He's been a clear leader of the anti-Hepworth, anti-Anglicanorum coetibus faction of the TAC, but as is common among the TAC bishops, there's no official biography on any TAC web site. The most information I've been able to find is in a parish newsletter of St Edmund's Waterloo, Ontario, which contains a report on the TAC 2007 Portsmouth meeting. (St Edmund's treated Gill favorably here, but since it became Anglican Use, we must assume there was a later parting of the ways.) Gill was consecrated bishop at that same meeting, following the death of his predecessor in June 2007 and his election at a diocesan synod. He signed the 2007 Portsmouth Letter from the TAC bishops as a bishop-elect.

Although Gill was ordained at some point as a priest in the mainstream Anglican Communion, I haven't been able to find him in ordinary parish ministry. The parish newsletter linked above says,

After leaving school he worked in the freight industry. He then studied at St Paul's College in Grahamstown, and at the University of South Africa. He is an ordained Priest, and was appointed as the Chaplain to St Mary's DSG [Diocesan School for Girls] in Pretoria where he served for 16 years.

However, his main career seems to be as a school administrator, and as bishop he continues to have a day job as a deputy principal at the Jeppe High School for Boys in Johannesburg. (Both St Mary's DSG and Jeppe appear to be among the most prestigious in South Africa.) Left unanswered is where he had his seminary education and the date and the reason he left the mainstream Anglican Communion for the very small TAC franchise in Southern Africa.

It's worth pointing out that school administators have never had a reputation for high intelligence, and Gill appears to follow in this ignoble tradition. In that context, I offer this quote from the 2007 Portsmouth Letter, to which Deputy Principal Gill affixed his signature:

1. We accept the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, which is a ministry of teaching and discerning the faith and a “perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity” and understand this ministry is essential to the Church founded by Jesus Christ. We accept that this ministry, in the words of the late John Paul II in Ut Unum Sint, is to “ensure the unity of all the Churches”. We understand his words in the same Letter when he explains to the separated churches that the Bishop of Rome “when circumstances require it, speaks in the name of all the Pastors in communion with him. He can also – under very specific conditions clearly laid down by the First Vatican Council – declare ex cathedra that a certain doctrine belongs to the deposit of faith. By thus bearing witness to the truth, he serves unity”. We understand that, as bishops separated from communion with the Bishop of Rome, we are among those for whom Jesus prayed before his death “that they may be completely one”, and that we teach and define matters of faith and morals in a way that is, while still under the influence of Divine Grace, of necessity more tenuously connected to the teaching voice of catholic bishops throughout the world.
2. We accept that the Church founded by Jesus Christ subsists most perfectly in the churches in communion with the See of Peter, to whom (after the repeated protestation of his love for Jesus) and to whose successors, our Divine Master gave the duty of feeding the lambs and the sheep of his flock.
3. We accept that the most complete and authentic expression and application of the catholic faith in this moment of time is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its Compendium, which we have signed together with this Letter as attesting to the faith we aspire to teach and hold.
4. Driven by these realizations, which we must now in good conscience bring to the attention of the Holy See, we seek a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See, at once treasuring the full expression of catholic faith and treasuring our tradition within which we have come to this moment. We seek the guidance of the Holy See as to the fulfillment of these our desires and those of the churches in which we have been called to serve.

But by 2011, our deputy principal had reversed himself on these matters, saying in a letter to ACA Bishops Strawn, Marsh, and Williams,

Anglicanorum Coetibus was a response in part by the Roman Catholic Church to our 2007 letter; what (in any environment) would be a normal bargaining exercise. That some of our Episcopal TAC brethren have simply swallowed it, 'hook, line and sinker', is evidence both of their naivety and their desperation to be accepted.

Excuse me? Wasn't the whole point of the 2007 letter

That the TAC seeks corporate reunion with the Holy See without condition. In this way there would be no need for committees discussing doctrine and reporting back to various authorities. It would be a straight out application for corporate reunion, no strings attached.

and

Any petition to Rome would need to include an explicit recognition of the Petrine Office (i.e., the Office of Pope) as being of the esse of the Church. Put simply it would mean that the TAC accepts that the constitution of the Church as given by Christ included the leadership of St Peter as it has been handed on in the Church ever since. That the Pope has real and immediate jurisdiction in every local Church and enjoys the gift of infallibility when teaching in certain circumstances.

On top of which, the bishops, including the deputy principal, signed the Catechism of the Catholic Church as well. So let me see. The intent of the 2007 letter was to ask for union with the Holy See without condition. It acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope. The bishops as a gesture of good faith signed the Catechism on top of everything else. The whole point was to say yes, we're swallowing this hook, line, and sinker! Yes, we're actually pretty desperate! Yet the deputy principal four years later said this was just part of a "normal bargaining exercise"? It takes me back to my own school days and the sessions I had with my own deputy principals: it's my school, kid. I make the rules. I don't care what I said yesterday, I'm saying what I'm saying today.

And what on earth did the TAC have to bargain with? In my last post, I said the US membership was in the low four digits. If the Australian membershp is 400, the South African membership can't be much different. We know nothing of the membership in India, but in light of the other countries, I can't imagine it's much different, either. So there's a great likelihood the TAC as a whole is still in four digits -- Wikipedia says the Pope's outfit has 1.6 billion. The membership of the entire TAC is nothing more than a fluctuation in the number of Catholic baptisms in a given week -- what did the deputy principal think the TAC was going to bargain with?

Numbers, Again

In an early post here, I noted that the biggest impetus to start me on this project was simply learning that the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia had about 400 members. This put the "Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion" in an entirely different perspective -- if the numbers are so low in Australia, a major component of the TAC, what are they like elsewhere? My parish-by-parish tour of the ACA over the past few days has clarified the numbers for me in the US, too. While I've said it's hard to tell exactly which congregations in the various ACA dioceses are missions and which are full parishes, I came up with an estimate Monday that about 43 are missions, making the rest parishes.

A mission, at least by the definition in the Diocese of the Missouri Valley canons, has fewer than 20 members. It's hard to find out whether this definition is consistent across the ACA, but I'm going to assume it is in the absence of any other good info. But to be sure, let's say that every one of the 43 missions has 19 members (a true average, of course, would be less, since not every mission would have the maximum number of members). So the total membership in the 43 ACA missions would be 817.

Then let's go to the parishes in good standing. I'm not aware of any public source for membership numbers in individual ACA parishes, but having visited every web site for every ACA parish that has one in the past several days, I can say that the church buildings are almost all on the small side. A couple in photos, such as those in Concord, NH and Portland, ME seem to be fairly substantial, but there are plenty of others that aren't. I'm going to make a guess of 60 as an average membership for the 25 ACA parishes in good standing (which means half would be smaller and half would be larger), which would put the total membership for those parishes at 1500.

There are, of course, knowledgeable people who will say that 60 members is the lower limit for a viable parish anywhere, and I agree, but I'll say just look at the ACA's attrition rate in the past few years, and look as well at how many ACA congregations don't have their own buildings. This means, by the way, that an estimate of total ACA membership that's credible to me would be 2317, not the 5200 given on Wikipedia.

Let me say that if anyone from the ACA would like to correct my estimates here with hard information, such as that derived from parish reports or diocesan receipts, I'll be very happy to correct what I've said here. However, the estimates I've made are from several days' study of ACA parish and mission websites, combined with knowledge of parishes, budgets, and governance derived from over 30 years of active church membership. But I'm willing to be corrected -- with the understanding that just saying "that crazy blogger doesn't know what he's talking about" is not a correction.

It's also worth pointing out that as we approach US Thanksgiving, we're coming to the end of the traditional Anglican stewardship-pledge drive season. Let's think about the ACA simply in terms of stewardship: 2300 used to be (and might still be in some cases) the size of a single Episcopal parish in a medium-sized city. Yet for the ACA, this number is scattered from Maine to Florida to Alaska in 60-some-odd parishes and missions, with two diocesan bishops, a suffragan bishop, assorted retired bishops, and all their associated expenses, especially their travel junkets. (Speaking of which, two ACA bishops each went on the extravagant 2012 trips to Johannesburg, Greece, and Florida.)

This is not good stewardship of resources. If nothing else, this should be troubling the consciences of Marsh, Strawn, and Langberg. The parishes that chose to go into the Ordinariate were in fact making a better choice over stewardship than the ones, with the bishops, who've chosen to stay out.

Back after the US holiday with more questions.

Who Is The Rt Rev John Vaughan?

Earlier this year, the ACA consecrated The Rt Rev John Vaughan as Suffragan Bishop for the Diocese of the Eastern United States. An Anglican suffragan bishop in the US is elected by a diocesan synod but is subordinate to a diocesan bishop and has no right of succession to the diocesan position. [UPDATE as of November 5, 2013: he was consecrated diocesan bishop of the Eastern US (essentially a promotion, at least in title) on February 20, 2013.] Since the current diocesan bishop in DEUS is the episcopal visitor Brian Marsh, he is Vaughan's boss, and as we shall see, Vaughan has every reason to do what he's told. The official bio in the link says the following:

In 1985 Bp. Vaughan was ordained to the [Roman Catholic] priesthood at St. Michael's Church Upper Glanmire County Cork Ireland. Shortly after Ordination he left Ireland and relocated to the United States to serve the people of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Miami Florida and the Episcopal Diocese of Florida. In 2005 he began his service in the Anglican Church in America at St. Patrick's Church in Port St. John, Florida until being appointed Vicar General of the Diocese of the Eastern United States in 2011. He is a resident of Titusville, Florida and has one son. He was elected Suffragan at the DEUS Synod in February.

This is correct as far as it goes, but it leaves out much detail -- again, as with all the other major figures in the ACA, we have troubling gaps. An article in the Lakeland, FL Ledger for May 17, 1996 covers the slightly unusual case of Vaughan, a former Catholic priest, going into the Episcopal priesthood. There we learn that Fr Vaughan took a leave of absence from the Catholic priesthood in 1990. A frequent reason for such leaves is so that a priest can re-evaluate his vocation in light of a wish to marry, although the Ledger piece says that Vaughan didn't meet the woman who did become his wife until after he'd left the priesthood.

Naturally, as a Catholic priest who's left the priesthood, he's not eligible for re-ordination and would not have been able to go into the Ordinariate as a priest. The ACA parish he eventually took over in 2005, St Patrick's in Port St John, FL, did not go into the Pro-Diocese of the Holy Family, although many other parishes in DEUS did.

Vaughan worked selling insurance, not in the priesthood, between 1990 and 1996. In 1996, he was ordained an Episcopal deacon at St Paul’s Episcopal Church, Winter Haven, FL. According to both St Paul's and the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida, he served as an interim priest there for only a short time. The only other reference I have to that period is a wedding there at which he officiated in 1998.

The one other assignment for Vaughan as an Episcopal priest that the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida has been able to give me is as Vicar of an Episcopal mission, St Joseph's Orlando. This is now closed, but there's still a web reference to the mission. It says

St. Joseph Episcopal Church is a mission church begun by the Central Florida Episcopal Diocese in 1996. It began with 15-20 members and has varied in size over the years from 25-75 members. It has endured challenging locations, beginning in a hotel meeting room, moving to a warehouse, and operating in a small mall. Presently it is located in a beautiful Church, sharing space with All Saints Lutheran Church.

Presently, we have a diverse ethnic mix of warm, welcoming, and sharing parishioners of all ages. Our Sunday Service attendance varies from 25-50 members. We are attempting to grow in number to offer more ways of worshiping our Lord, and also to be able to build our own Church.

I contacted All Saints Lutheran Church in Orlando, which owns the building the mission used. The pastor there replied,

St. Joseph was here 2005 through January of 2009. John Vaughn was the Vicar for I believe the first two years of that period but I may be incorrect on that. Father Paul Kyger (retired) served the parish for a time after that and later a woman priest served the parish, but I cannot recall her name. I recently heard that St. Joseph recently disbanded.

(A call to the number for St Joseph I found in a local business directory received a message that the number had been disconnected; the Episcopal diocese told me the mission finally closed in January of this year.) We're left with some questions. One is why, in 2005, Vaughan moved from St Joseph Episcopal Orlando to St Patrick's Anglican in Port St John. St Joseph mission hadn't closed; it went on for another six years. It's hard to think Vaughan would have left TEC for doctrinal reasons: he'd gone into the Episcopal priesthood in 1996 fully aware that TEC had been ordaining women for almost 20 years. He also would presumably have been happy with the 1979 prayer book. These were the issues over which the ACA's predecessors broke from The Episcopal Church. And the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida was one of the most conservative in that denomination.

Actually, Vaughan's career has remarkable similarities with that of his colleague on the opposite coast, Anthony Morello. Both are currently standing in for diocesan bishops in their own dioceses, and neither of those diocesans appears to be, shall we say, incorruptible. Both Vaughan and Morello were ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in the mid-1990s, and after marginal careers with the peculiar title of "interim priest" and positions as vicars of failing missions, they left TEC after about ten years, winding up at tiny parishes in the ACA.

In both cases, when I've contacted sources within TEC to verify employment, the response has been to keep a careful distance, combined with a certain bemused curiosity as to what they're up to now. (Another troubling issue with Vaughan is that although the DEUS website has a link to the St Patrick's Anglican parish site, of which Vaughan is rector, that web site no longer exists. That's a bad sign -- can the parish no longer afford even that expense?) Then the dioceses where both resided were ravaged by defections, to the point that they were almost the last men standing -- so they got promoted.

On one hand, it's a little like that theory-of-promotions corollary to the Peter Principle, the Dilbert Principle:

Adams explained the principle in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article. Adams then expanded his study of the Dilbert principle in a satirical 1996 book of the same name, which is required or recommended reading at some management and business programs. In the book, Adams writes that, in terms of effectiveness, use of the Dilbert principle is akin to a band of gorillas choosing an alpha-squirrel to lead them.

But a better analogy might be John Z. DeLorean's insight into the "non-obvious choice" of managers in his book On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors: executives won't promote people they perceive as threats. In fact, the people they promote will have such questionable qualifications that their loyalty to their protector will be absolute. In other words, both Vaughan and Morello are there to do precisely as they're told. If they don't, their protectors will simply allow events to take their ordinary course, and they'll be out.

Scott Adams and John DeLorean were chronicling behavior in declining institutions. Could this be the case with the ACA as well?

UPDATE: I have a new series of posts based on additional research into Bishop Vaughan's career beginning here.

Follow The Money

Here's a bit of ecumenical news that's on the report of the Anglican Province of America's 2012 Synod (the ACA and APA had ratified an "Intercommunion Agreement"):

In May 2012, Bishops Marsh and Langberg and their wives along with APA Bishops Loiselle and Grundorf and their wives did a spiritual and reconciliation retreat to Greece retracing the steps of St. Paul and St. John in this ancient land discussing and getting to know each other in preparation for our anticipated unity.

The ACA version expands on the holy purpose of this mission:

This trip afforded an opportunity for worship, collegiality and long-range planning. . . . They spent four nights on Rhodes, an island visited by St Paul and used as a base by the Knights Hospitallers during the Crusades, two nights on Patmos, where St John spent his last years, and five nights on Samos, also visited by St Paul, and from which they took a day trip to Ephesus on the coast of Turkey. The scenery was beautiful and the people, culture, accommodations, and food were all great.

Hey, great cruise! Er, who paid for it? Rank has its privileges, of course, and while it's churlish to ask such a thing, it couldn't help but pop into my mind in the context of the shrinking ACA. In addition to the Diocese of the Northeast, which we looked at yesterday, the Diocese of the Missouri Valley lists only 16 churches on its web site, of which, if we rely on the designation "Priest in Charge" for the clergy, nine are missions.

The Diocese of the Eastern United States lists just fifteen, of which possibly five are parishes, the rest missions (several don't even have web sites). The Diocese of the West has eleven churches, of which five appear to be missions (St Mary of the Angels is a special case, of course).

By my count, this comes to 68 churches, of which by my estimate 43 are missions. A mission has fewer than 20 baptized members and is not self-supporting, or by other definitions I've seen does not pledge to its diocese. In other words, in most of the ACA dioceses, more than half of the churches aren't paying for their bishop, and by extension, about two-thirds of all ACA churches are not paying for their presiding bishop, either. Yet Marsh does quite a bit of traveling -- in 2012 alone, there was the trip to Johannesburg to get rid of Hepworth, the ecumenical cruise to Greece, a trip out to Hollywood to create a visual at St Mary of the Angels, a trip to Florida for the APA synod, all this in addition to his episcopal visits. Who pays for this extravagance?

Any info out there?

Updated List Of Northeast Parishes

So here's the result of another hour or two spent on a quiet pre-holiday Sunday trying to make some sense of the conflicting versions, between the canon and the web site, of

• What's in the ACA Diocese of the Northeast
• What's not in the ACA Diocese of the Northeast
• What's an ACA Mission
• What's an ACA Parish

And here's what I have. I've retained the bold and the strikethrough from my last post for consistency, but what they now show is that there's simply no rhyme or reason to either listing. The best conclusion I can draw is that the canon is completely out of date, the web site a little less so, but it's still inaccurate.

Connecticut:
St. Matthias, Mystic Appears to be a mission

Maine:
Resurrection Mission, Camden Mission
St. Francis' Mission, Deblois Mission
St. Thomas, Ellsworth Mission
St. Augustine of Canterbury, Old Orchard Beach Mission
St. Paul's Church, Portland ACA Parish
Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Priory, Raymond Mission?
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Waterville Mission
St Mark, Cornish No Record

Massachusetts:
St. Columba, Dudley ACC Mission, not ACA
St. George, Easthampton Mission
St Paul’s Parish, Brockton Forward in Faith/Anglican Mission in America, not ACA
Church of the Holy Spirit, Pepperell (APA/ACN Mission)
St. Matthew, Boston No record

New Hampshire:
St. Luke, Amherst ACA Parish
Good Shepherd, Charlestown Mission?
All Saints, Concord ACA Parish
St Margaret of Scotland, Conway ACA Parish
Trinity - Pro-Cathedral, Rochester Mission
Trinity Anglican Church, Lebanon Mission
St. Elphege, Winchester No record

New Jersey:
St Augustine, Elizabeth Mission

New York:
St. Joseph, Brooklyn ACA Parish
Holy Redeemer, Canandaigua Mission
St. Mary the Virgin, Liverpool Mission
St. Augustine, Elmhurst (Queens) Mission
St. Elizabeth, Tuxedo ACA Parish
Holy Cross, Webster [Rochester] ACA Parish
Church of St. Nicholas, West Seneca Mission
St. Lucy, West Winfield Mission
Holy Innocents, Scarborough No record
St. Jude, The Bronx No record
St. Winifred, Hollis No record

Vermont:
St. David, Poultney Mission
Christ Church Anglican, St. Johnsbury Mission
All Saints, Danville No record
St. Andrew, Randolph Center No record

Rhode Island:
St. Matthias, Ashaway No record -- same as St Matthias Mystic CT?

The individual web sites aren't always clear on whether a church is a full-fledged parish or a mission. I've tried to lean in the direction of making it a parish if there's any doubt. In the absence of other information, if it says it meets in another denomination's church building, in a Masonic lodge, etc., I've made it a mission; if it seems to have a substantial building of its own, I've made it a parish.

The overwhelming impression I get, though, is that nobody's working very hard on any of this. It's a mess. It took me a few hours to make more sense of it than is out there now, and I wasn't paid to do it. What of the clergy and lay people who are paid to keep this stuff straight -- or even the volunteers, who could have kept this up to date? By their fruits. . .

But if anyone can provide corrections, clarifications, or updates to what I have here, I'll be happy to make any changes. The total I have right now, by the way, is 26 congregations (which confirms the number in last week's post) -- by far the largest diocese in the ACA -- of which 19 seem to be missions, which is to say they don't pledge to the diocese. Where is the money coming from? I'll look into that a little more in subsequent posts.

I Feel Like One Of Those Detectives On Cable True Crime Shows,

but maybe that's why I called this blog Cold Case File, huh? Anyhow, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about ed pacht's complaint that I hadn't asked anyone about all the differences, and then, because it was the middle of the night, I began thinking about what the differences between the ACA Diocese of the Northeast parishes listed in their canon and the ones on the web site really were, and it began to make me feel hinky, as the detectives say. When I woke up this morning, I realized I had enough time before mass to do some work. I've reorganized the list on the ACA-DONE web site to do what I did with the ACA Diocese of the West earlier, crossing out the parishes on the web site that aren't listed in the canon. But then I realized I had a bigger problem, which I half-understood overnight, that there are many parishes listed in the canon that aren't on the web site. Those I've put in bold in the list below. So here's a first cut at all the discrepancies.

Connecticut:
St. Matthias, Mystic

Maine:
Resurrection Mission, Camden
St. Francis' Mission, Deblois
St. Thomas, Ellsworth
St. Augustine of Canterbury, Old Orchard Beach
St. Paul's Church, Portland
Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Priory, Raymond
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Waterville
St Mark, Cornish

Massachusetts:
St. Columba, Dudley
St. George, Easthampton
St Paul’s Parish, Brockton
Church of the Holy Spirit, Pepperell (APA / ACN)
St. Matthew, Boston

New Hampshire:
St. Luke, Amherst
Good Shepherd, Charlestown
All Saints, Concord
St Margaret of Scotland, Conway
Trinity - Pro-Cathedral, Rochester
Trinity Anglican Church, Lebanon
St. Elphege, Winchester

New Jersey:
St Augustine, Elizabeth

New York:
St. Joseph, Brooklyn
Holy Redeemer, Canandaigua
St. Mary the Virgin, Liverpool
St. Augustine, Elmhurst (Queens)
St. Elizabeth, Tuxedo
Holy Cross, Webster [Rochester]
Church of St. Nicholas, West Seneca
St. Lucy, West Winfield
Holy Innocents, Scarborough
St. Jude, The Bronx
St. Winifred, Hollis

Vermont:
St. David, Poultney
Christ Church Anglican, St. Johnsbury
All Saints, Danville
St. Andrew, Randolph Center

Rhode Island:
St. Matthias, Ashaway

By my count, there are 18 parishes listed on the ACA-DONE web site that aren't listed in the canon (those that are crossed out above). There are 12 that are listed in the canon but aren't listed on the web site (those in bold above). There are exactly six parishes that are listed on both the web site and the canon (not counting the APA/ACN church in Peperell, MA).

It's possible to imagine some reasons for a certain number of inconsistencies: some churches may have been on the web site but not in the canon because they were missions (i.e., they were too small, or didn't pledge to the diocese) and not parishes in good standing -- OK. But why the inclusion of so many parishes in the canon that aren't listed on the web site? One parish, the Church of the Holy Spirit, Pepperell, MA is listed on the web site as being part of the APA/ACN and is presumably there due to the ACA's intercommunion agreement with the APA. Does that explain other discrepancies? Who knows? Or is the diocese growing at tremendous speed, and the webmaster can't keep up? There are simply so many discrepancies that there can't be a simple explanation. UPDATE: A preliminary web search suggests that a number of the parishes shown in bold are either in other denominations, like the APA or ACC (possibly having left the ACA at some point), or have dropped off the map entirely, like St Matthias Ashaway or St Jude The Bronx. My impression is that the canon is completely out of date. On the other hand, All Saints Concord lists itself as ACA, has an elaborate web site, but doesn't appear on the ACA DONE list of parishes on its own web site.

On the other hand, there's the wonder of e-mail and the miracle of persistence. We'll see what falls out in the coming days and weeks!

More Contradictions

I got an e-mail from a visitor who points out a contradiction between the list of parishes and missions on the ACA Diocese of the Northeast web page and the list of congregations contained in the most recent update to the diocesan canons. According to Canon 15.5 of the the latter, which I've re-formatted for readability,

At the time of the adoption of this Canon, the Congregations of this Diocese are:

In Maine:
St. Mark, Cornish;

In Massachusetts:
St. Columba, Dudley;
St. George, Easthampton;
Holy Spirit, Pepperell;
St. Matthew, Boston;

In New Hampshire:
St. Elphege, Winchester;
St. Luke, Amherst;
St. Margaret of Scotland, Conway;

In New York:
St. Elizabeth, Tuxedo;
Holy Cross, Rochester;
Holy Innocents, Scarborough;
St. Joseph, Brooklyn;
St. Jude, The Bronx;
St. Winifred, Hollis;

In Rhode Island:
St. Matthias, Ashaway;

In Vermont:
All Saints, Danville;
St. Andrew, Randolph Center;
St. David, Poultney.

In a previous post, I noted a 31% decline between a 2009 total for the Diocese of the Northeast and the "official" listing of parishes on the web site as of now. In response, someone posting as "ed pacht" on Fr Anthony Chadwick's blog commented

I’m sorry, but I find myself wondering what world the blog author inhabits. I’ve witnessed the same events as he, and lament at the confusion, misunderstanding, and clumsy actions I’ve seen on both (all?) sides. Self-righteous condemnation by any of the parties about any of the others is entirely out of place. His characterization of my diocese (The Northeast) is nothing short of bizarre. Did he bother to inquire, for instance, as to why the numbers seemed to fluctuate? Did he take note that there was a brief increase in numbers coming from the merely temporary joining of an APCK diocese and its bishop? Did he notice that the drop he perceives was a result of those same churches moving on to ACC? All that was a blip, temporary. Yes, some small and non-viable missions have closed. Others are being founded, and many parishes are growing. As Mark Twain once said, reports of our demise are somewhat exaggerated.

However, I count 17 parishes in good standing in the current version of the canons, versus 27 on the diocesan web site. The world I inhabit is, I would guess, just down the road from El Rushbo's Realville, and what I see there says to me

• The number of parishes in the Diocese of the Northeast has been declining
• The numbers don't seem to be fluctuating so much as they're just declining.

There's no question that there may be explanations of one sort or another for all the discrepancies we're seeing, but the fact is that they're discrepancies, and people are noticing them. "ed pacht" asks if I've bothered to inquire about the reasons -- if he can give me a contact, I'll be happy to, although I've had e-mails from Anthony Morello (who's told me to stop e-mailing him), and from Bishop Marsh, who's told me that basically I'm the only one causing trouble here. Can ed point me to someone who'll answer any questions I might have? And it seems as if other folks are reading this blog and coming up with questions of their own.

I'll be happy, as I am here, to follow up on tips and points of information that visitors may choose to send, and I'll keep any identities confidential.

Who Is Brian Marsh?

Brian Marsh, Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Church in America as well as diocesan Bishop of the Northeast, is the other member of the triumvirate currently running the ACA. There's no official bio on the ACA web site, and as is the case with Strawn, you have to find it almost at random on a parish site. There are few dates and little other hard data, and we must resort to web searches for other basic information and combine that with informed conjecture. The result, as with the others, is troublesome gaps and puzzling contradictions.

Unlike Morello, whose academic background is a complete mystery, or Strawn, whose seminary was a marginal, unaccredited institution, Marsh attended The Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary, a bastion of contemporary liberal theology. Marsh's fellow alumni include openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire Eugene Robinson and "gay American" former New Jersey Governor James McGreevy, who, following his resignation as governor, attempted a career makeover as an Episcopal priest. While on one hand we can say "not that there's anything wrong with that", on the other, the ACA is a member of the conservative wing of Anglicanism that would never ordain openly gay clergy -- yet the denomination's Presiding Bishop received his formation in precisely the liberal environment the ACA was set up to abjure.

A better source for other biographical information is a profile in a local paper from 2009, when he was consecrated ACA Bishop of the Northeast and finally left his day job as a high school drama teacher:

It's the latest career change for Marsh, 60, who hasn't been afraid to alter direction over the years. After working in the theatrical world and human services, he moved his young family from western Massachusetts to New York City to enter the seminary when he was in his mid-40s. Now, as he takes on his new role as a regional bishop, he looks back and sees his previous work as a natural path that has led him to his new calling.

He spent most of his life in western Massachusetts, other than his time at an undistinguished university -- except for two forays to New York. The first involved dreams of the stage:

Like many serious actors, he tried his hand in his mid-20s in New York City. "I found less work than I thought I'd get," he says. To support himself, he signed on with a temp agency, mostly doing office work.

But, as with almost everyone who goes to New York or Hollywood to become a star, it was back to Belchertown. Then, 20 years later, came dreams not of stardom but of the Episcopal priesthood, and it was back to the city that, unlike Belchertown, doesn't sleep:

So in 1993, after a last summer with the Shakespeare company, the family moved to New York, where he enrolled in The General Theological Seminary to become an Episcopalian priest. His children, who were 6 and 9 at the time, attended school in Manhattan while his wife did educational consulting work.

If this were a job interview and I were in human resources, I'd want to know a little more about what happened here. Seminary is just one part of a process that leads to the Episcopal priesthood. For instance,

Attend seminary for three years and earn a Master of Divinity degree. During your studies, you will become a candidate for ordination and probably will be required to attend a candidacy conference. In January of your senior year, you must take the General Ordination Exams (GOEs), which will help determine if you are ready for ordination.

Somehow, this process, which involved enormous disruption, time, effort, and expense, didn't pay off the way it should have, viz, in Marsh becoming an Episcopal priest. And General Theological Seminary is liberal-Episcopal through-and-through, there's nothing sorta-kinda about it. All we know is something didn't work out. Instead, the next datum we have is that he "completed" his seminary training in 1996, returned to Belchertown yet once more, and was ordained a priest, not in The Episcopal Church but in the ACA, in 1998. By then, he'd become a high school drama teacher, and he kept that as a day job while for ten years he was a part-time pastor at a couple of tiny ACA parishes in southern New Hampshire.

The tendency in the Episcopal Church has been to put the best possible face on the number of middle-aged people going into seminaries as a second career. They bring all the insight they've gained from a couple decades of adulthood, blah blah blah, but what they don't point out is that many of those same people want to try the priesthood after one or more earlier career choices simply haven't worked out. And the Episcopal priesthood is seen as something prestigious, secure, and not very demanding.

On the other hand, there's no shortage -- indeed, as we've already seen, a huge surplus -- of people who've already gotten this exact same idea. It's far easier to get into seminary than it is to get hired as a priest once you get out. We may assume that, irrespective of any other obstacle to his ordination as an Episcopal priest, Marsh was not skimmed off the top of his graduating class as the crème de la crème, and back to Belchertown it was. It took him two years to find a couple of part-time jobs in a third-rate denomination.

And we've already been looking at what seems to be a corollary to the law of small numbers: when the talent pool is tiny, anything can happen. In the ACA, somehow, utterly mediocre figures like Strawn and Marsh vault to the top; something like that seems to have happened with Hepworth as well.

So Who Was The Duper And Who Was The Dupee?

I've been part of a lot of informal discussions on who's come out on top in the St Mary of the Angels situation. It's probably time at this point in the narrative to do some sort of a tally. It was plain to everyone that many conflicting personal agendas were involved in all the convoluted events, and it was clear that not every participant was acting with full knowledge of what the other participants had in mind. For instance, as Ralph Clark pointed out in his statement, some number of parishioners claimed, sincerely or not, to be in favor of St Mary's going into the Ordinariate, but to be against Fr Kelley. As a result, once they couldn't get David Moyer's support for removing Kelley, they aligned themselves with Bp Strawn and Canon Morello, apparently in hopes that Strawn and Morello would eliminate Kelley but otherwise clear the way for the parish to enter the Ordinariate.

This didn't happen, notwithstanding any vague assurances Strawn and Morello may have made at parish meetings. The most recent version of events was in a local paper, although somewhat garbled: "At this time the church remains under the auspices of the Anglican Church and Morello said there are no plans to enter the Roman Catholic order." So here are the first dupees, the naive but sincere parishioners who had been stirred up against the rector (possibly having been told the rector was obstructing the process), but who felt that the ACA would rescue them and put them into the Ordinariate. Someone identifying himself as "former parishioner" posted the following comment on Fr Smuts's blog:

re the Ordinariate: “[W]hy is it that Morello says that there are no plans for St. Mary’s to move in that direction?”

Because he has lied to the laity and lied to the clergy from day one. No doubt, he has no plans to move in that direction because he is not able to be ordained a Catholic priest himself nor willing to submit to Catholic authority. That he at first wanted to bring in a former Catholic priest to be rector was sign enough that he was taking many of us for a ride. His lack of transparency about the “charges” against Fr. Kelley is of a piece with his duplicity regarding the Ordinariate. Now that he has chased off the pro-Catholics he has the prize all for himself; the majority who wished to become Catholic are now already Catholic or dismissed/barred from the parish by Morello and unable to vote (again) for the parish to enter the Ordinariate. . . . Count me the biggest dupe of all.

The second dupee, in my opinion, was Andrew Bartus. In my opinion as well as that of other observers, Bartus apparently felt that he could advance his career by hastening the parish's entry to the US Ordinariate, where he apparently felt deft maneuver a la Barchester Towers would favor his appointment as rector. Events by early spring 2012 suggest he had seriously miscalculated. He had aligned himself with the small group in the parish that was talking to Bishop Strawn about reasserting control over the parish following the dissolution of the Patrimony. He went as far as asking to have a private meeting with my wife and me in late March about important developments that were about to take place, but he canceled the meeting at the last minute. Within days, the events of early April 2012 listed in the timeline on the Freedom for St Mary blog, took place, Bishop Strawn inhibited Fr Kelley, and Bartus had left the parish. Some in the parish believe Bartus had been led to believe that he would be named rector until the last moment.

Those associated with Bartus have given varying accounts of what his actual intentions were. It's hard to avoid thinking, though, that if he'd played his cards only a little differently, he would have been able to stay in a well-paid position as curate at St Mary of the Angels, with few actual duties beyond the daily offices, under a 65-year-old rector. If there hadn't been so much friction and controversy -- some part of it, according to Ralph Clark's statement cited yesterday, incited by Bartus himself -- he could have gone with the parish ino the Ordinariate and then, either on the rector's retirement or sooner if the rector had impediments to ordination as a Catholic priest, quite possibly become rector himself. Instead, he's serving a mission group meeting between Roman-liturgy masses at a Catholic parish and working a day job. It's hard to avoid the impression that people with private agendas exploited his apparent poor judgment and immaturity -- he's one of the bigger dupes in the story, as I see it.

What of the ACA, Morello, Strawn, and Marsh? The transaction whereby they rode in to the rescue of eight or twelve distressed parishioners in April 2012 is undoubtedly complex. All the evidence suggests the anti-Hepworth majority in the ACA and TAC had been stewing over the Patrimony ever since Hepworth set it up, and they were eagerly waiting for the earliest possible opportunity to rid themselves of the Archbishop and dance on the Patrimony's grave. Indeed, the timeline on the Freedom for St Mary's site has this entry:

2012-01-11: Bishop Strawn stayed away from a secret meeting with some Vestry when informed by Patrimony’s Bishop Moyer that he had no Jurisdiction over, no interest in, nor business with St Mary of the Angels.

The move the ACA finally took in April had clearly been in the works for some time. But who was calling the shots? Let's look at the present outcome and ask qui bono? It's hard to imagine that Marsh, Strawn, or Morello is happy with how things have turned out. A legal case they expected to have resolved in the space of a few weeks in May-June 2012 is dragging out for an extended period.

My understanding is that the parish accounts are still frozen, and unless they can find a way around that, they can't even pay a supply priest to say mass, even if they could find one who'd agree to do it. If they were expecting to get their hands on all the money, they haven't been able to, and likely won't until all possible appeals from both sides have been exhausted. As a result, they've bought themselves an enormous headache well above their meager paygrades. The scandal can't help in recruiting new clergy to a post like St Mary's, nor in retaining the parishes they have anywhere in the ACA.

What about the lawyers, who are said to make out no matter what? This is a hard one, too. It's understood -- Judge Linfield remarked on it -- that both teams have done an outstanding job. Unfortunately, my understanding is both teams have claims on the same frozen St Mary's accounts. My guess is that neither firm is likely to be paid anytime soon. Even the lawyers aren't cleaning up.

So again, qui bono? Let's look at the actual results. The parish remains locked, with no masses said since June 2012. Although Morello had told a local paper they'd be resumed sometime in November, this seems unlikely, especially given the obstacles of paying a supply priest or even finding one willing to come into the situation, given what we know about the players. The great majority of parishioners seem to have left looking for other options -- devout Christians prefer not to miss mass Sunday after Sunday, month after month. Yet those are the very people you want in a parish. They also recognize that if Strawn and Morello can remove vestry members in violation of state and canon law and appoint their own stooges in violation of same, as well as excommunicate parishioners at will, there's no point in their even trying to participate in parish life. So the rank and file Christians are pretty much gone.

Who's left? The hard core of eight to twelve dissidents, a diverse group, some members since the 1970s, some very new, some pro-Ordinariate (at least they say they are), some resolutely anti-Catholic. They'd been out-voted in a series of parish elections on the Ordinariate and on leaving the ACA, and they'd been voted off the vestry. But in the end, they're still in charge, now Vestrypeople for Life, it would seem. It doesn't seem to make much difference to them that no masses are being said, no AA meetings being held, no homeless coming to the door and getting small handouts -- they're in charge. They, I suppose, are the dupers, and everyone else is the dupee. Except, of course, as C.S.Lewis also knew, there are in-groups, but there's never an ultimate in-group: someone else is always more in than you are. Someone else is more in to this in-group as well.

The Bitter Factional Split Within the ACA

regarding Anglicanorum coetibus was, of course, only part of the story. During 2011, and almost certainly well before then, the Roman Catholic machinery was in motion to establish a US Ordinariate for former Anglicans. The actuality of Anglicanorum coetibus was a twofold disappointment in the pro-Catholic faction of the TAC, because not only didn't it offer to receive the TAC in a body, but it left the door open for other Anglican groups to go into Ordinariates as well. The TAC had gone to all the effort of making the first overture, but then Pope Benedict said that any old Anglicans could apply -- especially from mainstream Anglican Communion churches, not just the breakaway TAC.

Although the US Ordinariate was erected on January 1, 2012, it's fairly plain from events that an in-group of prospective clergy had been pre-arranging who would do what for years in advance, and most of those were Episcopal priests from the Diocese of Fort Worth. The Anglo-Catholic blog covered this story to the point that the resulting controversy forced a suspension of posts. But here's an example:

The Ordinary, the Vicar General, the Vicar of the Clergy, and the rector of the principal church (read: dean of the cathedral) are all 'Fort Worth men'. All of them. If this were the Personal Ordinariate of Fort Worth, there would be no problem with that. I doubt that any of these good and able men from Fort Worth have even paused to consider that some would find Msgr. Steenson's appointments problematical or objectionable rather than a cause for celebration.

And a denial from the Ordinariate:

The head of the U.S. branch of the Anglican Ordinariate, Msg. Jeffrey Steenson, has denied accusations it has given preference to former Episcopal clergy in its ordination process. However, among its first class of priests, 16 of 19 are former Episcopal clergy, with only 3 receiving their formation and orders from the continuing church.

I would say that my own experience in both the academic and corporate worlds leads me to think that there's nothing at all unusual about cliques of insiders pre-wiring new endeavors, and on the whole I find the allegations of favoritism credible, simply on the basis that human nature works this way. I'm less concerned that former ACA priests weren't well represented in early ordinations -- as we've seen, not all of them come from the elite seminaries that produce many Episcopal priests -- but I do find the overall careerism among some Ordinariate clergy a matter of concern. After all, The Episcopal Church that they left has long had a huge surplus of clergy, and with its increasing willingness to ordain and hire women, openly gay, and transgendered people, there were proportionally fewer career paths for straight male priests there. The Ordinariates, on the other hand, create new slots for straight males, even married ones, exclusively.

The then-Curate at St Mary of the Angels, Fr Andrew Bartus, came from the same Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, and in fact, based on the accounts of clergy familiar with the situation, accepted the call to St Mary of the Angels following his graduation from Nashotah House in mid-2010 on the basis that St Mary's would be heading for the upcoming Ordinariate, although no announcement of its formation had been made, and St Mary's had not made (and could not make) any actual move in that direction. Whatever Fr Bartus's most heartfelt motives may have been, it's also plain that his career prospects as a newly-minted straight male alumnus of theologically conservative Nashotah House would have been indifferent at best within The Episcopal Church.

In light of that, conflict between Bartus and his bishop, Daren Williams, was inevitable when soon after ordaining Bartus a deacon in the ACA, Williams announced his intention not to go into the Ordinariate and not to take his diocese in. Not only had Bartus come to the ACA expecting a path to the Ordinariate, but he was, according to some clergy observers, connected to the Diocese of Fort Worth clique that was even then at the center of things. Williams refused to ordain Bartus and a second pro-Ordinariate deacon priests, and he then inhibited Bartus for allegedly making too many favorable comments about the Ordinariate. Bartus was rescued from this situation only by Hepworth's creation of the Patrimony and the entry of St Mary's into it -- otherwise, his career in the priesthood would have come to an early close. And this was done with the approval and support of Fr Christopher Kelley, the Rector -- none of it would have happened without it.

In light of that, the statement on the Freedom for St Mary site by Ralph Clark, a former vestry member who was privy to the events of 2011, is remarkable for what it says about the conflicts between Bartus and Kelley:

It is important to note that we had an episcopal visit from our Bishop (David Moyer) in June of 2011 to help deal with a growing personality conflict between Fr. Bartus and Fr. Kelley and to address some of the concerns I mentioned above. It was after this visit that the move to remove Fr. Kelley began in earnest among a small part of the parish instigated by Fr. Bartus.

Clark says later,

At the same time a rumor began to circulate (instigated by the Curate) that Fr. Kelley could not be received in the Ordinariate because of his theological stances and his marital situation and that he (Fr. Kelley) was trying to secretly derail our entry to the Ordinariate by telling people we could enter the Orthodox Church as an alternative to the Catholic. I was unclear about this rumor but I know that several of those who wanted to join the Ordinariate but remove Fr. Kelley took it to heart. These suspicions had been there when Fr. Kelley made a statement before our vote in May, that whatever the result, he would remain with St. Mary of the Angels. That and the fact that after the vote everything concerning the Ordinariate seemed to come to something of a halt.

The vote to which Mr. Clark refers here took place in May 2011; since the Ordinariate was not erected until January 2012, it's difficult to see what else could have been done until that time. In addition, I attended numerous adult education, Bible study, and catechism classes throughout 2011, and at no time heard any theological stances from Fr Kelley that were at variance with mainstream Anglo-Catholic opinion or the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (In fact, I'm now attending catechism classes at a Catholic parish, and I've found that the preparation I received from Fr Kelley was fully consistent with them.) Nor did I ever hear an opinion from Fr Kelley that the Orthodox Church was an alternative to the Ordinariate. Nor did I hear any statement from Fr Kelley that could be construed as anything but fully supportive of the Ordinariate, irrespective of whether he could be ordained as a Catholic priest. His wife is divorced from a previous marriage and applied for a Catholic annulment; this is a lengthy process and had not been resolved during this period -- for Bartus to speculate on it was premature.

There is some opinion among St Mary's parishioners that Bartus felt that if he could disqualify Kelley for Catholic ordination, he would be placed by Msgr Steenson as Rector of St Mary's, especially considering his Diocese of Forth Worth connections, and this would have been one of the most prestigious positions in the Ordinariate -- the sort of plum other Diocese of Fort Worth clergy were also receiving. While there are many roots to the current complicated and unhappy situation, Bartus's career ambition can reasonably be considered as one piece of a very intricate puzzle. Certainly any back-channel communication between Bartus and influential Diocese of Fort Worth-related clergy would not have helped Kelley's prospects under those circumstances. What we do have is Clark's account of friction, instigated by Bartus, with Fr Kelley, as well as friction, instigated by Bartus, between Kelley and some parishioners who began to favor a pro-Ordinariate but anti-Kelley position.

Bartus left the parish following the ACA's reassertion of authority in April 2012, which in any case made further ambitions for him there impossible. He was ordained a Catholic priest in the presence of Msgr Steenson in July 2012 and currently serves an Ordinariate mission in Orange County, CA.

Hepworth Designated David Moyer

as the bishop for the Patrimony of the Primate. Moyer, along with Hepworth, was another major figure in conservative Anglican circles due to a long-running legal battle he'd begun as an Episcopal priest under that denomination's controversial Bishop of Pennsylvania, Charles Bennison, whose own career was checkered with scandal and financial extravagance. Moyer had been rector of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, a prestigious Anglo-Catholic parish, since 1989; the current US Catholic Anglican ordinary, Jeffrey Steenson, was Moyer's immediate predecessor there as well. In 2002, Bennison deposed Moyer as a priest, but Moyer stubbornly remained as rector of the nominally Episcopal parish until 2011. After a series of ecclesiastical maneuvers, in 2005, the ACA consecrated him its Bishop of the Armed Forces and episcopal visitor to the few TAC parishes in the UK. His continued legal battles, culminating in a lawsuit against his own attorney for losing a case, had begun to give him a reputation as a loose cannon.

Becoming bishop for the Patrimony of the Primate added to Moyer's duties with the ACA, but again, as with other TAC bishops, there was something not quite right about him. Although he was one of the by-then minority in the TAC that was in favor of Anglicanorum coetibus and wanted to take a group from Good Shepherd Rosemont into the Ordinariate, in early 2012, the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia denied him his votum to become a Catholic priest in that diocese, and Steenson refused him and his group admission to the Ordinariate as well.

St Mary of the Angels Hollywood, which had always been an Anglo-Catholic parish and which had previously tried to become Anglican Use within the Catholic Church, began the ecclesiastical procedures to transfer from the ACA Diocese of the West to the Patrimony of the Primate in December 2010 and went in by vote at its parish annual meeting in January 2011. Moyer, in his new capacity as ordinary to the parish, promptly ordained the pro-Ordinariate deacon whom Bishop Williams had previously inhibited and refused to ordain a priest. This caused controversy in the ACA, where the majority felt Moyer had exceeded his authority.

Separately, Louis Campese, also a former Episcopal priest who had since become ACA Bishop of the Eastern United States, created a "Pro-Diocese of the Holy Family" in February 2011. At the same time, he resigned as an ACA bishop. He did this for the same reason that Hepworth created the Patrimony, to escape the hostility of the ACA majority that had either changed its mind about the Portsmouth Declaration or never accepted it in the first place. (Campese's home parish in Orlando, Florida continued the process of entering the Ordinariate and was successfully received in the summer of 2012, although Campese, at age 78, did not become a Catholic priest.)

By February 2011, Strawn and Marsh, the remaining diocesan bishops in the ACA proper, along with the now-retired Williams, had had enough. They issued a pastoral letter questioning the authority of both the Patrimony and the Pro-Diocese of the Holy Family:

Recently, because of questionable and possibly irregular episcopal actions that have taken place in both Florida and California, we asked the chancellors of the Anglican Church in America to render an opinion regarding temporal and corporate issues related to the ACA, particularly as concerns the Patrimony of the Primate. The chancellors' decision, released in a letter dated February 5, 2011, has been widely disseminated. It appears on the ACA web pages.

. . .

The chancellors' letter emphasizes the state of broken communion in which we presently find ourselves. The Patrimony of the Primate was initially established as a temporary entity to allow for the smooth transition to the Roman Catholic Ordinariate for those so inclined.

It was the expectation that the Patrimony would exercise no diocesan functions, but would respect the established diocesan structures within the ACA. Indeed, the Patrimony of the Primate was envisioned as an entity for those who wished to leave their existing diocese while waiting for the Ordinariate to be formed. Although it was our hope that we all might remain together under the umbrella of the ACA, that now seems impossible.

Moyer made an episcopal visit to St Mary of the Angels during this period. I can't recall the text on which he preached, but I do remember the thrust of his sermon: "The Church is a battleground", he said, and in fact, he thought this was a good thing. On reflection, I couldn't disagree, either; his position wasn't all that far from the Annie Dillard epigraph for this blog. At the time, though, I thought he was referring only to his ten-year battle with Episcopal Bishop Bennison; I was completely unaware of the behind-the-scenes maneuvers within the ACA. On the whole, I suspect he was well-chosen for the role he had to play, and as I learn more about what happened at St Mary of the Angels and within the ACA, I think he probably did about as well as anyone could. He's certainly an ambiguous figure, but he's by no means all bad.

As A New Parishioner At St Mary of the Angels

in early 2011, I was completely unaware of the bitter opposition that had begun to arise within the ACA and the TAC to Hepworth and his endorsement of Anglicanorum coetibus. (Naturally, the clergy, although more aware of it than many of us, acted properly in not stressing it with us themselves.)

Some bloggers have offered the opinion that the Holy See deceived Hepworth in how Anglicanorum coetibus would be interpreted, but based on my research into events, it's hard for me to see any deception on the part of either the Vatican or Hepworth. Although the Portsmouth letter petitioned for the TAC to be admitted as a body, I can't imagine how this could have been done from a practical standpoint. Especially since Hepworth had been citing a wildly inflated number of 500,000 members in the TAC (even 50,000 is probably too many by an order of magnitude), common sense alone suggests that not all those people would wish to become Catholic.

Although most of the TAC bishops had signed the Roman Catholic Catechism as part of the Portsmouth Declaration, this in itself presented problems: based on that Catechism, TAC members who had divorced and remarried without securing Catholic annulments would be in violation of the Church's teaching. In fact, many Catholics leave the Church and go into Anglican denominations specifically as a result of divorce and remarriage. And leaving that aside, there are issues like artificial birth control, abortion, sex outside marriage, the authority of the Pope, and less visible doctrinal differences that would present obstacles to many other Anglicans. There's no practical way any Pope can go "Poof! you're all Catholic!" to a theoretical half a million people, even if they all wanted him to do so. I can see no indication that Hepworth ever seriously thought this would happen, or that the Holy See ever deceived him into thinking this. In fact, some of his published letters stress that he thought the process would be at best gradual, and certainly recognized that some might never go in.

Second, ordinations of TAC clergy as Roman Catholic priests presented an even bigger problem. Some TAC clergy -- including Hepworth himself -- had left the Roman Catholic priesthood. The Catholic Church does not re-ordain priests who've left the Catholic priesthood, period, full stop. Also, the Catholic Church puts priests through rigorous seminary training; when it does ordain a priest coming from a Catholic seminary, it's sure of his commitment and formation. While some TAC clergy had been to reputable Anglican or Episcopal seminaries, others had not. Beyond that, some clergy (again, like Hepworth, but also including ACA Bishops Strawn and Williams) had divorced and remarried. The Catholic Church will ordain priests from other denominations who are married on a case-by-case basis, but the same restrictions on divorce and remarriage apply as to lay people. There is no practical way the Vatican could admit all TAC priests on a blanket basis. Inevitably some wouldn't make the cut. I've seen no statement from either Hepworth or the Vatican that could be construed otherwise.

Third, the Catholic Church was not going to make anyone in the TAC a bishop. While it does consider married priests, it does not have any married bishops and is unlikely ever to, since it wants to retain the possibility of reunification with the Orthodox churches, which also do not have married bishops. (Jeffrey Steenson, the married former Episcopal bishop that Rome placed in charge of the US Ordinariate, was made a Monsignor and given the title of "Ordinary", not bishop.) Beyond that, the dioceses in the TAC are pitifully small and in any mainstream denomination would not warrant bishops. As a result, not only would many TAC bishops not be eligible for Catholic ordination as priests, none of them could possibly hope to retain the power and prestige they had as "bishops" in their tiny denomination.

Clearly many in the ACA were having second thoughts. Although he had signed the 2007 Portsmouth Declaration, Daren Williams, then ACA Bishop of the West, sent the following letter to his clergy in September 2010:

It appears to me that the Diocese of the West as a whole is a long way from accepting this offer from the Roman Church.

At this time I declare to you, the clergy of the diocese, my position and perspective. I am not led to request application to enter the Ordinariate.

Two other ACA bishops, Strawn and Marsh, followed suit. Hepworth began to realize he was losing the support of most TAC bishops. He wrote to Marsh, Strawn, and Williams

Very clearly, you have renounced this understanding of your fellow bishops, and no longer teach with the same voice as them. Equally clearly, you have not taught and led the people committed to your care with that one voice of a united College. Each of us has started from the same position as that which you have confronted. Tragically, I am forced to the conclusion that some have led their people, others have followed them.

The letter carried veiled threats of unspecified disciplinary action, but it's likely that even then, he wouldn't have had the votes in the College of Bishops to carry his position. A year later, they would demand his own resignation.

Williams continued his bitter opposition to those in the ACA who favored the upcoming Ordinariate. He refused to ordain two deacons who'd expressed their intention of going into the Ordinariate as priests, and he went as far as inhibiting one of them for saying favorable things about it. However, Williams by then was in poor health, and late in 2010 he suddenly resigned as Bishop of the West. But the opposition of the three US bishops made Hepworth aware that he would need to take steps to protect the priests and parishes who'd followed the intent of the Portsmouth Declaration and intended to avail themselves of Anglicanorum coetibus.

As a result, he set up a device called the Patrimony of the Primate in October 2010, only weeks after the defections of Williams, Strawn, and Marsh, quite conceivably once he saw that opposition bishops would be taking the sorts of actions Williams had already taken. Certainly one way to interpret Bishop Strawn's actions against St Mary of the Angels beginning in April 2012, following Hepworth's departure and the dissolution of the Patrimony of the Primate, would be to see them simply as a continuation of what the like-minded Bishop Williams had been doing just before the Patrimony was established.

I'll say more about the Patrimony of the Primate and the continuing bitterness toward Anglicanorum coetibus in my next post.

John Hepworth Didn't Get A Fair Trial

from the Traditional Anglican Communion tribunal that expelled him from the College of Bishops. On the other hand, just because the trial wasn't fair doesn't mean something's not hinky. My own view is that Hepworth, Prakash, Botterill, and Marsh all deserve some sort of punishment in Purgatory that would involve their being cooped up together in a windowless padded cell for some number of millennia. The fact is that Hepworth is of a piece with other TAC bishops, with a biography that includes puzzling contradictions and suspicious gaps. Much of the bio I've been able to put together here is from Wikipedia, with supplementary material from Australian news articles and Anglo-Catholic blog posts.

Born in 1944 to Catholic parents, Hepworth began his seminary studies in 1960 at St Francis Xavier Seminary in Adelaide, Austrailia. Hepworth alleged publicly in 2011 that he was repeatedly raped and sexually abused over a period of 12 years from age 15 by two priests and a seminary student. This would have placed the dates from 1959 or '60 to 1971 or '72, with the abuse occurring while he was between the ages of 15 and 27. (The fact that the "abuse" continued well into his adulthood raises questions of consent.) In 1968 he was ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church for the Archdiocese of Adelaide. An article in The Australian says he left the Catholic Church in 1972, when he "fled" to Britain and drove trucks for Boots chemists.

After returning to Australia in 1976, he was received into the Anglican Church of Australia (the mainstream Anglican Communion franchise) as a priest. Another Australian article details allegations of financial mismanagement beginning in this period: "A Catholic archdiocese source said allegations of financial mismanagement were raised when Archbishop Hepworth was administrator of the parish of Glenelg, a beachside Adelaide suburb, in 1974." (This would contradict the statement that he left the Catholic Church in 1972.) From 1976 to 1977 he had permission to officiate in the Anglican Diocese of Ballarat. From 1977 to 1978 he was the assistant priest in the Colac parish and, from 1978 to 1980, was the rector of the South Ballarat parish based in Sebastopol. According to the Australian link,

He also faced court in Ballarat about 30 years ago charged with misappropriating $1200 from the Anglican parish of Sebastopol. "I wrote a cheque from a church account for a debt; there was no conviction recorded," he said.

He apparently returned to school. He has a degree in political science and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Adelaide in 1982. For five years he was a lecturer in politics at the Northern Territory University before becoming co-ordinator of international studies at the University of South Australia.

In 1992 Hepworth joined the breakaway TAC Anglican Catholic Church in Australia (ACCA) for unspecified reasons, under unspecified circumstances. In 1996 he was consecrated as a bishop. He served as an assistant bishop until April 1998 when the diocesan resigned due to health problems. From then until November 1999, Hepworth acted as bishop administrator. In 1999 he was elected as the new diocesan bishop. In 2002 he was elected Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) in succession to Archbishop Louis Falk.

The tribunal conducted by the TAC in October 2012 alleged that apparently at some time after his election as Primate in 2002, he was guilty of financial irregularities connected to

alterations and additions to private properties owned by [Hepworth] and lay canon Cheryl Woodman.

"Both you and Ms Woodman have made substantial alterations and additions to your private properties at the expense of the Australian church to accommodate the Office of the Primate, and I require details of those additions to private property from you, as well as the authorisation that preceded the construction thereof," Archbishop Prakash wrote.

In 2005, Hepworth and other Australian TAC figures began talks to determine an effective strategy to unify the Traditional Anglican Communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Their conclusion was to request that Rome receive the TAC in a body, with the TAC acknowledging Rome's complete supremacy. As a gesture of good faith, the TAC bishops would acknowledge the authority of the Roman Catechism. In 2007, a large number of TAC bishops and vicars general signed a letter known as the Portsmouth Declaration, which contained the petition and acknowledgement. (Of those notable in the current controversy, Bishops Prakash, Gill, Moyer, and Williams were present and signed the letter; Bishops Marsh and Strawn were not present and did not sign.)

Also in 2007, Hepworth began meetings with the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide regarding his allegations of clerical abuse from 40 years earlier. However, he would not give the archdiocese permission to investigate his allegations until 2011, citing the trauma resulting from the abuse.

In 2008, Hepworth by his account ordained Peter Slipper, an alcoholic Australian politician who became Speaker of the country's parliament, to the TAC priesthood, although by his account he was fully aware of Slipper's drinking.

[A] church member said he believed Mr Slipper's ordination had been strategic and viewed as "a good thing" as the MP was perceived to be "on the way up".

In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, which although it offered an additional path and inducements for Anglicans to convert to Catholicism, caused some disappointment in specifying that those wishing to convert would need to do so as individuals or as part of individual parishes. The TAC would not be brought in as a body. Clergy in particular would be evaluated for Catholic ordination on a case-by-case basis. As a result, in 2010, three US bishops of the TAC/ACA (Strawn, Marsh, and Williams) issued a letter essentially withdrawing from any promises implicit in the Portsmouth Declaration. (Neither Strawn nor Marsh had attended the Portsmouth meeting in any case.) Bishop Prakash of India and Bishop Gill of South Africa subsequently withdrew their support as well.

In particular, the need for clergy to be re-ordained as Catholics presented problems for Hepworth, who had already left the Catholic priesthood (the Catholic Church won't re-ordain former Catholic priests). He'd had a divorce and remarriage, and had been consecrated a bishop in another denomination, thus incurring excommunication as a Catholic. This meant that unless the Catholic Church made several major exceptions in his case, he would not be eligible for the priesthood, much less a bishopric. Nevertheless, he hoped that the allegations of abuse he'd made earlier might be applied as mitigating circumstances. With those hopes fading, though, in 2011, he made his decades-old allegations public and filed a police report. In 2012, the time bomb that was Peter Slipper went off, with Slipper being forced to step aside from his position in Parliament under allegations of expense account fraud and gay sexual harassment; his position as Hepworth's protege hit the press as well. And the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide concluded that the final living priest Hepworth had named in his accusations was innocent of abuse.

In December 2011, the bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion called for Hepworth's immediate resignation. Hepworth responded with a promise to retire in mid-2012. In response, the bishops elected Samuel Prakash of India as the temporary primate, and via various apparently irregular proceedings throughout 2012 moved to expel him from the TAC College of Bishops. While Hepworth continues to have defenders, his credibility had been seriously damaged.

A letter from Bishop Botterill quoted here strongly implied that financial irregularities were not the problem and gives this reason for the expulsion:

When the College of Bishops met for the first time since the Holy Father issued Anglicanorum Coetibus they unanimously voted to decline the invitation to become Roman Catholic and wrote to the Holy Father of the resolution of the Traditional Anglican Communion to remain Anglican. Thereafter, and contrary to the resolution of the College of Bishops, Archbishop Hepworth (having resigned as Primate) continued to advocate that our Dioceses be disbanded and that our members become Roman Catholics.

This brings us back to some of the conflicts within the TAC and the ACA and their direct impact on the St Mary of the Angels situation.