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.
