It's all over but the appeals: the Los Angeles Superior Court has turned the historic St Mary of the Angels parish in Hollywood over to a tiny breakaway "continuing Anglican" denomination, the Anglican Church in America. I was going to start out by describing the ACA and its splinter-group parent, the Traditional Anglican Communion, as tiny, corrupt, and breakaway, but I'm going to leave the corrupt part out for now and simply let my research tell its own story. It's not my intent here to outline the specifics of the case: another site, the Freedom for St Mary blog listed on my blogroll here, does that in detail. As my posts proceed, I'll sketch in history and background as needed, but I'm more interested in the bigger picture: what's really going on here? How can we understand what's happening? How does it relate to some of the basic reasons we go to church -- like the problem of evil, for example? Keep in mind, though, that this is a cold case file. The court has ruled, further legal action is going to be slow, and I don't hold a lot of optimism that anything much will change from how it is now.
The story of what took place in recent months at St Mary of the Angels, a former Episcopal parish that in the past had had members and friends like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Charlton Heston, is complicated and unhappy. More than a few parishioners -- it's probably more accurate now to describe almost all of them as former parishioners -- were deeply affected. It's been suggested that some may need the sort of counseling that people get for post-traumatic stress, and I'd say that many of us are as shell-shocked as we'd be if we saw the devil appear in a sudden poof right before our eyes, except if that happened, the devil wouldn't be what we expected, no red-colored guy with horns, hooves, and a pitchfork -- we'd be ready for that, after all. The real devil is the way C.S.Lewis thought he'd be, a mediocre guy in a business suit out on a cigarette break, and that's probably the part that bothers us most.
What I want to do here is describe the mediocre guys in business suits, or business casual, or even clerical collars, show what the devil's really up to in this day and age. Best round up an usher and see if he's got any life preservers and signal flares on hand: hold on.
