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.