Although I was not present at the signing of the Portsmouth Petition, Bishops Langberg and Williams signed for the ACA. The text of the petition was not publicized until months later. I did not know of the contents of that petition until it was delivered orally by Archbishop Falk at a meeting of several ACA bishops in 2008.As a matter of fact, despite much searching on the web, I haven't been able to find a published text of the Portsmouth Letter earlier than January 27, 2010. The note accompanying the text on that blog says,
Though excerpts of this document have been released to the media, the full text has remained confidential pending a formal response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as is normal in such circumstances. As the CDF has formally responded to the TAC bishops and vicars general, it is now published exclusively on The Anglo-Catholic at the behest of Archbishop John Hepworth, Primate of the TAC.So Marsh's statement appears to be credible as far as it goes. He had, though, been Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of the Northeast since 2006 (he was not consecrated diocesan bishop until 2009, when Langberg retired). He had every need to know what was in that confidential document; Langberg, a signer, should have provided him with the text. Whatever the combination of Langberg's reticence and Marsh's incuriosity may have been, the result is telling.
Based on what we've learned from other accounts of how the Portsmouth Letter came together, this says something important about the dynamic within the Traditional Anglican Communion:
- In developing their original strategy for approaching the Vatican, Hepworth and the other Australians who worked with him recognized that they had nothing to bargain with. Thus they wanted to make it plain in the Portsmouth Letter that the Vatican would make all the decisions, assuming it made any decisions at all.
- In this alone, Hepworth was realistic. The Vatican is assumed to have a highly effective intelligence operation, and it must certainly have recognized that the TAC had nothing like the membership Hepworth was claiming for it, nor a priesthood or polity remotely worthy of the name.
- However, from numerous accounts, including this most recent one from Presiding Bishop Marsh, it appears to have suited both Hepworth and Falk to keep the actual terms of the approach, as expressed in the text of the Portsmouth Letter, confidential, while allowing interested parties to gain the impression that the request was actually for some unspecified type of "corporate union".
- Those parties, I would nevertheless say, were in the position of the mark who's easy to cheat. They wanted to hear that the Vatican was going to give things away, because they didn't want to pay the cost of coming by them honestly.
Langberg was lucky enough to duck the issue of what Anglicanorum coetibus actually offered the TAC by retiring and leaving the issue of backing out of it to Marsh. Poor Williams was probably too ill, or too stupid, or both, to understand fully what he'd signed at Portsmouth, and his career ended on the wreckage of his diocese when the reality of the Apostolic Constitution became known. Actually, the same thing happened to Hepworth. Only Falk has been slippery enough to get away with his role in the disaster.
But this is the truth of the TAC and the ACA. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Fr Chadwick? Fr Smuts?
