Archbishop Louis Falk of the Anglican Church in America has issued a statement on the website of that jurisdiction concerning a set of "complementary norms" allegedly in addition to the Norms already stated in the new Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus. In it he has said the following [italics in original]:If you go to that post, the comments are illuminating as well: nobody can figure out what set of "norms" Falk is referring to, and they think he may have made something up out of whole cloth!"An initial set of Complementary Norms has been issued by the Confraternity [sic] for the Doctrine of the Faith, which we be [sic] discussed in detail by representatives of that body and of the TAC College of Bishops within the near future. We are now asking members of the ACA (and other TAC provinces) to study the Norms and then pose such question [sic] as may occur. (Some already have, such as: Question: Will we be able to continue to have married priests indefinitely? Answer: Yes. Question: Will those of us who were formerly Roman Catholics be excluded from the Anglican Ordinariates? Answer No. Question: Will we loose control over our Church finances and property? Answer: No) There will be more. These can be sent to your own Bishop, and he will see that they get to the appropriate TAC representatives. Your concerns, as well as your thoughts and prayers, are an essential element and a vital part of this process."
Up until this whole business started I have tried to be "ecumenical" and to hope for some sign of good faith from the ACA/TAC. Sadly, I must state very bluntly that it is very obvious that what Archbishop Falk has promised his people in this statement cannot be reconciled to the new constitution. We have read the constitution put forth by Rome. I stand by all the essays written heretofore both by Rev. Canon Charles Nalls, and by myself. I do not know why these promises are written on the ACA website, but I know that Rome cannot grant these "complementary norms" and also implement the new constitution; neither could Rome grant these "complementary norms" without first undertaking a major overhaul of its Canon Laws and establishing in their place new polity.
I may be placing a target on my back, but I must protest: The statement of Archbishop Falk cannot be true. Why are they doing this? What is the purpose? That I cannot answer: But I can read the Apostolic Constitution for myself, with the added advantage of understanding Roman Catholicism and specifically the Pastoral Provisions to the boundary line, the limits to which it has been extended. The reality does not match the rhetoric.
The statement by Falk linked in that piece no longer appears on the ACA web site, for whatever that's worth. It appears that some of the opinions Falk gives either oversimplify the situation or misstate it completely. There is no question, for instance, that parishes that go into the Ordinariate with property do surrender a great deal of control to the Ordinary and the Catholic diocese. Married clergy are approved on a case-by-case basis, and those with prior marriages would need to receive annulments. Former Catholic priests are never re-ordained. Catholics already baptized outside the Ordinariate aren't usually eligible to become full members, although they may certainly attend mass at any Catholic parish, including Ordinariate.
Put in the context of my posts over the last several days, I think this suggests several things about Falk. First, he simply doesn't let the truth get in the way of anything he says. This probably goes along with a tendency to tell people what they want to hear. If, in yesterday's case, Morello wanted Falk to say he'd never offered episcopal authority over St Mary's, he was happy to say it. If, a few months later, he was sworn to tell the truth under oath, well, then, he'd tell the truth.
The statement above, from 2009, was presumably made to try to calm the growing dissatisfaction within the TAC regarding Anglicanorum coetibus and the fact that the tiny TAC, not having asked for any special deal from the Vatican, wasn't going to get one. (It's also worth pointing out that Falk, retired as a bishop since 2007, was still meddling at will in ACA affairs.) It also appears to be a somewhat bleary attempt to shade the issue. Tell everyone something like what they want to hear and sort it all out later -- I've had bosses like that. The problem is that eventually, you've got to face the fact that not everyone is going to get what they thought, and that becomes an obstacle down the road.
My surmise is that this is a credible explanation for what happened at St Aidan's Des Moines. I've heard accounts of events from various sources, but I want to stress that none of those sources was Fr Seraiah. It appears that things went pretty much as you'd expect: people were considering becoming Catholics. Some of them had impediments, like divorces and remarriages, that would make the process difficult or impossible. In fact, the law of small numbers would say that in a sample size as small as the 25 members of St Aidan's, you were going to get a higher-than-expected proportion of special cases. Just a few families where a divorce and remarriage is involved create an outsized problem. Someone should have had a plan for dealing with this, or perhaps someone should have thought it wasn't a good idea for St Aidan's to have applied in the first place.
Nevertheless, none of these potential impediments was a secret to anyone. But if we follow the pattern we seem to see with Archbishop Falk, he would have done everything he could to shade the issue, tell people it would be different under the Ordinariate, or whatever. I know nothing about the situation in which this placed Fr Seraiah, who sincerely intended to become Catholic and did enter the Ordinariate as a priest earlier this year, but I assume there had to have been conflicts between what Falk was telling people and what he felt he could honestly say.
In the end, as I understand things, it appears that the parish was sufficiently confused between what Falk was telling them and what they were hearing anywhere else that they called Msgr Steenson up to Des Moines to make things clear, and that in effect was the end of any fairy tales -- the parish voted overwhelmingly to stay out. It sounds as though the parish may have blamed Steenson or Seraiah for the outcome, rather than where the blame belonged.
Commenters at Fr Chadwick's blog, unhappy at this series of posts, have accused me of "McCarthytism", although nobody's sure what that means any more, and some figures, such as Alger Hiss, were demonstrably Stalinist spies and proven in court to be liars. McCarthy was an alcoholic opportunist; Hiss and the Rosenbergs were Stalinist spies, and McCarthy's antics never made them less what they were. People have to make up their own minds.
Fr Chadwick comments,
I met Archbishop Falk in Portsmouth in October 2007 and found him to be a very pleasant fellow and worthy of respect. I don’t know what happened to make him not go through with application to the Ordinariate. I suspect he smelled a rat. Who knows?Of course Falk is a very pleasant fellow when you meet him. Some folks are like that -- they tell you what you want to hear; that's one of the points I've been making. But that always just hides their own agenda. I suspect Falk never seriously intended to go into the Ordinariate; he was always just working both sides until, once Steenson turned up in Des Moines and told his flock what he'd been unwilling to tell them, he couldn't do it any more. Then nobody can figure out what happened! Falk seems to me basically a con artist, hardly a bishop.
