As A Matter Of Fact, I'm Mildly Interested,

although I would stress it's only mildly, in the actual number of members in good standing (as defined in either the 2008 or 2011 bylaws) still remaining at St Mary of the Angels. There were 64 members in good standing as of the February 2012 annual meeting. The angry core of dissidents numbered about 8 to 12 as of mid-2012. A large but undetermined number of members in good standing was turned off by the events of late 2011 and early 2012 and had left by the time the ACA seized the parish in April. At least nine faithful parishioners were then excommunicated between April and December 2012. Under the existing bylaws, if any who then remained on the rolls had not received communion during the Christmas season 2012, they would be dropped from the rolls. I can't see that this leaves a whole lot of people.

Under the existing bylaws, any new people who came in after April 2012 would still not have qualified as members in good standing by a February 2013 annual meeting. My guess is that if anyone applied the existing bylaws and were strict about members in good standing, the parish wouldn't even qualify as a full parish under the ACA canons -- with fewer than 20, it would be a mission. On the other hand, if there were 64 members in good standing a year ago, it would be interesting to see the list the parish now has of those it still considers members -- and based on that, the question would be whether the number actually in the February 3, 2013 annual meeting constitutes a quorum.

These issues are moot, because anyone who raises them in the actual meeting will almost certainly be ejected by the members of the angry core, who've already physically ejected their fellow parishioners from the premises. By the same token, Robert's Rules will be interpreted only insofar as they support the angry core clique. It'll be an exercise in futility and an unnecessary dose of stress for anyone who thinks he or she has the time to waste going to that meeting -- and I'm sure they'll either physically remove anyone they feel is not with the program, or call LAPD to do the same. "Canon" Rivers will likely pretend it's not happening.

Still, if anyone has information on how many members in good standing remain at the parish, I'd be interested to hear it, and I'll publish it here.

The 2013 St Mary's Annual Meeting

is on Sunday, February 3. Although the new priest-in-charge, Frederick Rivers, by implication invited me to it in his e-mail the other day, I definitely don't plan to attend. I'm still not sure if I've been excommunicated, anyhow, but even if I weren't, my wife and I anticipate being received into the local Catholic parish at Easter, which is just a couple of months away, and there's no sense getting re-involved at St Mary's when there's so little likelihood that it will ever wind up as a Catholic parish now.

Nor would I recommend that anyone attend that meeting. Just for starters, the two people who should definitely have been excommunicated in 2012 -- the ones who, egged on by Anthony Morello in full vestments, violently shoved their fellow parishioners out of the parish hall last July while yelling things like "I'm going to break your neck" -- are instead running the show. The new absentee priest-in-charge, 74 years old and clueless, is inevitably going to defer to them in all things.

And there's going to be plenty for him to defer about. Given all the excommunications over the past year, the closure of the parish to masses for five months, and the disregard for the parish bylaws the dissidents have already shown, there are going to be numerous potentially contentious issues:

• Exactly who has been excommunicated? The faithful parishioners are aware of nine, but are there more? How many? Who are they?
• As a result, who is now a member in good standing? The bylaws say they have to have attended regularly for a full year, but how does the five-month closure of the parish affect this?
• Based on that, what constitutes a quorum?
• And who is eligible to serve on the vestry? Most of those who were excommunicated were formerly on the vestry, with their terms ending in different years. Who will be elected to serve on which spot? And by the way, a member in good standing must also pledge to be eligible to serve on the vestry. Where are the pledge records?

That meeting is not going to accomplish anything good. My guess, actually, is that so few people will wish to attend that by any sane criterion, there won't be a quorum, but that won't stop the angry core from doing whatever they wish to do, and Rivers, the putative adult in charge, will simply defer to them.

"We need to stay away from that place," says my wife. "We can never go back there. That place is evil."

Here's The Continuing Problem

with "continuing Anglicanism": it always, always seems to involve a lowering of standards. "Canon" Frederick Rivers is just the most recent example: he thought he might have a vocation, but he decided a vocation didn't involve going to seminary. I'd say normally that ought to end it, huh? Well, no, not in his case, he finally got a renegade ex-Episcopal bishop to ordain him, and poof! all of a sudden he was a rector. In a "continuing Anglican" denomination, of course. Never mind that he'd had a day job with "Capital" Records.

In my day jobs, every time a resume crossed my desk where the guy misspelled the name of a nationally-known company he'd worked for, that took him right off the list of possibles. It worked to my benefit (as well, presumably, as that of my employer): once I had a boss who was determined to hire a jerk, any jerk, just someone who was so bad it would make him look good. He handed me the stack of resumes that had come in, and his top choice was in front. The guy had spelled his current employer "Northrup". I was able to ding him in a hurry. I'm sorry I can never do Frederick Rivers the same favor.

But one thing I can't escape is simply the number of typos and misspellings that reach official statements from the ACA, including the most recent one I cited a few days ago regarding the episcopal "oversite" in the Diocese of the West. I assume the Presiding Bishop either wrote or reviewed that one. A fetish for the 1928 Book of Common Prayer compensates for many, many things. Indeed, the report of the review committee, on which Rivers sat, that issued presentments against Fr Kelley in June 2012 noted how well-educated the complainants (i.e., the usual St Mary's dissidents) were. These were the same well-educated types who put up the new parish web site in December that called the denomination "Angelican", with the priest-in-charge "Cannon" Morello.

Again: nobody knows where Anthony Morello went to college, where he presumably received his MDiv, or where he received his PhD. If his eulogists will contact me with this information, I'll be most happy to publish it here. The best information we have is that he was somehow able to get a bishop in the Philippine Independent Church to ordain him, and since the PIC is in communion with The Episcopal Church, Bishop Borsch had to recognize his orders, to his eventual regret. Frederick Rivers apparently is not the holder of an MDiv degree, which would normally disqualify him for ordination in a real denomination. Stephen Strawn received his MDiv from an unaccredited mail-order seminary. Even Brian Marsh appears to have completed seminary studies, indeed at a prestigious institution, but something else appears to have interrupted his ordination as an Episcopal priest, and the ACA, a couple of years later, became his Plan B.

Leaving the complex marital histories of most listed above aside (and I'm told that Rivers's official bio is by no means the whole story in his case), none of those ACA clerics would remotely qualify for the Ordinariate priesthood. Fr Kelley at least made the attempt, and absent the campaign of character assassination against him, might well have succeeded. The difference between Fr Kelley and the others is that he did in fact qualify for the Episcopal priesthood, he had high expectations of himself, and he had high expectations of his parish.

I think this is the main reason for the bitter vendetta that the ACA "clergy" has pursued against him.

I've Said Earlier That The ACA Would Need To Find

an unscrupulous and utterly reliable replacement for the indispensable Anthony Morello. Whether Frederick Rivers proves to be that person is yet to be revealed, but from the record, it looks like he's a contender. The ACA Diocese of the West's web site lists him as on the diocese's ecclesiastical court, and he participated in a hearing on June 19, 2012 that brought a presentment against Fr Kelley on spurious charges. It is believed that he participated in the October 11, 2012 ecclesiastical trial of Fr Kelley, although it has also been suggested that the presence of all members of the court can't be confirmed on that date, and it's also plain from the record that all the proceedings were stage managed by Anthony Morello, although Morello was not himself on the review committee or the court.

There can be little question that Rivers is aligned with the ACA's interest in doing whatever is necessary to seize the parish's property, even though the ACA had said at least three times during 2011 and 2012 that the parishes in the Patrimony of the Primate were no longer in its jurisdiction, and in fact it allowed all other parishes in the Patrimony who wished to do so to leave. So for starters, Rivers ignored the simple question of whether the court had jurisdiction.

Second, a major allegation against Fr Kelley was that he had excommunicated two members of the parish on the mere basis that they disagreed with him. The court ignored, first, the fact that the excommunications never took place, and second, that Anthony Morello had actually excommunicated at least nine parishioners on the spurious basis of "abandonment of communion", even though, with the parish closed to masses on Morello's order, it was not possible for those parishioners to receive communion there.

In his bio on the Church of the Epiphany web site, Rivers says he felt that Episcopal Church seminaries "were more like graduate schools for career-minded men in the 'church business'." But what on earth is he doing in the matter of St Mary of the Angels but putting the particular "church business" of the ACA (in fact, the theft of a non-ACA parish's property) ahead of his conscience?

Farther down in his bio, he says that during the 1970s controversies over the Episcopal prayer book, he questioned "whether he was being a 'Pharisee' for seeking to worship in the historical Anglican way". I would suggest to Canon Rivers that one can be a Pharisee in ways other than those connected with the Book of Common Prayer, and indeed, if it were me, I'd be worried indeed that my conduct in relation to Fr Kelley and St Mary of the Angels could in fact be Pharisaical.

But then, not only is Canon Rivers on the Ecclesiastical Court, but the same guy who isn't much on seminaries himself is also the diocese's Ecclesiastical Recruiting and Development Officer. One thing that I've noticed all along is that the clerics who've been most assiduous in pursuing Fr Kelley's case have also been ones whose own priestly formation has been irregular, including Anthony Morello, Stephen Strawn, and Frederick Rivers. Fr Kelley's priestly formation was by far the most correct of any. Pharisee? You decide.

The Ven. Canon Frederick W. Rivers

is the new Priest in Charge of St Mary of the Angels, succeeding the late Rev Canon Anthony Morello, PhD. Rivers is Rector of the ACA Church of the Epiphany in Phoenix, AZ as well. Curious as to whether he would continue there or move to Hollywood, I e-mailed him and got this reply:

Hi John,

I am rector of both Epiphany and St. Mary of the Angels parishes and will continue to live in Phoenix for the time being. We will bring in a curate for St. Mary's when Fr. Taylor's term expires. I will see you on February 3 when I will be at Mass and chair the annual meeting.

blessings,

Canon Rivers

Whoa! More information than I needed to hear! A new curate as well? But let's stay with Canon Rivers for the time being. There's a bio for Rivers on the Church of the Epiphany site that raises the first important point: "The Ven. Canon Frederick W. Rivers was born September 27, 1938 in Phoenix, Arizona." This would make him 74 years old as I write. The mandatory retirement age in The Episcopal Church is 72. The mandatory retirement age for real Catholic priests is 70; for bishops 75. So on the basis of age alone, Rivers would not be an active priest in either real denomination.

His priestly formation as well appears to have been willy-nilly; between stints as a "territory manager for Capital [sic] Records" and "promotion manager for a number of independent record labels", he "visited two Episcopal seminaries, one in Massachusetts and the other in California." At various times, priests gave him reading lists, and eventually he was ordained in one of the predecessors to the ACA, almost immediately becoming Rector of The Church of the Epiphany, which he has been since 1984. Based on this formation, he also would not be a priest in any real denomination.

He also follows the pattern the ACA has set for St Mary's: an absentee "priest in charge" with a "curate" on site. This is reminiscent of the old-country practice of absentee priests collecting the benefices of multiple parishes (and thereby enriching themselves), appointing curates or vicars at modest pay to perform the actual duties of a priest in each parish. Even from medieval times this was seen as corrupt, as I believe it is here. I don't know what the financial arrangements are regarding Rivers's status as "priest in charge" or the remuneration of any current or future curate at St Mary's.

However, several things seem logical: first, Rivers, simply due to his age, is no threat to Marsh or any potential prelate in the ACA or the Diocese of the West. There is no way he can establish a track record in continuing to "stabilize" St Mary's that would put him in the running for any higher position. At that, he's probably similar to Morello, who I'm pretty sure Marsh recognized as having a brief shelf life himself due to his unhealthy appearance.

Second, what of poor Nicholas Taylor, brought in as a factotum to say masses a few times a week in December 2012, with his exit already in the works by January 2013? What can this say about the potential longevity of any poor schlub sent to serve in that position? I can't avoid the feeling that the hard core of angry dissidents now entrenched in the parish began to plot against Taylor almost immediately, and they're already in the process of ejecting him. Heck, if on the off chance the ACA were able to put St Paul the Apostle in that place as a curate, the hard core would be on his case just as fast.

Third, even allowing for the small size of the ACA, which by number of parishes and number of communicants is in its entirety smaller than a single diocese in any real denomination, Brian Marsh as "presiding bishop" seems to be consolidating all power and authority in his own hands. The Diocese of the West has been disorganized and leaderless for years; it had no succession plan and no credible candidates to assume leadership with the death of Anthony Morello, who was himself conveniently in poor health. Canon Rivers, due to his age, can't be regarded as any but a short-term solution to the St Mary of the Angels problem, and any leadership he provides will be from the next state over in any case. Any on-site curate will clearly be in a tenuous position from the start. This also makes highly questionable Marsh's assertion that St Mary of the Angels has been "stabilized".

In a corporate environment, this would be a recipe for disaster and a sign of insecurity and incompetence at the top. I can't see that it will be any different for the ACA or St Mary of the Angels.

Tidings From The ACA Diocese Of The West

The Visitation Calendar page of the ACA Diocese of the West site now contains the following message:

The office of Vicar General and Bishop Ordinary are currently vacant. The visitation schedule will be determined when oversight is established. Who will attend the House of Bishop [sic] meetings is to be determined. The Diocese is under the Episcopal oversite [sic] of the Presiding Bishop, The Most Reverend Brian Marsh, and until further notice he is the convenor of the Synod, which may be rescheduled at a future time.

This tends to confirm two intuitions that I had when I first learned of Anthony Morello's death: first, they've got a succession problem. Nobody's ready to step into his place (but more about his place below). Second, it's pretty plain that Stephen Strawn has no interest in returning to the position he'd left in October 2012 as episcopal visitor. With only 17 parishes and missions listed on the web site of the Diocese of the Missouri Valley, Strawn is not overstretched in his own diocese.

My view continues to be that Strawn's conscience is troubling him, and he doesn't want to get his hands any dirtier than they've been, although the only way he can be washed clean will be to turn around and make things right. However, realistically speaking, this would mean that if he did this, he'd be purged by the ACA House of Bishops just like they purged David Moyer, so he's going to have to be satisfied with pretending not to be involved and doing whatever he needs to do in order to sleep at night.

But consider how key Anthony Morello had become to the whole ACA frammis. As Priest-in-Charge of St Mary of the Angels, he was accountable to the Canon to the Ordinary and the Vicar General, who both happened to be Anthony Morello. Theoretically, Anthony Morello as Vicar General was accountable to an episcopal visitor, except the episcopal visitor had decided he didn't want to hear too much about what Anthony Morello was doing, as either Vicar General or Priest-in-Charge. But whatever it was, Presiding Bishop Marsh was happy about it -- his eulogy tributes to Morello certainly reflect that.

Now Marsh basically has the whole thing under his thumb, at least in theory, except that by design, he's going to be much too busy to pay attention. My guess is that Marsh is still in denial that Morello's gone and is simply going to proceed as long as he possibly can as though Morello were still around, doing all the indispensable things that he didn't want to hear too much about.

Based on some of the remarks I've seen on the web, there were people in the ACA who thought that Morello was a wonderful, charming, Christian sort of guy. There are, in fact, people who are able to masquerade as things they aren't -- con artists can be very charming when they're actually stealing you blind. It's worth pointing out that during his dozen years or so in The Episcopal Church, he seems to have fooled two bishops in two dioceses for a few years, but in both cases he appears to have left both those dioceses soon enough in some degree of disgrace. And of course, those were real bishops, not guys like Strawn and Marsh who dress up as bishops a few times a year.

It's dangerous for Strawn and Marsh to have deliberately taken so little interest in what Morello was doing, because that could come back to bite them. By the same token, it's just as dangerous for Marsh to pretend that things are going to be just fine at St Mary of the Angels and the Diocese of the West with nobody minding the store. The core group of dissidents that make up the rump of that parish are people who tell lies and make conspiracies for sport. Marsh is making a grave error to trust them -- and whether he admits it or not, trusting them is what he's doing.

In that context, within the past few days, the St Mary of the Angels web site has been changed to read:

The Venerable Canon Frederick W. Rivers, Priest in Charge

That's a subject in itself.

Just So Nobody Misunderstands

where either Stephen Smuts or Brian Marsh is coming from, Smuts links to Marsh's "newsletter" on his blog. In it, Marsh expands on the notice of Anthony Morello's death that was on the ACA site:

Canon Morello served as Vicar General of the Diocese of the West. He was instrumental in shepherding the parish of St. Mary of the Angels during its recent difficulties. Because of Canon Morello's efforts, St. Mary of the Angels has stabilized and has now resumed services. Canon Morello was also rector of All Saints Anglican Church in Fountain Valley, California.

A Requiem Mass will be held at All Saints Anglican Church on Wednesday, January 23 at 4:00 pm. I will celebrate the Mass and preach.

Clearly in his view, violently shoving parishioners, threatening individuals with legal action, calling law enforcement for peaceful activities on public property, and mass excommunications are "stabilizing" the parish. That he will celebrate the requiem mass indicates the regard in which both he and Strawn held this corrupt and despicable individual. And Smuts feels this announcement is worth sharing. However, there's another interesting passage:

A rededication of the parish of St. Mary of the Angels will be held at a later date. Originally scheduled for February 10, the rededication is now tentatively scheduled for early April.

Nor has there been any announcement of any episcopal visitor for the ACA Diocese of the West, nor an announcement of a new priest-in-charge for St Mary's. Apparently Nicholas Taylor would have been incapable of any rededication, huh? Morello, with his over-the-top bullying style, is apparently irreplaceable.

I've Paid A Lot Less Attention Here

to the status of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, in large measure becuase it looks less and less like it's going to be an option for St Mary of the Angels, unless Canon Morello is able to follow through on his promise of assistance from the other side. However, there is a lengthy and typically unproductive discussion from last August still going on at Stephen Smuts's blog on why not many people are going into the Catholic Ordinariates.

This brings me back to the question of how the US Ordinariate is proceeding, especially in relation to the ACA. This post at Catholic Left from last September is somewhat misleading, in that it lists former ACA clergy who have been received into Ordinariate parishes, although it makes no distinction between reception as laity and reception as candidates for the priesthood, and it doesn't say anything about the status of their reception, as far as that's applicable. In addition, other ACA priests have applied with their parishes to join the Ordinariate, but unless those parishes have been scheduled for reception, they aren't on the list, and we don't really have any status there, either.

I count 24 parishes and missions on the web page of the US Ordinariate, including those in Canada, with estimates of membership falling, as far as I can tell, somewhere over 1,000 (if anyone can provide more clarity on this or other points I raise here, I'll be very happy to add to or correct anything I say). I believe the current status of the ACA is somewhere fewer than 70 parishes (of which about 40 are missions with fewer than 20 members in good standing), with my own estimate of total membership being around 1,500.

Both totals are very small; I'm sure there are numerous flying saucer cults in the US with far more members. It does say something, though, that even a half-hearted effort by the Ordinariate for its first year has put it in contention with a major "continuing Anglican" denomination -- but from all I hear, the effort is half-hearted. A small number of former Anglican priests has been ordained to the Catholic priesthood, but the ordinations of others have been stalled in the pipeline -- and those ordinations are inconsistent.

Fr Chori Seraiah, for instance, has been ordained to the priesthood in the US Ordinariate without a parish, but other candidates are stalled under the presumption that they don't have a parish to go in with. One reason that has been advanced for what seems to be a general sclerosis is that the Catholic Church moves slowly -- but the evidence seems to be that it moves slowly except when it moves quickly.

I keep hearing that the US Ordinariate is an in-group centered on former Episcopal Diocese of Ft Worth clergy; I keep hearing that phone calls don't get returned; I keep hearing that things are poorly run. I simply keep hearing this, but from what I've seen in the case of St Mary of the Angels, as well as other instances, I can only conclude that there's a basis for what I keep hearing.

My wife and I decided we didn't have enough time in our lives to wait for the Vatican to move on St Mary of the Angels, so we went with Plan B and are becoming Catholics by another route. But if there are so many obstacles for so many people to join the US Ordinariate, why bother? What's the point? I keep thinking that one point may still be to be a small, exclusive group, notwithstanding that's hardly the goal of the Catholic Church or the Church Universal. Something ain't right.

A Message From Canon Morello

I thought necromancy was a mortal sin, but considering everything, it's good to hear from the guy.

Let's Back Off And Look At The Pattern

I hadn't really thought, until I reviewed the ACA's reversal on the House of Bishops resolution from January 10, 2012, that there was nothing new there. In that resolution, they said:

Almost two years ago, in anticipation of the erection of the American Ordinariate, the House of Bishops of The Anglican Church in America authorized the creation of an entity styled the Patrimony of the Primate. This entity was designed to be a temporary structure, something of a “holding tank,” for those parishes, clergy and people who desired entry into the Ordinariate. It was agreed that the Patrimony of the Primate would cease to exist once the Ordinariate was established. Given that the American Ordinariate was erected on January 1, 2012, the term of the Patrimony of the Primae has thus lapsed. Those who were formerly part of the Patrimony of the Primate must now make a decision regarding their future jurisdiction. Anyone, whether clergy or laity, who may now wish to return to the Anglican Church in America, should do so by contacting the diocesan bishop in their area. . . .

Now that the circumstances regarding the Ordinariate have been clarified, we welcome those who wish to return to the ACA and encourage them to communicate directly with their ecclesiastical authority. The process of return is designed to be as simple as it is pastoral. But, in any case, the Patrimony of the Primate has, with the erection of the Ordinariate, ceased its operations within the United States as of January 1, 2012.

But by June 2012, the ACA had decided it was in its interest to legitimize its seizure of St Mary of the Angels, and it "clarified" its earlier position:

[S]ince the HOB of the ACA had declared the said Patrimony to have ceased on the day the Ordinariate was created in the USA, as per the erms [sic] of the original agreement, the Patrimony of the rimate [sic] in the USA would have ceased to exist effective January 1, 2012. At that point, the COB affirmed that the Patrimony of the Primate in the USA ceased to exist on the date the Ordinariate was created and the Ordinary names [sic] (January 1, 2012). Further, COB unanimously affirmed that all clergy and parishes/missions of the Patrimony had reverted back to the diocese in which they are geographically located.

This may sound like it is in conflict with an earlier resolution of the HOB that stated that clergy and parishes/missions could “apply” to return to their ACA diocese should they desire. But the reality is that the resolution dealt with clergy and parishes/missions that desired to return before the Patrimony ceased to exist or after they had been accepted into the Ordinariate.

Except that said "earlier" resolution was dated January 10, 2012, after the Patrimony had ceased to exist, and it clearly referred to those parishes in the present tense -- "Given that the American Ordinariate was erected on January 1, 2012, the term of the Patrimony of the Primae has thus lapsed. Those who were formerly part of the Patrimony of the Primate must now [emphasis added] make a decision regarding their future jurisdiction." Words mean something. Beyond that, the ACA made no move to reassert authority over several other parishes that had in fact applied to join the Ordinariate but had not been accepted, including the Holy Cross Anglican Mission in Honolulu and the Church of the Holy Nativity in Payson, AZ, which were never listed on the 2012 list of ACA parishes in the Diocese of the West.

There's nothing unique about this, though -- the whole backing and filling over the Portsmouth Petition is simply the same script. With the exception of the few TAC bishops who signed the Portsmouth Letter and have actually had the integrity to become Catholic priests or laymen (and the two who were purged but haven't gone over), the great majority are still busy airbrushing history.

It occurred to me a while ago that, when I saw the numerous photos that reach the web of TAC bishops at their meetings, dressed up in their faux-cardinal cassocks and cummerbunds, these are little more than members of any fraternal group that dresses up and wears funny hats at conventions. Indeed, they're not much different from the sorts who go to Civil War reenactments and pretend to be General Sherman or Abe Lincoln, except that the Civil War guys have a much clearer picture of when they're play-acting.

I've Called This Blog A Cold Case File,

but yesterday I did mention a continuing campaign by the ACA of character assassination and legal harassment against Fr Kelley. One puzzling factor in this whole business is that the ACA and the parish dissidents haven't been satisfied just to get the rector off the payroll and out of the rectory, which would normally be the final goal of any parish and any church polity wanting to make a change. They're out to destroy Fr Kelley, indeed, to squash him like a bug. This is the utterly un-Christian part of this whole sorry saga.

Once Fr Kelley was ordered to vacate the rectory, a lengthy negotiation then ensued for his personal artifacts that had been in the parish office, including many of his books. Since May 2012, of course, he hadn't had access to the parish office, which was occupied by the dissidents on the main floor of the parish, and had had no chance to retrieve his personal property. While he and his family had been able to remove their property from the rectory once the court ordered them out, he still didn't have access to the parish office.

One would think that a parish made up of adults, even one controlled by a dissident rump, would then decide OK, he's out, we're well rid of him (justifiably or not), let's give him the chance to clean out his desk and take his books and other effects -- indeed, the sooner the better.

Didn't happen. Weeks went by, with the rump and the ACA insisting that the stars and the planets were not entirely in conjunction, the moment was not quite propitious, and of those who might be on the scene to assist Fr Kelley in removing such a quantity of items, not all were deemed fully acceptable. Some number of boxes was finally approved for release, but it's my understanding that this still isn't the full amount, and discussions of one sort or another are still under way. Why can't the rump just be done with the guy? Why the continued harassment?

By the same token, even with Anthony Morello permanently out of the picture, the ACA is continuing legal harassment of Fr Kelley. The charges, which will come up in a civil jury trial in the fall of 2013, are twofold as I understand them: First, that when the ACA seized the parish in late May 2012, it did so with three days remaining in the May pay period. Because Fr Kelley had received his May paycheck a couple of weeks earlier, although he was considered terminated three days prior to the end of May, he had been paid through the whole month. Thus, he was unjustifiably holding onto three days' pay.

Second, the vestry, while it still had control of the parish business accounts, signed a check as retainer to TroyGould PC, its law firm, to defend the parish in the actions the ACA had brought against it. As I've pointed out here several times, a rector is never signatory to parish business accounts, which are controlled by the vestry, with two authorized signers required, neither of whom is the rector. This was the case with Fr Kelley and St Mary of the Angels. Engaging a law firm to defend the parish corporation in a lawsuit was a prudent business decision aimed at protecting the corporation's assets. It was approved by the vestry, and the check was signed by authorized signers.

The ACA is now insisting that Fr Kelley forged the signatures of the authorized signers in order to hire TroyGould. A judge has already ruled that the signatures are not forged and are valid as part of Fr Kelley's attempt to secure unemployment benefits. The authorized signers will swear under oath that they signed the check and their signatures were not forged. Yet the ACA is pursuing this case.

I've had to ask my wife, a retired attorney, to explain this to me several times, because I keep having some basic questions: (1) if the parish really believes Fr Kelley owes them three days pay, why not go to small claims court? Why pay an attorney far more than the three days' pay to have a jury trial over this? (2) if the ACA really believes Fr Kelley forged a check, why not go to the district attorney and file criminal charges?

My wife's answer is this. The bottom line is that there's no way the DA will take a case where the people whose signatures are on the check say gee, that's my signature, nobody forged it, and here's why. So the ACA has to take it to a civil trial, where the standards are different. In a criminal trial, there has to be proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The DA couldn't possibly get that in this case. In a civil trial, the proof depends on a preponderance of evidence. There might be a chance a jury would believe that, even though the people who signed the check testify under oath that they signed it, Fr Kelley could have hypnotized them or something and actually forged it anyhow.

To bolster that case, the ACA needs the second charge, that Kelley stole three days' pay. The amount isn't important, they're spending far more than that for attorneys to argue the case. And that, by the way, appears to be the bottom line from a year full of allegations and innuendo regarding Fr Kelley: the late Vicar General darkly insisted, in comment after comment on various blogs, that the IRS and the DA would both be on Kelley's trail, the truth would be made known, it all would come out in court. Well, it's coming out. You decide.

Morello's death does pose problems for the ACA, since they will need to have someone else supervise the legal work on the case, and he's no longer available to testify or give depositions. The outcome of the appeal process could also affect the case. However, the cost of the legal representation has now become more than the parish's law firm can handle on a pro bono basis.

Please review the appeal for help in this matter at the Freedom for St Mary blog.

Anthony Morello Passed Away

of a heart attack on January 13, 2013. I'd been told numerous times that he had been in poor health, and in fact that he had been close to death when he left the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin about 2005. At minimum, his passing poses a succession problem for the ACA, one that it seems to me they should have anticipated, and one that will be difficult for them to solve.

I've posted an outline of Morello's career here, although it leaves out his final promotion to Vicar General of the Diocese of the West on October 27, 2012. His rise in the ACA, after leaving The Episcopal Church under a cloud of scandal, is remarkable: in 2010, he was new to the ACA and a newly-hired associate at All Saints Fountain Valley; a little over two years later, he'd become Vicar General of the tiny and troubled diocese and was in line to be elected bishop. (My view when he was promoted was that the electors, assuming he'd be elected no matter what, would pretty much all vote for him out of fear of reprisal once he was installed.)

His leadership style was hamartic, so much so that it's easy to envision his passing as some sort of divine reprisal, although his poor health is explanation enough. As Priest in Charge of St Mary of the Angels, his record includes

• Serving as point for the ACA in seizing the parish in May 2012, in violation of the ACA House of Bishops resolution from January 2012 that it no longer had jurisdiction over former Patrimony of the Primate parishes
• Initiating legal action, in violation of ACA canon law, against the parish
• Convincing some segment of the members that the ACA was taking over the parish only to resolve issues related to Fr Kelley, after which it would assist the parish in entering the Ordinariate. By September 2012, he had announced there were "no plans" to take the parish into the Ordinariate
• Presiding, fully vested, over an episode in which two dissident parishioners, assisted by hired security, violently shoved members of the parish out of the basement, July 20, 2012
• Excommunicating at least nine parishioners on the spurious grounds of "abandonment of communion"
• Conducting a vindictive campaign of character assassination and legal harassment against the parish's rector, a good man and a priest
• Keeping the parish locked, with no masses said, from July to November 2012
• Making numerous threats of violence, legal action, or calls to law enforcement when faced with any sort of question from parishioners.

However, it's plain that ACA Bishops Strawn and Marsh endorsed every one of these actions at every step along the way, and indeed, the ACA House of Bishops commended these actions unanimously as "devotion to God's holy church".

My own view of his promotion to Vicar General was that Bishop Strawn wished to withdraw as episcopal visitor simply because his conscience had become troubled at what was going on, and he wanted to give the impression that his hands were clean, although he'd clearly endorsed and perhaps even encouraged what Morello had been doing all along. Morello's rapid rise, and his placement as priest-in-charge of St Mary's, indicates how completely the ACA was relying on this most unfortunate leadership style.

And this leads to the question of what will happen now. Nicholas Taylor was installed at St Mary's as a curate, reporting to the priest-in-charge. It's fairly plain that he was made curate to put him on a very sort leash, with Morello giving the orders -- it would be too easy for Taylor to get the wrong idea and be nice to the wrong people, after all. Either the ACA now has to trust Taylor, or it has to find someone else to crack the whip.

By the same token, the ACA Diocese of the West is without leadership. Left to its own devices, it could well get off the reservation. At minimum, Strawn will have to reassert himself as diocesan visitor, something I don't believe he wished to do and which will continue to trouble him, and appoint a new Canon to the Ordinary. The question is whether he can find a successor to Morello who will be as unscrupulous and utterly reliable as the late Vicar General -- the pool for even this kind of talent seems small within the ACA.

My wife cites an insightful remark by a former long-term parishioner, now among the excommunicated, made some weeks ago: "This isn't finished. A lot of bad actions have gone down in that place, but people have still had a chance to turn around and make things right. They haven't. They're going to start turning on each other. They're going to start getting really sick." That observation was perceptive and even prophetic. I still don't think things are finished there, either. If I were Strawn or Marsh, this would give me a great deal of pause. Bishops, there's still time for you, if not for Anthony Morello, to turn around and make things right.

Numbers Are Important

The episode in Acts 4 involving the Sanhedrin's attempt to muzzle Peter and John came up in confirmation class the other night, before I'd read anything about alleged TAC censuses:

As they were speaking to the people, the priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to them, being greatly disturbed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they laid hands on them and put them in jail until the next day, for it was already evening. But many of those who had heard the message believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand.

The use of the number struck me at the time, because I'd been thinking for many months about the actual totals of the earliest Christians in the Gospels, and it's a lot. There were feedings of five thousand at one point, four thousand at another. Another time, the crowds were so thick that a paralytic's friends had to climb onto a roof and lower the guy through a hole in it. In the case above, the Sanhedrin clearly recognized that if they tried to imprison Peter and John, they'd have a situation on their hands that they couldn't control, and they had to find a face-saving way to back down.

There are echoes of this incident in modern times: Solidarity in Poland was a Catholic movement, and it became plain to the Soviets that there were too many people in it for them to control effectively. Numbers are important. Churches with national memberships in the hundreds are an embarrassment on the face of it. They're also very poor stewardship: there's not enough income to do anything significant, and of what comes in, too much is going to support supernumerary bishops, vicars general, and canons, whose see may cover only several dozen people.

This is why I think that it's a sign of desperation that Ms Gyapong and Fr Chadwick should be citing highly questionable censuses that more or less acknowledge that in places like the UK, Canada, Australia, and the US -- where it's much harder to conceal or exaggerate -- the numbers are lugubriously small. The censuses hope to make up the difference by suggesting there are hundreds of thousands somewhere out in the conceptual bush, India or South Africa.

My wife and I count ourselves lucky that we never involved ourselves with the full-fledged TAC and only joined St Mary's after it had gone into the Patrimony. It was probably a combination of God's grace and pretty good catechism by Episcopal clergy that made me recognize that "continuing Anglicanism" was never a serious option. For those who chose it as adults, for whatever reason, I believe more and more that this reflects questionable judgment. It speaks well of the parishioners at St Mary of the Angels that majorities over two generations felt that "continuing Anglicanism" was not a good option for them, either, and it speaks well of former TAC parishes that went into the Ordinariate, too.

I've heard the opinion over and over from both former TAC clergy and laity, and not just from St Mary's, that they're well out of the TAC. The evidence and example of the Gospels is that the Church is about great swaths of humanity -- at some point, all of it. The Church has nothing to do with exclusivity, snobbery, esotericism, or tiny groups that somehow have things right. Ms Gyapong has left the TAC and should be thinking about better things to do with her time than make excuses for it. Fr Chadwick doesn't seem to be sure whether he's in or out. He should be thinking that one through as well and not wasting his time trying to pretend the TAC has much of anything to do with the Church.

TAC Census?

Both Ms Gyapong and Fr Chadwick have recently cited separate "censuses" of the "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion". Ms Gyapong's version does not cover the US ACA or the Australian ACCA, but it cites total numbers of "laity" in 2009-2010 for Canada as 1,200, India as 91,600, and southern Africa as 28,000. Only the number for Canada is remotely credible, as far as I can see, although "laity" is undefined here -- The Episcopal Church is moving toward counting the twelve-step groups who meet in parish halls as part of its own attendance, so I'm just not sure what the TAC means by "laity".

The two traditional measures of parish size are average Sunday attendance and members in good standing. Average Sunday attendance will always be a larger number, since members in good standing are typically over 18, confirmed, and pledging, while average Sunday attendance will include children, drop-ins, visting relatives, regulars who don't pledge, occasional worshippers, and so forth. I've used members in good standing here for consistency.

Fr Chadwick's version, which is taken from an old post on Christian Columba Campbell's blog, uses "attendance", which I take to mean average Sunday attendance. While this is going to be larger than any estimate based on members in good standing, he comes up with a worldwide total of 240,800, with by far the largest number -- 54% -- in India, although another 38% are in two African provinces. Interestingly, the totals in first-world countries are far smaller, and even those are off, in my view, by factors of at least two or three. A commenter says, "In my 13 years within the TTAC there has never been 1800 members within the UK, 300 would be more accurate."

Regarding Canada, another commenter says, "Elsewhere on her blog Mrs Gyapong gives the 'last count' of the ACCC as 700 (some kind of census was taken). This was before anyone entered the Ordinariate but after some defections to non-TAC jurisdictions by those who were opposed. Of the 700, about 100 entered the Ordinariate." This would be more consistent with an estimate from late 2010 in the newsletter of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen for 500 members in good standing in Canada overall -- if the 700 in the comment is average Sunday attendance, then the two would be in general agreement.

Fr Chadwick's version gives 2,500 for the ACA. The ACA's Wikipedia entry, which strikes me as wildly inflated, gives 5,200. My own estimate, based on a review of the web entries for every parish along with some totals from the FCC newsletter I cited above (which have so far proved to be spot-on accurate), would be 1,500. If we allow for 1,500 members in good standing, I'll grant 2,500 average Sunday attendance.

Fr Chadwick gives 6,500 for Australia and environs. I've relied on an estimate from an Australian newspaper of 400 for the ACCA, although there seems to be a growing consensus that the ACCA is almost nonexistent at this point.

Although Fr Chadwick's census lists 65,000 for Southern Africa, this is simply not credible. The web page for the Anglican Church in Southern Africa lists 14 "centres". Visiting those links, I see parish photos suggesting about 40 people posing in each, which would give a total of 560 visible attendees, probably not all members in good standing. I strongly suspect this is pretty close to any actual total, which would put Southern Africa in line with Canada and Australia -- being generous, all somewhere in the mid-three digits.

Regarding India, the comments on Fr Chadwick's blog all suggest that there can be no reliable estimate. I had an e-mail from a former cleric at St Mary of the Angels who retired to India and said that there is simply no discernible TAC presence there. That individual wanted to see one, looked for one, and couldn't find it. I find this reliable. Statistics from third-world areas are always suspect: death tolls from disasters mount in proportion to their distance from Western capitals.

Ms Gyapong gives as a reason to believe the inflated totals in her census as "Anyway, I know some of the bishops, like Louis Falk and Craig Botterill have traveled to some of these countries and seen evidence of real parishes and people." The trouble is that I don't find TAC bishops credible: Louis Falk, the most venerable of the lot, has told several untruths that I've discussed on this blog. Potemkin villages are a well-known phenomenon and are certainly the sort of things that a third-world province would trot out to impress a Western bishop.

I stand by my earlier estimate that total members-in-good-standing of the TAC are no more than about 3,000, and that includes Africa. India by all responsible accounts is impossible to estimate. However, a legal principle that might be apposite is that if damages are impossible to estimate, that basically means they're non-existent. I am not going to take the word of TAC bishops, of all people, that things are somehow otherwise.

I Was A Minor Casualty

of the extremely long and contentious vestry meeting of December 11, 2011, of which some other details appear on the Freedom for St Mary timeline. Prior to going into executive session to wrangle over Fr Kelley, the vestry approved both a preliminary draft budget I had prepared for 2012 and my recommendation of a payroll service to take over direct deposit, withholding, and tax reporting. I naively thought I could proceed with getting the parish's finances in decent shape.

However, one of numerous objections to Fr Kelley on the part of the anti-Kelley/anti-Ordinariate minority was that I had been named "interim treasurer" by the vestry before I had qualified as a member in good standing of the parish, which the parish bylaws said I had to be in order to serve as treasurer. On the other hand, the bylaws made no mention of an "interim treasurer" position, and the vestry determined that this title could potentially get around the problem. After a good deal of contention relative to this and other points, the vestry did vote me in as "interim treasurer" at its October, 2011 meeting, so the vestry was aware of the issue, and a majority decided it was an acceptable move to put me in place. Among the many spurious complaints about Fr Kelley from the minority was that he had "appointed" me treasurer in violation of the bylaws. Actually, the action was taken by majority vote of the vestry.

And in fact, by December 2011, I was just a few weeks short of becoming a member in good standing of the parish, having attended and made donations since January, and this would have meant I'd met the requirement by doing so for a full year. The fact was that I was qualified to do the work, having banking experience and having served as an assistant treasurer at a prior Episcopal parish, and unlike the prior treasurer, I was actually doing the work, getting the bills caught up, recommending a solution to the payroll withholding problem, and preparing a budget for the following year.

So as far as I could see, the vestry was having its problem solved, it had an "interim treasurer" willing to do the work and doing it acceptably, and I would have been fully eligible to serve as permanent treasurer within weeks. But it turned out that my position as "interim treasurer" was a sticking point for the anti-Kelley minority, for whom the resignation of the prior treasurer was a major issue. So during the contention over Fr Kelley's resignation in the executive session, I was also by-the-way removed as "interim treasurer", replaced by a completely unqualified member of the anti-Kelley minority. That individual later proudly told the vestry that he didn't know how to balance his checkbook, and his wife had to do it for him.

The payroll service the vestry had approved and whom I'd notified kept calling me, asking what the next step was going to be, and unfortunately, I had to tell them that their new contact was the new treasurer, who like my predecessor was skilled mainly at doing nothing. No further steps were taken to hire the payroll service, but if the vestry had proceeded with doing it, the IRS problems that surfaced in March would never have reached that level.

Just As In The Corporate World,

the apparently simple problem of non-performers has unexpectedly complex ramifications. Friendships and office hanky-panky can keep incompetents in their jobs. I've seen firsthand situations in corporate downsizings where non-performers stayed while capable people were laid off -- the more or less explicit reason was that the non-performers would be utterly unable to get work elsewhere, while the capable people would have no problem. So of course, they kept the non-performers and let the capable people go.

There are still other reasons why non-performers survive: two departments might be feuding, and it could be useful for one of them to have an incompetent serve as interface with the enemy department, just to add to the frustration. A non-performer might cause problems that would make his or her managers seem more important. Once I went to a job interview where all the managers in a department met with me in a conference room. They listed some of the problems they were having and asked me how I would solve them.

I basically said it sounded like these were smaller problems that had a bigger cause, and I explained how the bigger cause could be addressed. The room fell silent. Finally the big boss spoke up: "I see. He's just going to solve the problem, not waste a lot of time fighting the symptoms day to day." They didn't like that idea at all. After all, if things went smoothly, it might make the half dozen managers in the room seem less important and less necessary. I didn't get the job. The non-performers could heave a sigh of relief.

In my view, the former treasurer at St Mary's was a classic non-performer. She was utterly unsuited to the job, and she wasn't doing any of it. I assume there were other underlying problems that led to things like major bills going unpaid, but I never knew her well enough to speculate on what they might have been. I'm inclined to think, though, that the non-payment of important bills was not deliberate, it was a symptom of underlying problems, whatever they may have been.

As I said yesterday, Fr Kelley and the senior warden had no choice but to secure her resignation in any way they could, tactful or otherwise, and the unpaid bills were an emergency that they didn't fully know about until the former treasurer left. The parish simply didn't have the leeway to keep her in that position, unlike a large corporation, where it's easier to pass the buck and shift blame. On the other hand, when a large corporation can afford not to deal with such a problem, it avoids the bitter conflicts that result from dealing with it.

The former treasurer had solid connections among the anti-Ordinariate minority in the parish, and she was very bitter at Fr Kelley for holding her accountable. Although she left St Mary's for a neighboring Catholic parish, she apparently spent many hours in continuing phone conversations with her friends in the anti-Ordinariate group. She became a useful focus for continuing anti-Kelley sentiment, which was probably a surrogate for what was actually anti-Ordinariate sentiment among that group. This in turn led to a useful narrative that the group wasn't actually anti-Ordinariate; it was just anti-Kelley, and once the Kelley problem was solved, the parish could go into the Ordinariate without any trouble. Anthony Morello's eventual announcement that this wouldn't happen showed the falsity of this narrative.

While I don't think the original problem of unpaid bills was something concocted deliberately as a conspiracy, I do think that the problem as it evolved became very useful for the anti-Ordinariate minority. On one hand, any potential bad consequence of the unpaid bills could be used against Fr Kelley, as it would have happened on his watch -- and the threatened IRS seizure was a perfect example. On the other hand, the former treasurer became a martyr. No matter that Fr Kelley had done the only thing that could have been done and taken the only action he and the senior warden could have taken to solve the problem.

The Missing Payments to the IRS

weren't the only problem in the fall of 2011. I've heard differing accounts of why there was no 2011 budget, which the parish bylaws say is the treasurer's responsiblity, but in any case, the parish annual meeting could not approve one in January of that year. On top of that, by the time I started opening bills, I discovered that pretty much every bill the parish had was many months overdue. The insurance on the parish van was days from being canceled for nonpayment. If the dialog on Operation Repo is any indication, the van itself was not long from that fate as well.

And whatever had happened to the outstanding bills, they weren't in the treasurer's office, and they weren't in the treasurer's in-box in the parish office. The first I found out about any overdue payment was the statement that arrived in the next new billing cycle after I became treasurer. As I say, it appears that the treasurer had done all her work from home, and all the bills must still have been there. At the very minimum, I have to conclude they passed through someone's hands between the incoming postal delivery and the treasurer's inbox.

And the puzzling part there was that the parish had the money. There were tens of thousands of dollars in the business checking account when I started, and I had no problem bringing all the accounts up to date, including the hundreds of dollars in late payment penalties that had accrued. The treasurer had given thirty days notice when she resigned, but it was clear that she hadn't paid any bills for some months prior to that. I believe she's said that the rector and senior warden had ordered her not to pay the bills, but I never heard that version from them, and for the time I worked as interim treasurer, they were clearly anxious that the parish's bills all be paid, and on time.

The one bill I never saw was the one from the IRS. Actually, I was looking for it, just as I was looking for the next gas bill, the next water bill, the next electric bill, because I wanted to be sure the important stuff got paid. I was looking for any record I could find on what was being withheld for all the employees, too, because that wasn't in the parish office.

This wasn't just attributable to the former treasurer: the parish's last audit had been from the official accounting firm of the ACA Diocese of the West. Once a new audit was done by another firm in early 2012, that firm discovered that the ACA firm had wrongly calculated withholding for the parish's employees in any case. (I had tried to contact the former ACA firm with my own questions, but they didn't reply: it appears that they'd ended their relationship with the ACA-DOW during the upheavals of the past several years.)

Here's what I can reliably say about the state of the treasurer's office and the fate of the IRS notices during the fall of 2011:

• The treasurer had, from all indications I'd seen, not been performing satisfactorily in any part of that job through the summer of 2011. No satisfactory 2011 budget had been completed. No satisfactory treasurer's reports had been given to the vestry for at least several months.
• All the parish's accounts were seriously in arrears, with several close to bad consequences, not just the IRS withholding.
• The previous treasurer had not been performing the duties of the job in the parish treasurer's office, so that incoming bills were apparently dealt with in her residence, not at the parish. This would include bills and correspondence with the IRS.
• Communication between the treasurer and the rector, wardens, and vestry was not satisfactory.
• The rector, wardens, and vestry were not aware of the serious problems that had arisen with bill payments generally, not just the IRS.
• However, the rector and senior warden had enough indication that the treasurer was not performing satisfactorily that they acted correctly in obtaining her resignation by summer 2011, however this may have been done.

But this still doesn't answer all the persistent questions I have about why the rector and senior warden never learned of the unpaid IRS withholding.

The Most Bizarre of the Financial Allegations

involves the threatened IRS seizure of the parish in March-April 2012. The bare-bones chronology of this episide appears in the timeline at the Freedom for St Mary website:

2012-03: Sixth 30 day Warning of imminent seizure demand notice Demand letter for non-response likely from IRS reminding SMotA Opposed Treasurer that withholding of January 2011 severely overdue; no letter or report on this given to Vestry or Fr Kelley

2012-03-15-16: Seventh Two week Final Warning Demand letter for non-response likely from IRS reminding SMotA Opposed Treasurer that withholding of January 2011 severely overdue; no letter or report on this given to Vestry or Fr Kelley

2012-03-30: An IRS letter of Final Notice before Seizure arrives 4 days early. Immediate phone calls are placed to the IRS. Seizure agent recognizes that this is entirely a surprise to the Vestry [with the likely exception of Marilyn Bush] and is over an $800 employee withholding payment not made in January, 2011. The IRS advises it would have sent repeated letters regarding this throughout the year previous.

(Might SMotA Opposed have likely intercepted these letters and NOT presented them to the Rector Wardens and Other Vestry?)

The IRS agent in charge of the seizure scheduled for Monday, 4/2/12, looks over Saint Mary of the Angels’ record of its recently hired accountant and Saint Mary of the Angels having initiated steps to reconcile other out standing issues and decides Saint Mary of the Angels was neither “oppositional” nor “non-compliant”, but merely “uninformed.” An immediate automatic tax resolution is put in place.

As the parish's interim treasurer between September and December 2011, I had direct experience of the issues that led in part to this curious business. Although I was fairly new to the parish (having attended only since January 2011), I'd been attending various adult education and Bible study groups as well as mass, and the rector and some of the vestry had gotten to know me pretty well. During the summer, the regular treasurer unexpectedly resigned, and Fr Kelley and the senior warden approached me to see if I'd take over as interim treasurer.

As it happened, my work experience sometimes involved computer disaster recovery planning, which was a good background for what I found as interim treasurer, and I'd been an assistant treasurer responsible for the Sunday count at a prior Episcopal parish. What I discovered was that although the parish had a new computer in a perfectly satisfactory treasurer's office, the treasurer had been doing all her work on her home computer, and the records and paper files she'd moved to the office prior to resigning were by no means complete.

In fact, her resignation was what a computer disaster planner would call a "disaster", which strictly speaking is any unplanned event that interrupts normal business computer processing. A payroll was due within a short time, for instance, but I had absolutely no records to show how much anyone got paid or how much they had withheld. I couldn't find any records of prior withholding payments to the IRS, either. Discussions with Fr Kelley and the senior warden indicated that nobody had been satisfied with the treasurer's performance -- for instance, I asked to see samples of prior treasurer's reports to the vestry so I could see what information they were used to having. I was told that the treasurer hadn't been making them, so unfortunately, they couldn't provide samples.

I don't know what discussions took place between Fr Kelley, the wardens, and the treasurer, and they would be confidential anyhow, but the upshot was that she'd resigned, and this was probably the only possible outcome. Any rector is only nominally responsible for a parish's business operations, which are supervised by the vestry. Whatever was done to nudge the treasurer into resigning was pretty clearly proper, in my view. The missed withholding payment from January 2011 that ultimately led to the IRS threat of seizure was simply part of the treasurer's overall unsatisfactory performance, and Fr Kelley, with the senior warden, had moved to correct this problem as far as they could by the summer of 2011.

The first thing I did to meet the payroll was what any business has to do under similar circumstances, whether that's a fire, earthquake, hurricane, or anything else that makes it impossible to process a new payroll that's due in a short time: you simply go back to the prior payroll, two weeks earlier, and issue checks to exactly the same people for exactly the same amounts, which will take care of 95% of the problem, and clean up the discrepancies as soon as you can.

That made sure that the babysitters, clergy, housekeepers, music director, and choir could pay the groceries. A bigger problem was what to send the IRS for the tax and social security withholding, because there were no records. I figured the easiest way to handle this would be to solve the whole darn problem -- bring in a payroll service. Pay them one check each month and let them handle all the paychecks by direct deposit, calculate the withholding correctly, and send that to the IRS. If we did that right once, we wouldn't have to worry about it again.

I took the idea to Fr Kelley and the senior warden, who supported it. I made the recommendation at the next vestry meeting as well, and they gave me the go-ahead.

Allegations of Financial Impropriety

by Fr Kelley at St Mary of the Angels are ongoing. One feature of these allegations is how frequently they morph. During the short period I acted as interim treasurer at the parish in 2011, I got to know something about the finances and what was and wasn't going on: in general, the parish was in the black, and its expenditures were reasonable, considering the age of the building (1930) and its state of deferred maintenance.

The bank which is the tenant of the parcel the parish owns determined in early 2011 that it hadn't been paying enough rent (I'm not kidding). They cut the parish a check for roughly $70,000 to make up the difference. The vestry decided that this money would be applied to refurbish the building exterior, renewing stucco, roofing, paint, and rain gutters. The money was put into a CD until payment would be required. The work was put out for bid during summer 2011, and the contractors made the renovations during the fall. There were no irregularities in this process, and the work was definitely needed, since there had been a major roof leak the prior winter. The budget for the renovations came out very, very close to the amount of the CD, and there were no overruns.

I was interim treasurer at the time the work was done and the bills came due. I pointed out to Fr Kelley and the wardens the need to cash the CD. This was done; Fr Kelley accompanied the authorized signers to the bank, we got a cashier's check for the CD, carried the check over to the bank where the parish had its main business account, made the deposit, and started writing checks to the contractors. The project was, in fact, very well managed; the only glitches I'm aware of were the disturbance in the neighborhood caused by the noise and dust from sandblasting the old stucco, which was unfortunately unavoidable, as well as a penalty payment to the parish's rubbish disposal company for excess weight due to the sandblasting residue. Stuff happens, otherwise, the whole thing went well and was completely on the up-and-up.

Fr Kelley was never an authorized signer for any parish account other than the rector's discretionary fund. This is typical of church finance generally. The normal parish accounts require two authorized signatures on any check. Fr Kelley accompanied the authorized signers in picking up the cashier's check for the CD and depositing it in the business checking account simply out of normal conscientiousness -- this was a big sum for an important project.

One of the early allegations against Fr Kelley on the financial side was that he "stole" $70,000 from a parish CD. I can only assume this referred to the CD dedicated to the building renovation from the bank's rent payment -- there were no other CDs in this amount.

When these allegations first surfaced in mid-2012, I e-mailed ACA Presiding Bishop Marsh outlining the circumstances above, indicating that the money had been budgeted by the vestry, all expenditures were in accordance with the budget, Fr Kelley was not an authorized signer on the accounts, and no money from the renovations had gone to him. Since I had been the parish's interim treasurer at the time, I offered to answer any other questions he might have or provide any other substantiation or clarification he might need to resolve this issue. Marsh never replied.

I also discussed the renovation project and my role as interim treasurer in writing the checks with the parish's outside auditor in early 2012. The auditor never found any issues relating to the project.

However, one of the allegations against Kelley in the ACA kangaroo proceedings against him in fall 2012 had morphed into the idea that he'd "tried to" open an account to deposit the $70,000, presumably for his own use. Although there was absolutely no evidence that he'd "tried to" do any such thing, and there were two witnesses to what had actually occurred (the routine transfer of a cashier's check from one bank to deposit in the parish's normal business account in another for an authorized use), Fr Kelley was "convicted" (or whatever the actual word is) on this spurious allegation by the ACA.

I've Had Several E-Mails From Knowledgeable People

who tell me that "Norm" is a well-known special case who makes unfounded assertions about a wide range of matters related to Anglicanism and Catholicism on various blogs. My guess is that if he didn't already exist, someone would have to invent him, because the viewpoint from which he speaks is very close to the viewpoints expressed on David Virtue's and Stephen Smuts's blogs from people clearly associated with the ACA and the St Mary's dissident minority.

I started this blog in a fit of that's-the-last-straw frustration at both Virtue and Smuts. Both have routinely passed through versions of events that came clearly from the ACA and the dissidents, leaving it to the comments on such posts for others to try to correct facts -- but anyone trying to counter the "official" version in a comment runs into torrents of character assassination, reassertion of falsehood, and so forth in the comments as well. So I found the need to post the truth as closely as I could determine it in a less contentious environment.

So it's both puzzling and food for meditation that the version of events posted by an apparent freelance troll should be so consistent with the ACA side of the story -- I have no idea whether or not "Norm" has coordinated his posts with anyone in the ACA, and I'm actually proceeding on the assumption that there hasn't been any coordination. Ockham's razor suggests this is the wisest course in any case. Nevertheless, the ACA should be thanking this guy! Here are the implications of what he's said:

• Much of the controversy at St Mary of the Angels stems from long-standing but unspecified "character issues" relating to the rector
• The rector is basically a clone of David Moyer, who was in fact turned down for Catholic ordination and had been a controversial figure in Anglo-Catholic circles
• The pro-Ordinatiate parish majority isn't really a majority and needs to move on
• The Catholic Church has given them plenty of options if they really want to become Catholic
• But, like the Rosemont group still following Moyer, they're rejecting the numerous Catholic offers and choosing to follow Fr Kelley in a cult-like movement.

The actual facts are:

• Fr Kelley has acted ethically and with integrity as rector of St Mary of the Angels. Msgr Steenson has acknowledged this by recommending that, although the parish might best be served in light of the controversies by cutting him a very generous severance package, this is not related to his moral character
• Fr Kelley has not had the long history of active dissent and out-of-control litigation that has characterized Bp Moyer's career in recent decades. The two are different people
• The parish majority is in fact a majority. It is pursuing responsible avenues for its continuing spiritual development, including the most recent appeal to the Pope
• It would not be good stewardship for the parish simply to "move on" without pursuing all appropriate avenues for retaining the property
• The Catholic Archdiocese and the Ordinary have in fact dropped the ball in allowing the parish to apply to join the Ordinariate but then making no serious provision for its continuation as a Catholic body when obstacles arose
• Holding an Anglican mass in a public park or private residences, without a bishop's oversight, is clearly a temporary measure and a matter for which the parish is seeking a more permanent resolution. The vestry has also accepted Msgr Steenson's recommendation to grant Fr Kelley a lengthy sabbatical.

The common strain of opinion between "Norm" and the ACA is, I think, meant to salve the consciences of those who'd like to ignore what's happening. David Virtue and Stephen Smuts have interests in this matter that they don't always acknowledge: Virtue is not an Anglican of any stripe himself and is of the evangelical persuasion. He is at best highly skeptical of Catholicism, if not overtly anti-Catholic. Smuts is a "priest" in the tiny and corrupt Traditional Anglican Communion. His priestly formation does not appear to have qualified him remotely for the Catholic priesthood, should an Ordinariate in South Africa even be an option. His bishop, Michael Gill, is on record with fiercely anti-Catholic opinions. He sometimes makes posts that appear to be sympathetic to the Catholic Church on his blog, but his career as a priest depends entirely on his remaining a fringe-group Protestant, and we may assume he will never actually post anything that would displease his anti-Catholic bishop.

Both Virtue and Smuts are pulling versions of the whole "continuing Anglican" bait-and-switch: they're members of a blogosphere that, according to the conventional wisdom, is more even-handed and trustworthy than the mainstream media. In a few cases, there are in fact bloggers who do a better job than paid journalists. However, Virtue and Smuts are simply doing a disservice to the Anglo-Catholic or "continuing Anglican" wing of Christianity by publishing falsehoods under a veneer of objectivity. Unfortunately, it's a sad commentary on the effect they're having that freelance trolls are simply echoing their biased viewpoints.

The Usual Craziness

I wouldn't normally post about something like this, but the combination of ignorance and vitriol in a post from someone calling himself "Norm" on the thread concerning the letter from St Mary's to Pope Benedict XVI on Ms Gyapong's blog seems to me indicative of one theme that goes through the whole St Mary's situation. "Norm" says in part (emphases in original):

The parish clearly lost its case due to bad legal advice and incompetent representation in court. Unfortunately, neither the parishionners nor the bootstrap start-up known as the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter have the financial resources to hire competent attorneys to pursue the matter. Thus, the parishionners’ [sic] best option is to cut their losses and move on.

Here, Msgr. Steenson has stated that the parishionners [sic] are welcome to come into the Catholic Church as members of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, and their numbers are clearly sufficient to establish an ordinariate community in Hollywood. I have no doubt that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles would provide facilities for them. Indeed, there seem to be indications that some, though I have no idea how many, former members of St. Mary of the Angels have taken this step.

As to clergy, the statement from the ordinariate several months ago concerning this parish, which seems to have disappeared from its web site, indicated pretty clearly that Msgr. Steenson would not accept Fr. Kelley for Catholic ordination — which now harkens back to Cardinal Manning’s earlier rejection. It’s very probable that Cardinal Manning’s staff noted the same character issues in Fr. Kelley that dictated Msgr. Steenson’s more recent decision, and thus refused his request for Catholic ordination, with the obvious consequence that the parish did not come with him into the Catholic Church. Of course, this would not bar Fr. Kelley from coming into the ordinariate as a layman.

Backing up a step, this whole scenario begs the question of whom the community that is still gathering with Fr. Kelley is following. Quite simply, are they following the Lord, or are they following Fr. Kelley?

The parish is represented by TroyGould PC, which specializes, among other things, in the corporate governance issues that the litigation with the ACA brings up. Many parishioners with specific knowledge of events and documents related to the case worked closely with TroyGould attorneys, and I believe we developed a mutual respect and appreciation, for Fr Kelley's integrity and that of the Ordinariate-bound majority on one hand, and for the attorneys on the other. Nobody at St Mary's who worked with TroyGould or who attended the court proceedings feels that TroyGould provided "bad legal advice" or "incompetent representation". Judge Linfield in his opinion noted the high quality of legal representation on both sides of the case.

Then "Norm" says (in bold, no less), "It’s very probable that Cardinal Manning’s staff noted the same character issues in Fr. Kelley that dictated Msgr. Steenson’s more recent decision, and thus refused his request for Catholic ordination, with the obvious consequence that the parish did not come with him into the Catholic Church." I simply don't know what "Norm's" relation to the parish is, or where (if anywhere other than a ouija board) he's getting his information. The first attempt by St Mary of the Angels to become Anglican Use lasted from 1980 to 1984, when, according to Fr Jack Barker, who was Rector of St Mary's during this period,

[B]oth Bishop Law and the Ecumenical Relations Committee of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had made it clear that sensitivity to ecumenical relations would be paramount in the carrying out of the pastoral provision. . . . It was in October 1984 that Bishop Ward, in behalf of cardinal Manning, reported to PDSAC clergy in Los Angeles that no parish of the pastoral provision would be allowed in the archdiocese and that both clergy and laity would have to be received into the Catholic Church on a strictly individual basis through their local latin rite parish.

Fr Barker was received into the Catholic Church following Cardinal Manning's refusal to admit the parish and then ordained a priest in a neighboring diocese, so there were no character issues related to any rector of the parish in 1984. Fr Kelley was nowhere near St Mary of the Angels at the time and had nothing to do with its application to join the Anglican Use provision, which clearly was denied due to the Archdiocese's desire not to irritate The Episcopal Church by poaching a parish. Fr Kelley was not hired by the St Mary's vestry until 2007. In addition, during June 2012, Msgr Steenson met with the elected St Mary's vestry and recommended that the parish place Fr Kelley on an extended sabbatical that would amount to a generous severance package. In the letter in which he recommended this, he noted that such an action would be for reasons "not related to the rector's moral character". Nor did this constitute any sort of direct refusal to ordain Fr Kelley.

I simply don't know how random people in the blogosphere, who adopt a highly knowledgeable tone, pick up this sort of misinformation. The last communication I'm aware of between Msgr Steenson and the vestry was the June letter, in which Steenson proceeds under the assumption (however unrealistic) that the parish will resolve its difficulties and enter the Ordinariate as a body. I'm aware of no specific statement from the Ordinary regarding any entry to the Ordinariate by St Mary's parishioners as individuals, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has made no statement that I'm aware of regarding any other facilities for them.

This sort of misinformation -- especially unfounded attacks on Fr Kelley's character, which "Norm's" comment is specifically, in bold, meant to be -- has been picked up in the past by bloggers like David Virtue and Stephen Smuts and published without question. I have no idea why people with no apparent connection to the parish would wish to do this. False witness, though, is clearly a sin.

The Comments at Ms Gyapong's Blog

regarding the St Mary of the Angels letter to the Pope raise interesting and worthwhile questions. I would say that they break down roughly this way:

• What is the status of a group that had intended in good faith to go into the US Ordinariate, but due to factors outside its control on one hand didn't become Catholic, but on the other was excommunicated from its "continuing Anglican" denomination?
• How badly do they still want to become Catholic?
• And by the way, what will happen to that building and other property?

My personal view is that the Ordinariate, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, or both, didn't handle the first question particularly well. As a distant observer, it does seem to me that the Ordinary learned an important lesson from the St Mary of the Angels episode, which was that once a parish votes to come in, by far the best course is to move quickly and bring it in. This seems to have happened at the Parish of the Incarnation in Orlando, for instance.

However, once the admission of St Mary of the Angels was indefinitely postponed in January 2012, the parish itself received no identifiable pastoral leadership from the Ordinariate or the Archdiocese of Los Angeles -- the majority, with its clergy, was simply cast adrift. Andrew Bartus, who had not yet been ordained a Catholic priest, was pursuing his own agenda in the Diocese of Orange and took a small number of parishioners with him, but they were doing this as individuals, not members of the St Mary's parish that had applied for admission under Anglicanorum coetibus. At minimum, it was an error for the Ordinary to confuse Andrew Bartus and a small group with the parish as a body, if in fact that's what happened.

In fact, the visual of Bartus's subsequent reception with his small clique and his ordination was that the Catholic Church apparently felt the matter was finished, notwithstanding there were still two priests and a deacon in the parish left hanging, along with several dozen parishioners who'd been catechized and were completely ready to become Catholics. Msgr Stetson, Msgr Steenson's representative and a confidant to Abp Gomez, appears to have lent his prestige to this unfortunate visual, and whatever he may or may not have done behind the scenes, he took no further leadership role with the parishioners, who, again, had applied to join the Ordinariate as a body, not just as individuals.

As the letter I published yesterday indicates, a number of parishioners, who'd been given no clear course by the Ordinary, joined or rejoined Catholic parishes individually. My wife and I decided the most important thing was to become Catholic, with birettas, fiddleback copes, and gold patens far down our list. (This should be an indication of how well we were catechized and influenced by the personal examples of Fr Kelley, Fr Ledbetter, and Dcn Yeager.) In fact, the Catholic parish we joined a few blocks away from St Mary's could hardly be farther from Anglo-Catholic liturgy. That we've found it a holy and welcoming place has helped us grow spiritually and reinforces our view that the specifics of liturgy are of secondary importance.

I think that if there'd been any sort of leadership from the Catholic side following the Ordinary's indecision of early 2012 and then the ACA's reassertion of control, more parishioners would have taken this course. While I certainly don't speak for Fr Mott at Our Mother of Good Counsel, he appears to be sympathetic to Fr Kelley and the pro-Ordinariate parishioners at St Mary's, and there might still be some opportunity for the parish as a group to maintain some coherent existence there. My understanding is that following the prayer vigil at St Mary's on the evening of January 4, the participants were invited to Our Mother of Good Counsel for a benediction. I think that any further moves in this direction would be very positive.

Due to the continuing legal action and the prospect (however remote) of the elected vestry prevailing against the ACA on appeal, that vestry needs to continue as a body until all legal avenues have been exhausted. As a result, the fate of the building and other property is still up in the air, and it would actually not be good stewardship for the vestry simply to throw up their hands and go their separate ways. The parish majority, as a result, still has a necessary relationship to the property, though it's not inseparable from the parish as a member of the Body of Christ.

Letter to the Pope

Here is the text of a letter to Pope Benedict XVI that was sent at the start of the year from members of the large pro-Ordinariate majority at St Mary of the Angels. I believe it speaks for itself:

January 2013

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI
Apostolic Palace
00120 Vatican City

Most Holy Father:

This letter is written on behalf of a small, but historic parish in Hollywood, California, USA, St. Mary of the Angels. For well over a year we have accepted your most kind offer to enter the Catholic Church as a traditional Anglo-Catholic use parish. We have had formal votes by the parish on two occasions. In both cases there was a super majority of those wishing to do so by over 80%.

During 2011, our clergy provided a number of months of instruction from the excellent, Evangelium Catechetical course. This was eagerly attended by parishioners ready for unity with Rome.

Msgr. William Stetson was our contact with Archbishop Jose Gomez. He came and spoke to us of the steps necessary for our journey.

We eagerly awaited our early reception in January of 2012, as soon as an Ordinary was named.

You may imagine our puzzlement and disbelief when everything came to a halt. There had been a small group in opposition to our entry in the Catholic Church. They had managed to mail a packet to Cardinal Wuerl in Washington D.C. falsely accusing our priest, Father Christopher Kelley, of multiple counts of serious wrong doing.

Your Holiness, Father Kelley is a priest of deepest Christian faith and practice. In the five years as our priest he has displayed the virtues that should be found in all priests, a complete and total dedication in his love of God, his parish and preserving the beauty of our Anglican traditions and liturgy.

Although we had placed our parish under the Patrimony of the Primate (organized for parishes wishing to join the Ordinariate) we found ourselves threatened with a hostile take-over by a denomination we had withdrawn from (The Anglican Church in America). We found ourselves in need of legal representation. The legal action was initiated by this same ACA who now claimed St. Mary’s parish as their own. We are a freestanding California Corporation with a legally elected governing board yet we have been barred from the property.

Our gates have been locked since mid-June of 2012. Masses were begun on December 2, 2012 but only by invitation. They have claimed to excommunicate all of the duly elected board members and most of those whose hearts were set on the Ordinariate. No homeless are being given aid and no community groups have been allowed to meet.

Many parishioners have become discouraged and left, some have joined Catholic parishes, but there is a small remnant that has continued to celebrate Mass in the park and now in a private home.

Ultimately we believe in the power of God to intervene on our behalf.

Our plea to you, Holy Father, is for your help and prayers on our behalf in order to bring us to the chair of St. Peter. Our hearts long to bring our precious, historical, beautiful church, St. Mary of the Angels into full communion with the Holy See of Rome.

We remember you in our prayers and pray for the unity of the church Jesus came to establish.

We sign below with deepest humility and gratitude for your joining your intentions with ours.

[names redacted]

Anglo-Catholicism as Camp

Ms Gyapong points to a post by Fr Andrew Bartus on the Baroque and its relation to Anglo-Catholic vestments. I know Fr Bartus and have a difficult time taking him seriously. (Ms Gyapong has complained that I don't know Abp Hepworth; to her I would reply back at you re Fr Bartus.) That post is one more among the many reasons I can't take Bartus seriously, and indeed one more reason I would not reach in his direction for Catholic worship.

Fr Bartus says,

In the Church of England (and elsewhere too), the revival of the Baroque was indeed to demonstrate liturgically the ecclesiology: that Roman Catholicism was the true form of the faith. This produced the fine heritage of Anglo-Papalists who followed the Oxford Movement in those early days in seeking corporate reunion with the Church, today fulfilled in the Ordinariates. . . . Notice that the majority of the bishops and hierarchy who composed and led the "groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately" were in fact men who wore lace, fiddlebacks, and who were Anglo-Papalists.

I would simply refer Fr Bartus, Ms Gyapong, and anyone else who might be interested to Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on Camp. The essay is lengthy but inchoate, and since it's trying to catch an ephemeral idea, difficult to summarize. But here's one of her points:

This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in his heyday.

I've referred before to the appeal of Anglo-Catholicism to gays, and of course Camp is largely a gay phenomenon. I don't mean to denounce either Camp or Anglo-Catholicism on that basis: I came to St Mary of the Angels, which must have been among the highest of high-church parishes, from an only slightly lower-church, urban Anglo-Catholic, largely gay Episcopal parish. I appreciate the Anglo-Catholic style, though Anglo-Catholics need to recognize there is such a thing as Camp, and as I become more familiar with the garden-variety Catholicism down the street, I've got to say that I appreciate Campiness in worship only up to a point. Here's another piece of the Sontag essay:

The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, satire - seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.

Anglo-Catholicism is as much Camp as it is Baroque. One hates to say this, but if the clergy were to turn up at Our Lady of ______ vested in lace, birettas, and fiddleback copes, accompanied by an altar party, with a subdeacon brandishing a paten at the distribution of the host, it would clear the room -- the hundreds who normally attend any of several Sunday masses there would probably never come back; they would most certainly be voting with their feet on Bartus's proposition that Campy Baroque somehow meant that Roman Catholicism was the true form of the faith. Bartus, who'd probably have been subdeacon, would be shaking his head about how they just didn't understand.

But I'm not completely sure at this point that they'd be wrong.

There's a Worthwhile Essay by Prof Tighe

on Ms Gyapong's blog. It confirms the conclusion I've slowly been coming to myself: the Anglican "statement of belief" is normally taken to be whatever Book of Common Prayer is accepted in a particular jurisdiction. For those who do not accept the US 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which does not include the Thirty-Nine Articles in its main body, then they simply do accept the Thirty-Nine Articles, apparently without much thought: "the Articles are perfectly useless as a Confession of Faith for contemporary Anglicans".

Prof Tighe's essay does not, and was not intended to, address the issue that's closer at hand to my own concerns, which is the increasingly obscure implications of the Portsmouth Letter and what appear to me to be the muddled motivations of those who drafted it and those who signed it. The basic problem is that Anglicans don't necessarily believe a whole lot that can be pinned down, and Prof Tighe understands that this is a feature as much as it's a bug. What we have with the Portsmouth Letter is a splinter group of putative Anglicans, representing one particularly flaky wing of the whole movement, signing on to a statement of faith derived from a very different Christian tradition. Neither the drafters nor the signers appear to have given the implications of this much thought, although the Vatican's response appears to have been shrewd at the very least.

I suspect there were several different subtexts among the various signers, and it's significant that only a minority have so far availed themselves of the opportunity the Vatican provided to them. Archbishop Hepworth, for instance, a key drafter of the Letter, has not yet re-converted to Catholicism as a layman as far as I'm aware. Shouldn't this raise some questions about his own sincerity? Others who signed were no doubt being "good Anglicans" in the sense that they were bowing to perceived political pressure, and once that pressure seemed less powerful, they promptly unbowed to it. Archbishop Falk seems to have shifted positions with every change in the breeze.

My conclusion from my own observation, supported by opinions like Prof Tighe's essay, is that "continuing Anglicans" are little different from those of the discontinuing persuasion, and on the whole the US Episcopal Church has actually behaved with greater consistency than the ACA or the TAC. I find Bishop Bruno far more appealing a figure than Bishop Strawn, and indeed, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori no more unpleasant than Presiding Bishop Marsh. Neither is an intellectual giant, though on balance I'd say Jefferts Schori behaves with marginally more integrity.

Archbishop Hepworth Isn't A 39-Articles Anglican, I Assume,

although that raises the question of what kind of an Anglican he is. Ms Gyapong correctly asks someone in the TAC to clarify where the Thirty-Nine Articles now stand in that denomination's ecclesiology, because I'm not sure where they've ever stood. In the 1979 US Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, they're listed among "Historical Documents of the Church", and as an Episcopal priest whom I respect puts it, that's what they are, they're a historical document. The TAC, which with other "continuing Anglicans" has a peculiar fetishistic relationship to the 1928 prayer book, doesn't have this escape clause, although I'd say it's a point in the 1979 prayer book's favor.

The Wikipedia entry on Anglo-Catholicism, although apparently written by informed contributors, never quite gets around to resolving the problem the Thirty-Nine Articles have always raised. Specifically, it's possible to say Archbishop Hepworth, or Fred Farplethwaite for that matter, is not a "39 Articles Anglican", but that raises the question of what kind of an Anglican he is -- and this isn't trivial. In the 2012 court cases regarding who was in charge at St Mary of the Angels, the ACA's attorneys argued that the ACA hierarchy were the experts on the "Anglo-Catholic" faith.

Because both sides in the case agreed that facts were not in dispute, no witnesses were called or cross-examined, and this may have been a mistake. I think a better step would have been to call either Canon Morello or Bishop Strawn as witnesees and ask them specifically what statement of belief they ascribed to in order to call themselves "Anglo-Catholic". In their proceedings against Fr Kelley, for instance, they referred to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Did that mean they ascribed to all of the Thirty-Nine Articles? In that case, how could they be "Anglo-Catholic"? I wouldn't put much stock in the ability of either Strawn or Morello to sort this out on the witness stand -- Hepworth either, for that matter. Fr Smuts will be wise if he ducks Ms Gyapong's invitation, too. Recalling the truism that Anglicanism is "the thinking man's religion", I certainly would except the "continuing" variety in any case.

On the other hand, for the bishops and other clergy who signed the Catholic Catechism as part of the Portsmouth Petition process, exactly which of the Thirty-Nine Articles did they abjure thereby? Did this imply a change in whatever statement of belief bound the entire TAC? Apparently not -- and by purging Hepworth and Moyer at minimum, the ACA House of Bishops and the TAC College of Bishops (many of whom signed the Portsmouth Letter) were asserting that Anglo-Catholicism apparently doesn't mean they're specifically Catholic, either, except they don't really ascribe to all the Thirty-Nine Articles, or maybe or maybe not. Or maybe they just believe that all you need is love.

I suspect that the bottom line is that the TAC believes whatever anyone can get away with saying it believes right then, subject to being purged down the road. I'd go a bit farther than Ms Gyapong -- besides asking which of the Thirty-Nine Articles the TAC does or does not ascribe to, I'd ask how the College of Bishops differs from the Politburo, or for that matter The Episcopal Church. Why do we need more than one Anglican denomination if they all work the same way? True, I may not like the TEC or TAC stance on women priests or gay bishops one day (take your choice), but wait a week or two, and someone will bully in a different version, and maybe I'll be happier with that one. TAC, TEC, what's to choose?