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 ChargeThat's a subject in itself.
