The Bishop Who Died Of AIDS

We're dealing with oral history here, backed up as much as I can do it with Google searches. Richard Willars was the first ACC Bishop of the Pacific and Southwest, consecrated in 1988 at St Mary of the Angels. He was definitely the St Mary’s ordinary prior to the ACA-ACC split. However, I 'm told that Willars passed away from AIDS in 1993, and this was hushed up at the time. I'm told in fact that Willars moved into an office at the rear of the St Mary's basement (which later became the parish library) to die, although it is not known whether he finally passed away there.

Following Willars’s death in 1993, there was an ACC diocesan synod in 1994 at which there were 22 ballots but no pope, as it were. Seeland presided over the meeting and eventually became bishop-elect. According to an ACC parish history (which provided other dates here), Falk left the ACC “for personal reasons” in 1991. However, if ACC Bp Willars was still in the St Mary’s rectory as of 1993 and still a bishop though on his deathbed, there must at minimum have been some ambiguity. For some reason, ambiguity, Louis Falk, and St Mary of the Angels keep popping up in the same sentences.

It does appear that Willars's death was hushed up; references to him on the web are very hard to find. He began his ministry as an Episcopal priest at St Luke's Westcliffe, CO in 1953; he returned there and by 1977 took part of the St Luke's congregation as an early breakaway from TEC even prior to the St Louis conference. That, of course, resulted in his being deposed as an Episcopal priest. He may have been an associate in a San Diego Episcopal parish in the 1950s. We're still left with the intriguing question of St Mary's jurisdiction between the ACC-ACA split of 1991 and its final accession to the ACA in 1994. I may try e-mailing Falk and Wilcox themselves to see if they can shed any light on this question, as good a project as any for Ash Wednesday.

I'm also told that the confrontation with ACC Bishop Seeland in 1993 was not on the entry steps to the parish, but on the side steps down to the undercroft parish hall, and the person who raised his arm was not Fr Wilcox, but Dr. Robert "Bob" Williams, the longtime Senior Warden. This brings the matter into clearer focus, since it is the Williams episode that is a well-known part of parish lore.

Again, I am eager to hear more information about Bishop Willars, Bishop Seeland, the status of St Mary of the Angels as an "ecclesiastical peculiar" between 1991 and 1994, the confrontaiton between Dr Williams and Bishop Seeland, and Seeland's inhibition of Fr Wilcox.