What we know is that a year after the meeting and on his retirement as an Episcopal bishop in 1994, Pope converted to Catholicism with the expectation of then being ordained as an Anglican Use Catholic priest. A liberal Episcopal blog gives one interpretation of these and subsequent events:
He had denied he was leaving The Episcopal Church right up until the day he left. When he made the announcement, he said he planned to seek ordination as a Roman priest. He told us he had known for the previous two years that he would go to Rome. This led some here to question whether or not he’d earned his quite substantial salary as bishop by fraud for those two years.There is no question that the substance of the October 1993 meeting was kept highly confidential, and one part of the written record indicates that Pope requested communications from the Vatican be sent to his home, not his office. Wayne Hankey, a participant in that meeting who drafted the semi-official minutes, in his 1997 letter to the editor of The Tablet strongly implied that Cardinal Ratzinger had made some type of promise to Pope, which he was subsequently unable to keep.
Whatever the basis, Pope became extremely bitter and returned to The Episcopal Church in 1995. The blog cited above quotes the New York Times:
“he publicly took communion from the hand of an Episcopal priest, saying in an interview that he had left the Catholic Church and abandoned plans to enter its priesthood.” The article quoted him as saying “he had succumbed to a ‘growing unease’ about his original decision. His unease, Bishop Pope said, lay in his feeling that he could not give up his status as a bishop, which he would have to do to be re-ordained as a Catholic priest.["]A conservative Catholic blog gives a different view, noting as well Pope's eventual return to Catholicism in 2007:
As Episcopal bishop, Clarence Pope had tried to negotiate with Rome for a personal prelature for Anglo-Catholic converts in the US: although his meeting with John Paul II went well, the plan was stonewalled by officials and nothing came of it: only Cardinal Ratzinger supported such a plan, and it did not fall within the competence of Ratzinger's Congregation, obviously. [This version appears not to be borne out by the written record; apparently the meeting with John Paul II was part of a public audience, and nothing substantial was apparently discussed there. John Paul instructed Pope subsequently to go through Ratzinger and by implication the CDF.] When Clarence Pope then converted individually, his new Catholic bishop announced that he would be willing to ordain Clarence Pope as a Catholic priest--if his diocesan Priests' Council approved (?!?). The Priests' Council rejected ordaining Clarence Pope, as they deemed him far too "traditional."My own view is that Ratzinger may well have made some type of promise to Pope connected with the establishment of a personal prelature. It may well have been twofold, that Pope would be in charge, and quite possibly that his episcopal orders would be recognized, since the record appears to indicate that Pope spent considerable effort documenting his line of succession at the Vatican's request.
Whatever the specifics of the alleged promise may have been, it seems to me that Pope envisioned a specific path to being named ordinary that would involve his resignation from the Episcopal House of Bishops, his reception into the Catholic Church, and then his ordination as a Catholic priest and possibly a bishop as well. Some part of this process went awry, to Pope's enormous disappointment and bitterness.
Bishop Clarence Pope's somewhat erratic journey provides what I think may be a context for Jeffrey Steenson's own resignation as an Episcopal bishop, his ordination as a Catholic priest, and his designation as US Ordinary. Steenson, remember, was clearly the number two behind Pope in the 1993 meeting with Ratzinger and apparently did much of the work in preparing the proposals in the written record.
He addressed the 2008 Anglican Use Conference in July of that year on "The Causes For My Becoming Catholic"; the text is on line. He describes what he presumably hopes his audience will believe was his last-straw issue as follows:
It is not necessary to rehearse all that was going on in the Episcopal Church at that time, except to say that the tumult reached a crescendo at the House of Bishops meeting on March 20, 2007. That was the day the bishops overwhelmingly rejected the valiant work that had been done to propose more effective instruments for the Anglican Communion, and they insisted that the polity of the Episcopal Church is independent, democratic, and connected to the rest of Anglicanism by voluntary association. By sunset I knew that I could not remain in the Episcopal Church under these circumstances.He made no mention in that address of his impending ordination as a Catholic deacon in December 2008, nor his ordination as a Catholic priest in February 2009, nor what I strongly suspect was his already-foregone designation as US Ordinary in December 2011. Nor does he honestly characterize the close call he and Pope had with going over 15 years earlier -- if he'd been so pro-Catholic then, over the usual matters of women's ordination and the 1928 BCP, why did he need to wait for a much smaller decision by the House of Bishops to make the final push? The only mention he makes of the October 1993 meeting with Ratzinger is less than fully descriptive:
In October of 1993, I had the great privilege of meeting the Holy Father at the general audience, when a group of us were in Rome to explore how Catholic unity might be realized corporately by smaller Anglican communities.It seems entirely reasonable to surmise that, had the course that Bishop Pope intended to follow in 1993 played out as planned, Steenson would almost certainly have gone over with Pope, perhaps as his vicar general and eventual successor. When the whole business was put on indefinite hold after 1994, Steenson stayed with The Episcopal Church, continuing to advance: in 2000, he became Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of the Rio Grande; in 2004, he was elected Bishop Coadjutor there, succeeding as Diocesan in 2005. At that point, he'd at minimum had his ticket punched as an Episcopal bishop, should the possibility of a Catholic personal prelature in the US re-emerge.
Opinions differ on what the problem was in 1994, and as a new Catholic, I must acknowledge my inexperience at reading Vatican tea-leaves. But it's almost impossible for me to avoid assuming that sometime after Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope in 2005, any impediments to an Anglican personal prelature in the US disappeared. Some time after 2005, but I would have to think well before any public announcement of his departure in 2007, someone, possibly Cardinal Law, who'd set up the 1993 meeting and also received Steenson as a Catholic in 2007, called him up and said something like, "Remember that thing we were talking about in 1993? Well, it's on again."
