Capt. Louis Renault: What on earth brought you to Casablanca?The first item of business I have, which will almost certainly be a process of wrapping up this journey, is this: were Cardinals Manning and Mahony, at the time Archbishops of Los Angeles, justified in turning down St Mary of the Angels in its effort to become a Roman Catholic Anglican Use parish in the mid-1980s?
Rick Blaine: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Capt. Louis Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick Blaine: I was misinformed.
I think they were. In the process of becoming Catholic at Our Mother of Good Counsel, the parish a few blocks away from St Mary's, I discovered that it had gone through its own period of angry dissent in the 1970s. I don't know all the details, although there are people there, including Fr Mott, who lived through that time and have vivid memories (Fr Mott has said that it provoked a crisis for him over his own vocation). The most I can say, subject to correction from those more knowledgeable, is that it was basically over Vatican II, that the senior priest at the time barricaded himself in the rectory, that parishioners were picketing, and that Cardinal Manning finally had to get involved and put a stop to it.
By the time St Mary's left The Episcopal Church and entered its first set of lawsuits, the business at Our Mother of Good Counsel would still have been vivid recent history for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Leaving the question of women's ordination aside, liturgical modernization would have been basically the same issue that provoked the controversies at both parishes. I have a feeling that, although Cardinals Manning and Mahony were both liberals, the question of church authority would have been paramount: St Mary's, if admitted as an Anglican Use parish, could potentially have become a locus of anti-Vatican II dissent just a few blocks away from a parish where this had already been a sore point. Indeed, liturgical conservatives like Charles Coulombe were following St Mary's application to join the Ordinariate in 2012; while I'm sure they meant no overall harm, the liturgical issues were still present and still the same. If I'm correct, turning St Mary's down in the mid-1980s would have been a no-brainer.
While we were on vacation, my wife and I went to mass at a Catholic parish where problems had come up due to the appointment of two new priests with Spanish surnames: pledges and receipts were down 20%, with parishioners leaving on the basis that the diocese was going to "turn it into a Mexican parish". I suppose this is one thing bishops are for; he has my sympathy in this matter. I would also guess that this sort of thing has been going on since before St Paul's epistles. But why would any bishop want to admit a new parish that was already going through this sort of thing?
So, in hindsight, that's my answer to the first question I began asking when I started going to St Mary's.
