Certainly they won't return to the ACA. Nor would they seek out the APA, which is on the verge of merging with the ACA. So, what are they going to do? Go in with any of the other tiny, corrupt "continuing Anglican" splinter groups? Indeed, the Ordinariate itself looks less and less like a good option, even assuming it would eventually accept the parish. I've been told, and not even in confidence, that any Ordinariate group that got started in Los Angeles would now be entirely new and separate from St Mary of the Angels, and it would be under the supervision of Andrew Bartus, pastor of his white people's group out in Orange County.
I believe this is largely because Bartus, despite his immaturity and lack of pastoral experience, is a member of the Fort Worth in-group that travels first class in Ordinariate circles, so he's assured preferment. On the other hand, the faithful St Mary's parishioners have made it clear that, given their history with Bartus and their knowledge of his character, they would never accept him as a pastor. So there you are, at least the Ordinariate in-group has a grasp of one reality -- whether they think they can find a whole new flock of docile Anglo-Catholics in Hollywood is something else.
This goes in turn to the question someone e-mailed me with a few weeks ago: why would people need the inducement of an Ordinariate to become Catholic? I've kept returning to this question, because a version of it pops out of the story of Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope and the 13-year delay in Anglicanorum coetibus. Bishop Pope was going to become Catholic, but clearly only with a sweetener, which apparently included his appointment as Ordinary. When that fell through, he didn't even stay Catholic. Why indeed would people need the inducement of an Ordinariate to become Catholic, because that's clearly what some people need! Frankly, my opinion is that Steenson is cast from the same Clarence Pope mold, and he wouldn't have gone in without a sweetener, either.
As I said the other week, the message I'm beginning to get from how this journey is turning out is that Anglo-Catholicism in many of its forms is a dead end. "Continuing Anglicanism" is full of opportunists, charlatans, and con artists. The Roman Catholic Ordinariate is currently run by people who don't seem to be getting the message from the new Pontiff, who has been saying over and over words to this effect:
During an assembly in Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican on Thursday evening, Pope Francis asked the gathered bishops of Italy to heed to a new pastoral vision. . . .“We are not the expression of a structure or Organizational necessity," Francis proclaimed. "[But] the sign of the presence and action the Risen Lord,” which requires a kind of “spiritual vigilance.”
“The lack of vigilance … makes the pastor lukewarm; he becomes distracted, forgetful and even impatient; it seduces him with the prospect of a career, the lure of money, and the compromises with the spirit of the world; it makes him lazy, turning him into a functionary, a cleric worried more about himself, about organizations and structures, than about the true good of the People of God,” Francis said.
