Should be quite an altar party for, what, 20 parishioners, plus a security guard? This would be the approximate number Mrs Bush gave the local paper in July. What's the big deal here?
The only conclusion I can draw is it's the money. But how much money are we actually talking about? For the short time I was interim treasurer, in late 2011, I got a picture of what was involved. I prepared a budget plan before the dissidents threw me out, so here's what the money looked like as of 2012: Total monthly income was about $28,000. However, this included pledge and plate of about $6,000, which can't possibly be the same with the purge in membership after 2012, as well as maybe $400 from hall rental to 12-step and other groups, which were thrown out by the dissidents. So we're down to maybe $22,000 a month rental from Citibank for the corner lot belonging to the parish.
Total monthly expenses at the time I put together the budget were in the $24,000 range, so without pledge and plate and hall rental, the parish would not have been able to remain in the black after the 2012 problems, all other things being equal. However, the competing vestries, elected and unelected, have both promised money to two competing sets of attorneys for ongoing legal expenses. All things simply are not equal now. The parish's resources are going to be largely dissipated in lawsuits, which haven't ended, and for which attorneys have yet to be paid.
In addition, the building is 80 years old. A windfall payment in 2011 allowed some deferred maintenance to be undertaken, but the building has continuing plumbing and termite issues, and it will still need to be maintained.
Without attending the November 16 festivities (if I tried, I assume Mrs Bush would summon the police, with Marsh et al pretending this wasn't happening), I could probably write for Bp Marsh and the others something much like the empty verbiage and happy talk they'll deliver in their homilies and little speeches at the reception. New beginning! Great new things! Bright new future for the ACA! Let us move forward in a spirit of (I hate to write this, but I'm sure it will be said) RECONCILIATION!! The security guard will be watching the door and will not applaud, of course.
The money, though, is what this has all been about, and the money isn't there. The church was barely in the black before the troubles began; now everything and more is certainly spoken for. The ACA is not going to get any money out of St Mary of the Angels, and it will likely lose money net-net on all the travel expenses for the bishops to attend the rededication. What happened?
I'm still intrigued at yesterday's comment at the Freedom for St Mary's blog, to the effect that the dissidents lied to Messrs Lancaster and Anastasia about the legal status of the agreements that the elected vestry had executed with the Catholic Church. I'm less interested in the legal specifics, which can be argued (that's what courtrooms are for), than in the assumption that the dissidents lied. In my experience, they've made so many statements that I know to be false that I've got to say this is a most reasonable assumption.
So many lies were being told in that place that more than one person familiar with the parish's history has sighed and said, half in jest, "That place needs an exorcism". As a Catholic, I believe in the existence of both angels and demons as a matter of faith, as outlined in the Catechism. Indeed, Fr Kelley conducted the 2011 Lenten study group on C.S.Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. At the time, I thought they were a little too cute and far-fetched; now I think Fr Kelley was on to something.
The Tempter and his assistants approach us through our weaknesses. Greed is one of the seven weaknesses that can lead us to sin, according to traditional theology. Our weaknesses also interfere with the spiritual discernment that lets us know if people are, among other things, telling lies. As the Orthodox priest Fr Zosima said in The Brothers Karamazov, if you lie to yourself, you'll never be able to tell if other people are lying to you.
The parish dissidents, I suspect, have been lying to the ACA all along about the money they can get out of St Mary of the Angels. They must certainly have been supported in this by the late Canon Anthony Morello, who appears to have gained the trust of the bishops by suggesting he could get that money for them. The ACA hierarchy, a group of people with character flaws and secrets, has never been in a position to discern whether they're being lied to. Beyond that, greed is something that works out of all proportion to reality: true crime programs on cable are full of stories about people who will kill for a few thousand dollars insurance, money they'd run though in a matter of weeks. But they'll kill for it. Something like that, I'm convinced, is what's working in the little minds that run the ACA.
Indeed, the glimmer of understanding that the money isn't really there is what's driving the continuing lawsuits against Fr Kelley -- if it isn't there, he must have stolen it! The fact is, though, that the money was never there.
The money and the ACA's deluded expectations are what this "rededication" is all about.
