Unanswered Questions

Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand ends its narrative about 1999 and is in any case based on an incomplete written record, supplemented by the oral history of participants whose knowledge of the circumstances is incomplete or biased. It's brought us about as much as we can know about Louis Falk and his role in the ACC-TAC-ACA up to this point.

There are numerous unanswered questions.

• Bess was either unaware of, or chose not to mention, Falk's defrocking by The Episcopal Church in 1966, although it appears that this was known to figures in the ACC at the time of Falk's 1991 departure. While we now have confirmation from the Diocese of Fond du Lac that he was defrocked, we still don't know the circumstances that led to that outcome. The Episcopal Church tends to regard deposition/defrocking as a very last resort, and in recent decades has not used it as discipline for things like simple adultery, no matter how conspicuous. I've heard several versions of the Falk story, at least one of which would be, if true, explosive. Should such circumstances emerge, this would probably have a near-fatal effect on the ACA, although the ACA is rapidly shrinking in any case. It would certainly be prudent for the APA, considering merger with the ACA, to investigate this matter further. As the case of retired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony indicates, even a retired or semi-retired status does not insulate a prelate from major scandal.
• His Wikipedia entry says, "From 1976 to 1981 he was President of General Growth Management Company in Des Moines, Iowa." We know nothing of Falk's career from his defrocking in 1966 to his appointment at General Growth Management in 1976, ten years later, nor why, after five years, he left that position. However, the other circumstances of his biography suggest his business career may have been as rough a ride as his ecclesiastical career.
• We know nothing of how St Aidan's Des Moines got its start, apparently de novo as a "continuing" parish, nor how it came to call Falk, a defrocked Episcopal priest, as its rector.
• We know nothing of how Falk came to the attention of "Bishop" James Mote, one of the original "continuing" bishops who emerged from the 1977 St Louis meeting. Mote's motto was "Play dirty and pray!" Did this have a bearing on Falk's rapid rise under Mote within the ACC? It's puzzling that Mote, who left The Episcopal Church over doctrinal issues, would choose to ally himself so closely with an ex-cleric who'd left it due to scandal. One would think the grapevine would have made the circumstances of Falk's departure known to Mote.
• Bess's narrative ends before Falk's retirements, in 2002 as Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, in 2007 as Bishop of the Missouri Valley, and apparently sometime after 2009 as President of the ACA House of Bishops. I've been told that the 2002 retirement as Primate of the TAC was forced and due to a "miscalculation", of which we currently know nothing.
• Nor do we have a clear picture of Falk's continuing behind-the-scenes role in the TAC and the ACA. By his own testimony, he continued to exercise episcopal authority over St Mary of the Angels as of 2010, involving himself in the Patrimony of the Primate, although the Patrimony was specifically the creature of Archbishop Hepworth. What is Falk's de facto current role?
• What was Falk's role in the forced retirement of Hepworth as TAC Primate? It's worth noting that Samuel Prakash, Hepworth's replacement as "acting Primate" of the TAC, was among those consecrated with Falk at Deerfield Beach, FL in 1991, when Hepworth wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye.

As always, information will be greatly appreciated, anonymity maintained.

The More Things Change,

the more they stay the same. A visitor, noting the near-constant maneuvering by Louis Falk, "Archbishop" successively of the ACC, TAC, and ACA in the 1980s and 90s, points out a recent example of similar hyperactive politics, the consecration as bishop of The Rt Rev Robert Todd Giffin, of the Diocese of Mid-America, Anglican Province of America (APA), on Saturday 6th October 2012. Of note is the presence of "Presiding Bishop" Brian Marsh of the ACA as a co-consecrator, along with Walter Grundorf of the APA. Regular visitors here know that Marsh and Grundorf have been kissy-kissy of late, going on an ecumenical cruise to the Greek islands together with their wives last May.

Giffin, I'm told, is a fascinating case, as "continuing" bishops tend to be. A Nashotah House alumnus, as far as my informants are aware, while at Nashotah House he was a seminarian under the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy. However, after graduating Nashotah House he is said to have done some work with the Charismatic Episcopal Church and later served at two ACC parishes (one in Wisconsin and one Indianapolis, IN). He then moved to southern Indiana and entered The Episcopal Church through the Diocese of Springfield, IL and started a parish in Evansville, IN, which has gone through the following mutations:

1. 2004- Faith Anglican Ministries founded (1979 Rite 2 parish under the oversight of Diocese of Springfield- TEC)
2. 2005- Changed name to All Saints Anglican Church (ASB parish under the Diocese of Bolivia)
3. 2007- Changed name to The Shepherds Church (Various liturgies under first the diocese of Bolivia and then CANA)
4. 2008- Changed name to St. Andrew's Anglican Church (Straight 1928 BCP Under 1st CANA and then the ACA)
5. 2009- Changed name to Western Rite Orthodox Mission of Evansville (under the Antiochian Church)
6. Part of 2009- A bit sketchy during some of that year. Every few days a different jurisdiction was listed on the website (one was the APCK). However, my informants do not know what happened and if there was any official connection with any of these jurisdictions.
7. 2009 or 2010 All Saints Anglican Church (1928 BCP and Anglican Missal parish under the APA Diocese of Mid America). This has remained the same since 2010.

And of course, from the "ecumenical" record of the ACC, the AEC, the TAC, the ACA, and the APA, as well as the record of this Evansville parish, they're going to live happily ever after in the APA, don't you think?

The 1991 Merger Between The ACA And The AEC

was troubled. AEC "Archbishop" Anthony Clavier, with his questionable personal history, was a ticking time bomb, something that Louis Falk, with a skeleton in his own closet, almost certainly recognized from the start. Douglas Bess continues the story,

In developments that some members of the ACC could have predicted would occur, Bishop Clavier resigned from the ACA [in 1995] amid allegations of sexual misconduct. . . . He reportedly would invite female parishioners into his office and then "come onto them." He was further reported to have told them that they should be "honored for Jesus Christ to want your body." (pp 210-211)

According to Bess, there were those who sensed an invisible hand at work, and not that of the Almighty:

[T]here were others who thought that Bishop Falk had maneuvered the situation against Clavier. However, Falk continued to emphasize that Clavier's exodus was a serious loss for the ACA, and it was also reported that Falk was "staggered by the news" of the charges against Clavier. (pp 211-212)

The bottom line, of course, was that Falk had maneuvered the AEC into an ACA that, purged of the anti-Falk ACC faction, was now exclusively a Falk domain with the departure of the AEC's Clavier. Nevertheless, the merger soon enough proved unstable.

In the months following Clavier's departure, disputes began to arise over decisions being made by the Standing Committee [of the ACA Diocese of the Eastern United States, which had absorbed the AEC and replaced Clavier pending election of a successor]. Within a short time, over half of the diocese['s] parishes withdrew from the ACA, and eventually formed yet another Continuing Anglican body known as the Anglican Province in America (APA), electing Bishop Walter Grundorf as its new leader, Interestingly, many of those who went with the APA tended to be comprised of original members of the AEC, and those who remained in the newly shrunken ACA tended to have been those who were originally affiliated with the ACC. (p 212)

I don't think it will escape many regular visitors here to recognize that the APA and the ACA have recently formed an intercommunion agreement, with the intention of full merger (actually, re-merger). Since the same players are involved -- Grundorf on the APA side, Falk on the ACA, working through his stooge Brian Marsh, it's difficult for me to imagine an outcome different from the one that took place in 1995.

But Charlie Brown always trusts Lucy with the football.

The ACC Bishops Weren't Fooled

by Falk's behind-the-scenes maneuvering in 1991.

In a meeting held in Deerfield Beach, Florida, in June of 1991, Falk and Bishop Connors of the ACC met with Clavier, Fr Frank Pannitti, and Fr Walter Crespo of the AEC, to discuss selections for potential bishops and priests to serve the TAC in South America. (pp 200-201)

Note that Falk, having created a superdenominational body in the TAC under his exclusive control, then proceeded to deal with the AEC outside the channels of the ACC bishops, who had (correctly) been expressing serious reservations about the dodgy AEC "Archbishop" Anthony Clavier.

An ACC priest from Colombia, Fr Victor Manuel Cruz-Blanco, tried to convince Falk that some of the candidates were unfit for their office, and noted that one of them had been denied the priesthood in the ACC due to some alleged moral misconduct while studying as a Roman Catholic seminarian, only to be ordained later into the AEC. Falk withdrew into a private meeting with Clavier and Connors, eventually returning to inform Fr Cruz-Blanco that the questionable candidates would be accepted into the TAC since, it was declared, the South American region was henceforth under their control. The next day they informed the Colombian priest that he was no longer to refer to himself as the Vicar-General of Colombia, that he was no longer to write letters to any of his fellow priests, and that all of his candidates for the priesthood were to be handed over to Fr Crespo's supervision. (p 201)

Once the ACC bishops realized that Falk had in effect appropriated their authority via the TAC and had been de facto operating a denomination merged with the AEC without their approval, they brought formal charges against him in August, 1991.

In other words (to many within the ACC), his actions gave the appearance of covert machinations of a man who was trying to take as many as he could from his old ecclesiastical body before he bolted for another. (p 202)

However, the September 1991 trial didn't take place, because one of the bishops on the court had to leave due to the death of his mother, leaving the proceeding without a quorum. According to Bess, the ACC then made a compromise, allowing Falk to take his diocese with him out of the ACC.

Falk attended the Deerfield Beach meeting in October, at which the Diocese of the Holy Trinity, a reported 70 percent of the Diocese of the South, and a smattering of parishes from both the ACC and other Continuing bodies merged with the AEC to form the Anglican Church in America (ACA)[.] (p 202-3)

I'm told that in the ACA, Falk kept the titles of Archbishop and Metropolitan of the West and added the title "Primate of All of the United States of America." (Clavier was allowed to call himself Archbishop, Metropolitan of the East, and "Primate of the Untied States of America.") The ACC majority met shortly afterward and elected Bishop Lewis as its new Metropolitan. But even before the October meeting, a new AEC scandal emerged involving Clavier, Crespo, and Crespo's priests in New Jersey.

[E]vidence emerged during the investigation that Clavier had unknowingly ordained a priest who had been a bigamist, but then had only mildly disciplined the priest for concealing the impropriety from his bishop. Worse still, Clavier had "supported" a priest who had been placed in a mental hospital for sexually assaulting young boys. (p 203)

We're seeing a pattern that will continue with Falk and his successors in the ACA-TAC up to the present: a willingness to work with and through priests who have records of scandal in other denominations, as long as they're useful to Falk and his successors. Falk himself, of course, has exactly that sort of record, so it shouldn't be surprising that he's not squeamish when it comes to others. The example of retired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, though, suggests that memory is long in cases like this, and the ACA should beware of it. "Presiding Bishop" Marsh, wouldn't it be wise to get out in front of what could blow up regarding "Archbishop" Falk?

The Fairfield Conference That I Mentioned Yesterday

displayed a pattern that was becoming common in "continuing Anglican" "ecumenical" meetings: there's a head-fake toward unity, followed by a purge of those who, unwisely, come out in favor. I've already discussed "Bishop" Robin Connors, who appears in Divided We Stand sponsoring a similar 1981 "ecumenical" meeting in Spartanburg, SC. Connors's parish, St Francis Spartanburg, had been part of the Polish National Catholic Church until 1982, when the PNCC dropped its Anglican rite provision. Tbe parish then petitioned for direct episcopal oversight from Louis Falk of the ACC (i.e., a "peculier"), something Falk has frequently allowed, and which contributed to several subsequent misunderstandings in the St Mary of the Angels cases.

The outcome of the Spartanburg meeting was that there was no outcome. The ACC was all for unification, except that Falk in particular questioned the consecrations of the bishops in any competing denomination, so that intercommunion, in the sense of each denomination recognizing the episcopal actions (such as ordinations) of bishops in other denominations, would be impossible. Falk was all for unity except when it involved unity! This has been a typical pattern for Falk all along.

Interestingly, St Francis Spartanburg tells me that it has on its records that "In 1987, Father Connors was elected Bishop of the Provincial Synod of New Orleans." This diocese remains in the rump ACC, but does not appear as an ACA diocese, while Connors, as we've seen, followed Falk into the ACA after the 1991 split. At the same time, it appears that St Francis Spartanburg never left the direct supervision of "Archbishop" Falk, so that his home parish wasn't in his own diocese.

AEC-ACC unity talks continued without a resolution into 1990. An added complication was Falk's desire to create the Traditional Anglican Communion as a worldwide body incorporating the ACC. At a meeting in Des Moines in 1990, the ACC bishops were still unable to decide whether they could rule on the validity of AEC orders. Nevertheless, the Traditional Anglican Communion was formed in a meeting that same year in Victoria, BC, with Falk elected its first Primate, though at the time this was essentially just a retitling of the ACC-under-Falk, incorporating as well the small, Falk-allied Anglican Catholic Church of Canada.

Falk either continued to politic for unification with the AEC, or he began laying the groundwork for a future withdrawal from the ACC, according to which side is recounting the events. He began circulating to strategically placed priests, without the knowledge of his fellow bishops, drafts of a pro-unity proposal that he was encouraging them to put forward at their diocesan synods leading up to the Provincial Synod in October of 1991. . . . He was also quite possibly establishing connections by which a potential withdrawal on his part from the ACC could lead to the greatest possible success. (p 199)

He and "Archbishop" Anthony Clavier of the AEC then issued a "Call for Unity", inviting all continuing Anglicans to another "ecumenical" conference in Deerfield Beach, FL in October of 1991.

. . . Falk quickened the pace of his behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Just as the majority of the laity within the Continuing movement had been unaware that he had seeded resolutions into local diocesan synods, and that he had attempted to monitor debates held on these resolutions, they were also largely unaware that he was taking allegedly disgruntled parishes in the Diocese of the South under his wing. In July of 1991, two parishes from Florida and North Carolina contacted Falk with requests to be placed under the Patrimony, the stated reasons revolving around internal parish disputes that had not been handled properly by the diocesan bishop, William Lewis. However, just as likely, the real issue could have centered upon a desire by these churchmen to accompany Falk in what was no doubt perceived as an inevitable coming split in the ACC. (p 200)

From early in Falk's career with the ACC, we're seeing a pattern of intensely duplicitous activity, aimed entirely at furthering his own ambitions at the expense of the overall movement, although by 1990, as Bess points out, a "continuing Anglican" movement was a chimera. The pattern includes working through unscrupulous proteges like Robin Connors, behind-the-scenes maneuvers, extra-canonical actions including the frequent creation of "peculiers" in order to bypass the normal workings of dioceses, and intervention in parish politics at the behest of disgruntled minorities where the agendas of the minorities matched his own.

There's nothing new in what happened at St Mary's in 2010-2012, and the strategy is vintage Louis Falk. Now and then, people have contacted me in effect urging me to back off Falk, his heart is in the right place, he's done things to help St Mary's behind the scenes. Baloney. The only guy he wants to help behind the scenes is Louis Falk. Based on the pattern we've seen, characters like Anthony Morello or Stephen Strawn have acted either on his specific instruction or with his tacit approval. The best way for Falk to demonstrate that I'm incorrect would be for him to announce publicly that he does not support the ACA's campaign of legal harassment and character assassination against Fr Christopher Kelley.

More to come.

The Utterly Misplaced Ambition

that seems to be behind Falk's rise within the ACC during the 1980s, whereby he quite ruthlessly shoved aside the motley collection of alcoholics, misfits, poseurs, and sexual nonconformists who constituted the hierarchy to become Archbishop and stay at the top, is astonishing, especially in light of how inconsequential the tiny ACC was in the overall scheme of things.

Although the full record is incomplete, he first appears as a "Fr. Louis W. Falk" on page 154 of Bess's book,

a man so seemingly high-church that he had once written an article extolling the virtues of Marian devotion, including keeping the Feast of the Assumption (though he tellingly called it a "pious opinion" and tried to justify the practice with Biblical evidence.)

At that time (the Mobile synod of 1980), Falk appears to have been a reliable ally of the Anglo-Catholic Bishop Mote of the ACC, and in consequence, according to Bess, he was "appointed" (p 155) by other bishops as Ordinary of a newly-created ACC Missionary Diocese of the Missouri Valley. It appears that Falk had previously been Diocesan Dean in Bishop Mote's non-geographic Diocese of the Holy Trinity.

Falk's emergence was part of a successful strategy by Bishop Mote to ally himself with influential low-church forces to seize control of the ACC for the Anglo-Catholic party, a pattern of maneuver and betrayal that Falk would continue on his own. Of the history of Falk's parish, the pre-fab chapel St Aidan's Des Moines from which he emerged, we learn nothing, other than to assume it was already in place by then. Nor do we learn precisely how Falk entered the ACC, how he became Mote's Dean, or even whether he attended the 1977 St Louis convention.

According to Bess, low- and broad-church factions within the ACC almost immediately began to express disquiet that the Anglo-Catholic side would purge them, and apparently as reassurance, the ACC bishops began formal discussions in 1981 on merger with the pre-St Louis, broad-church American Episcopal Church under "Bishop" Anthony Clavier.

Clavier is a peculiar figure, who seems to have had little theological education, but who hopped among numerous independent Anglican denominations in the UK and the US until becoming "primate" of the AEC in 1981. Later developments suggest his sexual appetites were as complex as his ecclesiastical affiliations, but it's worth noting that Falk allied himself with Clavier for precisely as long as Clavier was useful to him, but once the usefulness lapsed, Falk quickly purged him.

By 1983, for reasons not given in Bess's history, Falk had become "Archbishop" of the ACC. Even so, while merger talks with the AEC continued through the mid-1980s, Falk's position on the matter constantly changed. Falk opposed the AEC's independent effort to set up a franchise in India, characterizing it as a group "posing" as Anglicans (p 185). By 1986, Falk participated in one of the many quasi-ecumenical "continuing Anglican" conferences, this one in Fairfield, CT, and moved toward advocating union. Bess speculates that this was because Falk saw the likelihood of defections from the ACC if he did not.

The chief culprit in potential defections appears to have been Bishop Tillman Williams of the ACC Diocese of the South (p 186). In behind-the-scenes maneuvers, Williams was edged out.

Bishop Williams resigned from the ACC in March of 1986, announcing that he had been accepted into the [Diocese of Christ the King], and that he had been slandered by the ACC bishops. Although the allegations against Williams seem to never have been replicated in print, several sources have anonymously indicated that he was rumored at the time to have been a homosexual. . .

Since Falk was the top ACC bishop at the time, it's hard to imagine that he didn't at least condone what went on. It's certainly part of a pattern we keep seeing, whereby the "ACC bishops" (and later the ACA bishops or the TAC bishops) in a body take some despicable action, with none of the blame attaching to Louis Falk, who nevertheless always seems to be nearby.

The story will continue. I will greatly appreciate any information that can shed further light on Falk's career between the Affirmation of St Louis and the 1980 Mobile synod.

John Hepworth's Case,

where he alleged serial abuse (by his own admission, well into adulthood) by Catholic priests as a mitigating circumstance to his leaving the Catholic priesthood, got enormous attention when it became plain that, in accordance with well-established Vatican policy, once laicized, he couldn't return to the Catholic Church as a priest.

There was also a certain amount of speculation as to his motives in making the overture to Rome via the TAC in the Portsmouth letter: he somehow, in this view, wanted to make things right in bringing a large number of Anglicans back into the fold, not least himself. It was an interesting case: scandal, the Catholic Church, ecumenism, and so forth. The TAC's consistent misrepresentation of its size ("400,000") certainly made the story seem more important than it was.

It may be that the revelation of Louis Falk's own scandal has everyone shell-shocked, and other than here, there's been no public reaction. I still think it's worth drawing reasonable conclusions about Falk's motives before I move farther into the historical record as recounted in Douglas Bess's book.

In fact, there's a lot in Falk's biography that I find puzzling. A scion of a prominent Wisconsin family that had achieved great success in brewing and manufacturing, he should have gone to Yale or the equivalent in the mid 1950s -- that's what the Ivies were there for. Looking at the parallel career of John Danforth, a contemporary whose family background is also similar, is instructive indeed.

Instead, he went to then-Lawrence College in Appleton. Again, as someone who would be expected to take a key role in shepherding the family's fortunes in his generation, he should have been going on to a prestigious law, medical, or business school. Instead, he went to seminary -- at least it was prestigious. But within a few years of ordination, he found himself defrocked, which certainly raises the question of whether he had an authentic vocation.

As we'll see, by the early 1980s, he'd left the business career he'd taken up, returned to a clerical career of sorts, and began a rapid rise in the new "continuing Anglican" movement, which in the view of the chronicler Douglas Bess was initally thought to have great potential, siphoning hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of communicants away from The Episcopal Church, which had defrocked him. Might it be reasonable to surmise that his eventual role as "Archbishop" of his tiny splinter denomination was a form of, or at least an attempt at, overcompensation for his earlier failure?

I think that's one explanation for the record we see in Divided We Stand, and which I'll be discussing here.

I'll be happy, by the way, to give Falk the opportunity here to present his own version of events -- I'll be happy to do an interview, by phone or e-mail, questions submitted in advance, answers published here without revision. For that matter, he's free to contact David Virtue with his version -- I'm sure Virtue would go with it in a second. The apologia, after all, is a long-established and well-respected literary form. Well handled, it could make me look small indeed. I'm accepting that risk.

Yesterday I Mentioned

Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand: A History of Continuing Anglicanism. I believe this is as scholarly and somewhat reliable a treatment of the "continuing Anglican" movement as we're likely to get, at least for the time being, although it has flaws as scholarship (no index, for instance), and the author acknowledges that written source material is very hard to come by.

The reviews and web reactions I've seen are largely superficial and driven by the particular set of blinkers that each "continuing Anglican" who reads it appears to be wearing. The book's story covers the movement from its roots in dissatisfaction with The Episcopal Church's drift toward wacky leftism in the 1960s, through 1999 -- it's significant that it stops before the election of openly gay TEC Bishop Eugene Robinson in 2003, the Portsmouth meeting and letter of 2007, the departure of five TEC dioceses to form the ACNA in 2009, and Anglicanorum coetibus and the erection of Anglican Ordinariates in 2009 and afterward. But as analysis, as I'll discuss below, it lets a reader put Portsmouth and the Ordinariates in context.

The book has another big, big context, which Bess doesn't dilly-dally about expressing:

[B]y the 1980s the sectarians were forced to confront a more disappointing reality. Their movement had not shaken the Episcopal Church to its knees, nor had it succeeded in gaining large numbers of adherents, since the total membership in the movement numbered [optimistically] in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions, as had initially been hoped for.

Bess bookends his history with a further assessment:

Most observers of the Continuum, whether inside or outside of it, have interpreted the movement in largely negative terms. The reaction of mainstream Episcopalians has been one of near total silence for more than two decades.

As an active Episcopalian from about 1980 until my wife's and my decision to become Catholic by the best possible path in 2011, I can certainly corroborate that view. Indeed, most of the "continuers" of my acquaintance, clergy and lay, are now former "continuers" looking actively for a Plan B, who freely express the view that they've been had. Our Episcopalian friends have hardly noticed, other than to express sympathy with our parish's plight. I write here from the perspective of someone who (I think correctly) always thought the Continuum was faintly disreputable, who never seriously considered joining it, and who went into the St Mary's parish only when it was in the Patrimony of the Primate with the clear intention of becoming Catholic. Nevertheless, my wife and I were had as well.

The organizational history that Bess covers, it seems to me, has two chief strains. One is the Anglican Catholic Church, the main official body that resulted from the 1977 St Louis conference, and its quasi-ecumenical dance with the pre-St Louis American Episcopal Church, which lasted until the partial merger of the two in 1991 to form the Anglican Church in America and the subsequent Traditional Anglican Communion. The other strain covers all the other continuing bodies, including the rump ACC. Naturally, the strain that interests me is the ACC-AEC-ACA-TAC evolution. Louis Falk is a major figure throughout that history, and he appears as such in Bess's book. As a result, I'll have still more to say about Falk here, especially in light of what we know about him now. However, I very much doubt now that the ACA or the TAC will outlive Falk by much, if at all.

The history of Falk, the ACC, and the ACA also sheds light on the Portsmouth letter, and again, what we now know about Falk gives a new perspective on what happened there, what Falk and Hepworth may have intended, what they actually got from the Vatican, and how they reacted. Portsmouth, it seems to me, is simply a culmination of other quasi-ecumenical conferences post-St Louis, ranging from the 1981 Spartanburg meeting, the ACC-AEC dialogues of the 1980s, the 1991 Deerfield Beach meeting, and the subsequent purge of the AEC's Anthony Clavier from the merged ACA, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Night of the Long Knives.

Handsome is as handsome does. A leopard doesn't change its spots. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Stay tuned!

Trouble In Paradise?

I've had fragmentary reports of the St Mary of the Angels annual meeting that took place on February 3, 2013. It sounds as though, notwithstanding the ACA had excommunicated a large number of parishioners thought not to be with the program, the meeting was as long and contentious as ever, and even among the hard angry core now running the show, there was new dissent. One family, prominent among the anti-Kelley party, has now left the parish in a dispute with the redoubtable Mrs Bush, and others are apparently on the way.

I've been reading Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand: A History of Continuing Anglicanism. There was a lot I didn't know about when I thought going into the Ordinariate via St Mary of the Angels would be a good idea, but Bess's book, which was published before either the 2007 Portsmouth meeting, the departure of the ACNA dioceses, or Anglicanorum coetibus, would have explained a great deal. Hindsight is 20-20.

I'll have more to say about this book.

Who Is Louis Falk? -- V

As I've kept saying here, something about Louis Falk doesn't quite fit, no matter how I turn it. Or, as the claims manager Keyes says in Double Indemnity, "I've got a little man." Falk was an Episcopal priest from 1962 to 1965. He played the whole game, waited until he was a little older to go to seminary, went to Nashotah House. In 1962, Episcopal priest was a stable, prestigious profession. They gave you a house in a good part of town, and they gave you a good car. The Falks are a prominent Wisconsin family, too. Why would Louis Wahl Falk III, the patriarchal namesake, give that up and move to Iowa? It just doesn't fit.

Prompted by some very helpful leads, I began piecing details together, and I was finally in a position to e-mail the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac with a query. I received the following reply from the Diocesan Archivist and Historiographer:

Thank you for your inquiry. According to our canonical register and consulting diocesan journals, Louis Wahl Falk, III was ordained a Deacon on 23 January 1962 and a Priest on 6 August 1962 by the Rt. Rev. William Hampton Brady. He served as Rector at St. Augustine, Rhinelander from 1962-1965. He was suspended from ordained ministry on 24 January 1966 and deposed 24 September 1966.

"Deposed", of course, is the proper Episcopalian word for "defrocked". In addition to the record of the diocese, I found a mention on the website of St Barnabas, Tomahawk WI (which the web site notes is served by supply priests) that a Louis W. Falk had served that parish from April to May, 1965. My guess is that by the spring of 1965, Falk was already in bad odor in Rhinelander, and someone was trying to do him a favor, or perhaps he was all St Barnabas could get.

I don't want to get into the reasons Falk was defrocked -- I've heard them, of course -- but I'll say that a surmise that serious scandal was involved would not be off the mark. The Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac has always been among the most conservative, and 1966 was well before "continuing Anglicanism" in any case -- it's safe to say that theological punctiliousness was not Falk's failing. A move to Iowa would be consistent with wanting to start over in a new career, at a distance from the scene.

A clerical observer says,

That information was put pretty tightly under wraps all the years I was in the Continuum...and I know some pretty rabid "Falk Haters" in the ACC who never even said THIS!!! ... I may have heard rumors... but never knew for sure. Suspended...then deposed. Wow.

Wow indeed. While Falk is nominally retired, this information is still pertinent because Falk is still active behind the scenes, where he seems to be happiest. He transmitted the 40-page list of complaints against Fr Kelley from the small group of St Mary's dissidents to Cardinal Wuerl in late 2011. Via Anthony Morello, he told an outright falsehood to David Virtue in 2012, claiming he had never offered episcopal oversight to St Mary's, when in sworn testimony a few months later he was forced to admit that he had. He's a shadow man.

This information says a lot about Falk and the "continuing Anglican" movement. First, it confirms the impression I've always had that the movement is just faintly disreputable: the ACA and the TAC were started by a defrocked Episcopal priest, after all. The whole point of "continuing Anglicanism" has been that it's holier than The Episcopal Church -- it adheres to higher standards, a purer prayer book, no priestesses, and no gay bishops (whoops, Bishop Willars doesn't count). Except, er, two major "continuing" denominations, the ACC and the ACA/TAC, were founded by a defrocked Episcopal priest. In other words, maybe The Episcopal Church has higher standards after all.

Second is simply the issue of hypocrisy: with Falk pulling the strings via a unanimous vote in the ACA House of Bishops, the Diocese of the West conducted a kangaroo proceeding that deposed Fr Christopher Kelley on fabricated charges. Falk himself, on the other hand, was defrocked for reasons that were all too substantial and covered it up. Considering that both Louis Falk and Anthony Morello left TEC under clouds of scandal, I've got to wonder if their animus against Fr Kelley was simply because Kelley is a good man and a conscientious priest, when Falk and Morello were neither.

The third problem with "Archbishop" Falk is sincerity: once it became plain that Anglicanorum coetibus wasn't going to grandfather anyone in as a priest, and nobody was going to be a bishop, the issue also arose that nobody who was under ecclesiastical discipline would be considered for Catholic ordination. While Falk almost certainly wouldn't have become a Catholic priest due to his age, there would still have been the lingering question that he had left The Episcopal Church under discipline. His own tiny parish had so many members with divorces and remarriages, or Masonic connections, that it finally stayed out of the Ordinariate. Unspoken was the fact that Falk himself could not possibly have become a Catholic priest even if he'd wanted to: he'd left The Episcopal Church in disgrace. Another clerical observer said:

One wonders what bearing an old scandal like that could have on the more recent issues surrounding St. Mary's. Is it a permanent indictment of Falk's character? Since archbishops should be held to the highest moral standard, how is it that a man with that sort of resume, as it were, could later become the primate of the TAC. Maybe he left that little tidbit out! Perhaps the Catholic authorities at the ordinariate or the CDF did their research, found this old skeleton in Falk's closet and quietly denied him postulancy to their holy orders. Maybe that is why didn't answer my inquiry as to why he is not in the lineup for ordination in the ordinariate. After all, he is the one who brought us to this dance!

There's more about Falk that doesn't quite fit. Why did he leave the business career that was supposed to be such a success after at most 15 years? Why did he leave that and go back to the "priesthood" at tiny, prefab St Aidan's? And I've got a little man about other key players -- there's lots we don't know about "Presiding Bishop" Marsh, as well. Episcopal priest looked like a good, solid, respectable gig to him, too, or he wouldn't have become an aspirant and then a postulant and then gone to General Theological Seminary. What didn't work out there?

Gentlemen, it's Lent. You need to turn around and make things right. This isn't going to stop until you do that.

It's Lent, Guys, Time For Assessment!

A visitor takes exception to the count of 11 parishes that I gave the other day for the ACA Diocese of the West. Here is his tally:

"Eleven Parishes" is an exaggeration, no matter how you look at it. Here are the real numbers:

Alaska: One mission [St George Fairbanks]. Consisting of a tiny handful of dissidents who split from the original parish, The Church of the Redeemer - it was "Redeemer" that got to keep the bank account as well as the large piece of land purchased for a new church building - the current mission has not grown in the last five-years and is now meeting in the local Masonic Lodge. Ash Wednesday services this year were held in a parishioner's home. MISSION COUNT: 1

Arizona: At one time the DOW had 7 fairly large parishes all over Arizona. The Deanery of Arizona used to have large clericus meetings with upwards of 12-15 clergy coming to their gatherings. Now, there is only one legitimate parish [Epiphany Phoenix], where not much has changed over the last 20-years. Same Rector from the beginning (or 1984), who is now listed as the "Priest in Charge" of St. Mary of the Angels. He will turn 75 this year, far beyond the canonical age for mandatory retirement in the ACA. They recently acquired some land and have grandiose plans for a new church building with a new name, but that's been planned for the last ten-years at least. The other mission [St John's Chandler] is tiny and I doubt they ever actually have any regular services on Sunday. They are a "paper parish" at best! TRUE PARISH COUNT: 1

California: Over the years, 12-15 parishes and missions have gone away in California. Either switching jurisdictions or closing their doors for a number of reasons. At one time, the California Deanery was so big, there was talk of making it into two - North and South - due to the sheer size of the state and numbers of clergy attending clericus. St. Mary's is listed, but you know their story. The former "Cathedral" [All Saints Fountain Valley] has an aged congregation that has shrunk over the years and is currently being served by two "Sub Deacons". They list Sunday "Morning Prayer" and "Mass" - I have no idea how they are pulling that off. There is one small parish up north [St Peter's Auburn]. The Rector there pulled his parish out of the ACA/DOW near the end of Bishop Williams' term - but - then suddenly reappeared on the Diocesan list again. Nobody knows why. Another legitimate parish exists in the high-desert [St Columba's Lancaster] - a parish that voted 100% to go into the Ordinariate, but then chose to stay in the ACA. I'm sure that's a very interesting story. The other "mission" [St Stephen's Fillmore] is essentially "on paper" only - they have no congregation. The clergyman up there has tried diligently to get something going - but with no Diocesan funds, there's not much he can do. He usually posts "No services this Sunday" on their website, and to contact the clergy "for time and location". The mailing address is the vicar's home. TRUE PARISH COUNT: 4 (giving a very wide benefit of the doubt)

Hawaii - nothing. One parish closed.

Idaho - nothing

Nevada - nothing. One parish closed long time ago.

Montana: There appears to still be the one tiny mission [St Augustine of Canterbury, Hamilton] that has gone from one jurisdiction to the other over the years, with a small and aged congregation and clergyman who must be approaching 80-years old. No website. I'd be surprised it they are even still in existence. TRUE MISSION COUNT: 1 ??

Oregon: One legitimate parish with no building [St Francis Portland]. An angry offshoot from St. Mark's, Portland. Originally founded by Bishop Connors TRUE PARISH COUNT: 1

Washington: Once the home to 7 or 8 growing ACA parishes and missions, now the count is truly ZERO. One "parish" is listed, but everybody knows that the elderly priest from there has not been seen at a Synod or a clericus in over ten years. The last Bishop to visit (+Williams) reported that there is a building, but nothing is really happening there. The Rector has to be well into his 90's now. No website No way to tell if they are even still in existence. TRUE PARISH COUNT: 0

In all honesty... There are SIX parishes and two actual missions. And that's being generous.

Can anyone provide equivalent information for other ACA-TAC dioceses?

Connors Lasted Four Years as Rector Of St Mark's, Portland OR

According to the parish, from January 1998 to December 2001. However, during that time, he resigned as Bishop of the West amid controversy at the 1999 dicocesan synod. I suspect he was no more popular as a rector than he was as a bishop.

But then we have a "peculier" situation: Connors, shorn of both his see and his cure, remained in Portland and was involved in starting a new mission, St Francis Portland, OR. This was in effect in direct competition with the existing St Mark's parish -- even McDonald's doesn't set up franchises that compete directly with each other in a particular territory, but the ACA, thin on the ground to say the least, apparently saw no problem in this. (I wouldn't be surprised if this contributed to St Mark's eventual decision to leave the ACA, although that finally occurred during a dispute with Bishop Williams over Anglicanorum coetibus.) I suspect it wasn't a coincidence that St Francis Portland had the same patron as Connors's old parish, St Francis Spartanburg.

And St Francis Portland was a "peculier", directly under the Primate and not a member of the ACA Diocese of the West. Again, I suspect this was because Connors and Falk went back a long way, and Falk was going to allow St Francis Portland to poach another ACA parish if it meant favoring Connors. An e-mail to St Francis Portland, now in the ACA DOW, asking for the dates Connors was rector or priest-in-charge, has so far gone unanswered. I'm told that Connors eventually returned to Spartanburg.

Connors, without a cure and without a see, resurfaces in name as a "bishop" who had sent his "apologies" at the Portsmouth meeting in 2007. He appears in the 2008 TAC Directory as "Bishop Missioner" of "The Continuing Anglican Church of Zambia", which I strongly suspect was a sinecure in the literal sense. His address at that time was Charlotte, NC.

It looks to me as though Louis Falk's thumbprints are all over this guy's career. I will appreciate any further information anyone may have on the Rt Rev Robin Connors.

At Its Peak, The ACA Diocese Of The West

had something like 38 parishes. This would still be miniscule for a diocese in any real denomination, but from that peak, it's now down to 11, which is impossible. Robin Connors had something to do with this, but he wasn't the only one, and as I've suggested, he's more a symptom than a cause. Still, the recent history of St Mark's Portland, OR, the ACA-DOW parish of which he eventually became rector, is worth review.

On January 17, 1993, St Mark's Portland officially withdrew from The Episcopal Church and affiliated itself with the Anglican Church in America. The Rev. Charles H. Osborn, who had served as rector from 1962 to 1974 and who had helped found the ACA, returned to serve as interim priest-in-charge until a new rector could be called.

That new rector was Fr. Dartland Anderson. I'm told that possibly in the late 1980s or perhaps 1990-91, Anderson had attempted to bring his Northern California house-church (just him and his wife) into the ACC's Diocese of the Pacific and Southwest pre-ACA, when Fr. Greg Wilcox of St Mary of the Angels, then ACC, was in charge of vocations and the examining chaplains board. "Fr" Anderson had no theological education and had dubious sources of Succession. Fr. Wilcox told him that he needed to get some training and formation and they might talk again in a few years.

A few years passed, and St. Mary's was being wooed by Bishop Mark Holiday. Holiday was the first ACA Bishop of the West, having previously been AEC Bishop of the West before the ACA- ACC merger and the 1991 Deerfield Beach, FL ACA consecrations. I'm told that Bishop Holiday showed up at the St. Mary's parish office with the new rector of St. Mark's Portland - and head of the Examining Chaplains for the New DOW/ACA - none other than Dartland Anderson. This was one of many reasons why St. Mary's stayed out of the ACA as long as it could, choosing to stay "peculier" under "Archbishop" Falk, which lasted until the parish was ordered to the synod to vote for Robin Connors, Bishop Holiday's eventual successor. However, following what I'm told were controversies over money, Anderson resigned as rector of St Mark's Portland.

Anderson has since resurfaced, having rearranged his name slightly, as The Rt Rev Ian Anderson, a "Bishop" at something called the "Diocese of the Resurrection of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA", which of course is not The Episcopal Church. What he is actually running appears to be a wedding chapel, rental cost $150, organist $250, honorarium for the bishop extra. If nothing else, this is an indication of the very thin line between respectability and charlatanism in "continuing Anglicanism". My sources wish him well.

Anderson's successor at St Mark's Portland was Fr Martin Wray, who unlike Anderson was the real thing: he was from the UK, with the right accent, indeed a real Church of England priest, which might ordinarily have caused a "continuing Anglican" parish some hesitation, but perhaps the posh accent allayed any concerns. However, as befits an actual priest in the Anglican Communion, he began to express objections to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and he mooted moving the altar out from the wall in order to celebrate the mass ad populum in proper style. (Well, what else did they expect?)

I'm told that he also fired the whole altar guild within a month of his arrival, and his dog, given the freedom of the parish, tended to defecate in the Lady Chapel. Sounds entirely U to me. Having spent thousands to bring him over, the parish spent thousands more to send him back.

Like that of Ian Dartland Anderson, Wray's story doesn't end there. I don't normally post pictures here -- I'm sure you get enough at the Smuts site -- but I can't resist this one:

Father Wray is in gold tights on the left. From the UK Daily Mail:

A charity 'vicars and tarts' party has sparked outrage amongst church-goers after a clergyman wore a flamboyant mini-skirt and leggings outfit for the event.

The Reverend Martin Wray, of St Lawrence the Martyr Church, South Shields, has been on sick leave for almost three months after some of his parishioners expressed alarm at his part in the night in August [2010], which aimed to raise funds for local charities.

What was meant to be a fun-filled affair has divided opinion with some of the congregation believing the vicar's decision to dress up as a 'tart' had brought his parish into disrepute after a photograph of Rev Wray at the party, was published in the local newspaper, the Shields Gazette.

Wray, who had been married with children at St Mark's Portland, entered into a gay partnership in May 2010. He subsequently resigned his cure and retired from St Lawrence the Martyr and the CofE. It's worth pointing out that in Anglicanism, a rector is called by a vestry with the assent of a bishop. The ACA Bishop of the West who assented to Wray's hiring at St Mark's Portland shares in the poor judgment and poor stewardship reflected in that episode. Wray was the real thing, all right.

Wray's successor as rector of St Mark's Portland was ACA Bishop of the West Robin Connors.

Many thanks to my anonymous informant for the links in this post.

The Nicest Thing I've Been Told

about The Rt Rev Robin Connors is that he was an egomaniac. He is most pertinent to our story as Bishop of the ACA Diocese of the West from 1994 to 1999, when he resigned amid controversy at that year's diocesan synod. He was ordinary for St Mary of the Angels during a fairly quiet time in the parish's history, but his own history during the last years of his career is anything but quiet. However, I believe he's important here less for what he himself was than for what it says about Louis Falk, whom I'm increasingly convinced is the shadow man behind this whole sorry story.

Connors first appears as Priest in Charge of St Francis Anglican in Spartanburg, SC, an American Episcopal Church parish since 1970. The AEC, founded in 1968, was an early breakaway from The Episcopal Church, predating the "continuing Anglican" movement derived from the St Louis Declaration; it appears to have been a reaction to the centrist liberalism of TEC in the 1960s, and it appears to have had a component of segregationism, since TEC banned segregation in its parishes in 1964. By 1986, St Francis Anglican Spartanburg had become an Anglican Catholic Church parish, with Connors its rector. Connors was consecrated an ACC bishop in 1988, along with Richard C Willars, who died of AIDS at St Mary's in 1993.

In 1991, the Anglican Church in America was formed as a merger of the AEC and the ACC, although most of the ACC stayed out. It's plain that Connors was of the ACA faction under Falk: he next appears as one of the eleven original bishops of the ACA consecrated in 1991. His title was "Assistant Bishop to the Metropolitan", who of course was none other than Louis Falk. It appears that Connors remained at Spartanburg as rector as well as an ACA bishop, but St Francis Anglican Spartanburg was, I'm told, a "peculier" directly under Falk and not a parish within the ACA Diocese of the Eastern United States. Connors's consecration as an early member of what appears to have been an ACA clique, and the status of his parish as a special case, suggest that he had some measure of favor from Falk.

In 1993, under a new title of "Executive Director of the International Anglican Fellowship", he went to South Africa to start the TAC franchise there, returning to Spartanburg after about a year. (The International Anglican Fellowship, which describes itself as the missionary arm of the Traditional Anglican Communion, has on its website a message indicating "The IAF is down to two months of operating funds"; the fundraising plea is from a former executive director and successor to Connors, located in Victor, MT.)

According to the South African account, Connors returned to Spartanburg in 1994. However, that year he emerged as Louis Falk's preferred candidate for ACA Bishop of the West at that year's diocesan synod, succeeding Bishop Mark G. Holiday, another of the ACA founding clique. St Mary of the Angels, which since the 1991 formation of the ACA had been a "peculier" and not a parish of the diocese, was nevertheless ordered by Falk to send a delegation to the synod in San Jose and ordered specifically to vote for Connors. Connors, from South Carolina, had had no prior connection with the Diocese of the West.

I'm told by a source who was present that Connors did not come off well; the entire St Mary's delegation found him egotistical and abrasive. The delegation, after meeting with Connors, went to Falk to complain, but Falk countered that Connors was a better candidate than his opponent. "It's not the devil you know, it's the devil you don't know," Falk is reported to have responded. "I can control Connors. I can't control the other guy." He reiterated his order to vote for Connors; even so, at least one member of the St Mary's delegation voted against him. Naturally, with delegates instructed by Falk on how to vote, Connors was elected, and in fact he was consecrated at St Mary of the Angels in 1995.

There's more to come on Connors. The takeaway here, though, is that I don't think anything happens in the ACA or the TAC that doesn't still have Falk's tacit support. This most certainly includes the campaign of legal harassment and character assassination against Fr Kelley. I believe that if Louis Falk were to oppose it, it would immediately stop.

"Archbishop" Falk?

More Ecclesiastical Peculiars (or "Peculiers")

I learn via two clerical observers that there were more "peculiars" in the ACA and the TAC, which in the absence of a readily available definition on the web, I will speculate is a parish that is not part of a regular diocese, but is uniquely under the see of a primate or metropolitan. Clarifications from knowledgeable parties will be most welcome. One observer has suggested that Archbishop Hepworth's Patrimony of the Primate was nothing but a big peculiar. Among other things, I would assume that the advantage of being a peculiar is that it is not subject to diocesan canons, and it is not subject to supervision from a diocesan ordinary. We may assume that a primate or metropolitan would have less interest in supervising an individual parish, and being made a peculiar could amount to a kind of preferential treatment (i.e., an opportunity for corruption). One clerical source points out that being a peculiar amounts to an exemption from normal requirements for a financial audit.

I'm told that Archbishop Hepworth had at least two "peculiars": the parish at St Francis, Portland, OR, which was not in the ACA Diocese of the West, and Fr Anthony Chadwick, a non-parochial priest living in France, who runs a blog, and whose ecclesiastical status has been unclear since Hepworth retired. The parish St Francis Portland appears to be related to the unique status of ACA Bishop Robin Connors, who will be the subject of at least one post here as I develop more information. Connors had also been the rector of St Francis Spartanburg, SC, which was an American Episcopal Church parish from the founding of the AEC in 1970 and then moved into the pre-ACA Anglican Catholic Church. Connors and St Francis Spartanburg, unlike most of the ACC, moved into the ACA with Falk. St Francis Spartanburg was then made a peculiar under newly-minted Archbishop Louis Falk and was not a part of the ACA Diocese of the Eastern United States. As I noted the other day, St Mary of the Angels was a peculiar under Archbishop Falk from 1991 to 1994 or 1995.

As usual, I will greatly appreciate corrections, additions, and clarifications. However, in the context of what I believe I've learned about Bishop Connors, this strongly suggests preferential treatment, with the clear opportunity for corruption. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: I am grateful for corrections and clarifications as usual: a knowledgeable visitor points out that what I have spelled as "peculiar" is in fact "peculier" with two e's. Wikipedia notes, "A Royal Peculiar (also spelled "Peculier"), an area including one or more places of worship under the jurisdiction of the British monarchy." As I noted the other day, a fragmentary Parliamentary record suggests these were abolished around 1848 in the UK, but as with many other archaic corrupt practices, revived under the banner of adherence to the true and ancient faith by continuing Anglicans.

A Correction And Some Added Information

A source has clarified the situation with the St Mary's rectory and where Bishop Willars had his deathbed. As I'd mentioned in yesterday's post, the St Mary's rectory is tiny, and it was difficult to imagine Fr Wilcox (described to me as 6'3", 320 pounds), his wife, and a terminally ill patient sharing those quarters, and I was right. Bishop Willars was in fact set up in an office area at the rear of the parish basement proper, adjoining the rectory via a breezeway. That office later became the parish library. My source doesn't know if Willars actually passed away in that space, but he spent most of his final confinement there.

Regarding the rectory, my source continues,

The cotttage behind the church was never in use as a rectory [uring most of the Wilcoxs's tenure]. . . . The parish rented a house about 6-doors to the west on Finley, on the opposite side of the street[.] This was the rectory for many years. When the owner sold it[,] the Wilcoxes moved briefly to a condo in Glendale[, and then they decided] to be frugal and live in the tiny cottage. The Wilcoxes lived in the Finley rectory at the time of Bishop Willars's death.

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.

An Ecclesiastical Peculiar

An informed observer has raised a question about the timeline from the Freedom for St Mary blog that I quoted in yesterday's post.

I have a clear recollection of reading in The Christian Challenge at the time, ca. 1992, that when Fr. Wilcox came to St. Mary as its Rector he was an ACC priest and St. Mary was an ACC church (meaning the majority portion of the ACC that had rejected the merger between the minority of the ACC and the AEC, and which called itself the ACA). Subsequently, Wilcox had a fight with the ACC's Bishop Seeland, which led to both Wilcox and St. Mary switching to the ACA, which was then, of course, headed by Falk[.]

I've raised this with other informed parties, who tell me that as of the early 1990s, St Mary of the Angels Hollywood was an "ecclesiastical peculiar" under Bishop Falk. A google search on this term turns up not much useful, other than an impression that in the Church of England, ecclesiastical peculiars seem to have been abolished around the same time as rotten boroughs, for roughly the same reasons. That Bishop Falk and the ACA would be perpetuating practices long abandoned elsewhere as corrupt is, as we've already seen, not a surprise -- but perpetuate Anglican purity we must!

Fr Wilcox, I'm told, came from the ACC parish St Luke's La Verne, CA and had been an ACC priest. St Mary's jurisdiction appears to have been an "ecclesiastical peculiar" until 1994, when Falk ordered the parish to attend the ACA diocesan synod in San Jose and vote for Falk's preferred candidate for Bishop of the West, Robin Connors, who was consecrated ACA Bishop of the West at St Mary of the Angels in 1995. St Mary's formal admission to the ACA as a parish other than a "peculiar" appears to have happened at the time of the 1994 synod.

Prior to that, apparently in 1993, there was a confrontation between Fr Wilcox and Bishop Seeland on the St Mary's steps. It appears that Seeland had been elected ACC Bishop of the Pacific and Southwest, but had not yet been consecrated. As a result, Wilcox felt that Seeland, as only a bishop-elect, was not eligible to make an episcopal visit to the parish, whose status appears to have been unclear in any case. Wilcox, by this account, raised his hand in a gesture to block Seeland's entry, which Seeland interpreted as an attempt to strike him, and this caused Wilcox's inhibition as an ACC priest.

A news item from 2005 apparently also refers to this episode:

"(The politics) took a toll on the parish, because that's not why people come to church," Wilcox said. "At one point they erected a chain-link fence because there were rumors the bishop would come and try to take the property. . ."

Clearly, controversy, ambiguous authority, and angry bishops trying to seize the place are nothing new in the parish's history. If anyone knows more about Bishop Connors, Bishop Seeland, "ecclesiastical peculiars" and anything else relating to this period in the parish history, I will be most eager to hear it. UPDATE: Another knowledgeable party e-mails me to say it was his impression that the chain link fence episode dated from the original break with The Episcopal Church. Again, any information with be appreciated.

Just For Grins,

I looked up the "Bishop Seeland" mentioned as inhibiting Fr Wilcox and then filing suit against St Mary of the Angels in the prior post. It turns out that this is the late Arthur David Seeland, who was consecrated a bishop in the pre-1991 ACC but was among those who refused to go with Louis Falk's reconstituted ACA in 1991 and remained with the ACC. At the time of the ACC's lawsuit against St Mary's, Seeland was ACC Bishop of the Pacific and Southwest. However, Seeland and many of those same bishops who stayed with the ACC then left the ACC to form the Holy Catholic Church (Anglican Rite), "concerned about what they considered to be the ACC's doctrinal comprehensiveness and moral relativism." (My head hurts.)

Seeland appears as a party in additional litigation a few years after the 1994 ACC lawsuit against St Mary's, another typical "continuing Anglican" case: somebody claims to be a bishop, someone else inhibits said bishop, everybody files suit. Nothing new, huh? This to me is just one more example of the extremely poor stewardship represented by the "continuing Anglican" movement: too many bishops with little to do other than foster schism and sue each other. Catholics, I notice, do express concern that their pledges not go to support litigation. So far, we don't hear the same from "continuing Anglicans".

Who Is Louis Falk? -- IV

I started a series of posts on this question in December, and as I intimated in the first post, Falk is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle that won't quite fit. Some of my correspondents have been rasing issues that go farther back in history -- as I've said here, the St Mary of the Angels story is one that goes back for generations, and when I go back, Louis Falk is still in the story. As I said in December, there's a great deal about this man that we don't know. On the other hand, the "continuing Anglican" movement would not have been what it became without Louis Falk, and I'm not at all sure that this speaks well of the movement.

As I reported in December, Falk was ordained an Episcopal priest in the 1960s. It's not clear whether he actually ever served in an Episcopal parish (there was no "continuing Anglican" movement at that time, and there was general consensus among main line Protestant denominations toward a centrist-to-liberal alignment, including dissent over the Viet Nam War), and he went into business until 1976. The biographical information we have on Falk and the history of "continuing Anglicanism" following the St Louis declaration is sketchy, and I get most of this from Wikipedia entries: the first Anglican Church of North America was formed sometime after the St Louis meeting in 1977, with four bishops (none Falk) consecrated in 1978. At some point soon after that meeting, though I can’t find a specific date or set of circumstances, the Anglican Catholic Church split from the first ACNA.

Of Falk’s role, his Wikipedia entry gives information that seems incomplete: “In the late 1970s Falk joined the Anglican Catholic Church. He became Rector of Saint Aidan's Parish in Des Moines. In 1981 he was elected first bishop of the Diocese of the Missouri Valley. On February 14, 1981, in Des Moines, he was consecrated a bishop. . . . In 1983 Falk was elected Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Catholic Church. In the late 1980s, under Falk's leadership, the Anglican Catholic Church entered into discussions with the American Episcopal Church to effect a union between the two bodies. The two bodies united in October 1991 to form the Anglican Church in America of which Falk became the first primate. Falk helped convene and create the Traditional Anglican Communion [also 1991 per Wikipedia], of which he also became the first primate.”

However, the Wikipedia entry on the ACA says, “Most ACC parishes declined to enter the new ACA, resulting in a continuing existence for the ACC, while the remainder of its parishes and some of its bishops joined the AEC in forming the new church.” But then we come to the Freedom for St Mary timeline and the “Second Lawsuit” between the ACC and the ACA over the St Mary’s property. It's worth pointing out that until 1987, St Mary of the Angels's preoccupation had been with becoming an Anglican Use parish. When now-disgraced Cardinal Roger Mahony made the final decision rejecting the parish's application to become Anglican Use, it went into the pre-1991 Anglican Catholic Church.

1987-02-27: Saint Mary of the Angels affiliated with ACC, received by ArchBishop Falk

1987-11-01: Salve Regina newsletter notes Saint Mary of the Angels designated pro-cathedral for ACC diocese

1988-01 30: Bishop Louis Falk consecrates two Bishop’s at Saint Mary of the Angels

1991-10-12: Vestry follows ArchBishop. Falk, re-affiliates with the TAC

1992-02-14-16: Ap Falk celebrates mass, including bi-lingual Spanish mass.

1992-04: Resolution establishing standing rules to govern actions and processes of the Vestry.

1992 CD: St Mary joined the ACA [Anglican Church in America]

1993-04-25: Special Saint Mary of the Angels Parish meeting, Parish votes to change of affiliation from ACC

Bishop Seeland “inhibits Fr Wilcox”

1993-05-03: ArchBishop Falk proclaims jurisdiction over Saint Mary of the Angels from TAC

1993-05-17: Fr Wilcox declines request to become considered for Rector in ACC Parish in Denver, as he already is Rector in ACA Saint Mary of the Angels Parish.

1993-11-11, Bishop Seeland ACC appoints alternate priests in charge of Saint Mary of the Angels

1994-02-16: Bishop Seeland and ACC sues Saint Mary of the Angels

I will greatly appreciate any additional background and information anyone can provide regarding these events and Louis Falk's role in bringing the parish into the pre-1991 ACC.

However, it's plain that from the start, "continuing Anglicanism" was an unstable element. Somehow I've got to ask whether Falk's personality was a factor here.

Why I Don't Have Comments, Revisited

A visitor e-mailed me asking again why I don't have comments on this site. I have two main concerns that led me to this decision. One is that the popular Anglo-Catholic blogs, by Chadwick, Smuts, and Gyapong, have a lot of regular commenters who, if they aren't strictly speaking trolls (a troll, by the definitions I've seen, posts pseudonymously), tend to be people who are either ignorant or deliberately obtuse, and they make opinionated posts at length. I simply don't see the use of giving them a platform: I'd have to spend a lot of time repeating myself and refuting them. My purpose here is to get information and informed opinion out, not to host a playground for juveniles.

The second issue is that members of the St Mary's angry core do in fact post as psuedonymous trolls, especially on the Smuts blog, where they apparently feel "Father" Smuts is simpatico, and since he often posts announcements from the TAC without question, I'm pretty sure he is. I have what I think is a realistic expectation that these people would flood a comment section here with counterfactual assertions, calling anything I say into question. It's a free country, if they want to disagree with what they see here, they can start their own blog.

Those who've had corrections, clarifications, additional information, new leads, and so forth know that I make factual corrections as soon as they're brought to my attention, and I do not publish information provided in confidence. In general, this system seems to be working; I have a gut feeling that I'm making little bits of progress now and then by publishing information here that needs to get out, and the low stress level I have without the need to babysit comments allows me to continue with this effort.

AN OPEN APPEAL FOR MERCY

This comes from Fr Chip Wheeler of Honolulu. I'm as puzzled as he is by the silence in the ACA.

To past and present clergymen and laity of the Diocese of the West, Anglican Church in America:

Whenever I read the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37), I try to plug myself into the story. I ask myself how I have responded to the proverbial wounded traveler that I have encountered on life's journey. Have I demonstrated compassion like the Samaritan outcast, or have I just passed by the wounded like the priest or the Levite, in denial of the existence of the man in crisis lying in the road?

I would submit to you that our fellow priest and brother, Fr. Christopher Kelley, is one such man who has fallen amongst thieves, and been stripped and wounded. His wife Mary Alice, his daughter Elizabeth and his son Andrew have been even more severely wounded in their relative vulnerability.

Fr. Kelley and his family have endured the most surreal persecution that could possibly befall the most miserable of all clergymen and their families in this litigious nation of ours. There is a veritable lynch mob that has seized control of St. Mary's, Hollywood for the last year. They have harassed Fr. Kelley and his family through actions tantamount to terrorism, and hounded them out of his rightful cure, their parish and their home. These evil people have garnered a semblance of ecclesiastical legitimacy by seducing avaricious ACA clergymen to lend their imprimatur to their despicable crimes. Together, clergy and laity have accused Fr. Kelley of all manner of conduct unbecoming a clergyman, tried him in a ecclesiastical kangaroo. They have even hauled him into secular court to prosecute him under civil law, and yet every one of their accusations has been utterly bogus.

Rightful members of the vestry and other humble members of the parish have been excommunicated and barred from the Holy Eucharist at St. Mary's. They, too, have suffered persecution at the hands of these false brethren. The violation of the rights of these innocent people is absolutely inexcusable.

If I were still affiliated with the Diocese of the West or the Anglican Church in America, I would be distraught at the fate that has befallen the Kelleys and the vestry of St. Mary's. I would be utterly ashamed of my association with my diocese and denomination and would seriously consider using whatever authority I had as a priest to appeal for sanity in Fr. Kelley's case, and mercy for the whole Kelley family. As it is now, I regret ever having been a part of the ACA DOW.

As Lent approaches, I implore you to consider this appeal in your prayers and to do whatever you can do to see that justice is done and mercy prevails for the Kelleys. Remember that all of us will stand before our Judge one day. I urge you to make your voice heard by the standing committee of your diocese, and by the clergy and lay usurpers of St. Mary's, Hollywood.

Your brother in Christ,
Fr. Lawrence B. "Chip" Wheeler
Honolulu, Hawai`i

P.S. Just so that you know that I speak only as a friend and former DOW colleague of Fr. Kelley's, I would like to make it clear to you that, after two years of regular participation in worship and fellowship in the local Catholic diocese, I have decided not to join the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter or associate myself with the Roman Catholic Church any further.

"I've Never Seen Anything Like It,"

a vestryman remarked to me when the anti-Kelley frenzy was at its height. "I was on vestries, served as warden, at Episcopal parishes back east. I've seen lots of things, but I've never seen anything like this."

That remark came to mind as I was reflecting on an e-mail chat I'd had a few days ago with a knowledgeable party. He'd basically said (and I'm paraphrasing freely), "OK, I'm now pretty sure that Fr Kelley didn't steal anything, wasn't on drugs, didn't have a naked black girl hidden in the basement, wasn't running a cult. But why did he get so many people ticked off at him?" It's worth pointing out that, in a roundabout way, the knowledgeable party was saying that there was no basis for the charges in the ACA's presentment against Fr Kelley.

What he was saying, though, was that people were angry with him. Really angry. Eight or twelve people, and they were going to do whatever they could to get rid of him. The party listed some of the sore points, which I won't go over here, except to say that they were all within Fr Kelley's province as rector, since they had to do with staff personnel decisions and the use of the property.

In other words, we move from the phantasmagorical to the mundane: every parish has factions, every parish has sore points, every parish has little controversies over the new dossal or the departure of a sexton. It's worth pointing out that canonically, this is exactly what a bishop is supposed to concern himself with: if the factions in a parish get out of control, it's the bishop's job to step in and resolve conflicts between the factions and the rector, generally leaning toward supporting the rector unless the rector is doing something obviously out of order.

The bottom line with St Mary's is that the system wasn't working, and in fact there really wasn't a system to work at all. This is part of the illusion that the "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion" has tried to create: with a few hundred members in any given diocese, topheavy with bishops and prebendaries, the TAC tries to promote itself as an alternative to the outfit run by the guy in Canterbury -- indeed, a full sibling to the Catholic Church, denied its proper status by the churlishness exhibited in Anglicanorum coetibus. Balderdash. These guys have no idea how to run a denomination.

A major reason for the disaster of 2011-2012 is that the bishops weren't doing their jobs, and as far as I can see, this is because the canons weren't being followed, and lines of authority were completely invisible. I keep hearing from numerous sources that Louis Falk was a major player behind the scenes in all the events, which is peculiar, since the man was doubly retired, having left the post of Archbishop in 2002, the post of Bishop of the Missouri Valley in 2007. By comparison, can you imagine what the ACA would do if now-retired John Hepworth tried to involve himself in any ACA parish or diocese? Why is Falk allowed to keep meddling?

By multiple accounts, Falk, retired, nevertheless gave the authority for St Mary's to enter the Patrimony of the Primate in late 2010, in his own words asserting episcopal authority to do so. Where was David Moyer, the bishop nominally in charge of the Patrimony? At the same time, by multiple accounts, Falk verbally gave authority for an Episcopal priest to serve as a priest at St Mary's, though he never followed through with paperwork (this looks more and more like a typical Falk operation).

Although Moyer made an episcopal visit in January 2011 and involved himself in personnel issues at various times during the year, it's clear that on major issues, Louis Falk was calling the shots, though Hepworth was nowhere to be seen. A clerical observer formerly in the Patrimony has noted that in his experience, he was never quite sure who was in charge, Hepworth, Falk, or Moyer. This is a recipe for disaster. Moyer, of course, had been preoccupied with his legal disputes against Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania Charles Bennison Jr since 2002, and throughout 2011 was clearly distracted by his final ejection from the property at Good Shepherd Rosemont. He was simply in no position to offer episcopal supervision to any parish in another denomination.

This left Falk to meddle from the shadows. In late December 2011, when Moyer finally decided (correctly) that the allegations by the angry dissident core were too vague to act on, the angry core had already learned that they could go around Moyer to Falk and Strawn. Falk obliged them by passing a 40-page bill of particulars (which has never been made public by the ACA) against Kelley to Cardinal Wuerl, although as a retired prelate, he had no authority to do so and no standing other than that given by the artificial prestige of the TAC. John Hepworth would never have equivalent standing to do anything like that.

The last ACA Bishop of the West, Daren Williams, had been elected on the first ballot by the diocesan synod despite the fact that he came from Pennsylvania, had no connection with the ACA or the Diocese of the West, and had a complicated marital history. He basically didn't work out and retired suddenly after a few years following a vote of no confidence from his standing committee. A good part of what happened to St Mary of the Angels was a result of weak and inconsistent episcopal authority, giving the small number of angry dissidents ample opportunity to circumvent the rules, and indeed simple common sense.

But as the saying goes, a fish rots from the head. I worked for a company where the CEO went to prison for securities fraud. It showed at every level of the organization -- the company worked the way the clique at the top wanted it to. The ACA and the TAC are Louis Falk's organization.

The Standing Committee Of The ACA Diocese Of The West

is somewhat equivalent in its function to a vestry in an Anglican parish. It serves as the board of directors of the temporal corporation that makes up the diocese. According to the ACA-DOW Diocesan canons,

6.2 The Standing Committee shall consist of four Clergymen canonically resident in the diocese and four Lay communicant members of the diocese, elected by a concurrent vote of a majority of the delegates from each order at Synod. Not more than one member shall be from any one Parish or Mission.

also,

6.4 The terms of all members of the Standing Committee shall be four years, except that one members [sic] from the Clerical order and one member from the Lay order each may be elected to serve a one, two, three or four year term, to insure that the terms of only one clerical and one lay delegate expire each year. Mid-term vacancies shall be filled by vote of a majority of the Committee's members. The election of members of the Standing Committee elected by the Committee's members to fill mid-term vacancies shall be ratified at the next meeting of Synod in accordance with Canon 6.2.

A clerical observer has pointed out with some distress that Mrs Marilyn Bush appears as a lay member of the ACA Diocese of the West Standing Committee as of December 2012, with a term that theoretically expires in 2014. Mrs. Bush has previously appeared on this blog as a member of the angry dissident core at St Mary of the Angels, who revealed her loyalty to this faction only following her election to the St Mary's vestry in February 2012. She was designated "senior warden" after other, elected members of the vestry were uncanonically removed (as acknowledged by "Bishop" Strawn in an e-mail to the late "Canon" Morello) following the ACA's seizure of the parish.

I assume that Mrs Bush was elected to fill a vacancy in the Standing Committee after the 2012 Diocese of the West Synod. To anyone's knowledge, no representative, either clergy or lay, from St Mary of the Angels attended the 2012 diocesan synod, since the status of St Mary's as an ACA parish was in dispute, and the ACA House of Bishops by its January 2012 resolution (following the 2011 opinion of all its diocesan chancellors) had ruled that parishes in the Patrimony of the Primate were in fact no longer in the ACA.

Mrs Bush is the widow of Irving Bush, a noted trumpet player from the big-band era who later played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who passed away in 2009. My understanding, based on her own account, is that her husband was against all religion, and she did not attend church during their marriage. She began attending St Mary of the Angels Hollywood in early 2011, at about the same time as my wife and me. She would have qualified as a member in good standing of the parish, at least on the basis of attendance for a year, in early 2012, just in time to be elected to the vestry at the February annual meeting that year.

There was no confirmation class during 2011 and no episcopal visit for confirmation during 2012, which leaves open the question of whether Mrs Bush was ever confirmed by an Episcopal bishop, since the ACA and other "continuing Anglican" denominations did not exist prior to her marriage to Bush. I've been informed that members of the angry core group of dissidents were actively opposed to my wife and me joining the parish from our arrival in early 2011 (at the same time as Mrs Bush), and vociferously insisted that Fr Kelley obtain all applicable documentation on our confirmation as Episcopalians and our membership in prior Episcopal parishes, even though we'd been active churchgoers throughout our marriage.

I'm not aware of an equivalent effort regarding Mrs Bush, who by her own account had not attended church for 40 years prior to coming to St Mary's. I know nothing of her religious life prior to her marriage. However, since the angry core group of dissidents had been punctilious in wishing to verify my wife's and my eligibility for membership, I would assume there would be that much more reason to want to investigate whether Mrs Bush had ever even been an Episcopalian, much less confirmed in the denomination.

Mrs Bush is an octogenarian, and many people feel she's been manipulated by the angry core. However, she is also a Hollywood social fixture due to her marriage to Irving Bush. It seems likely that she was placed on the Standing Committee by a vote between synods at the urging of the late "Canon" Morello and is there because she will ratify without question any action taken at the behest of "Bishop" Marsh.

Several questions remain. She was presumably named to a two-year term by vote of the Standing Committee, between diocesan synods. Why the two-year term? Did she replace a member of the Standing Committe who had resigned? Which one resigned? Will the 2013 diocesan synod ratify this election? Will it take into consideration Mrs Bush's minimal association with the parish, the diocese, the denomination, and religion in general? What if the ACA loses in the appeal process over the St Mary of the Angels seizure?

I would find it difficult to be associated with the ACA or the Diocese of the West. As I've said many times, it's a tiny, corrupt organization. It appears that the Standing Committee has been in the pockets of Morello, Strawn, and Marsh and is complicit in this corruption. Ladies and gentlemen, you now have a chance to turn around and make things right.

Getting Back To The Issue

in yesterday's main post, I think there was another, and not completely related, reason for the enormous upsurge in anger at Fr Kelley and the parish majority during the spring of 2012. The core dissidents had managed to put four of their members on the nine-person vestry during 2011, which led to the inconclusive vestry meeting of December 11, 2011, in which a letter was presented to Fr Kelley requesting his resignation.

The fact that this took place was a bombshell for the parish rank-and-file, which had been completely unaware of secret meetings between the dissidents, Bishop Moyer, and Bishop Strawn, as well as their overall hidden agendas. The majority of the parish was certainly satisfied with Fr Kelley's performance, and the fact that the move to get rid of him had been kept such a secret was an indication that the people behind it knew it wouldn't be popular.

The result was that, since this unpleasant news came out in mid-December, the rank and file began to talk informally to come up with a picture of what was going on, who was involved, and how that related to the terms of the vestry members. As it happened, most of the key players had come onto the vestry between parish annual meetings, and they faced re-election at the next annual meeting, which would be in early 2012. The fact that these same people, thwarted in their December 11 attempt to remove Fr Kelley, had then gone to Cardinal Wuerl via "Archbishop" Falk with their complaints and had the parish's reception to the Ordinariate delayed, added to the rank and file's desire to have the conspirators off the vestry.

As a result, the rank and file informally came up with a set of candidates for the vestry election in the annual meeting that would replace those in the conspiratorial core. All of the conspirators termed off the vestry in 2012; none was renominated from the floor, and replacements were voted in who were actually representative of the parish as a whole. Marilyn Bush, the current "senior warden", was voted in because the parishioners were not aware of her support for the angry core; had the parish election been held with a valid electorate at the 2013 annual meeting, when she would have termed off the vestry, she would not have been renominated and would not have been re-elected.

One motive for the growing anger at Fr Kelley as 2012 moved along was simply the recognition that he had the support of an overwhelming parish majority, which among other things did not wish to elect the angry core of dissidents to any position of responsibility. It was simply not a coincidence that the first steps "Bishop" Strawn and the late "Canon" Morello took were to remove the elected vestry by any means, however uncanonical and indeed illegal.

I Updated

Sunday's post to include some clarifying information from Michael Frost; I had misinterpreted information in some blog comments he had made, and he does not currently live in the Omaha area. However, his e-mails to me raise another question. He does appear to attend the eucharist at the breakaway "continuing Anglican" parish at St Aidan's Des Moines. He appears to recognize that, although he calls himself Antiochan Orthodox, the Orthodox churches do not view Protestant communion as something its communicants are eligible to receive:

Further, Orthodox Christianity does not permit its faithful to receive Holy Communion in non-Orthodox communities, whether they be Roman Catholic, Protestant, or whatever. Hence, while Roman Catholicism may extend Eucharistic hospitality to Orthodox Christians, it does not mean that Orthodox Christians are permitted to accept such hospitality.

Mr Frost has not said in his e-mails whether he actually receives the eucharist at St Aidan's, but if he does, I still question what's going on here. If he doesn't actually receive the eucharist, how does he deal with that problem? Wouldn't it be better to attend this Western Rite Orthodox parish in Des Moines?

UPDATE: So Mr Frost responded to the post:

Mr Bruce,

I was unpleastanly surprised to see you blogging specifically about little old me on your site. Why you'd care about me, an average layman, is beyond me. But if you really want to know something about me, why didn't you just ask? You have my e-mail.

Not that it is really any of your business and it is certainly not any real concern of your blog!. . .

Actually, I disagree, because I've been making a point here quite a bit about misplaced punctiliousness. It is the obligation of every Orthodox Christian to receive the eucharist frequently. Mr Frost has explained to me at considerable length how this or that particular Orthodox service or Orthodox priest (there appear to be three or four Orthodox parishes in Des Moines) doesn't suit him. So instead, he attends an Anglo-Catholic splinter-group parish, but doesn't receive the Sacrament. It sounds so far as though, despite his protestations, he isn't really Orthodox, or at least not a good one, in the sense that he doesn't seem to be meeting his obligation to receive the eucharist frequently in an Orthodox parish, but he certainly isn't an Anglo-Catholic, although he frequently opines on punctilious Anglo-Catholic issues, and he opines on me, on St Mary of the Angels, and on Fr Kelley, in the comment sections of various blogs.

I'm just saying this guy, based on the accounts he gives of himself, is strange, and even somewhat representative of the strange folks who do post on "Father" Smuts, Ms Gyapong, and elsewhere, in the matter of misplaced punctiliousness, or perhaps more simply characterized, hypocrisy. I'm picking on you, Mr Frost, because you've been picking on me, on St Mary of the Angels, and on Fr Kelley. That's my business.

The Timeline At The Freedom For St Mary Blog

is sketchy for the last years of Fr Gregory Wilcox's roughly 20-year tenure there. Since the timeline indicates that the vestry recommended hiring Fr Kelley in early 2007, Wilcox resigned as Rector in April 2006, having come to the parish in 1987. (He is now at St Joseph's Anglican, an APA parish.) I wasn't around for the last controversy involving him: I'm told that he had joined one of the cult-like movements derived from est, either Landmark or Lifespring depending on the account; he had moved out of the rectory in connection with this new association and was neglecting his pastoral duties. There were one or more highly contentious parish meetings, and the parish was deeply divided over whether to terminate him, but it eventually did. This was the proximate cause of Fr Kelley's hiring as rector.

That the parish would have been as divided as I've been told it was over what should have been a simple issue -- est and its derivatives are clearly an alternate, non-Christian belief system, and a Christian clergyman who embraces them has abandoned Christian communion -- goes, I think, to one of the unfortunate strains in St Mary of the Angels Hollywood's history. (If anyone can provide additional information on the circumstances of Fr Wilcox's departure and the surrounding controversy, I'll be eager to hear it.)

Sin, conscience, repentance, and their relationship to the Church work in mysterious ways. Since none of us is without sin, we're all troubled in conscience. The route away from a troubled conscience is repentance, which takes various forms in the branches of Christianity. Where repentance is incomplete or nonexistent, all sorts of problems develop, ranging from hypocrisy to overcompensation to double lives. Jesus of Nazareth understood the working of hypocrisy very well when he urged his followers not to make a big display of religiosity in public, drawing a clear distinction between projecting an image and living out a reality.

Unfortunately, Anglo-Catholicism presents a real temptation in this regard, because its elements -- elaborate vestments, punctiliousness over liturgy, a sense of exclusivity -- offer ample opportunity for ostentatious display. This is one reason I've found it extremely refreshing to participate in Ordinary Form masses at a real Catholic parish, and it's created a new sense of perspective on the mass at St Mary of the Angels, which is about as high-church as anyone can get. I certainly don't think all Oxford-Anglican style liturgy is hypocritical -- I think Fr Kelley is a devout and sincere man who follows liturgical propriety from a sense of high duty.

On the other hand, as far as I can see, there have always been parishioners at St Mary's who for whatever reason find liturgical ostentation a temporary salve for whatever is actually ailing them, and I'm sure that whatever it is, it isn't the same with any two people, and it may often not be all that bad a thing -- it's just ailing them, and it isn't getting fixed. What they're after is basically a phony church. What they'd really prefer is someone who will at least tacitly endorse the phoniness: thus the support for a rector who makes it plain that he doesn't actually believe any of that stuff, and the unwillingness among a certain faction of the parish to clean house.

I think this is one factor, though not the only one, at the root of the bitter opposition among an angry core minority to Fr Kelley and the move to join the Ordinariate. The Catholic Church is a real denomination. For 25 years previously, St Mary's had been drifting between two tiny "continuing Anglican" splinter denominations, with minimal and ineffective episcopal supervision, to the point that the rector was becoming less and less Christian in any actual set of beliefs. There were people who liked it that way, and they bitterly resisted any move to make St Mary's less about image and temporary salves to conscience and more about real religion and real repentance.