Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Would A Merged ACA and APA Stay In The TAC?

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood? This is a purely theoretical question, because I'm not sure how long any of those entities will last -- the TAC is probably now circling the drain, and my impression is that Brian Marsh has always operated independently of Prakash. Gill periodically comes to the US on junkets (so would I if I lived in a backwater), but I doubt if his counsel has much weight here. Without the ACA, the TAC is a dead letter.

Nevertheless, we get vague reports that some unspecified sort of progress is being made toward merging the ACA and the APA. Recall that the ACA and the APA originated as two sides of a schism within the Anglican Catholic Church, the principal "Continuing Anglican" entity that emerged from the 1977 Congress of St Louis. As I discussed in the posts linked yesterday, some members of the ACC became distressed at Louis Falk's willingness to work through bishops of questionable reputation. The proximate cause of the split was an attempt in 1991 to put Falk on trial and depose him. The trial didn't quite come off, and Falk with his faction withdrew from the ACC to form the ACA. The anti-Falk group in the ACC became the APA, although this group subsequently splintered as well.

I've already speculated that, since the cause of the ACA-APA split was basically Louis Falk, a merger won't take place until Falk is permanently out of the picture -- although "retired", he clearly has worked behind the scenes, and I suspect there's a story waiting to be told of what his role was in the reversal of the TAC over the Portsmouth Petition and Anglicanorum coetibus. (This is why they used to cut the heads off deposed monarchs, after all.)

So would the APA faction in a merged denomination countenance any participation in the TAC, also a creature of Falk? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?