Sunday, January 25, 2015

"Why St Mary Of The Angels Is Important"

This was the title of a post on one of the Anglo-Catholic current-events blogs that flourished in the wake of the Portsmouth Petition and Anglicanorum coetibus. Its thrust was that St Mary of the Angels, harbinger of the "continuum", early aspirant to Anglican Use within the Roman Catholic fold, would, after decades of frustration, see its vindication as a jewel of the forthcoming US Ordinariate and take its rightful place as an exemplar of everything Anglo-Catholicism would become.

I did a search on that string, and variations of it, this morning, and nothing now appears. I don't know if that blog still exists, although if it does, it's probably inactive, and that post may wisely have been taken down during some subsequent time of mature reflection. Nearly all of those triumphalist Anglo-Catholic blogs are inactive or gone altogether; only a few persist, although they've drifted off into triviality. They avoid the subject of St Mary of the Angels like the plague: the parish, among the few bloggers still willing to call themselves Anglo-Catholic at all, is like the figures airbrushed from photos of the Stalinist Politburo.

The fact is that Anglo-Catholicism has become a dead letter. The reason is 2012. The Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter was erected on January 1, but as of this morning, if I google the words "ordinariate disappointment", I get 85,900 results. The same year marked the collapse in scandal of the Traditional Anglican Communion, which had considerable prestige following the Portsmouth Petition, but was soon enough revealed to be a pretentious front verging on the fraudulent.

2012 was also the start of the period in St Mary's history marked by the Third Lawsuit. My own view is that the events and people surrounding the Third Lawsuit are just as important as those surrounding the First and Second Lawsuits, and they tell us something important about the state of Christianity now. I don't believe for an instant that Pope Benedict meant Anglicanorum coetibus as a mere put-up-or-shut-up gesture, but insofar as we can very dimly discern the purposes of the Almighty, perhaps that's what He Himself may have had in mind. Anglo-Catholics have, in response to the implicit challenge, shut up.

St Mary of the Angels has been involved, sometimes indirectly but more often directly, with most of the major figures connected with where Anglo-Catholicism now finds itself. The names include Louis Falk, David Moyer, William Stetson, and Jeffrey Steenson; and at only slightly farther remove, John Hepworh and John-David Schofield, as well as the more comical figures of Andrew Bartus, Anthony Morello, Owen Rhys Williams, Stephen Strawn, and Brian Marsh. Anglo-Catholics, as far as I can see, would prefer not to think of nearly all these people.

Anglo-Catholics, if the movement is going to survive as a wing of conservative Christianity (it's doing well in the very liberal Anglican fold) are going to have to do some serious re-examination. So far, I'm not seeing it. An unwillingness to address the subject of St Mary of the Angels Hollywood and the responsibilities of both the "continuum" and the Ordinariate in creating the disaster of the Third Lawsuit is a major symptom.