I note that as of January 31, Bishop Williams’s name no longer appears as episcopal visitor to the ACA DOW or as a suffragan in DONE. Can you confirm this?But the Information Officer is apparently not in the business of providing even basic information, at least not to me. An e-mail to the St Mary's contact e-mail bounced, no such ID at the ISP. (One more indication that the Bush parish is a sham, they don't have a public inquiry e-mail, and they don't answer the phone.) An e-mail to a DOW priest who has sometimes been helpful has also gone unanswered.
Here's the story as best I can reconstruct it. Owen Rhys Williams apparently got religion in middle age after drifting from job to job. He gravitated to St Mark's Portland, OR, at the time an ACA parish under Louis Falk's protégé Robin Connors. In his younger days, Williams had gotten an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree, which is authoritatively characterized as "at base, a non-professional, largely-unmarketable art-school degree".
He never attended seminary, but he was apparently able to convince Connors in his fairly brief role as ACA Bishop of the West that he was worthy of ordination. The errors I've identified in his management of the St Mary's calendar strongly suggest that his knowledge of Anglo-Catholicism falls well short of what would be expected of an ordinary candidate for confirmation, much less a priest: he appears to be wobbly on Advent and Lent, as well as fuzzy on doctrines like the Immaculate Conception. I continue in the belief that I've expressed here before, that he can't name the seven sacraments without a crib sheet.
Nevertheless, Connors hired him as a curate, and he succeeded to the rectorship of St Mark's when Connors was forced out of that position. However, at some point, something went wrong. Not only did he leave St Mark's Portland, but he wound up all the way on the other coast, at Trinity Anglican, Rochester, NH. Praise to the bishop, who doth prosper thy way and defend thee! Williams was consecrated Suffragan Bishop in the Diocese of the Northeast on April 25, 2013, in a do that outshone even that of The Rt Rev James Randall Hiles, two days later.
Williams da man! (Maybe this is a premonition, though -- that photo is tilted, and it makes me woozy.) on August 8, 2013, Williams was designated episcopal visitor to the ACA Diocese of the West as well. (However, any reference to this has already been scrubbed from the DOW web site.) But something went wrong. Again, this time at Trinity Anglican. By September 2014, he'd been shipped out to St Mary of the Angels, with no notice taken of the departure at Trinity Anglican. Wait -- ain't he da man? Why weren't they distraught to see him go?
Now, as of January 31, 2015, he's been scrubbed from the rosters of both the Diocese of the Northeast and the Diocese of the West. (He's still on the ACA home page as DOW episcopal visitor, but this is probably an oversight that will be corrected soon.) But no announcement has been made. Not a peep.
As far as I can tell, he lasted less than two years as a suffragan bishop. I would guess that if he was eased out quietly, there must have been factors that everyone understood could be problematic even before he was consecrated. This has got to be a profound embarrassment to everyone in that photo just above.
If he was eased out, was anything done to sweeten the deal? Like maybe a payment from the St Mary of the Angels treasury? Just wondering. We'll find out soon enough, I'll betcha.
