So What's Going On Here?

Bishop Owen Williams, it seems to me, is almost certainly out of the picture, although there's been no official announcement, and so far no replies to my e-mail inquiries. Several pieces of this puzzle are unusual. The speed with which both the DOW and DONE websites were purged of his information is remarkable: after Robert Bowman's prior arrest on child pornography charges was brought to light here, it took All Saints Fountain Valley months to remove his bio from its clergy web page, and there was also considerable delay before Bowman finally announced the Almighty had prompted him to move his ministry to an undisclosed location.

But the departures of bishops under any circumstances are normally announced. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles was completely transparent about the premature retirement of Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala following the revelation that he'd fathered two children in the course of a long affair. The ACA itself announced the "sudden retirement" of Owen Williams's predecessor Daren Williams. ("I've come to like Daren Williams," says my wife. "He had more sense than I thought he did at the time when he inhibited Andrew Bartus.")

What prompted the quick evacuation in Owen's case? The other day I speculated that the Christmas message from APA Presiding Bishop Grundorf may have appeared on the DOW web site without Grundorf's knowledge or permission, and this may have been awkward for Brian Marsh -- but this is pure speculation, and it's hard to think that, considering the overall lethargy and detachment of the ACA House of Bishops on any matter not pertaining to Fr Kelley, this would cause Marsh any serious concern. Remember, they promoted Tony Morello.

Well, maybe one day in the hereafter I'll run into a knowledgeable ACA priest, maybe in the shower room in Purgatory, and he'll explain it. "Well, the Grundorf thing might have been part of it, but the real reason was. . ." And to get the guy out that fast, after what seems to have been a record of things going wonky throughout his career and not much being done about it, it would have to be remarkable indeed. But for now, your guess is as good as mine.

But there are still more stitches to try to read on this fastball. I noticed, when Grundorf's Christmas message appeared on an ACA web site, that Brian Marsh had given no equivalent Christmas message in 2014, when he'd given one in prior years. Is Marsh preoccupied? I noted last year that Stephen Smuts, the semi-official PR mouthpiece of the TAC, had been ordered not to post about or link to anything connected with the ACA. This almost certainly came from Marsh, and I thought at the time that Marsh's view was that any publicity at all about the ACA was bad publicity, so he'd rather there be no publicity.

And bad publicity for the ACA is inevitably bad publicity for Brian Marsh. Whatever happened with Owen Williams, bad as it was for Williams, it's probably just as bad for Marsh. We'll see how this plays out.