Hollywood is a sophisticated place, with capable, intelligent people, some of whom are Catholics, or want to be. If you try to play games with capable, intelligent people, you risk disaster, which is the big error the ACA made in trying to play games with the parish. St Mary of the Angels is not a Plumstead Episcopi, a place where Steenson and Hough can deposit some favored mediocrity. It is definitely not the place for them to try to park Andrew Bartus. I speak here only as an informed observer, but one who has a good sense of what will never play. Let's keep this in the background from here on out.
But why did Houston, figuratively speaking, stop answering the phone from St Mary's after January 2012? The answer was partly the letter (my wife calls it "the ka-ka letter", probably the best term for it), which as I understand it was about 40 pages of rambling, ungrammatical and misspelled allegations against Fr Kelley. No one connected with the elected vestry, and not Fr Kelley, has ever seen it, so I can only surmise its contents. Apparently the ka-ka letter was enough to stall the process of joining the Ordinariate for the parish.
My surmise is this: we already know the Bush group has difficulty with spelling, grammar, and other indications of ordinary adulthood. Until it was pointed out, they styled St Mary's an "Angelican" parish. Their calendar errors are legion. I assume the ka-ka letter included the allegations against Fr Kelley that were contained in the charges brought against him in the ACA's "court", as well as the allegations of "misconduct" made to the California unemployment board. We know that these allegations were impossible as described and counterfactual. LA Superior Court Judge Jones reviewed them and found them unsubstantiated. The California unemployment board reviewed them and said there was not "a shred" of evidence to support them.
Nevertheless, based on the explanation Msgr Stetson gave a parish meeting in January 2012, Louis Falk felt they were important enough to pass on to Cardinal Wuerl in late 2011, and Wuerl felt they were important enough to pass on to Steenson. I'm scratching my head. Fr Z's advice for those appealing to bishops is not to have s single exclamation point in one's correspondence. I would guess that, at minimum, the ka-ka letter had quite a few.
In the real world, where my wife dealt with things like sexual harassment complaints, adults have to conduct an investigation and determine the credibility of charges. The responsibility of the Ordinariate, if only the responsibility of a Christian to act justly, was to investigate these complaints, determine their credibility, and act accordingly. Those connected with the Bush group had been making similar complaints to David Moyer when he was ordinary to the parish. Moyer made at least two trips to Hollywood in 2011 to investigate them and appears to have come to the same conclusion that every other responsible party has come to since: they were at best too vague to act on, but also illogical and wildly counterfactual.
This was a pastoral issue. There was a hard core of nut-job troublemakers in the parish. My guess is that Steenson wanted a Plumstead Episcopi, not a pastoral problem, and he punted. The result was what we've seen. This project isn't going to succeed any better in 2015 or 2016 than it did in 2012 if all Steenson and Hough want from the parish is a Plumstead Episcopi.
