More Community Dissatisfaction

with Mrs Bush and the appointed vestry. ("Bishop:" Williams is nowhere to be seen.) Based on references in the July 27 Ledger piece, I went looking for other news and found an earlier article from May 28, "With Citibank Move Will Community Space Be Gone?"

LOS FELIZ—At the red brick Citibank building on Hillhurst Avenue at Finley Street, community meetings have regularly been held for 20 years on the second floor. Now, with a shift in tenants looming, the future of the meeting space is uncertain.

Due to a recent downsize, as more banking is done online or via mobile apps, Citibank is moving its Los Feliz branch to a smaller space currently under construction just down the road at Russell Street. A hearing regarding the possible demolition of two homes near the site, to be used for bank parking, is scheduled for [the] first week of June.

A number of local groups use the second floor space, as well as the LAPD, which uses it for a community policing center. It is not entirely clear how this arrangement arose, but any agreement was based on handshakes, and the St Mary's rector, wardens, and vestry own the building and have final say on its use. Mrs Bush, head of the occupying force, is currently the person to see.

According to St. Mary’s church governing board member Marilyn Bush, negotiations are underway for a new lessee of the building. It remains unclear what will happen to the upstairs community room, she said.

Bush is currently heavily involved in negotiations between prospective tenants and the church. She said juggling the partitioning of the space and the church’s fiscal needs has become a challenge.

Citibank will move into the new smaller branch in October. According to Bush, the transition to a new tenant for the old Citibank location will likely be immediate. She said she would not rule out a second lessee renting the second floor space.

Anything other than that, she said, is “fiscally not responsible.”

With BevMo! pulling out of the deal, though, it's unlikely that transition to a new tenant (if one can be found) will be "immediate".

It's worth noting that the May 28 story makes no mention of the pending legal issues, currently likely to go to trial this coming September. In the view of informed observers, with a new trial following the reversal of Judge Linfield's original ruling, legal precedent makes it likely that the property will be returned to the control of the elected vestry.

We're talking about a lease with over $20,000 monthly rent. Nobody is going to commit to something like this with control of the property up in the air, which is why BevMo! suddenly pulled out after belatedly learning of the lawsuits. But Mrs Bush and the appointed vestry appear to be desperate for money -- so desperate that they'll play games with the liquor license process and, apparently, conceal the facts of the legal situation from the prospective tenant.

As a fan of true-crime TV shows, I've simply got to wonder what else is going to come to light here.

St Mary Of The Angels Back In The News

The latest issue of the Los Feliz Ledger carries the story Church Schism Spills BevMo!, which is the next step in the process I mentioned two months ago, in which the Citibank branch that had paid the parish $20,833.33 in monthly rent, the income that kept it afloat, planned to vacate the premises and move down the street.

The story is remarkable for what it reveals about Mrs Bush and the other dissidents -- for starters, they kept their negotiations with BevMo!, a chain discount liquor store, under wraps. Nothing new there, but the community is unhappy.

LOS FELIZ—Within the space of a couple of weeks, a chain liquor store has applied for and pulled an application for a license to sell liquor on the site of the soon-to-be vacated Citibank branch at Hillhurst and Finley avenues.

Due to numerous complications, BevMo is no longer seeking the commercial space, which it had been in negotiations for during the past several months.

As local property owners ourselves, my wife and I feel the last thing the area needs is yet another liquor store. Mrs Bush, long a key member and sometime President of the Los Feliz Improvement Associaiton, nevertheless appears to have been behind an effort to get the store's liquor license approved on a hush-hush, fast-track basis.

Some local business owners, including Kamy Azizi, the owner of Hillhurst Liquors [about a block away from the Citibank site], questioned when BevMo had applied for the license as he only learned of its intent to move into the Citibank space after a notice for its application for liquor licenses was posted July 1st on the bank’s window.

According to Carr [an official with the state alcohol beverage control board], when an applicant files for a liquor license a city’s police department, planning department and city council are notified. Sarah Dusseault, Chief of Staff for Los Angeles City Councilmember David Ryu said the council office, to date, has not received such a notification. Ryu was sworn into office July 1st.

Several community boards, including the Los Feliz Village Business Improvement District and the Los Feliz Neighborhood Council, apparently kept the application quiet and deferred action.

“It’s just mind-boggling that they kept this so quiet,” said Azizi. “If you were smart, you would talk to the neighborhood first, get them satisfied, explaining to them what was going to happen. Maybe then you have a chance. But when you go behind the scenes and you do this kind of thing, everybody is against you.”

Mrs Bush is an extremely influential person in the Los Feliz area, not just among the dissident group at St Mary's.

Azizi is equally upset with St. Mary’s of the Angels senior warden and Los Feliz resident Marilyn Bush.

Bush has been the key person in charge of securing a new lessee when Citibank vacates the site Oct. 16th for a smaller location on Hillhurst at Russell Avenue. She has repeatedly told the news media and others the church’s financial interests come first regarding who it leases the building to.

Wait a moment. The church owns an adjacent commercial property and decides to lease it to -- a liquor store? Indeed, the BevMo! application suggested some type of tasting room or bar might also have been involved. But according to Mrs Bush, the church's financial interests come first. (I suspect Andy Bartus would cry "Amen!")

The area in which BevMo wanted to locate, according to the data, is allowed two licenses for businesses to sell liquor to take away, like a liquor store or supermarket and one license for consumption on site, meaning a restaurant, bar or tavern, for example. In the area in question, there are currently four approved licensed liquor stores or supermarkets and 20 restaurants, bars or taverns.

Additionally, liquor licenses can be fought, and successfully denied, if they are within close proximity of a school or church. BevMo’s store would have been directly next door to St. Mary’s and in a building on property the church owns.

However, it appears that the community is not the only group Mrs Bush kept in the dark:

According to sources, representatives from Bev Mo, only became aware of the church’s complex and outstanding litigation late in the process.

Welcome to the club!

Reasons For The Disappointment of Anglicanorum Coetibus

Here's what I think I've learned over the nearly three years I've done this blog:

• Anglicanism is a Protestant denomination, although as the knowledgeable ex-insider Frederick Kinsman said, it's less a set of beliefs than a policy (of wide toleration). Anglican toleration has resulted in three strains, High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church. The differences are wide enough that it's nearly meaningless to give "Anglicanism" a concrete definition. Although there have been limited defections from the dominant Broad Church strain along the existing fracture lines since the 1970s, these haven't changed the nature of the mainstream denomination. In addition, it has been a miscalculation to believe that any of the groups that defected would wish to become Catholic in any significant numbers. Whatever Anglicans are, and however dissatisfied smaller breakaway factions may have been with the Church of England or The Episcopal Church, they have mostly remained Protestant. Even self-identified Anglo-Catholics or Anglo-Papalists, tolerated within the Anglican scheme, have tended not to become Catholic via any path.
• At the same time, as I've begun to look more closely at the Ordinariates, I've come to realize that, small as they are, they are individual entities. Thus it's incorrect to say, as Mr Murphy recently did, that "The Ordinariate responds to now-bishop Philip North". He quotes the comments of two priests in the UK Ordinariate, neither of whom claims, as far as I can tell, to be speaking on behalf of Msgr Newton. This sort of linguistic imprecision is typical and reflects the tendency to reify an "Ordinariate", which is actually a collection of three jurisdictions that are widely scattered, small in membership, and disparate in their makeup.
• It can't help that people like Mr Murphy (who has taken on the role of de facto public relations flak for the Ordinariates, much in the way that Stephen Smuts used to be for the TAC) seem to regard membership in the Ordinariates as a sort of exclusive club. Today he asks plaintively, "Is there really no way for a “regular” Cradle Catholic to join the Ordinariate?" He goes on,

  It is not evident whether and under which conditions a person who has taken part in the activities of the Ordinariate for a longer period can apply for a transfer. So it would seem almost always to be the case that “once a cradle Catholic, always a diocesan Catholic”. This may seem unfair, even ludicrous to you, but that is the legal canonical position, as far as I can make out.

  It's not fair! I'm not sure what the not fair part of this is. Our current political leadership insists it's not fair that some are wealthy and some are not -- that's understandable; we can imagine that many wish to be wealthy who are not. But how many wish to be members of the Ordinariate if they aren't eligible under the complementary norms? There's an implication that membership is something to be desired like, say, rushing Phi Sig. This may be the case in the minds of Mr Murphy and a small number of other initiates. I don't see it otherwise. It reminds me of Frederick Kinsman's characterization of High-Church Anglicanism as "a chronic fastidiousness which spent its energy in pointing out how everyone else was more or less wrong -- the superciliousness of schism -- and in a willfulness to follow individual whims."

Eligible for membership in an Ordinariate group or not, as a good Marxist, I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

Liturgy And Agenda

Ordinariate News links to an article by Herr Prof Dr Hans-Jürgen Feulner on the Ordinariate liturgy (full text here). My first reaction is that it reads like a clumsy translation from stilted academic German, which is unfortunate, since given the subject, it ought to be more accessible to an Anglophone audience. The whole thing is heavy going indeed:

October 2011 saw the convocation of the international commission Anglicanae Traditiones: Interdicasterial Working Group, at first organized only by the CDF, which has been responsible for preparing a liturgical order for all the Personal Ordinariates according to the requirements of AC III and in due consideration of the Book of Divine Worship, of Sacrosanctum Concilium, and of what is meant by “Anglican Patrimony.”

Even so, it says very little. It boils down to saying, with footnotes, that Anglicanorum coetibus provides for an Anglican liturgy, to be determined. There are ins and outs. We've made progress.

It doesn't answer the question I've had for several months now, how a hybrid liturgy that, as far as we know, was the project of a small group of Church of England clergy in 1905 made it to official status through the intricate bureaucratic process (komplizierter bürokratischer Prozess) Herr Prof Dr Feulner refers to (aufbezieht).

Nor does it answer the question of why, particularly in the UK, this liturgy has been disastrously unpopular (unbeliebt). It has been so unpopular that the Vatican, in the person of Msgr Lopes, has taken note of it:

He added that it was ironic that many Anglo-Catholics who have joined the Ordinariate did not use Anglican prayer books as Anglicans but the Roman rite.

“We have many people in the Ordinariate who are unfamiliar with some of that wider tradition, the depth of tradition, in Prayer Book forms and Anglican Missal forms of worship. In a certain sense it’s an irony because here’s this wonderful liturgical patrimony and we have Ordinariate communities saying ‘wait a minute, that’s actually quite new’,” he said .

Mgr Lopes added that if an Ordinariate community simply uses the Roman Rite it becomes “indistinguishable.”

The issue, though, is not that it's unaccustomed (ungewöhnlich), rather that it is tedious (langweilig) and contains affected archaism (künstlicher Archaismus). As far as I can see, it reflects the private agenda of an in-group, which in various ways has been a feature of both the US and UK Ordinariates.

Lack of transparency (Not von Durchsichtigkeit) is simply one cause of the disappointing outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus.

Language Changes

Exhibit A, part of the lyrics to "A Secretary Is Not A Toy" from the Broadway show How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (1961):

A secretary is not a pet
Nor an e-rector set.
It happened to Charlie McCoy, boy:
They fired him like a shot
The day the fellow forgot
A secretary is not a toy.

The usage giving rise to the double-entendre presumably entered the language well after AC Gilbert first marketed his product in 1913. The same with "Anglo-Papalism". I have heard that uninstructed Americans are incapable of understanding that Anglo-Papalists can only be members of a particular movement in the Church of England, not The Episcopal Church or the "Continuum". The Wikipedia entry I cited yesterday notes that it, in contrast to "Anglican Papalism", is a locution of US origin, and, per the contexts I cited yesterday (and could no doubt continue to cite) is at root a vague and confusing term.

After all, the whole concept, how Anglicans might become Catholic or otherwise place themselves under the authority of the Pope, is subject to numerous interpretations. A uniate liturgy would be just one possibility. In the US, an Anglican can go in via RCIA, via Anglican Use, or via the US-Canadian Ordinariate. Are all, some, or none who go in this way "Anglo-Papalists"? I'm puzzled that anyone would want to insist on a single, exclusive definition for the term -- dictionaries, to deal with multiple meanings, have definitions listed 1, 2, 3, etc.

On the other hand, I heard the story once of an undergraduate who got a paper back from a professor who'd made angry red marks to the effect that he'd misused a certain word. The student took out his dictionary, went to see the prof, and pointed out definition 3, which matched his own usage. The prof, unfazed, took out his pencil, seized the dictionary, and crossed out definition 3.

When dealing with the Ordinariates, sometimes I'm reminded of that mindset.

So What's An Anglo-Papalist?

A visitor pointed me to a post, with comments, on Ordinariate News, in which Mr Murphy makes what appears to be an editorial insertion quoting Church of England Bishop Philip North referring to himself as a "die-hard Anglo-Papalist", with the implied criticism that, despite this self-characterization, Bishop North never became Catholic.

"Anglo-Papalist" appears to be a recent term. Frederick Kinsman, although he discusses the movement among some Anglicans to use the Roman breviary, does not use it in 1936. A web search of the phrase brings up, first,

I think I have a decent idea of what Anglo-Catholicism is, but Anglo-Papalism confuses me.

Second, Wikipedia,

Anglican Papalism, also referred to as Anglo-Papalism, is a subset of Anglo-Catholicism with adherents manifesting a particularly high degree of influence from, and even identification with, the Roman Catholic Church. This position has historically been referred to as Anglican Papalism; the term Anglo-Papalism is an American neologism and it seems not to have appeared in print prior to the 1990s. Anglican Papalists have suggested "that the only way to convert England is by means of an 'English Uniate' rite."

But in a comment at The Continuium, a visitor notes,

Jeffrey Steenson has been an Anglo-Papalist for many years, probably even since before his ordinations in ECUSA in 1979 and 1980.

The best one can say, in this case, is that Msgr Steenson was an Anglo-Papalist in pectore, as he seems to have said nothing on his real intent as an Episcopalian, and his preferred liturgy would have been the 1979 BCP. But, until he made his move, he would presumably have been a coreligionist of his brother Anglican bishop, Philip North. So what's an Anglo-Papalist?

As I've said here before, Anglo-Papalist is a vague term (a definition in the Urban Dictionary would probably make it clearer). It's a term I probably will never use without implied fright quotes. From context in common usage, I would say it's a more extreme version of Anglo-Catholic, itself an imprecise term that probably means someone in the Laudian, Arminian, or High Church strain of Anglicanism.

However, we're in a season of asserting political identity, with Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner setting the pace. So I would say that, following that model, an Anglo-Papalist is someone who identifies as Catholic but hasn't had the operation. After all, if you've been catechized and received, you're Catholic. Why make a big deal over being anything else? This, among other things, makes me skeptical of most of the comments on the Ordinariate News thread.

A better synonym for Anglo-Papalist, as I think about it, might be Anglo-Arbitrageur. According to Wikipedia, arbitrage is

the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. When used by academics, an arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs.

It seems to me that Anglo-Papalist clergy are arbitraging the difference between the Anglican market for vocations and the Catholic market. In the Anglican market, there is a surplus of candidates; in the Catholic market, there is a shortage. Anglicanorum coetibus eliminated or greatly reduced transaction costs by allowing Anglicans to become candidates for the Catholic priesthood even if married, and in many cases crediting their seminary expense. In addition, female and openly gay candidates are at a premium in the Anglican market, a problem we don't see in the Catholic market.

In that context, I actually can't disagree with Bishop North's implied analysis of the market:

My heartfelt fear is that the Ordinariate can offer priests only a diminished ministry, for the majority of us a part-time or voluntary ministry, and for all of us a ministry that lacks the opportunities, the depth and the riches of what we know at present.

However, his estimate of the market prospects of Anglican candidates is correct only if we consider the strongest ones. A good Anglican preferment is always to be valued more highly than a Catholic pastorate -- higher pay, greater prestige, more chance for hanky-pank, whatever. The problem is that the women and openly gay candidates mostly crowd the straight guys, other than the ones best connected, out of the Anglican market.

But for Anglican priests who already have a pension -- Msgr Steenson already had his airplane, after all -- or for those utterly without Anglican prospects (by his own admission, this includes Andy Bartus) the Ordinariate provides a positive flow of rewards (prestige, for instance, even if, as Bishop North anticipated, the job might be part-time or non-stipendiary) without transaction costs in one state of the market.

Bishop North had a point.

What Do We Mean When We Say "Anglican Patrimony?" -- V

A visitor whom I greatly respect has referred me to a series of posts at the Fellowship of St Alban site in Rochester, which he feels may be helpful in addressing the "Anglican patrimony" question. These are from 2010 and 2011 and discuss the Ordinariate's prospects in anticipation, and as my visitor acknowledges, show in part the difference between theory and practice. I think, though, that they're instructive concerning some of the contradictions in what we've come to see.

The most interesting so far, as I've worked my way through them, is one by Fr Phillips of the Our Lady of the Atonement parish, specifically entitled Anglican Patrimony. He says in part,

Imagine a family living in a comfortable home, surrounded by all that's been accumulated over the years. . . . If those things were to be destroyed in a fire, would the family's values be destroyed? Would they change their sense of what is beautiful? No. Those sensibilities are within the people themselves, not within the things. The articles simply serve as a means of expression. What can be replaced will be replaced. Other things that express the family's sense of beauty and comfort will be accumulated over time. But that which is being expressed comes from within the members of the family.

But of course, Fr Phillips's use of the word "family" here is figurative, and it's a little harder to transfer the analogy to something like the Anglican Ordinariates. On one hand, depending on our loyalties, we may see ourselves as Trojans, Spartans, Bruins, Cornhuskers, or Longhorns and definitely feel that makes us a family, but other than the occasional tailgate event or fundraising appeal, it doesn't hold us together much. Or we may eagerly anticipate the Schmidlap family reunion, this year in Pittsburgh, but find it's been dominated by the Connecticut Schmidlaps, who are vegan and not much fun, and are surprised to find the Pennsylvania Schmidlaps, with whom we played as children, stayed away.

So in practice, even the family that reveres the things that come from within can be a disappointment. But Fr Phillips continues,

Anglicanorum coetibus has plenty of naysayers, people who are certain that the numbers will be few. Maybe they're right, but so what? I hope hundreds of thousands will flock to the Ordinariates, but if they don't, that doesn't mean it hasn't worked. Let's face it, our Lord's little band of apostles didn't look exactly overwhelming at first.

This characterization of the Apostles as a "little band" has concerned me before, in the context of "continuing Anglicanism", a related question. If we think about the constant reference to crowds in Mark's Gospel, the feedings of the four thousand and the five thousand, the five thousand who create a situation beyond the Sanhedrin's control in Acts 4, or even the implication in Luke 24, verses 17 and 18, in the exchange between our Lord and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus,

And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?

And the one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?

clearly implying that the events of Holy Week were widely known among a large group of people, it's harder to think of early Christians as a "little band". If numbers are large in the Gospels, it means something. But let's look at a modern example, the Knights of Columbus:

Michael J. McGivney, an Irish-American Catholic priest, founded the Knights of Columbus in New Haven, Connecticut. He gathered a group of men from St. Mary's Parish for an organizational meeting on October 2, 1881, and the Order was incorporated under the laws of the state of Connecticut on March 29, 1882. Although the first councils were all in that state, the Order spread throughout New England and the United States in subsequent years. By 1889, there were 300 councils comprising 40,000 knights. Twenty years later, in 1909, there were 230,000 knights in 1,300 councils.

So far, the Ordinariates haven't taken off at that rate. And for whatever, reason, Fr Phillips and his parish, whatever his original optimism, have chosen themselves to stay out of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.

What Do We Mean When We Say "Anglican Patrimony?" -- IV

A visitor has very helpfully and generously been sending me a series of reading recommendations that are beginning to amount to a graduate seminar on certain aspects of Anglicanism, for which, and for whose personal insights, I am deeply grateful. One of his recent suggestions is Peter Nockles's The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1867. What would we do without Amazon used books?

In the past several posts, I've referred to three strains of Anglicanism, High, Low, and Broad, but these strains can be further subdivided, and their emphasis changes over time. Just one of Nockles's points is that prior to the Oxford Movement, the High Church faction was not dormant, and it was represented by groups like the Henley Phalanx and the Hutchinsonians. (A web search on both comes up completely empty, showing the limits of even our latest technology.)

Nockles traces the roots of the Oxford Movement in part to controversies within the High Church faction over how to react to both the American and French Revolutions, which led in turn to controversies over the Reform Acts of 1828-1832, which, by providing civil rights to Catholics and Protestant dissenters, raised questions on whether the Church of England could still be considered, either de facto or de jure, established. These questions either had different applications, or were completely irrelevant, in countries like Scotland and the US, where the Church of England had never been established.

Nockles also brings up a fascinating contrast between Oxford thinkers and earlier Latitudinarian thinkers of the 18th century, especially William Paley, whose watchmaker analogy has been revived as part of the Intelligent Design controversy. The Tractarians offered some disagreement to Paley, very much like the contemporary Thomist philosopher Edward Feser. This discussion could conceivably be helpful in moving the theistic case against scientific naturalism forward. It seems to me that this is just one example of how complex Anglican thought has been over time and the contribution that might be made in bringing Catholic thought into closer contact with it.

This could potentially offer some insight into the question of what "Anglican patrimony" really is. My main difficulty is that the Ordinariate figures I've encountered here just recently, from Bartus to Hunwicke to Wolfe, strike me as utterly incapable of addressing anything like these issues. Recent ordinands or candidates seem to have, if anything, still lower mental capacity, which has probably been a point in their favor with the Houston clique. The one Anglican cleric I know of interested in the Ordinariate who is fully capable of a discussion on issues like this, Fr Christopher Kelley, doesn't appear to have equivalent prospects.

A strong case can probably be made for something besides an ugly and unwieldy liturgy that can legitimately become Catholic as "Anglican patrimony". The question is whether the current collection of hacks and careerists who seem to be running the Ordinariate show in the US and Canada can deal with it.

A Digression Into Personal History

I was raised Presbyterian, but I fell away from the Church in college for typical reasons, exacerbated by the truly awful education available even at prestige schools in the 1960s. Still, my guardian angel, often to my resentment, kept me from going off the rails completely, and I returned to the Church via an Episcopal parish when I was about 30. (The thing that prompted me was the sight of Catholics leaving an Ash Wednesday service with ashes on their foreheads, so while I wasn't ready to become Catholic at the time, the impulse was certainly there.)

I wound up taking the Episcopal confirmation class and getting confirmed. Something basic in the confirmation class always bothered me. The main catechist was a newly ordained associate who was clearly on a good career path: the parish I'd joined tended to produce headmasters, deans, and bishops, and this guy had married a bishop's daughter. I knew guys like that in college, already on the fast track toward white-shoe law firms or investment banks or cabinet positions (or all three), so the type wasn't strange to me. But I knew at a very deep level that this guy was ready to do whatever it took.

I heard a report not much later about a prominent doctor in the parish who was a big enough donor to be seated at the head table next to the bishop (Rusack) at some dinner. Eventually, the doctor stammered out, "You know, Bob [I suspect he was able to call him Bob], as a doctor, it's always been hard for me to accept the virgin birth. It's been a long and spiritual journey. But now, after many years of struggle, I've come to recognize that yes, it's true."

Bob replied in astonishment, "What? You don't believe in any of that stuff, do you?"

This was maybe 15 years after Jim Pike, in the estimate of his brother bishops, took things a little too far. Pike's biographers, though, point out that in the bishops' view, the problems were more of style than substance, and Bishop Rusack is probably as good an example of Broad Church thinking as any. The good doctor was clearly a little too naïve, and Bob Rusack pointedly told him so.

I was also a little naïve myself, and that parish a little too sophisticated, and when the rector (formerly Dean of the American Cathedral, Paris) indicated he wanted to counsel me about something, I left and went to a parish that was felt to be Low Church as opposed to Broad. I wasn't sure what the difference was, and nobody had actually gone so far as to explain to me that the first parish was Broad Church, any more than one fish would need to explain patiently to another that, after all, we swim in water. I was happier at the second place, possibly only because I'd learned a little better to keep my mouth shut.

Indeed, my catechist had spent a good part of confirmation class covering the career path of Episcopal clergy, including the ins and outs of how a vestry hires and (heaven forfend) fires a rector. The associate who'd been hired along with my catechist at the first parish had already moved over to the second, on his own very good career path, so there wasn't that much distinction between Low Church and Broad; you could do very well either way. (I got along much better with the second guy; I'm sorry to say he had difficulties over the ladies in a later parish, was eased out of the priesthood, but took up a successful parallel career in the non-profit field.)

I was uncomfortable with the subtext of all this stuff the whole time. I told my mother at one point that it was hard for me to think The Episcopal Church had much purpose other than providing certain people with good careers. My guardian angel, still at work, seems to have prevailed on me to recognize that I had nevertheless returned to the Church, and this was as good an interim step as any.

I've got to say that what bothered me at a very basic level about the careerism sacrificing both doctrine and integrity to itself in TEC also bothers me in what I see of the US-Canadian Ordinariate. Whenever I get a little too close to Ordinariate priests, as I did with Fr Wolfe earlier this week, I get the same feeling. Maybe it's just me.

What Do We Mean When We Say "Anglican Patrimony?" -- III

Mr Murphy has kindly responded to the issues I raised in my first post here with an e-mail, where he says in part,

[A]s regards the definition of "Anglican Patrimony": since we do not have an authorised list or specific definition, we can only refer to the words of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus:

elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside her visible confines (i.e. of the Catholic Church). Since these are gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ they are forces impelling towards Catholic unity
(Lumen Gentium 8 as quoted in the preamble to AC)

so as to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared
(AC III)

He concludes, "And we have no more precise definition than that!" This seems awfully Anglican, and not in a good way. I'll have more on this in a subsequent post.

I can only wish that Cardinal Ratzinger had been better briefed, preferably with material from Frederick Kinsman, prior to his 1993 meeting with Jeffrey Steenson and Clarence Pope. The Kinsman view of Anglicanism is that it's something amorphous and dangerously vague.

The first concern I would have had as a Catholic fly on the wall in 1993 would be who Steenson and Pope actually represented. It's hard to think they represented anyone but, at best, a clique of like-minded and perhaps opportunistic Episcopalians, mainly in the Diocese of Fort Worth. (Both Steenson and Pope kept the 1993 meeting very quiet; Pope wanted all correspondence sent to his home, not the office. The outcome in 1993-4 was that St John Paul was not entirely on board and told Ratzinger to go through the CDF. Ratzinger had more sense than to try this and had to wait until he became pope to take the matter any farther.)

The second problem is that there are three main strains of Anglicanism, High, Low, and Broad, with Broad the most prevalent and infecting the others extensively. However, Steenson and Pope represented, if anyone, only certain members of the US High Church or Anglo-Catholic faction. Kinsman (Reveries, p 138):

Of Anglo-Catholicism, there are only two special criticisms. First, from an Anglican standpoint, it is not really Anglicanism: and second, from a Catholic standpoint, it is not really Catholicism. Yet, looked at from a purely Anglican environment, Anglo-Catholics have a case. Anglican history and formulas make it clear that, if, in the Church of England, any wish to imagine themselves Catholics, it is intended that they may do so. Two questions particularly concern Anglo-Catholics: Are Anglican ministers Catholic priests? Is the English Communion Service the Mass? There is here no discussion of the facts, merely calling attention to the policy of permissive fancies.

So, much of the Anglo-Catholic side of Anglicanism is founded, according to Kinsman, graduate of Keble College and Pusey House, Oxford, and sometime High-Church Bishop of Delaware, largely on "permissive fancies". Um, where are the precious treasures here? Anglicanism has set up a situation that's allowed a faction to pretend to be Catholic, and they're happy as bugs with it. I've thought now and then -- and I've heard the opinion from influential members of the US-Canadian and UK Ordinariates as well -- that in effect, if not actual intent, Anglicanorum coetibus was a put-up-or-shut-up gesture. Should substantial numbers of Anglicans wish to become Catholic and bring their precious treasures of faith with them, a certain type of door would be opened.

Disappointingly few have entered.

Kinsman made no specific prediction, but I don't think he'd be surprised at this outcome. The complaint we hear that "TEC stopped being Catholic in 1974" comes from Anglo-Catholics, and they're among the non-takers (probably "continuers"), although Steenson and Pope made their 1993 pitch to Cardinal Ratzinger on the promise that in fact they'd come over in a massive body, 250,000 strong, instead of in the forlorn and desultory little groups we've actually seen. But, as Kinsman correctly notes, the Anglo-Catholics are not the largest group among Anglicans, and certainly not the most influential. He says in Reveries, pp 143-144,

In my judgment, Anglicanism is best understood when it has no principles, only a policy; and that the [Broad] Anglo-Liberals best represent its policy and spirit.

So where is the "Anglican patrimony", besides the small number of liturgical additions to which Msgr Lopes refers? I see teary-eyed sentimentalism and pretty pictures of country churches on blogs like Ordinariate News, but no substance. One might point to CS Lewis, say, or other Anglican devotional writers llke Donne, Herbert, or Swift, but they're part of a literary tradition, read by people of all faiths or no faith, and are not coming into the Catholic Church in any special way.

I think we're pretty much left with Msgr Lopes's list of Cranmerian additions, plus some unspecified whatever. The whatever is what worries me.

What Do We Mean When We Say "Anglican Patrimony?" -- II

We might try to limit the Spong problem in several ways. One might be to cut and splice Msgr Lopes's words creatively and say, well, our definition of "Anglican patrimony" is that part of it that nourishes the Catholic faith, so we can't include the thought of an obvious heretic like Spong. But no heretic is an accepted Catholic thinker anyhow, so we're getting close to tautology: 'Anglican patrimony' is the Catholic part of Anglicanism, the part that nourished Catholic faith. So we've said the Catholic faith is the Catholic faith, which doesn't tell us anything about Anglicanism, which means we've said nothing.

But in my quote from Mr Murphy yesterday, he said the Ordinariate movement means to "bring the treasures of the Anglican patrimony into the Catholic Church". So we're somehow bringing something in that isn't heretical and wasn't there before. Exactly what is that? Spong is an easy call. What Anglican thinkers are more Catholic and not heretical?

But now my interlocutor rises up, red-faced and shaking: "Mr. Bruce. You. Are. Missing. The. Whole. Point. The Episcopal Church ceased to be Catholic in 1974, when it ordained women priests. The instances like Pike and Spong are from this very recent period and don't represent real Anglicanism and the precious Catholic treasures of its whole Patrimony."

The only answer I would give is that the Church of England ceased to be Catholic in 1534. The Catholic Church recognized this systematically in 1896. But my interlocutor is coming from a direction that I think needs greater examination. Earlier I discussed Frederick Kinsman's Salve Mater, his disillusionment with Anglicanism, and his remarkably clear-eyed prescience about its future, based on what he knew of its past.

In later life, Kinsman returned to teaching Church history, this time to Catholic seminarians. At Catholic behest, he published many of his lectures in Reveries of a Hermit (1936). This book has the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur. His lecture explicating Anglicanism for seminarians is contained on pp 132-150. A key element of his description is the division of Anglicanism into three tendencies, High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church. He feels the Broad Church faction has been the most dominant since Hanoverian times and traces some of its vagaries to its tendency toward general tolerance, which it had to promote as a political arm of the State. This has carried over to The Episcopal Church in its perceived need not to be controversial, a quality Kinsman certainly felt was not new in the 1910s, when he left.

But his remarks on High Church are also perceptive and, again, prescient (pp 136-7):

This type of [Laudian] churchman largely went out of fashion and power under the Hanoverians, but never out of existence. [In] 1832, a band of clergymen in Oxford made a fresh plea for. . . . reversion to the ways of Laud and his compeers. . . . although they strove to keep well within the limits of the Prayer Book. Later some of the party ignored these, used translations or adaptations of the Missal, and set themselves to copy altogether the ways of Roman Catholics. Their watchword was always "Catholic", and their aim the support of Catholic doctrines and practices. Yet, in the party, there was much exercise of private judgment, both in a chronic fastidiousness which spent its energy in pointing out how everyone else was more or less wrong -- the superciliousness of schism -- and in a willfulness to follow individual whims. The spirit of Catholicism is obedience.

I've simply got to refer readers to Fr Hunwicke's disturbingly silly remarks I cited yesterday. He's "heard it argued" (viz, by Msgr Lopes of the Vatican, Msgr Steenson, and no doubt others) that "the Extraordinary Form is not part of the Anglican Patrimony." Well, in his private judgment, it doggone well is. You can take the vicar out of the country, but not the country out of the vicar, it would seem.

I recall that, during the runup of the UK Ordinariate, there was some consternation over a delay in Fr Hunwicke's ordination, due to views he may have expressed on the web. In my estimation, any such caution was well justified.

More to come.

What Do We Mean When We Say "Anglican Patrimony?" -- I

I see this term being used frequently in an Ordinariate context -- for instance, David Murphy posted a comment recently on the Ordinariate News blog using the term:

The Ordinariate movement (for want of a shorthand expression) [is] the striving to bring the treasures of the Anglican patrimony into the Catholic Church and to provide a jurisdiction for former Anglicans to be received into the Catholic Church in groups and continue to live this patrimony as Catholics did begin in the United States with the Pastoral Provision and what was called the “Anglican Use”.

Since Mr Murphy is on the Board of the Anglican Use Society, we must view this opinion as having some weight. Fr Hunwicke, a much-revered priest in the UK Ordinariate, has also recently said,

I have heard it argued that the Extraordinary Form is not part of the Anglican Patrimony. I find this difficult to understand, and, if you have read the first four parts of this piece, so will you. Of course, the Extraordinary Form was never officially authorised in the Church of England or the American and Australian branches of the Anglican Communion. But, then, neither was the Ordinary Form. Certainly, in England, the Anglo-Papalist movement which is our own much loved ecclesial background did use the Tridentine Rite, used it and loved it, and suffered persecution for that use and that love. The Missale Romanum was the gold standard, with the English Missal providing, over half a century, an intermediate stage in the journey towards its full adoption. That is the place we have come from.

What seriously bothers me about both statements is their vagueness, and even their somewhat sloppy Anglican inclusiveness. The Vatican in fact took the trouble to provide its particular definition of the term in 2013:

In an interview published in the December issue of The Portal, Mgr. Steven Lopes of the CDF defined this distinctive “patrimony”. “We here have thought a lot about what constitutes Anglican patrimony, particularly as it involves the liturgy, and we have a working definition. It is to say that ‘Anglican liturgical patrimony is that which has nourished the Catholic Faith, within the Anglican tradition during the time of ecclesiastical separation, and has given rise to this new desire for full communion’,” Mgr. Lopes said.

He went on,

“’It has nourished the faith’: these expressions from the Anglican prayer books and how they are interpreted through the years - I’m thinking of the Comfortable Words, the Summary of the Law, the Collect for Purity, the Prayer of Humble Access - these are not museum pieces. They have sustained people in their faith because they have given expression, beautiful expression, to the truth! It is a truth of God that truly liberates us and draws us deeper into the mystery of God and of ourselves. The fact that these prayers capture this truth in such a magnificent way sustains faith.” “’Throughout the years of ecclesiastical separation’: well, that acknowledges the fact that Anglican liturgical patrimony is not just 1549 or 1662, nor is it just 1928 or 1976. We can’t go back to a specific period and say ‘this is it’, but you have to look at the whole Anglican experience to see how that faith was nourished’,” Mgr Lopes said.

It seems to me that Msgr Lopes is focusing on particular liturgical use, namely the list of Cranmerian prayers that he gives, although he eventually mentions the "whole Anglican experience", which it seems to me is not the best possible way of putting things. However, since Msgr Lopes is clearly referring to liturgy found in the Book of Common Prayer, this would tend to rule out Fr Hunwicke's assertion that the Extraordinary Form is part of "Anglican Patrimony".

Now someone can say, as someone surely will, "Well, 'Anglican Patrimony' means the whole Anglican gift, our whole wonderful spiritual experience. Why are you being such a curmudgeon and nitpicking what spiritual people like Fr Hunwicke say?" But if we do this, we're back to the basic problem of Anglicanism that informed Catholic writers like Frederick Kinsman point out: Anglicanism in fact means anything people choose to make it mean. Neither James Pike nor Jack Spong was tried or deposed for heresy. For instance,

The Rt. Rev. Peter Jensen, Australia’s Archbishop of Sydney, is making headlines for denying a heretic access to the pulpits of the churches under his care. The heretic is the retired bishop of Newark, New Jersey, The Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong — a man who has denied virtually every major Christian doctrine.

Heretics are rarely excommunicated these days. Instead, they go on book tours. Bishop Spong is visiting Australia at the invitation of Australia’s Anglican Primate Phillip Aspinall of Brisbane. When Archbishop Jensen denied Bishop Spong access to the pulpits of Sydney, Archbishop Aspinall extended an invitation for Spong to preach in Brisbane’s St. John’s Cathedral.

Who is the better Anglican, Spong or Jensen? Who decides which bishop is part of the "Anglican patrimony", especially if we "look at the whole Anglican experience"? The Primate of Australia, the best authority we can find, is saying they're both good Anglicans and seems irked at Jensen for thinking Spong is not. As Msgr Lopes says, we can't limit things to 1549 or 1662, 1928 or 1976. The 2009 kerfuffle is just as good.

Linguistic imprecision is part of what I see as the silliness in the Anglo-Papalist movement. I'll have more to say.

Amtrak

Don't worry, I'm not going to pitch the idea of buying a ticket on a train that'll be 20 hours late, or now and then put you off in a body bag. But not long ago I thought the word "Edsel" might somehow be appropriate when I started looking at the Ordinariate Rite liturgy, and the other day I was browsing the web and found a story on Amtrak that put me in mind of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.

But first, I neglected to mention another personnel change in Houston in my post about these. (We've already met Fr Wolfe, of course.) In addition to my mention of that appointment and the departure of Fr Sellers, the June 2015 Ordinariate Observer notes that Mrs Laurie Miller has assumed the position of Executive Assistant to the Ordinary, although Barbara Jonte is still listed in that position on the Ordinariate staff page. Ms Jonte, we learn, has moved over to be Special Assistant for Mission Advancement (italics in original).

Now Amtrak:

As it recovers from one of its worst accidents on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak faces frequent management turnover and structural change, in addition to chronic financial and political challenges.

Former Amtrak executives say the turmoil at the top in recent years has disrupted railroad management and distracted employees from their daily duties.

Steven Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) executive and now an adjunct professor in railway management at Michigan State University, said: "Rapid changes in management are never good, unless they're aimed at getting rid of nonfunctioning people. Management turmoil is of concern."

Over my working life, I got to know several corporations and even a couple of government agencies. I know a thing or two about dysfunctional organizations. I think I see the signs in Houston. This is an organization under pressure. The churning at the upper level reflects what is probably an inability to deal with the problem still farther up.

Reply From Fr Ken Wolfe

Fr Wolfe orignally replied to my e-mail by requesting a phone discussion, which I thought was prompt, courteous, and appropriate, and which I agreed to. However, this discussion appears to be off. Here is his revised reply:

Dear Mr. Bruce:

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter has a serious commitment to the protection of all children, youth, and adults at risk. We most certainly attend to any concerns related to the safety of children. However, in your attached e-mail, you don’t say children are being abused or neglected, that you have witnessed any abuse or neglect, or that someone who has experienced such misconduct has asked for your assistance. Rather, your complaint appears to be part of your general animus towards Father Bartus as is evident from your blog.

If you have a credible suspicion of abuse, neglect, or maltreatment of a child, youth, or other person please report it immediately to the Orange County Child Protective Services at 714-940-1000 or 800-207-4464. CPS has a 24 hour hotline, 7 days a week.

You may also consult detailed instructions on How to Report an Allegation of Physical Abuse and/or Neglect on the Ordinariate website. Simply use the Quick Link: To Report Abuse under Safe Environment: Protecting Children and Youth on our homepage. http://www.usordinariate.org/

The Ordinariate has policies on the use of alcoholic beverages in communities such as Blessed John Henry Newman. If there is a serious concern about whether actions are in compliance with our policy on the use of alcoholic beverages on parish properties, a person who has first-hand experience should bring the facts to the attention of the Ordinary or Vicar General.

Sincerely yours,

Fr. Ken Wolfe
Director of Child and Youth Protection
The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

I assume this altered position came after consultation with his superiors.

House Built On Sand?

Here's where I'm heading over the Ordinariates. I'm having a very hard time getting past the idea that Anglicanorum coetibus was issued based on two mistaken assumptions:

1. The flawed assumption behind "continuing Anglicanism", pointed out most effectively by Douglas Bess in Divided We Stand, that large numbers of Anglicans (especially US Episcopalians) would leave their denomination due to its increasingly liberal positions. While a number of "continuing Anglican" denominations emerged in the decade or so following the 1977 Congress of St Louis, Bess is correct in noting that The Episcopal Church hardly noticed, and the "continuing" groups remained small, while they redivided among themselves in very Protestant fashion.
2. The assumption, promoted by Jeffrey Steenson and Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope in their 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger that resulted in the draft of Anglicanorum coetibus, that the disaffected Anglicans (given Steenson's and Pope's affiliation, mainly US Episcopalians) would wish to become Catholic. Steenson and Pope continued the wildly excessive estimate of potential interest and were unrealistic in not recognizing the Protestant nature of Episcopalianism.

The two mistaken assumptions, it seems to me, explain the Ordinariates we see in 2015. Worldwide membership is in the mid four figures. The most successful North American parishes, still small by diocesan Catholic standards, entered the Ordinariates in their present size from earlier jurisdictions, either Anglican Use or other Anglican. No comparable parish has emerged de novo, and the groups started since 2012 are struggling, with those in the Washington, DC and Philadelphia areas pressed into merging.

Meanwhile, posts and comments on the Ordinariate News blog reflect a disturbing tendency, first, deliberately to reject grownup topics like pledging, budgeting, vocations, and building maintenance, and second, gratuitously to attack Episcopalians -- a case of the mote in your brother's eye, it seems to me. David Murphy, now on the Board of the Anglican Use Society, is, astonishingly, a leader in this tendency. Forgive me, but the appointment of Mr Murphy and some like-minded individuals to the Board of the AUS can only contribute to the idea that Anglo-Papalism in its various forms is something basically overspecialized, silly, immature, and eccentric. The adults in the room need to take note of this.

I'm moving increasingly to the view that joining the US-Canadian Ordinariate as of 2015 is not a good option for any group, including my friends at the St Mary of the Angels parish. I now feel they need to consider seriously and prayerfully what their best options will be when their legal issues are resolved.

E-Mail To Fr Ken Wolfe

I sent the following to Fr Wolfe this morning:

Fr Wolfe, I’m contacting you in your capacity as Officer for Child Protection Compliance for the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter. While the “safe environment’” documentation on the Ordinariate web site focuses on reporting instances of child abuse or neglect, it seems to me that if such an instance has to be reported, the system has already failed. As a participant in my diocesan VIRTUS program, I recognize the need to be vigilant over situations that can lead to an unsafe environment as well as the need to report actual abuse.

Before I became a Catholic layman via my diocesan RCIA program, I attended the St Mary of the Angels ACA parish in Hollywood, CA, while Andrew Bartus, now an Ordinariate priest, was Curate there. During that time, I had an opportunity to observe potentially unsafe situations involving Fr Bartus that appear to have carried over into his ministry in the Bl John Henry Newman group in Irvine, CA.

Two specific issues concern me. One is the possibly inappropriate use of alcohol at most parish functions in Irvine, and the other is insufficient distinction between Bartus social events and parish activities, which in my observation at St Mary’s often involved heavy alcohol use with children from several parish families being present. If continued in Irvine, this would be a potential violation of point 9 of the Ordinariate Code of Conduct, involving contact occurring at “the cleric’s residence or any other place that may lead to confusion as to the nature of the interaction.”

Parish announcements, and at least one published third-party account, concerning activities at the Bl John Henry Newman group indicate that nearly all of them involve consumption of alcohol. This incudes the reception following the regular 11 AM Sunday mass, usually called “coffee hour”, but is noted in a third-party published account as being called “wine hour” at the Newman group. Other regular and special events are held specifically in bars or breweries. The only group event in which alcohol is specifically not served is the coffee hour following the 9 AM Sunday mass.

It seems to me that this level of alcohol consumption at regular parish events is inappropriate and sets a bad example for children, who clearly attend mass and other events at the parish. In addition, an atmosphere in which alcohol is consumed is likely to cause adults to relax the level of vigilance and concern over maintaining a safe environment that they should have as responsible participants in parish activities.

I believe a minimum acceptable response to these concerns would involve, first, a clear distinction between Bartus social activities and parish events, with no children involved when alcohol is served at the Bartus residence, and second, a serious reduction in the number of parish events at which alcohol is served. In particular, serving wine during a noon coffee hour is highly unusual and should be stopped. No minors should be involved in any parish event conducted at a bar or brewery, and regular events at bars or breweries should be reconsidered.

I would like to give you the opportunity to investigate this situation and take corrective action before I raise it with the Diocese of Orange and the Secretariat for Child and Youth Protection of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

I look forward to your prompt and responsive reply.

US-Canadian Ordinariate Personnel Changes, Or Not

My own view, shared at least by a few other observers, is that whatever the US-Canadian Ordinariate has going in its favor is largely canceled out by incompetent or nonfeasant personnel. I'm still reeling from attempts to deal with Ms Chalmers when she was Chancellor in 2012, but the May 2015 Ordinariate Observer has, buried in an announcement of Fr Ken Wolfe's ordination, noted that by the way, he is also the new Chancellor. (Fr Wolfe, in Tucson, is yet another exception to the Ordinariates' stated policy of ordaining priests only in connection with the admission of groups.)

So the the US-Canadian Ordinariate continues to churn its officials. The recently ordained Fr Wolfe has also been appointed Director of Child and Youth Protection, with much greater fanfare than his appointment as Chancellor. On balance, this is good -- I have a great deal of respect for the VIRTUS program. My wife and I have both attended classes, and we've found that the material is serious, well-organized, and well-presented. As I've discovered with the Robert W Bowman case, even moribund and graying parishes without a whole lot of kids around can fall victim to priests and volunteers with child pornography arrests on their records.

However, given the record of the US-Canadian Ordinariate over more than three years, there's no guarantee that Fr Wolfe will actually do anything in his new position. One of the first things I'd want to look at if I were he would be the circumstances under which alcohol is served at the Bl John Henry Newman group in California, and other functions in which Andy Bartus is featured. No e-mail contact is given for Fr Wolfe -- wouldn't it be a basic requirement that anyone with any concerns over the safety of children and youth in the US-Canadian Ordinariate have a way to contact Fr Wolfe directly? I eventually found one via a google search, but not via the Ordinariate web site. [A visitor has noted that there's a link at the very top right corner of the home page, but not with the rest of the links.] (Looks like someone's going to audit this function in the Ordinariate. Hey, I used to know something about audits. Maybe I need to get in touch with the auditors.)

We learn from a comment at Ordinariate News that Fr Sellers, the incompetent or nonfeasant "Director of Communications", has been replaced as of July 1. Whoever has replaced him has made no apparent move to update the Ordinariate web site or post any further announcements -- in particular, shouldn't Fr Wolfe have a new page on the site announcing his agenda and asking for everyone's concern and cooperation? At first glance, it looks like the same club members, established or new, are simply trading posts.

Finally, we're into mid-July. The scuttlebutt was that Fr Jack Barker would be assuming some type of function in the Ordinariate as of July 1, possibly as a Vicar Forane. However, although he arrived at the Bl Newman group in Irvine on July 7, there has been no announcement from Houston on what his function will be.

But hey, everything's just fine! If Anglican Patrimony is for us, who can be against us?

Being Realistic

I started this blog when the specific events surrounding the attempt by the St Mary of the Angels parish to enter the newly erected Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter threw me and others into spiritual crisis. It then became an effort to get to the bottom of things, and it's taken me on a journey through "continuing Anglicanism", the position of church institutions in civil law, "Anglo-Catholicism" and its relation to "Anglicanism", the history of The Episcopal Church, what it means to become Catholic, RCIA vs reception via the Ordinariates, Catholic thought based on figures like St Thomas Aquinas, the nature of Catholic sacraments, and many other things. In fact, it's taken me through an education I wish I could have had at the age I should have had it. The journey isn't finished.

Here's a quote from John Henry Neman's The Idea of a University:

Right Reason, that is, Reason rightly exercised, leads the mind to the Catholic Faith, and plants it there, and teaches it in all its religious speculations to act under its guidance. But Reason, considered as a real agent in the world, and as an operative principle in man's nature, with an historical course and with definite results, is far from taking so straight and satisfactory a direction. It considers itself from first to last independent and supreme; it requires no external authority; it makes a religion for itself. Even though it accepts Catholicism, it does not go to sleep. . .

I don't have much patience for sentimental appeals to Anglicanism in whatever form as reasons to become Catholic via Anglicanorum coetibus. I think it's important to look realistically at what the Ordinariates' resources are, what their potential is, and what difficulties they face. At the same time, I also think back to my years studying English literature and the remarks of a professor I had as an undergraduate: he said that people sometimes want to idealize an England of the past, Canterbury Tales or The Faerie Queene or Shakespeare's Henry IV or Addison's Spectator or Dickens or Trollope and don't recognize that the English in that period were actually murderously efficient. The sentimental appeals to reified "Anglicanism" we see in whatever form, today, for instance at Ordinariate News, strike me as unrealistic, unsustainable for real spiritual growth, and unhealthy.

On the other hand, it seems that Ordinariate News has put its one consistently reasonable commenter on notice:

Oh EPMS. forgive my frustration, but if you have nothing to comment but your fears that the Ordinariate project will die within two generations, I would really prefer you wrote nothing at all.

For those of us who are doing our utmost to achieve exactly the opposite (and we too are aware of the risks!), your cries of woe are not helpful at all.

David Murphy

Regarding Ordinariate News, my wife commented, well, I guess you always have to have a cheerleading blog that says everything's fine and dandy.

"Anglcan Patrimony" Again

Fr Hunwicke has concluded his series of posts on the liturgy, and I'm mainly confused, since he seems to be appealing to a "principle" that I can't identify. This seems to be the thrust of his argument:

• Around 1905, an English cleric developed a hybrid English Missal that combined Cranmerian prayers with an English version of the Latin Tridentine text, which was used in some English Anglo-Catholic parishes. (However, this liturgy had no official sanction and was used only because Anglican bishops looked the other way; they also looked the other way when other clerics denied the Creeds. In addition, other versions of hybrid missals were in use elsewhere, with equivalent lack of sanction.)
• By the 1930s, other Anglo-Catholics or Anglo-Papalists (Fr Hunwicke is not precise in using these terms) decided the Missale Romanum was the truly lawful book of the Western Latin Church of which they felt they were members; the English Missal was a way of working towards that ideal. This view can most charitably be characterized as eccentric, since it was not sanctioned by Rome (which would probably have said on one hand, we can't stop you from using this as you please, but on the other, you should really simplify things and formally become Catholic); neither was it sanctioned by York or Canterbury. However, York and Canterbury had long since established the precedent that its clerics could get away with worse.
• Anglo-Papalist clergy were persecuted (I assume very occasionally) nevertheless for using a liturgy without sanction. Ah, the humanity! (By 1920, however, Frederick Kinsman wrote that while he never had an instance of having to discipline clergy for departures from usage while he was Bishop of Delaware, the general custom in both the Church of England and PECUSA would have required him, in the interest of uniformity, to do nothing.)
• Vatican II resulted in liturgical reform, but not in a direction Anglo-Papalists expected. However, the Anglo-Papalists were under York and Canterbury, not Rome. Nevertheless, in a remarkable Jedi-Jesuit mind trick, Rome forced them to stop using their hybrid missal, which in fact was sanctioned nowhere! Instead, although Fr Hunwicke raises this only by implication, Anglo-Papalists in the Church of England went to the Novus Ordo mass, with CofE bishops presumably continuing to look the other way.
• However, under Anglicanorum coetibus, Rome has spoken, and the particular UK version of the hybrid liturgy, dating from 1905 or so, can now be used in Catholic parishes. (The evidence we see is that, when it's been introduced in the UK Ordinariate, the parishioners have rejected it and instead have moved to Novus Ordo diocesan masses. Evidence from North America is more fragmentary, but the Ordinariate there is not thriving by any stretch.)

Fr Hunwicke would have us thus celebrate the triumph of "Anglican Patrimony" and principle. But "Anglican Patrimony" covers everything from Thomas Cromwell to Bishop Robinson. Where's the principle? What's to celebrate?

Frederick Kinsman On St Mary Of The Angels

St Mary's was just getting started in a Hollywood storefront when Kinsman wrote Salve Mater, but we've already seen that his understanding of Episcopalianism was clear-eyed enough to anticipate eventual cases like James Pike and Jack Spong. He also recognized how situations like St Mary of the Angels could come about (pp 102-103):

Episcopalianism is merely a form of Congregationalism, to which the "historic episcopate" forms an anomalous adjunct. Congregationalism means ministerialism. Ministers are cast loose in society to establish or hold personal followings; each is concerned to proclaim his own views and put in practice his own schemes. This tends to develop ministerial egotism and resolves church work into prosecution of parochial activities under special personal leadership. The one vital question is "Do you like the minister?" To like him, to attend his ministrations, and to co-operate in his schemes is to exhibit a high degree of piety; not to like him, to disparage him in contrast with his predecessor, and to be alert to oust him for a man of a different type, is to exhibit a higher, since it is the virtue of Protestantism to protest.

In this context, St Mary of the Angels was a Protestant enterprise from the outset, being in effect the personal scheme of Fr Dodd, who built a personal following among figures like Mary Pickford, and who, with his successors, ran the parish without much reference to a diocese until it suited them to cut loose entirely. In fact, this relation was baked into its founding documents. In recent events, we see Andy Bartus acting less like the Catholic he insisted he was to Protestant vestries than like the Protestant minister Kinsman describes, establishing a personal following, promoting his own schemes, and assisting the parish in its higher piety of ousting the rector.

Nothing in recent decades, it seems to me, would surprise Kinsman.

Taxonomy

Oddly enough, I interrupted a rereading of Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial to take up Kinsman's Salve Mater, but finishing Kinsman, I've returned to Johnson. Both books, it seems to me, take a rationalist approach to conventional wisdom. Both ask if something we assume to exist -- a "Catholic" quality in Anglicanism on one hand, a verifiable hypothesis of natural selection on the other -- is actually there, and both offer up an answer that no, neither exists.

This has got me asking once again what we mean when we say "Anglo-Catholic" or "Anglo-Papalist". It seems to me that there's a big definition and a smaller, subsidiary one that may not in fact apply at all, and we're trying to get hold of something very slippery.

1. Both Anglo-Catholics and Anglo-Papalists seem to adhere to a view, refined by Keble and Pusey and generally called the "Oxford Movement", that there is a "Catholic" quality in Anglicanism that was continuous after 1534. This does not appear to have been Newman's developed view, and Rome, investigating Oxford claims, eventually responded with Apostolicae curae. The Oxford view is what might most accurately be called Anglo-Catholic. It implies that Anglicans are Catholic enough that they do not need to take any particular steps to rejoin Rome or accept Papal authority. This is almost certainly what TS Eliot meant when he said he was "Anglo-Catholic in religion", as his personal life did not reflect any desire to approach Roman ideals of conscience.
2. The secondary issue involves liturgy, and this is what Fr Hunwicke has chiefly been discussing in his recent posts. From context, I'm beginning to conclude that "Anglo-Papalism" reflects a desire to hybridize Anglican and Roman liturgical language into a single missal, although there are numerous variations on this theme. Fr Hunwicke said flat out on July 4, "It was the authorisation of the Ordinariate Rite which restored the substance of the English Missal." However, although Fr Hunwicke cites a UK version of an English missal, there's apparently more than one. A visitor tells me,

   In the USA. . . [Anglicans] with "Roman leanings" produced two missals, The American Missal and The Anglican Missal. Both of them included material from the 1928 Prayer Book. One of them (I forget which) was basically the Tridentine Missal in Cranmerian English with bits from the 1928 BCP inserted; the other was basically the 1928 BCP rite with bits from the Tridentine Missal provided as inserts to be said silently. A Fr. Frank Gavin, a priest of the PECUSA Diocese of Indianapolis who taught at Nashotah House and at General Seminary, was associated with the production of one of these missals, the "Anglican Missal," I think.

   But in the US, it was probably more common either to use the 1979 Rite One (in TEC parishes), or the 1928 Eucharistic rite (in "continuing" parishes) with Tridentine additions to etiquette. As a result, at least liturgically, "Anglo-Papalist" actually means very little, especially since before the Ordinariate Rite, none of the missal liturgies had any ecclesiastical sanction -- it was all informal freelancing, with episcopal authority looking the other way.

Somewhere in this muddle, it seems to me, is an explanation for why the Ordinariates have underperformed. Those who describe themselves as Anglo-Catholic haven't moved to join, because they feel no need to, they're already Catholic enough. But nobody's attracted by the Ordinariate Rite liturgy, either. Frankly, it's ugly and unwieldy. If anyone thought the Ordinariates would sweeten the deal for any appreciable number of Anglicans, or even Anglo-Catholics, it was a wrong call.

Fr Hunwicke's Fourth Post On The English Missal

Fr Hunwicke's fourth post raises some additional questions for me:

[W]riting in 1962, a Fr Bertram Jones, Vicar of Wrawby (New Rites ... Right or Wrong?) acknowledged that "the desirability of revising the Roman Mass ... is evident, though haste should be, and probably will be, avoided. Eventually, it is almost certain, a revised Roman Mass will emerge, with the Latin Canon inviolate but much, if not all, of the audible part in the vernacular". He urged, for use within the Church of England, "the interim policy of treating the Roman Mass in Latin as the norm to be used whenever and wherever, all things relevant carefully considered, it is practicable to use it; the rite of 1662 and the vernacular for the audible parts as the only permissible deviations from it; and the Gregorian Canon, silent and in Latin (with the 1662 Prayer of Consecration permissibly interpolated), as of strict obligation in every Mass".

Fr Hunwicke appears to be in general sympathy with these views: "Within five years, a raw policy of naked aggression against Tradition had put paid to everything which Anglo-Papalists such as Jones thought to be obvious." He goes on to say, "It was the authorisation of the Ordinariate Rite which restored the substance of the English Missal."

As best I can see, Fr Hunwicke seems generally aligned with Oxford Movement sympathizers who see a continuity between pre-Reformation Catholicism in England and the Church of England, so that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer represents a form of Catholic continuity in liturgy.

This is not a Catholic view. the English Cardinal Gasquet, one of the principal authors of Apostolicae curae, was certainly of the view that Anglican orders were invalid from the time of the 1552 ordinal due to defect of intention. Frederick Kinsman echoes Apostolicae curae and goes somewhat farther in pointing out the historical record, borne out by the contemporary work of Diarmaid MacCulloch, that the Tudor Church of England was consciously and deliberately Reformed Protestant. Any slight revisions in the 1662 prayer book would have been half-hearted and in any case not taken seriously.

As a result, as far as I can gather from interpolating this into Fr Hunwicke's posts, certain Anglo-Papalist clerics, holding Anglican orders, were choosing to insert certain elements of Roman liturgy into the Protestant Book of Common Prayer. They were presumably free to do this as a natural human right, but under the normal discipline of the Church of England (if it existed), they probably should not have, and in fact, many of their parishioners, being good Protestants, objected to this, as they should have, if anyone took the Thirty-nine Articles seriously. The problem there, as Kinsman had recognized by 1919, was that Anglicans didn't take anything in the prayer book seriously, not the words in the liturgy, not the Thirty-nine Articles, and not the Creeds.

As a result, according to Fr Hunwicke, the bishops, interested primarily in what was expedient, looked the other way, whatever their view of the Oxford Movement.

The UK Anglo-Papalist clergy, according to Fr Hunwicke, eventually threw up their hands in horror at the Novus Ordo liturgy. They were entitled to do this, and not being Catholic, they were as entitled to dislike it as they were entitled to dislike, say, a recent Steinbeck novel. Some UK Anglican parishes, however, according to my visitor's account, saw their duty as Anglo-Papalists in moving the altar, removing the communion rail, and going to the new liturgy. Since Anglicans tolerated pretty much everything anyhow, this was OK, although the same Vatican whose rites they liked also said their Anglican orders were invalid.

But now we have another contradiction. The account Fr Hunwicke gives of earlier conflicts suggests that parishes led by Anglo-Papalist (but definitely not Catholic) clergy objected to Roman insertions into the prayer book liturgy. But the current situation seems to be that the Ordinariate Rite, a restoration of the English Missal that the Protestant parishes hated, is now rejected by Ordinariate parishes in the UK, who prefer the fully Catholic Novus Ordo rite.

The more I read of Kinsman, the better I like him. Anglo-Papalism, on the other hand, strikes me as eccentric at best.

A Preliminary Reaction To Fr Hunwicke's Posts On Anglo-Papalism

Fr Hunwicke has continued his posts that focus primarily on the UK version of Anglo-Papalism, considered separately from Anglo-Catholicism. He isn't finished, apparently, and his posts aren't yet open for comments. His third post raises an interesting set of questions.

But what Protestant laity very often wanted was the return of Morning Prayer instead of the Eucharist as the main service on a Sunday morning; if not that, they desired at least the removal of incense, chanting, servers, candles, bells. Their list of desired 'reforms' would almost certainly not include the removal of the Canon of the Mass, for the very simple reason that the Vicar said it silently during the singing of the Sanctus and Benedictus. They had never heard it and so they didn't even realise that they ought to be violently against it!

The thrust here seems to be that certain "ritualist" CofE clergy were inserting -- perhaps we might use the word "sneaking" -- Roman Catholic elements into the prayer book liturgy; indeed, in one case, saying the daily offices in Latin if nobody else was around to hear it done. Fr Hunwicke's implication seems to be that this was a bit naughty, but the clergy involved by and large got away with it, because the bishops looked the other way.

I've got to refer to my visitor's observation that Anglo-Papalism in the US took a different form than what Fr Hunwicke is describing for the UK. On the other hand, another visitor has very kindly sent me a copy of a book by Frederick Joseph Kinsman, Salve Mater. Kinsman (1868-1944) was a professor of church history at General Theological Seminary and then Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919.

After becoming a bishop, he fairly quickly became disaffected with his position as an Anglican and began to see that the view of Anglicanism as a Protestant denomination with superficially Catholic features was the correct one (very similar to the views we now see from Diarmaid MacCulloch). He concluded that the need for political compromise over many points of doctrine, especially the tendency to "tolerate" the ritualistic tendency that emerged with the Oxford Movement, essentially meant that Anglicanism didn't stand for anything. In 1919, he resigned as bishop and became a Catholic.

One bit of prescience in Salve Mater stands out: he brings up a series of scandals in the Episcopal Church and the Church of England about 1910, in which clergy in both denominations publicly renounced key aspects of doctrine, very similar to what James Pike and Jack Spong did later in the century, and much like Pike and Spong, they basically got away with it (a John W Suter in Massachusetts seems to have been eased out, much like Pike, but like Pike, he kept his social prestige).

Kinsman's point at the time was that, if you tolerate all sorts of things, you're going to get all sorts of things. Pike and Spong shouldn't have surprised anyone, given the nature of Anglicanism as some perceptive people like Kinsman have seen it. In this context, that Church of England bishops should have been tolerating all sorts of insertions into the prayer book liturgy, Roman Catholic or druidical or satanist, ought to be seen as a problem. Fr Z on his Catholic blog, after all, promotes the idea of "Say the black, do the red." If you see special prayers to the Easter bunny in your parish, take it as high as you can until it's fixed.

This appears to be the Catholic position. The Anglicans who were monkeying with the prayer book liturgy in the Church of England strike me as eccentrics of a particular English sort.

Strong Popes Make A Difference

In the context of recent Supreme Court decisions, some people have certainly raised the question of when, not whether, someone will sue a Catholic diocese for refusing to perform a same-sex marriage, and what the judicial outcome may be. Fr Z on his blog has been urging Catholics to prepare themselves for troubling times.

The one historical precedent I haven't seen mentioned, in print or on the radio, is the Kulturkampf, Bismarck's effort to marginalize the Catholic Church in Germany. It isn't fully parallel to the present-day Progressive agenda, and the Catholic Church in the US doesn't currently appear to be as unified against it as it was in late 19th century Germany. However, the consensus appears to be that Pope Leo XIII's strong leadership resolved that particular issue. Since I've become Catholic, I've slowly learned more about Leo XIII. I get the impression that he was a strong Pope along the lines of John Paul II.

We know the Enemy won't prevail. We can trust that the Holy Spirit will send us the leadership we need when we need it.