Stetson, I'm increasingly convinced, was intimately familiar with every detail in the process running up to Anglicanorum coetibus and then the erection of the OCSP. Since he was on the scene at St Mary of the Angels, I have no choice but to believe he transmitted everything he saw and heard to Wuerl, Hurd, and Steenson, and probably to Margaret Chalmers, the OCSP's attorney working under the title of chancellor.
The first big puzzle I have is why he appears to have ignored the legal problem with the St Mary's bylaws, which presented a can't-get-there-from-here. Fr Kelley told me about the problem in December 2011, and he told me later that the OCSP authorities, presumably Stetson and Hurd at minimum, wouldn't listen. According to the parish bylaws, the members had to be Anglican. Thus if any members were received as Catholics, absent a bylaw revision, they would cease to be voting members on the spot.
However, if any members of the parish remained Anglican, as a minority were certain to do, they would remain as voting members of the parish, and the property would belong to them. (This problem was over and above the issues raised by the January 2011 bylaw revision putting the parish in the Patrimony of the Primate, a major focus of the ongoing litigation.) It's a puzzle to me how Ms Chalmers, the OCSP attorney, and Msgr Stetson, with a degree from Harvard Law, could have ignored this, but they did.
The only way to handle this would have been a bylaw revision. But by December 2011, the parish was so bitterly divided that it would probably have been impossible even to conduct a parish meeting to consider such a revision -- even removing individuals threatening violent disruption, of which they were fully capable, would have been an insurmountable problem. In hindsight, Msgr Stetson was not the sort of leader such circumstances required, and he seems not to have wanted to address even the legal issue.
Stetson made no direct announcement following the apparent postponement of the parish's reception into the OCSP in early January 2012; it was explained by St Mary's clergy during a mass that Houston wanted a new vote on joining the Ordinariate. However, vote or no, this would still not have resolved the legal issue that would have resulted from receiving the parish majority without a bylaw revision.
Instead, as I noted here, Stetson addressed the parish on January 22, 2012 and answered our questions. As he put it, "Archbishop Falk contacted Cardinal Wuerl with new information that's caused us to re-evaluate what's happening." In that meeting, in response to a direct question that may have been from me, Stetson said definitely that no bylaw revision would be required before the parish could be received into the OCSP -- Houston simply wanted another vote.
In hindsight, I've got to conclude that Msgr Stetson here was either disingenuous or stunningly incompetent. My guess, based on what I've subsequently learned of chanceries and the like, is that nobody in Washington took the information Falk is said to have passed on seriously. (This was apparently an ungrammatical 40-page rant against Fr Kelley drafted by dissident parishioners, although no one outside that group has seen it.) Get real, if Wuerl wanted the parish in, it would have come in, 40-page rant or no.
I would guess instead that both Stetson and Fr Hurd were listening to back-channel allegations of financial impropriety from Fr Bartus, which they likely took no more seriously, but nevertheless found convenient to their purposes. However, it would also have been convenient to blame the issue on Falk and keep Bartus out of it.
But the bottom line is that the conditions Houston was now imposing, a new vote and, I believe subsequently to January 22, an audit, would still not have cleared the legal way for receiving the parish. At this remove, to negotiate the full set of obstacles that Houston had placed in the way of reception, and then to revise the bylaws to prevent a legal debacle, would have required a strong leader with solid organizational and interpersonal skills. This wasn't Stetson, it wasn't Steenson, either.
We can only surmise what the precise agenda was for Wuerl, Stetson, and Steenson, although I have got to assume it was precise. Stetson, I'm now convinced, was not the guy to try to bring it about, since whatever it was -- it must have involved putting Bartus in as pastor of St Mary's and harvesting the parish's resources -- it was ignominiously thwarted, in large measure by Stetson's apparent incompetence.
Whether Steenson's replacement arose from leadership qualities that may have contributed to this and other disasters is an open issue. But I'm learning that this sort of problem isn't unique in the Church as we now have it.
