St Mary's A Top 2016 Los Feliz Ledger Story

Via a St Mary's vestryman, I learn that the January 2017 Los Feliz Ledger lists the St Mary of the Angels story among its top picks of 2016:

Nearly all of the ongoing legal issues involving St. Mary of the Angels Church, except for an appeal filed a year ago without any action, have been resolved.

Most recently, a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge ruled on behalf of Father Christopher Kelley December 12, 2016 in a summary judgment that the petitioners fighting to remove him, including Los Feliz resident Marilyn Bush, “had no standing to initiate the litigation” according to Kelley.

Bush and others filed suit in 2012 to remove Kelley and assume control of the church. Ultimately, the lawsuit morphed into four separate cases, including a civil suit filed by Bush and others against Kelley and his family, which Kelley said was also dismissed last December 12th.

“We have cleared the rubbish from the back past,” said Kelley in an interview.

At one point during the 3-½ year legal proceedings, Bush and others won control in court and took over the church, while Kelley and his supporters refused to leave.

Locks were changed, security guards hired, and at one point the parish’s warring factions even operated from different floors inside the church building.

Finally, a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge ruled December 15, 2015 in Kelley’s favor and he and his supporters retook possession of the church in February of 2016.

Bush and others did file an appeal shortly after that December 2015 ruling, which is the one legal challenge that remains.

Kelley was the rector at St. Mary’s from 2007 until his firing in 2012 by the Anglican Church of America.

The complex saga began in 2011 after the parish voted twice to exit the Anglican Church and become Roman Catholic after then Pope Benedict XVI opened the door in 2009 for Protestant parishes to do so.

Overlapping that issue, was a vote, taken by the church’s governing body—called a vestry—asking Kelley to resign as their priest in 2011.

Kelley refused, indicating, in part, he and the church were no longer under the jurisdiction of the Anglican Church, citing the parish vote to move to Roman Catholicism. At that time, there was a so-called “holding tank”—a gray area, for lack of a better term—for parishes awaiting confirmation into the Roman Catholic faith.

Bush claimed in legal filings that the vestry had reason to fire Kelley, mostly over church financial wrongdoing. However, court documents showed those claims were unfounded.

Regarding the lease of the church’s property—what locals still refer to as the old Citibank building—negotiations to find a new lessee, Kelley said, are still ongoing.

Citibank moved from the space in October 2015 for smaller quarters on Hillhurst Avenue.

According to Kelley, Box Brothers used the building’s downstairs space throughout the 2016 holiday season, but still, he said, there is no announcement for a new tenant.

“It’s taken a while,” Kelley said. “It’s been vacant for over a year.

The article carries numerous inaccuracies, leading me to question whether Ms Cohen, listed as a co-author and who probably wrote this section of the article, has been getting "facts" from Mrs Bush without checking them. There was never a vote by the vestry "asking Kelley to resign as their priest in 2011." Nor was Fr Kelley ever "fired" by the ACA; the ACA had no authority over him or the parish after January 2011, which has been fully established in the court cases. The "holding tank" is not a "gray area"; the courts have held that the parish vote to enter the Patrimony of the Primate was valid -- nothing gray about it.

On the other hand, she does note that the courts have consistently found that there was never financial wrongdoing at the parish, and the opinion that the legal issues are working toward resolution in the parish's favor is probably also correct.

Ms Cohen once threatened to sue me for calling her a fourth-rate journalist, but I still think this story is a little too much for her. As the vestryman put it,

This does put her in the same accuracy boat with the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC & CBS News!!!! We, as the general public, cannot trust any of them to get the story right!

Thoughts On The Royal Stewart Club

My wife and my regular correspondent agree that the Royal Stewart Club is a harmless (I would say feckless) hobby activity that's basically an excuse to get buzzed. Another visitor takes a more positive view:

And if the organization that’s sponsoring the event draws a significant portion of its membership from Anglophiles, many of whom probably adhere to Anglican patrimony, Evensong led by a Catholic presbyter will showcase the preservation of the Anglican patrimony within the Catholic Church.

But this raises an issue that's been at the back of my mind for some time. Academic specialists have traced the origin of the Oxford Movement to an identity crisis within Anglicanism that stemmed from the Reform Acts that extended civil rights in the UK to non-Anglicans. Anglicanism had been justified in some measure as a "national confession", but if Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and the like were treated equally under the law, this undermined the idea of a national confession.

My problem for some time has been why Anglo-Catholicism had any appeal in the US, since the US Bill of Rights forbids any establishment of religion, which rules out from the start the sort of discrimination that was addressed in the Reform Acts. Beyond that, the colonies were settled extensively by Reformed Protestants and Methodists who had been opting out of established Anglicanism since the 17th century. So how could US Episcopalians have any identity crisis equivalent to what led to the Oxford Movement in the UK?

My surmise, confirmed by an academic correspondent, is that US Anglo-Catholicism stems from anglophilia -- if they do it that way in the UK, it must be worth doing, irrespective of any actual motive. But in the US, Episcopalians have always been the smallest main line denomination, and far smaller than the current numbers of ex-Catholics. The anglophiles among them have been even fewer, and Anglo-Catholic parishes have been heavily "affirming".

Indeed, my regular correspondent noted,

I have nothing against Charles, King and Martyr but his cult is the definition of a certain kind of Anglo-Catholic preciousness. I can't believe there will be a straight man in attendance.

The question for me is whether the Church is putting its efforts here in a good direction -- I'm told that Houston seems to be preparing to fold another group-in-formation early in the coming year.

Yeah, if a bunch of guys want to get buzzed waxing weepy and nostalgic about monarchies, let 'em do it. But the Knights of Columbus seems like a more positive activity, and I seriously doubt the Royal Stewart Club will bring anyone new into the Church.

Slow News -- But Then, There's The Royal Stewart Club Meeting!

My regular correspondent sent me this from Facebook:

The Royal Stewart Club of Los Angeles appears, based on its Twitter feed, to be a reorganization of the Los Angeles chapter of the International Monarchist League, whose chaplain has been the Rev Andrew Bartus for some years, which I noted here, although the link to that page has been deleted.

As a sometime corporate policy writer, I'm scratching my head. Fr Bartus is going to appear at this event in clericals (I assume, though he may be vested for evensong) and identifying himself as a Catholic priest, playing an official role as speaker and chaplain, although the Royal Stewart Club does not appear to have Catholic sanction. In a corporation, this would be questionable -- I could be a member of a professional group, as long as my management approved it, and identify myself as an employee, as long as I made it clear I didn't speak for the company. Appearing in clericals would certainly give an ambiguous impression at best.

But this goes beyond that. Via the Twitter feed, I'm happy to say they state that "we, as a matter of policy, do not support the establishment of an American monarchy," but this whole project seems kinda loopy, and the Twitter feed offers birthday wishes to Prince Charles Windsor, not an especially good example to Catholics, while it solemnly commemorates the anniversaries of monarchs' passing from the "much beloved Emperor" Franz Josef I through King Hussein of Jordan to the aforementioned Charles Stewart, who is generally recognized as having brought his fate on himself through political ineptitude.

Is Charles I an argument for monarchy? Heck, is Franz Josef I? The whole idea of a Royal Stewart Club (and note the precious spelling) reminds me of some of the crazies I knew in college -- Bill L subsequently became a C-lister in the conservative movement and, like something out of Brideshead Revisited, held Franz Josef in similar regard. I was crazy then, too, but I outgrew it. Bill L never did, but I assume his speaking fees are somewhere to the south of Dinesh D'Souza, who is after all a B-lister.

If I were Bp Lopes, I would urge Fr Bartus to drop this thing. The ongoing promotion of alcoholic activities in social media, it seems to me, would be another issue.

Spiritual Patrimony

I found this in Peter Ackroyd's biography of Thomas More:

On the Feast of the Innocents a "boy-bishop" was ritually enthroned in the principal churches of London; this was only tangentially an occasion of "misrule" of a late medieval kind, and was pre-eminently a solemn church ceremony with processions as well as enthronement. As one of the statutes of the Sarum puts it, "no man whatsoever, under the pain of Anathema, should interrupt or press upon these Children at the Procession." The child bishop, fully apparelled in ecclesiastical robes with mitre and crozier, delivered a sermon (which often touched upon the misdemeanours of the adult clergy) before walking through the streets of his district, blessing the people and collecting money for his churchwardens. This was one of the many popular festivals destroyed at the time of the Tudor Reformation.

I assume there was nothing peculiarly English about this practice, and it could probably be found throughout Christendom. I'm certainly moving toward the opinion that our present bishops might more profitably work toward restoring the Christendom to which Ven Fulton Sheen often refers, rather than trying to establish a faux Anglican Precious Spiritual Patrimony.

Hepworth Visit

Abp Hewpworth will visit and celebrate mass at St Mary of the Angels at 7:00 PM Epiphany Day, Friday, January 6, 2017, not Epiphany Sunday as I had previously posted. (I assumed!!) Anyone for whom this is convenient is, of course, invited. I will attend and try to get a photo, though probably not outside the church.

Never Assume!

Both of my regular correspondents are laity and have been commenting from the perspective that they "assume" Anglican seminary training equips Anglican clergy to hear confessions. After all, Anglicans recognize the sacrament, right? For that matter, even Cardinal Wuerl by implication assumed that the products of "legit" Anglican seminaries would require little additional formation. Yesterday I heard from one such "legit" product:

I totally agree with your observation on confession/penance and the lack of formation in that area in the Episcopal Church and its seminaries. My own formation in a low church seminary did not cover the topic outside an announcement that a professor would be available for confession so we soon to be graduates could have the experience once before ordination. I availed myself of an Episcopal priest- a former Catholic- for confession during my own time as a priest and even with my extra-curricular readings I had doubts on my own abilities as a confessor. I was simply unprepared due to my own background as an Episcopalian in which the general confession and personal prayer for forgiveness cover the whole territory of the sacrament of penance in Catholicism.

On reflection, how could things be otherwise? During my 30 years as an Episcopalian, I must have been in several dozen Episcopal church buildings, and in none did I ever see a confessional -- except one, St Mary of the Angels. St Thomas Episcopal Hollywood had a special chair in the Mary chapel that had a screen on one side that was, at least theoretically, a confessional, though given the catechesis available -- the seven deadly sins being "neither here nor there" -- it's hard to imagine what anyone would actually confess to.

If only 45% of Catholics go to confession, a common number that's out there, how many Episcopalians do? Remember, confession is required of Catholics, and fewer than half do it. It's not required at all of Anglicans. It would be interesting to hear how many Episcopal priests hear any confessions at all in their careers.

And a significant number of OCSP priests come from Reformed seminaries or other Protestant denominations where confession is not recognized and not practiced at all. Every indication we have is that the Ordinary and the Bishop simply "assumed" with Cardinal Wuerl that these guys know what to do. But there is no perceptible difference in the formation a former Anglican seminarian receives (if any) vis-a-vis a former Methodist or Presbyterian. Do the webinars mention confession at all?

One of my correspondents, a little bit irked, suggests that of course I can elect not to go to confession with an OCSP priest, but that doesn't mean they aren't eligible to hear it. But a big issue is whether they have the equivalent formation of even a mediocre Catholic confessor who's been more thoroughly trained and experienced -- we're talking about mature men, anywhere from 35 to 65 years old, who've been told "Poof! you're a Catholic priest!" without anything like the formation, or even the doctrinal training, of Catholic priests who at the same age have been hearing confessions for decades. Maybe someone can explain more concretely what seminary-level courses in Catholic moral theology Fr Holliday or Fr Sly or Fr Baaten had to take, or what practical instruction they had in hearing confessions, as part of their remedial formation.

And don't tell me you assume their bishop or their mentor was on the case. Never assume!

Now, I can choose to fly United, or I can choose to fly Southwest. The authorities make sure that the pilots are properly licensed and trained in both cases. Luckily, there's no airline out there that suddenly decides that, since bus drivers do 90% of what an airline pilot does, we'll hire a bunch of bus drivers and make them pilots with a little extra training -- we'd prefer Greyhound, actually, but some of the guys went to high school with friends who are now at Podunk Transit, so we'll take some of them as well.

Would I fly with that airline? Hell, no, and I use the term advisedly. But spiritually, I don't see how Anglicanorum coetibus as implemented is doing anything different.

Policy And Kremlinology

Interestingly, two of my most frequent correspondents have been disagreeing with my most recent posts, both basically citing policy, expressed or surmised. My first response is to say that policy in Houston is rarely published and always seems to have exceptions even when it is -- but as I said yesterday, even our new kitten could figure out how things work around the house without a policy manual.

One visitor cited 2011 remarks by Cardinal Wuerl to the USCCB in how candidates for ordination would be evaluated:

[H}e said that the applications were divided into three categories: (1) those who had completed a full program of formation in a "legit" Anglican seminary and thus would require relatively little additional formation, (2) those who had little formal preparation for ministry and thus would need essentially a full program of formation in a Catholic seminary, and (3) those who were somewhere in between, who would need individually tailored programs of formation to fill the gaps in the formation that they had received.

But even in the light of Cardinal Wuerl's statement, his criteria do not appear to have been followed with any consistency. I assume in context that a "legit" Anglican seminary is in the US an Episcopal seminary. Fr Holliday of the Church of the Incarnation attended Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando), which by Cardinal Wuerl's criteria would not appear to be a "legit" Anglican seminary.

Yet Fr Holliday was ordained both a deacon and a priest in December 2012 following the parish's reception in September, so wherever Fr Holliday lay "in between", it doesn't seem to have taken him long at all to remedy any deficiencies -- and this in contrast to Mr Simington, with a Nashotah House MDiv, still in formation. In fact, it sounds like the 90% rule was at least selectively in place as of 2012, and our kitten could have figured it out as well as I could.

But this leaves out a clear category (4), those whose applications would be either directly denied or conveniently lost or ignored -- which appears not to have been an inconsequential category. I refer again to the Anglican Ink post from August 2012:

Some former TAC clergy who have applied for ordination in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter tell Anglican Ink that they have been treated brusquely. Others report that a year after contacting the Ordinariate’ s Washington office, they are still waiting to hear what the future holds. . . . A second aspirant said he had been pressed to explain why he had not come to Rome when he left the Episcopal Church some twenty five years ago. If he accepted papal supremacy and the dogmas of the Catholic Church, why had he delayed a quarter century in making his submission, he was asked, the clergyman told AI.

Clearly there was never an expressed policy on who would be denied ordination, irrespective of whether successful candidates took just a webinar or something else. But even among the latter group, policy is unclear. My regular correspondent points out,

Mr Simington, the Nashotah House graduate, is in his second year of full-time seminary so standards seem to have been raised.

But Fr Baaten, the former Presbyterian who never had a program of formation in a "legit" Anglican seminary, was ordained just this year (at the same time that Mr Simington was undergoing more extensive formation) without much problem after doing little more than going to mass in Irvine for a year or two, and certainly not studying full-time in a Catholic seminary. So standards here, in contrast to Mr Simington, seem to have been lowered.

In 2012, I heard from several unsuccessful candidates who said they'd been told that Houston's policy (that word again) was not to ordain men who were not coming in with groups -- but this has clearly not been consistent.

Also in 2012, an applicant, who had left an Anglican-rite Orthodox group for the ACA and had been deposed by the Orthodox on that account, was told that the policy (that word yet again) of the OCSP was not to ordain applicants who were under discipline in a former denomination. Yet my understanding is that Louis Falk, who had been deposed by TEC for a very serious indiscretion, was granted a nulla osta and would have been ordained if St Aidan's Des Moines hadn't reversed its decision. And Andrew Bartus was inhibited by his ACA-DOW bishop, who was refusing to ordain him a priest. This became moot when St Mary's left the ACA for the Patrimony, but as far as I'm aware, the inhibition was never lifted, and this never stood in the way of his ordination.

A regular visitor noted this:

Popes going back at least to Pius XII (March 1939 - September 1958) have been granting dispensations from the norm of celibacy to permit ordination of former Anglican and former Protestant clergy in the Catholic Church very routinely, though each case historically was processed individually because the numbers were generally small.

My own view, if I were to have had the opportunity to interview Fr Baaten, would have been to ask what efforts he made, after leaving the Presbyterian Church, to investigate the avenues that might have been open to him for ordination as a married Catholic priest. Beyond that, why did he settle for Anglican ordination at that time -- and, after he was ordained in the ACNA, would he simply have been content to remain a low-church Anglican if his ACNA parish hadn't been thrown out of its property and a job opening had appeared for him there? But probing questions appear to be only selectively asked.

In the absence of policy, we're left with Kremlinology, trying to figure things out based on who's standing next to whom on top of Lenin's tomb. But this was a worthwhile exercise when the fate of civilization depended on knowing this sort of thing. The OCSP is not in that league, and it would appear that many Anglicans have figured that out already.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent replies:

Certainly there were no consistent criteria. Fr Tilley, priest at Good Shepherd, Oshawa, is a retired firefighter and might not hold a bachelor's degree. He certainly does not have an M.Div or equivalent. But he was a longtime ACCC clergyman and had a small congregation with its own building. He was ordained in the first wave. Fr Reid of BJHN, Victoria does not have an M.Div. He was ordained without being required to do even the webinars. Fr Randall Fogle is a graduate of the St Michael and All Angels (uanccredited) seminary described here, but he apparently had to do several further years of preparation at St Mary's Seminary, Cleveland, unlike his fellow St Michael's alumnus and OCSP colleague, Fr Sherborne, a military chaplain, ordained two years previously. I think the first idea was to get something up and running. Now the emphasis is on young celibate candidates. Married former clergy, going forward, will be under 55 and have a "ministry plan" ie an existing group or intent to gather one. Ordaining men for exclusively local diocesan ministry will be phased out.

But these new "policy" statements are unattributed and unpublished (other than here), and we have no assurance that they will be followed any more than any previous statements of "policy". And as to getting something up and running, the ordinations in the first waves were far in excess of even optimistic anticipated needs, with many priests ordained without any possible duties in connection with groups.

But things are gonna change! Sure.

The 90% Solution

Via Fr Z, I ran into this essay by Edward Feser, an Aquinas scholar with whom I'm already familiar. He teaches philosophy at Pasadena, CA City College. There was nothing like him at the elite school where I took philosophy courses.

Pope Honorius I occupied the chair of Peter from 625-638. As the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia notes in its article on Honorius, his chief claim to fame is that “he was condemned as a heretic by the sixth general council” in the year 680. The heresy in question was Monothelitism, which (as the Encyclopedia notes) was “propagated within the Catholic Church in order to conciliate the Monophysites, in hopes of reunion.” That is to say, the novel heresy was the byproduct of a misguided attempt to meet halfway, and thereby integrate into the Church, an earlier group of heretics.

To change the teachings of the Church to meet heretics halfway is, of course, a very bad idea. Anglicanorum coetbus clearly isn't doing this. On the other hand, what is it doing? I thought on and off yesterday about my visitor's remarks:

The reality is that over 90% of the formation in an Anglican or Protestant seminary would be virtually identical to formation in a Catholic seminary. . . [C]ourses even in liturgy and sacraments are likely to have covered the differences in liturgical practice and sacramental theology among various major denominations to some extent. . . . Thus, for an individual who has completed a full program of Anglican or Protestant seminary formation, what remains is the more mundane issues -- Catholic canon law, polity, processes, administrative procedures, and sacramental preparation and practice -- rather than an in-depth study of distinctly Catholic theology, liturgy, and sacraments.

So OK, by my visitor's reasoning, if I took some equivalent of the sophomore survey on World Religions at, say, Swarthmore, that would prepare me as, say, a Presbyterian, at least to take mass at a Catholic parish, since I would fully understand the difference between Catholic and Protestant sacraments. Now, to become a Catholic priest and administer the sacrament, not just receive it, obviously more would be needed. A more advanced survey would help, and then a webinar or two. And then a pledge that I buy into things. Or do I somehow have this wrong?

As a practical matter, what's going on in Houston, as best I can see it, is that although the Church isn't changing its formal teaching to meet heretics halfway, it is in fact fuzzing over important distinctions -- by my visitor's estimate, maybe something like 10%, in order to integrate groups of heretics into the Church with their clergy. Or clergy without heretics attached. Just gotta get these guys into clericals.

Let's keep in mind that Methodists are clearly copacetic as far as the Anglican ecumenism project goes. But like Presbyterians and unlike Episcopalians and "continuers", they have only two sacraments and do not recognize the full Bible. But they're still 90%, and as we've seen, they get waived in without much formality. Now, there's nothing official about my visitor's view that if a group accepts 90% of Catholic teaching, that's darn near close enough -- but even our new kitten could figure out how things work around the house without a policy manual. My visitor is simply perceptive.

So what's the cutoff? Baptists, maybe 85%. Another few webinars and they're in? Mormons? Well, there are a few sacramental issues like baptizing the dead, but although they don't recognize the Apocrypha, they make it up with the Book of Mormon. A college transcript with the sophomore survey on it, though, should fix things fine.

I'm not buying this. And by "this", I mean the actuality of Anglicanorum coetibus as it's been implemented. The only upside is that almost nobody else has bought into this either.

A Prosecutor Can Indict A Baked Potato

So the saying goes -- and, I'm told, a bishop can ordain a baked potato as well. Or not. As Fr Z puts it, a bishop can refuse to ordain you if he didn't like his cornflakes that morning.

In the normal course, a vocation is formed from childhood or adolescence, in the context of a parish and a diocese, quite possibly in a Catholic school, under the supervision of a director of vocations, and in a diocesan seminary. In the circumstance I brought up the other day, a bishop under canon 970 must examine each candidate to see if he is capable of hearing confessions, but ordinarily the bishop assumes the seminary has formed him adequately to do this. Indeed, if the candidate was raised Catholic, which must be the almost universal case, he's been going to confession regularly and has learned quite a bit about it that way.

The problem is that when we bring in priests from other denominations, none of this applies. Fr Z notes that at least in theory, a Catholic priest must be competent in Latin, and the bishop must also verify this. In my diocesan parish, the Gloria, Sanctus, memorial acclamation, and Agnus Dei, as well as litanies, are often sung in Latin, and all i can say is that it's a struggle to bring back my high school and college Cicero, Virgil, and Catullus to keep up. Catholic formation is more than crossing yourself.

Er, these guys who've come in from the CEC -- they can speak in tongues all right, but how's their Latin? The last time I saw Fr Bartus (in court), he was dressed in clericals just like Bing Crosby.

A regular visitor countered my view by saying

The reality is that over 90% of the formation in an Anglican or Protestant seminary would be virtually identical to formation in a Catholic seminary. Courses in scripture, patristics, homiletics, dogmatic theology (the creeds, for example), and various areas of pastoral ministry (ministry to families, preparation for marriage, etc.) would be completely identical, or very nearly so, and courses even in liturgy and sacraments are likely to have covered the differences in liturgical practice and sacramental theology among various major denominations to some extent. Additionally, "Do you understand the theological differences, including distinctly Catholic dogmas such as the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption?" and "Do you accept the Catholic belief?" are two questions asked of EVERY candidate for reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church, whether the individual will become a candidate for ordination or not. Thus, for an individual who has completed a full program of Anglican or Protestant seminary formation, what remains is the more mundane issues -- Catholic canon law, polity, processes, administrative procedures, and sacramental preparation and practice -- rather than an in-depth study of distinctly Catholic theology, liturgy, and sacraments.

Wait a moment. I was raised (if you can call it that) Presbyterian. One of the biggest things that Rev LeCrone stressed in confirmation class was that between St Paul and John Calvin was a long period of error and false accretion. The guys who had it right, like Hus and Wycliffe, were heretics. This is part of Protestant formation. I've got to assume that a Protestant pastor, formed with this sort of input to his or her vocation, will proceed to seminary and be told not to waste any time with Aquinas, who is sort of an extreme development in the long history of error and accretion. Sola scriptura is an important, and anti-Catholic, doctrine.

In addition, while the quality of Catholic education isn't a reliable factor, secular education is dominated by materialist assumptions -- just look at how frequently the word "evolution" is taken out of context to mean any process with a good result. Asking, "Do you accept the Catholic belief?" may produce a well-intended answer, but it simply doesn't replace decades of Catholic formation, which ideally should include Catholic schools. If I now realize not having a Catholic education is a disadvantage to me as a layman, how big a disadvantage will it be for a priest?

I think my visitor, in simply assuming that 90% of what's taught in a Protestant seminary is the same as what's in Catholic formation, is glossing over very important differences and flirting with indifferentism. After all, if Presbyterianism and Catholicism are 90% the same stuff, why become Catholic? Indeed, if Anglicanism is 95% of Catholicism, isn't it even more good enough to be an Anglo-Catholic? As I learned in the Boy Scouts, there's a big difference between a coral snake and a scarlet king snake, even though they look 90% the same.

A big reason I've been on this journey is that I've discovered it's not good enough, and it's a big reason I'm becoming very skeptical of what Anglicanorum coetibus has led to.

Another Puzzling Ordination In The Works

My regular correspondent reports,

I notice that Ed Wills, about whom we corresponded regarding his apparently failed attempt to gather an Ordinariate group at St Robert Bellarmine, Blue Springs, MO, will be ordained to the transitional diaconate next May. This was mentioned in an issue of the local diocesan paper which also mentioned that Fr Randy Sly has been appointed pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows, Kansas City and will continue as the administrator of Our Lady of Hope, the OCSP group which meets there, and that Fr Ernie Davis, the former administrator, will be taking over a diocesan parish. Fr Davis was a PP priest who was excardinated into the OCSP; perhaps he is returning to the Diocese of Kansas City.

In any event, Mr Wills seems to be an exact contemporary of Fr Sly, both having started university in 1971. [This suggests he was born in 1953, like Msgr Steenson.] Leaving aside the assumption that Mr Wills did not gather any former Anglicans to the 4 pm Vespers service, originally billed as an Anglican-style Evensong but now apparently a combination Bible Study and social event and his own slender connection to Anglicanism (his LinkedIn page indicates that he was a CEC clergyman from 1990-98), why does Kansas City need another OCSP priest, especially one in his mid-sixties? Mr Wills has been a Catholic for some years and is working as Social Justice Co-ordinator at SRB; no doubt the local diocese needs additional priests. But he would seem to do nothing for the OCSP's manpower issues.

I'm back to scratching my head over the CEC. According to Wikipedia, "Worship in the ICCEC is sacramental, evangelical and charismatic," and "Many worship services have times of 'ministry in the Holy Spirit', during which such things as prophetic messages, anointing and prayers for healing, and other charismatic gifts are active." I would certainly want to know what Houston's position is on the practice of speaking in tongues during mass, since a number of former CEC clergy have been. or now will be, ordained into the OCSP, which is not the policy of the Pastoral Provision.

My regular correspondent has speculated that a reason for Msgr Steenson's ouster may have been the practice of ordaining so many OCSP priests without groups, and who were unavailable to take over groups that lose their priests. But here we seem to have a very similar situation, so perhaps the CDF didn't see this as a problem after all.

Still, it's hard to avoid the continuing impression that OCSP priests are ordained with marginal qualifications and perfunctory examination, where they in fact seem to serve little purpose, perhaps only because someone owes someone a favor. At least the experience we have since Bp Lopes's arrival is that these marginal priests can also get pushed into retirement pretty quickly. But wasn't one factor in the clergy child abuse scandals the fact that marginal candidates were ordained priests, then retained with inadequate supervision and too much time on their hands?

I'm continuing to lose sympathy with this project.

A Question For Bp Lopes

Simply speaking:

Are all OCSP priests authorized to hear confessions and grant absolution to Catholics?

I ask this because a visitor sent me a link to this entry at the Canon Law Made Easy blog, which says

According to canon 970, a priest should not be given confessional faculties until he has been examined, and his suitability for hearing confessions has been determined. Nowadays, the general practice is that when a seminarian successfully completes all his seminary studies, and is established to be sufficiently prepared for priestly ordination, his bishop accepts this as adequate indication that he is knowledgeable enough about moral theology to begin hearing confessions in the diocese. The rationale is that if a seminarian were unqualified to be a confessor, he wouldn't have made it through his seminary courses in the first place.

I would note, though, that a number of current OCSP priests went to Reformed seminaries. I assume that no Reformed seminary covers moral theology from the perspective of penance as a sacrament. This applies in particular to Fr Baaten, whose entire pastoral experience of 20 years appears to have been in a denomination that does not recognize confession as a sacrament. And venial vs mortal sin, something that comes up in confession without a doubt, is unlikely to be covered outside Catholic seminaries. But I would also assume that cursory "distance learning" is not sufficient to qualify any OCSP priest to hear confessions, at least with any assurance that they are not placing souls in danger.

I also remember a TEC Nashotah House graduate explaining to an adult forum that the seven deadly sins are "neither here nor there". Subsequently he employed a medium to contact his deceased same-sex partner. Thus even a Nashotah House MDiv would not be much assurance that one such, ordained into the OCSP, should be hearing confessions.

So, again, are all OCSP priests authorized to hear confessions and grant absolution? If so, what type of examination were they given, and what makes Bp Lopes feel confident that the souls entrusted to their (and his) care are not placed in danger?

Because, frankly, I would not go anywhere near certain OCSP priests for confession. I'm beginning to wonder if I should be pursuing this with the CDF.

Maybe I'm Getting This Wrong

Earlier this week I was watching a Youtube presentation by a Catholic who was objecting to the introduction of the charismatic movement (i.e., speaking in tongues) in some Catholic areas. The source of his objection was that among Protestants, the practice arose as a way for members to demonstrate that they were elect. For Catholics, this represents a complete misreading of the sacraments, especially since the charismatic Protestants don't even have most of them. So why bring this phony gobbledegook into Catholicism at all?

This set me on a train of thought that led through the New Evangelization, to which the Youtube speaker also objected on the basis that it flirted with syncretism and indifferentism, and I began thinking about the sacraments a little closer to home as a diocesan Catholic. It being Advent, I went to confession this past week, and I encountered a genuinely compassionate and insightful confessor who reminded me that in giving me absolution, he was standing in the place of God Himself.

This in turn brought me back to Msgr Steenson's statement in the interview I linked yesterday: "In the first two years, the emphasis has been on clergy formation. . ." Excuse me? The first cohorts of OCSP priests were ordained after only the most cursory "distance learning". But it didn't stop there.

Earlier this year, Bp Lopes ordained a former Presbyterian who'd attended a Protestant seminary and then spent 20 years in a denomination that doesn't even recognize confession and does communion with grape juice and little cubes of bakery bread. His ordination as a low-church Anglican was pro forma, lasted only a few months, and apparently involved no actual pastoral duties. He was then allowed to hang around and watch in Irvine for a year or two until Fr Bartus figured he knew where to read from in the prayer book. Sounds more like the ACA than the Catholic Church to me.

Is anyone at his current parish going to him for confession? Why? I recognize that, once ordained, he can give absolution as if he were the holiest saint. But Catholics do more than recite an act of contrition and make the sign of the cross in the confessional -- they're supposed to get some sort of insightful encouragement that will point them in the right direction as well. I've got to assume that a good confessor is the result of years in (real) formation and then years of practical experience on the other side of the confessional.

As far as I can see, the "clergy formation" that has taken place in the OCSP, up to and including that of Fr Baaten, is a joke. As I've said before, I would only consider going to an OCSP priest for confession if the big asteroid were about to hit the planet and I had no other option. Msgr Steenson and Bp Lopes will be held accountable for this at their judgment.

My regular correspondent thinks Bp Lopes is now requiring greater formation in Catholic environments from upcoming OCSP postulants and candidates. Fine -- but, er, I can go to confession with a priest who's had even more than that, just down the street (figuratively speaking), anywhere, pretty much any time. Why would I go out of my way to find one who's sorta-kinda Anglican, when he may well not be what I need in my spiritual life?

Later in his interview, Msgr Steenson referred to OCSP parishes as ". . . places that will function for the purpose they were created, to bring people into full communion." At best, in the five years since the OCSP was erected, there have been a few thousand brought into full communion, although I have a troubling idea that they haven't been well catechized, and I also have the nagging suspicion that the Anglican hinky-jinky goes to class bias. Indeed, if their shaky parishes and groups fold in the future, will they even move to diocesan parishes? I'm just not sure what's meant by "full communion" here. Meanwhile, millions who were raised in full communion have left the Church.

I'm less and less in sympathy with this whole project.

Yet More Numbers

My regular correspondent has provided two more web references that give numbers for the OCSP. This press backgrounder from February 2013 lists 1600 members in 36 communities on the left sidebar. By February 2013, the OCSP had clearly reached something close to its current form:

Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston is the principal church. Other large communities include St. Luke, Bladensburg, MD; Christ the King, Towson, MD; Church of the Incarnation, Orlando, FL; and St. Thomas More, Scranton, PA. Ordinariate groups and clergy are located in areas such as California, Iowa, Alabama, New York and South Carolina; Edmonton, Victoria, Ottawa and Calgary.

In December 2013, B.C.Catholic carried an interview with Msgr Steenson that perhaps inadvertently reflects potential dissatisfaction in Rome with what the OCSP had become:

In the first two years, the emphasis has been on clergy formation, but now the ordinariate has clear direction from Rome to put its energy "into building up communities" so it does not become "a simple missionary society for Anglican clergy that want to come serve in the Catholic Church," Msgr. Steenson said.

"Now we're going to have to emphasize congregational development and evangelization," Msgr. Steenson said. "We need to strengthen these parishes and make them attractive places that will function for the purpose they were created, to bring people into full communion."

In the next paragraph, he gives a revised estimate of 3500 for lay membership, perhaps in response to pressure to show better results. However, the best estimate my correspondent and I can make is that OCSP lay membership has never been this high. While others may disagree, it's worth noting that officially released numbers -- 3500 in December 2013, 20,000 in November 2015, 6000 in February 2016, and 8000 in December 2016 -- are wildly inconsistent.

And whichever is closest to the mark, none exceeds the membership of a single large diocesan parish.

More On Numbers

My regular correspondent asked where the estimate of 2,000-2,500 members in the OCSP, which has now been disparaged in light of Bp Lopes's 8,000, came from, and I would have to answer it came from this blog, developed on the basis of the best information we could find, in a series of posts in March 2015 beginning here. Although another visitor retorts,

The Catholic Church normally does not publish news about receptions of persons baptized in other Christian denominations into the full communion of the Catholic Church for two reasons -- first, to respect the privacy of the individuals being received and, second, to avoid any appearance of triumphalism that would be an affront to our partners in ecumenical dialog.

in fact, OCSP or OCSP-related receptions have been regularly publicized, including here and here.

A review of the posts here estimating the size of groups and parishes shows that they proceed systematically, using the best available information, including published numbers where available, photos of events, parish bulletins, web site information, and so forth. It's possible to allow for incremental growth -- the six full parishes in the OCSP as of March 2015 are now eight -- but almost all the parishes are in the low three figures, and the groups number only in dozens.

In opposition to our systematic and empirical efforts, other estimates are all over the landscape. In an interview with Crux in November 2015, Bp Lopes is quoted as saying

the ordinariate for the United States and Canada has 42 parishes, 64 priests, four deacons, and roughly 20,000 faithful. It’s in an expansion phase, he said, both because other Anglican communities are still requesting entrance, and because his parishes tend to be keenly missionary and are attracting new members.

But if it's in expansion mode, why did he, a year later, give an estimate of 8,000 to Canadian TV? I think the answer is that in both cases, he was pulling numbers out of the air, but clearly, as he became more familiar with how things really were, he adjusted his best-case number well downward. A dithyrambically uncritical report of Bp Lopes's enthronement at Virtue Online says,

The North American ordinariate spans all of the United States and Canada and has about 6,000 souls worshipping in nearly 45 congregations which are served by more than 70 priests.

This strongly suggests to me that the people who are giving these numbers out, almost certainly connected with Houston, are nevertheless trying to put the best possible face on the actual situation, though they clearly haven't coordinated their stories. It's also worth pointing out that whatever actual information Houston has other than the wildly inconsistent estimates it occasionally makes, it doesn't release.

People are entitled to draw their own conclusions about the numbers discussed here. My effort in this blog is to understand for myself the factors that have led to the uniquely unhappy circumstances surrounding the St Mary of the Angels parish. The history is long and illuminating, but one thread in it is that the Anglo-Catholic project has had, from the start, a considerable element of hokum. The faithful need to be aware of this for their own protection.

Ruminating On The Legal Outlook

I'm told -- I didn't see it myself -- that following the court hearing Monday, Mrs Bush could be seen and heard loudly berating poor Mr Lancaster in the courthouse hallway. As I understand it, public reprimands of Mr Lancaster from Mrs Bush, an intemperate woman, are nothing unusual, and it's likely she'd call him out if the weather were not to her liking, leaving aside any legal failing. I'm told, though, that in the same hallway discussion, "Bishop" Rhys Williams's face was "beet red".

Judge Murphy's ruling can only be seen as a disaster for the Bush group and the ACA, in fact. It has numerous implications for the St Mary's ongoing legal strategy, on which it is probably not helpful for me to speculate. But leaving that aside, it establishes that in one important case, the Bush group is not the vestry, and the ACA has no authority over the parish. The attorney for Church Mutual Insurance was present at Monday's hearing, since it has a direct bearing on The Rector, Wardens, and Vestrymen of St. Mary of The Angels' Parish et al v. Church Mutual Insurance Company et al., which I covered most recently here.

Church Mutual's position is that the Bush group is not the Rector, Wardens, and Vestry and does not have standing to sue. Judge Murphy's ruling helps Church Mutual's case tremendously. The possibility that Bush et al will have their legal bills reimbursed by Church Mutual looks more and more remote.

In fact, the appeals court's ruling made it hard to avoid that in this and other related cases, the California courts would follow the precedent established in the "Episcopal church cases", whereby neutral principles of law would determine who controlled the parish, which went to the question of who was the vestry. The vestry was the one elected according to the parish bylaws, irrespective of whether the ACA could try to pick off any individual members by excommunicating them.

Judge Strobel's 2015 finding of fact in this matter was independent of Judge Murphy's recent summary judgment: both were separate and based on the appeals court's opinion. Without a better bugging device, I don't know exactly why Mrs Bush was cussing Mr Lancaster out on Monday, but if it was for any good reason, it should have been for misleading her and the ACA on their likelihood of success in this case.

When I last discussed the Church Mutual case, I said

Here's the puzzling thing: since last October, the squatters have gradually been running out of money. Since being evicted, they don't even have plate and pledge from Sunday masses, although a bulletin from their last mass discovered in the nave directs any remaining loyalists to make future checks payable to something called "Perseverance Mission". Perseverance Mission, I have a feeling, will not be in much of a position to fund further legal work.

However, I'm told that records left behind in the parish building by the Bush group include meeting minutes that indicate they had lost their tax exempt status. One can only speculate that any money removed from St Mary's parish accounts and transferred to "Perseverance Mission" created a taxable event, but how this could affect Mrs Bush's and the ACA's standing with the IRS I don't know.

I'm still wondering, though, where the money for all this has been coming from. I'm told that Lytton, Williams, Messina & Hankin LLP, the firm representing the Bush group in their suit against Church Mutual, will be in court for that case on January 9. I assume they will be paid, and those in attendance at the meeting of St Mary's friends and counsel on Monday speculate that Mr Lancaster is also still being paid. Where on earth is this money coming from?

8,000 Members?

There has been some note of an interview Bp Lopes gave on Canadian TV, in which he asserts that there are 8,000 members in the OCSP. A comment at Mr Murphy's site sums things up:

“I’ve just watched Bishop Lopes’ interview for the Canadian Salt and Light TV.

The statistics stated around 12.30 of the video material have come as a shock for me! I’m an incurable optimist, but I would never imagine that the CSP Ordinariate has already grown that much. Only a year or two ago, the numbers cited oscillated around 2,000 – 2,500 at the best. Now, we know first hand that there are 68 priests and… 8,000 (sic!) canonical members alone! That means much more, if cradle Catholics actually attending Ordinariate parishes are included. That’s a fantastic growth rate – contrary to what all those malcontents have predicted. . ."

The clear implication here is that somehow the OCSP grew by 5,500-6,000 members in the space of about a year -- or those who were doing the most conscientious job they could of estimating the 2,000-2,500 numbers were wildly off.

Let's try to figure out how this might have happened, and how we could tell. (A parallel issue might be the failure of the conventional wisdom to predict the outcome of the US election this past November. Certainly there was received groupthink that was wrong, but there were in fact numerous malcontents, conspiracy theorists, bloggers, and such who got things pretty close indeed.)

The first question I would have is whether we would have seen note anywhere of large numbers being received during this period. Keep in mind that those canonically eligible to be OCSP members are former Anglicans or Catholics who haven't completed the sacraments of initiation. There would need to be a special mass, at the Easter vigil or some other time, where all these candidates were confirmed. And this would have been primarily in the past year.

Somehow, no matter what exceptions or workarounds we might allow, we would be looking for several thousand receptions in recent months, spread among existing groups and parishes in the US and Canada. Wouldn't we expect some publicity about these remarkable events? No headlines, at Mr Murphy's site or elsewhere, announcing 600 Receptions at St Anselm Podunk!

I simply cite Fermi's Paradox writ small: There should be 100000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them? Let's keep in mind as well that the total of OCSP entities, i.e., groups and parishes, has declined net in the past year, losing (or at least losing track of) six, while gaining only one.

I posed this question to my regular correspondent, who replied,

We have a pretty good idea of their numbers, and they don't add up to half this figure. I suppose former Anglicans, etc who worship in diocesan parishes might have made the effort to register as OCSP "members-at-large," although this means they cannot serve on parish councils, among other, presumably minor, restrictions. If so, they have shown remarkable pertinacity, because there has been no obvious publicity encouraging them to do so.

Given the problems with the ParishSoft system I don't think we can be confident that the OCSP actually knows how many people are card-carrying members, but if one is going to pick an optimistic, blue-sky number and comes up with [only] 8,000 I think we can say that things are still fairly fragile. We also recall that this article gave the membership as 20,000---not a number we heard from the lips of Bp Lopes, of course, but a number somebody got from somewhere.

My correspondent later mused,

In terms of the target amount for this year's Bishop's Appeal, [St Thomas More], Scranton was in the number 5 spot, the top eight positions being occupied by the eight full parishes. There is not an exact correlation between income and membership, but there is a relationship.

I believe Fr Bergman's most recent count of membership there is roughly 200. Discussion within the past month of membership at Bridgeport, also now a full parish, places it at about 100. This means that almost all of the 8,000 membership Bp Lopes cites must be among the top four parishes. With something like an 80-20 or bell-type distribution, we would expect the top parish, presumably Houston, to be about 4,000, with another 3,500 or so distributed among three others. The last estimate I've seen for Houston is in hundreds, not thousands.

Someone might be able to prove this estimate wrong, but they're going to have to come up with more than I've seen. And I continue to say it's appraisal time for Bp Lopes.

Abp Hepworth To Visit St Mary's Epiphany Sunday 2017

I'm told that Abp John Hepworth, who is the parish's Ordinary, will visit St Mary's on Epiphany Sunday, January 8, 2017. Fr Kelley says the archbishop would like to spend some amount of time meeting with individuals, and if anyone is interested, they should call the parish to set up a time. However, the exact schedule for his visit is still up in the air, including the mass time. I'll post more information here as it becomes available.

I certainly intend to come to the mass Hepworth celebrates (taking care of my own obligation at my diocesan parish), and as I've told Fr Kelley, I would like to take a photo of him with his crook and mitre in front of the parish, which I will publish here if I get it.

This will be the first episcopal visit to the parish from a valid bishop since 2011, when David Moyer was here.

Judge Grants Motion For Summary Judgment Against Bush-ACA Plaintiffs

Los Angeles Superior Court Case BC485402 was brought by the Bush group, claiming to be the St Mary's vestry, and the ACA against Fr Kelley in 2012, alleging "conversion" or civil theft against him. Judge Daniel Murphy, who is Judge Strobel's successor in Department 32, brought this more or less to an end this morning after more than four years of highly vexing litigation. A list of some past shenanigans, dating only from 2013, can be found here. In Judge Murphy's words,

This action is one of four related cases concerning who controls St. Mary of the Angels Church in Hollywood, California (“St. Mary’s” or “Parish”). Defendant’s [Fr Kelley] motion for summary judgment asserts the defense of collateral estoppel, and relies heavily on the Court of Appeal decision regarding three of these cases, and the trial court decision in the Forcible Detainer Action (Case No.: 12U07875) .

He moved on to discuss the case:

A motion for summary judgment shall be granted if all the papers submitted show that there is no triable issue as to any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. (CCP § 437c(c).) There is a triable issue of fact if, and only if, the evidence would allow a reasonable trier of fact to find the underlying fact in favor of the party opposing the motion. (Aguilar v. Atlantic Richfield Co. (2001) 25 Cal. 4th 826, 850.) On its motion for summary judgment, the plaintiff maintains the burden that each of the elements has been proved and that there is no defense available, while on its motion the defendant must persuade the court that one of the elements in question cannot be established or that there is a complete defense. (Id.) Summary judgment motions are defined by the material allegations in the pleadings. (Baptist v. Robinson (2006) 143 Cal. App. 4th 151, 159.)

Defendant Father Kelley (hereinafter “Defendant”) moves for summary judgment on the grounds that Plaintiffs do not have standing to assert this action. Defendant contends that only the Vestry has standing to bring this lawsuit, and that none of the elected member of the Vestry (with the exception of one [Mrs Bush]) authorized this suit. Defendant also contends that ACA and DOW have no ownership interest in church property, and thus cannot allege damages and lack standing. Defendants argues that the Court of Appeal Decision and Forcible Detainer Action have a collateral estoppel effect entitling him to summary judgment.

Judge Murphy then decided:

Defendant’s material facts 1–5 establish that the bylaws deem St. Mary’s as the title holder of all real and personal property “Notwithstanding the Affiliation of the Parish.” Plaintiff does not dispute these facts, but rather objects to the evidence in support on the grounds that the by-laws document speaks for itself, and that the Court of Appeal opinion is not properly in the record before this Court. As discussed above, these objections are overruled. As such, the Court treats these facts as undisputed. Because St. Mary’s is the title holder of the property in dispute in this action, neither ACA nor DOW have standing in this action, regardless of whether St. Mary’s remains affiliated with ACA or DOW.

Defendant’s material fact 14 establishes that Levin, Jones, Park, Yeager, Pouncey, Hawkins, and Merrill [the elected vestry] did not retain counsel to file this suit against Defendant. This fact is supported by declarations from each of these Vestry members. Plaintiffs purport to dispute this fact, but rely on their objections to these declarations rather than their own competent evidence. As discussed above, these objections are overruled. As such, it is undisputed that excluding Bush, none of the Vestry members authorized the filing of this action.

Based on the foregoing, Defendant establishes that there is no triable issue of fact as to the standing of Plaintiffs in this matter. Accordingly, the motion for summary judgment is GRANTED.

Mr Lancaster has already told the court he intends to appeal any decision that goes against him, and he will almost certainly do so here. He argued against Judge Murphy's tentative decision by reasserting his position that since the ACA had excommunicated the elected vestry, the ACA should prevail. Judge Murphy replied, "The court disagrees, and the tentative stands." So this is by no means over, although with each such defeat, Mr Lancaster's task becomes harder and harder.

Following the hearing, I was invited to a meeting with Fr Kelley, the wardens, counsel, and other interested parties. One point that was noted is that Mr Lancaster files documents running hundreds of pages in all these proceedings, although his track record isn't good, and the judges don't seem to be impressed. What motivates Mrs Bush (who was present at this morning's hearing, with "Bishop" Rhys Williams) simply isn't clear; it's hard to think it's anything other than spite at this stage.

Blast From The Past

A visitor sent me a link to this entry at the Anglo-Catholic blog from December 2010, almost exactly six years ago. There are two very interesting posts from Fr Phillips, who was then and is now a Pastoral Provision Catholic priest. First:

I'm at St. Mary's now — just finished offering a Low Mass (Deacon Bartus kindly served), and the intention was for the success of the day's activities.

Er, how did that work, exactly? Did Fr Phillips check passports at the communion rail? It seems, after all, that nearly everyone at the St Mary's event was an Anglican, including Dcn Bartus, but Fr Phillips is Catholic. Did they all just ask for a blessing, or what?

Second question: Dcn Bartus, barely six months out of seminary, is specifically noted, and of course, both comments feature Fr Phillips, who at the time was prominently mentioned as in the running for US Ordinary, along with David Moyer. The one individual not credited at all was their host, Fr Kelley, the St Mary's rector, without whom the whole meeting could not have taken place. Seems like even Fr Phillips was playing politics.

The parish at the time was in the process of going into the Patrimony of the Primate. Then-ACA Bishop Daren Williams had reversed himself on Anglicanorum coetibus, had inhibited Dcn Bartus, and had refused to ordain him a priest for reasons that aren't clear, although Bartus went on to have a troubled relationship with his next bishop, David Moyer.

On the other hand, at least in terms of what became the OCSP, Bartus came out better than Frs Kelley, Phillips, and Moyer, and was probably the only one who knew the score about Steenson.

But it's also worth noting that in December 2010, this was clearly seen as a significant event: a large number of Anglicans gathering at St Mary of the Angels during Advent in anticipation of the Ordinariate. You really can't airbrush out the significance of the parish, and Bp Lopes will not succeed in any significant way until he can bring the parish in.

The OCSP, Syncretism, And The Press

My regular correpondent comments,

As you will see at the Ordinariate Expats site Mr Murphy is gradually transforming his blog into a quasi-official news and comment forum. In its day the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite blog maintained by Steve Cavanaugh covered the news fairly thoroughly and the Anglican Use Society site was a comprehensive source of information and more substantive writing on the subject. Whether the achievement of enthusiastic pioneers can be matched by a second wave dealing with the reality that theirs is destined to be a fringe movement remains to be seen.

The line is of course that AC has a significance far beyond its minuscule uptake because it demonstrates the Church's ability to appropriate the spiritual gifts of other Christian traditions, which may be a tool to draw Protestants into the Church or may just be a Good Thing in itself (a safer thesis, given experience to date). Considerable effort is also taken to demonstrate that many aspects of Anglican liturgy and spirituality actually belonged to the Church all along, despite the fact that this raises some issues around the first point.

I'm wondering if Bp Lopes is drinking some of this Kool-Aid. In his interview with the Register. he remarked, "[The Anglican prayer] I find myself using often in various situations, everything from the beginning of meetings to personal prayer, is the 'Collect of Purity.'" This, I discovered, is a sign that I've been Catholic long enough to have forgotten what he meant: the Collect of Purity is the prayer at the start of the Anglican rite that begins,"ALMIGHTY God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts. . ."

It seems to me that the Anglican usage of Purity isn't the same as the Catholic: if I go into confession and mention impurity, the confessor will know exactly what I mean, and purity in the Anglican rite is something else. I've got to take seriously what was explained to me in Episcopalian confirmation class: the Anglican collect is basically saying let's calm down, get centered, and concentrate here.

St Thomas Aquinas had something else in mind:

I know that every perfect gift, and especially that of chastity, depends on the power of Your providence. Without You a mere creature can do nothing. Therefore, I beg You to defend by Your grace the chastity and purity of my body and soul. And if I have ever sensed or imagined anything that could stain my chastity and purity, blot it out. . .

If Mr Jesserer Smith caught this in his interview, he didn't bring it up. I can't imagine Bp Lopes means to start staff meetings with a prayer for radical chastity. The longer I'm a Catholic, the more I recognize the important differences between Anglicanism (and for that matter other flavors of Protestantism) and Catholicism. Going too far in trying to gloss over the differences brings us, it seems to me, to syncretism.

This may start to explain why Anglicanorum coetibus is developing into a fringe phenomenon. But this goes to another problem, the OCSP's clumsiness in dealing with 21st century media. Bp Lopes is relying on stenographers -- I think this accurately characterizes both Mr Jesserer Smith and Mr Murphy. They see their roles as gushy cheerleaders who report what they're told without question.

The recent electoral results in both the US and UK should indicate this is an outdated media strategy.

Appraisal Time?

On November 24, 2015, the announcement was made that Msgr Steenson was retiring effective from the date of the announcement, and Msgr Lopes of the CDF would be replacing him as bishop. On February 2, 2016, he was consecrated bishop, although he had been making the decisions since his designation on November 24. Since Msgr Steenson's "retirement" at age 63 was most unusual for a Catholic prelate, we must assume that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had expectations for the OCSP that Msgr Steenson wasn't meeting.

This implies as well that whatever expectations are in the air from the CDF must still be active, and after a year, it's likely that Bp Lopes will be given some sort of formal review. This explains, it seems to me, the remarkable recent activity of Mr Jesserer Smith, staff writer for the NCR, on Bp Lopes's behalf. Not only did we get the interview I linked yesterday, but he drafted two press releases, almost certainly composed at Houston's behest but sent out on Rochester's account. The fact that I went so far as to speculate about one of these (rather than, apparently, just reprint it without comment) clearly got someone in Houston upset. Pressure?

So what has Bp Lopes accomplished? He began a Bishop's Appeal, and he seems to have put the cathedraticum on a sounder footing. He's made it a priority to visit the groups and parishes, but as my regular correspondent puts it,

His assertion that he has made 37 episcopal visits this year is I'm sure accurate but also somewhat misleading. Many of the full parishes and conveniently placed quasi-parishes have been visited more than once but a significant number of the 40+ groups have not yet been visited at all, including most of the marginal ones.

And a more troublesome issue is that many of the marginal groups are marginal indeed. I raised the question of just how many groups have closed or gone dormant in the past year, and my correspondent replied,

St Gilbert's, formerly in Boerne TX was supposed to follow Fr Wagner, now pastor of a diocesan parish in Kerrville, and begin worshipping at St Peter upon the Water Retreat Center in Ingram. However, I check the SPutW site frequently and while mass times are posted regularly there is never any mention of Fr Wagner or St Gilbert's. Nothing in the Notre Dame, Kerrville bulletin either. So I would regard it as defunct. The former parochial administrator of St Gregory the Great, Mobile has had to retire completely from active ministry owing to ill health. Mass is now offered by a local priest; I am unclear as to whether this takes place once or twice a month. Conflicting information on websites of host parish, Ordinariate group, and Facebook page. St Margaret's, Katy has [disappeared from the web and reappeared] but hasn't been upgraded or updated, although Fr Sellers is still President of the school which hosts it. Perhaps just an internet reboot. Fr Sellers' Facebook page also off.

It's worth pointing out that even if these groups are celebrating BDW mass without advertising it, no potential new members would be able to find them. So this makes a practical three, to which we add St Gregory Stoneham, MA, for four. But then we have St Alban's Rochester, which at best will resume activity sometime next year, although this could possibly be just Mr Jesserer Smith's somewhat gushy reading of the situation and not necessarily Bp Matano's. But then we have St Edmund's, Kitchener. My correspondent says, "I think they went out of business at the end of November 2015, so contemporaneous with Bp Lopes. He was certainly part of the decision to pull the plug, i.e. tell them that Fr Catania would not be replaced."

So this makes, as best my correspondent and I can put things together, six quasi-parishes or groups in formation that have at best gone dormant or ceased activity in the year since Bp Lopes's designation. If we say there are roughly 40 OCSP entities, this is 15% disappearing in a year.

One issue I've been working on as well is trying to get a picture of how many OCSP priests are actually available to replace those who retire or can't continue with their groups for other reasons -- again, looking only at 2016, this has become a serious problem. My correspondent says,

I note that the NCR article mentioned "10 or 11" married former Anglican clergy now in formation. There was a week-long gathering of them in Houston last month, although it was not publicised, for some reason. It will be interesting to see if these men are attached to groups (Jonathan Erdman in Louisville is at least one in this situation) or if they are free to relocate to look after currently leaderless OCSP communities. I hope there will be no further ordinations of men who then become Ordinariate clergy in name only, unconnected to any OCSP community. This simply bolsters the idea that the Ordinariate has "more priests than people."

Will 10 priests be ordained next year but so committed to their present locations that they can't move to bolster additional failing groups?

But so far, this neglects the big issue that discouraged the friends of Anglican ecumenism since mid-2012: St Mary of the Angels and Our Lady of the Atonement. I've got to think that the bungling of these key admissions at the start of the OCSP has been a sore point with the CDF ever since. Whatever may be going on behind the scenes, there's been no visible result.

Perhaps we'll yet see some gushy piece from Mr Jesserer Smith about how maybe someday something will happen!

WTH?

This is an acronym for "what the heck", if anyone is interested. Last week there was a kerfuffle after Prof Jordan of the dormant Rochester group sent out an e-mail that had been written by one Peter Jesserer Smith. I wasn't familiar with the name, and I simply assumed Mr Smith was a lay member of the Rochester group who'd written the piece. But today someone sent me a link to an interview at the National Catholic Register with Bp Lopes that was conducted by none other than Peter Jesserer Smith, who is identified as a Register staff reporter.

On November 28, Prof Jordan sent me the following e-mail:

Hello Mr. Bruce,

My attention was drawn to your blog posts about our group's email update. Generally, these news items are meant to inform the group and our friends and supporters of our progress. They are not meant to be for public debate or speculation. It could be possible that your posts may further hinder our progress.

I would appreciate it if you would remove the posts.

thanks,
Andrew Jordan

Excuse me? A professional writer for the NCR drafts your press release (which is what it could only have been), and you claim it's "not meant to be for public debate or speculation"? I don't get it. Mr Jesserer Smith, as I understand these things, is not defining a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. Even the most devout Catholics, it seems to me, are entitled to debate and speculate over his utterances. And maybe, as a full professor, Prof Jordan has mistaken me for a cringing graduate assistant. I fear at age 69 I don't need his influence to get me any new academic job.

I assume Prof Jordan was told to send this e-mail by Houston -- though if I were Houston, I'd be on Jesserer Smith's case, as well as Jordan's, for not running things by Bp Matano. Otherwise, if Matano in fact approved it, I'm not sure what the problem is.

Smith's interview with Bp Lopes, by the way, is nothing special.

Strong Leadership?

I attended an advent festival of lessons and carols, a uniquely Anglican event, at St Mary of the Angels yesterday afternoon. I made a rough count of about 35 people there including choir and altar party, which isn't too bad, since it wasn't Sunday mass. I noted a number of new faces and a good mix of ages. Fr Kelley and the parish are clearly making every effort to rebuild, and it was plain that friends of the parish were there as well, keeping it in their prayers and good wishes.

In fact, revisiting the truly beautiful nave, I got a sense of potential, if not optimism, equivalent to what I felt with others across North America in 2011 as we awaited the erection of the Ordinariate. The bungling of the St Mary's attempt to enter -- which had originally been intended as a hallmark event -- was, with the reversal at Our Lady of the Atonement, a major factor in the discouragement that overtook the Anglican ecumenical movement by mid-2012.

In the US, it's plain that the country is beginning to see a restoration of optimism following the presidential election -- if nothing else, the stock market's gains should be concrete evidence of this. It stems, it seems to me, from strong leadership. The US-Canadian Ordinariate could benefit from a dose of strong leadership as well, and if it gets it, it could produce renewed optimism like what we felt in 2011.

But happy-talk about maybe starting things up again in Rochester, or declaring that a marginal startup is really a parish, isn't that kind of leadership. One thing that would actually reflect strong leadership would be a genuine effort by Bp Lopes to bring the St Mary of the Angels parish into the OCSP.

A regular visitor cautioned me that a group intending to enter must not have ongoing litigation. The problem, though, is that the litigation for all intents and purposes is resolved. The strategy of the Bush group and the ACA has been simply delay -- Mr Lancaster told the judge almost a year ago that the outcome of the Bush appeal of the 2015 finding would be dispositive, and that they had requested it be expedited. By July, it had become plain that they hadn't requested this (in fact, they'd lied to the judge). At this point, they're simply trying to prolong the agony, and it's hard to see any motive for this other than simple spite.

I can only think that some involvement by Bp Lopes could facilitate resolving the issue. A simple request for a phone chat with Bp Marsh, in which Bp Lopes asks Marsh to outline what he means to accomplish by prolonging the legal action and what Lopes might do to resolve outstanding issues, might well move things forward. An informal visit to the St Mary's parish by Bp Lopes could also be a worthwhile gesture, and it might help him to get a better picture of the contribution the parish could make.

I have a feeling that up to now, Houston has been unwilling to open the can of worms that the events of 2012 represent. Not least of these would be a serious investigation of Fr Bartus's involvement in the division of the parish and the campaign of character assassination against Fr Kelley. The problem for Bp Lopes is that maybe putting someone new in Rochester or declaring that Bridgeport is a parish whether or not it can pay pastors' or sextons' salaries is small potatoes. Accomplishing what the OCSP actually set out to do in early 2012 is something else.

The OCSP doesn't have a chance of success unless its leadership is strong enough to undertake this task.

Court Hearing December 12, 2016

There will be a court hearing on December 12, 2016 at 8:30 am in Dept. 32 at the Stanley Mosk courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. It will be on the combined issues of the motion for summary judgment against the Bush group for lack of standing, as they are not the parish vestry, never have been, and have no standing to bring suit. There will also be a motion to dismiss the "related cases" against Fr Kelley. Mr Lancaster's position has been that the court should wait for the appeals court to rule on the Bush group's appeal of Judge Strobel's 2015 finding, but it appears that this will take a great deal longer than Mr Lancaster's original prediction.

This is an area where I continue to be skeptical of Bp Lopes's intent regarding the Ordinariate -- as I've said before, where there's a will, there's a way. Frankly, I think if he were to raise the issue with Bp Marsh of withdrawing the ACA's participation in the legal action, it would move the matter forward. The ACA's participation has certainly damaged its credibility -- it must certainly be a factor in making the ACA's projected merger with the APA "elusive", in Bp Marsh's own words. In the interests of its survival, the ACA needs to move on and focus on the future.

The St Mary of the Angels issue has also been a major problem for the OCSP's public image -- this blog is read by influential parties. Bp Lopes, as I've said before, you want me on your side.

More On The Bridgeport Parish

Regarding my skepticism over whether the Bridgeport parish fully qualified for its canonical erection, my regular correspondent adds,

I would say that there is no doubt that Fr Ousley is not being paid the designated OCSP stipend, because this does not exist. I assume it is one of the financial details that the OCSP administration is trying to work out. However, Fr Ousley was the full-time parochial administrator of St Michael and All Angels, Philadelphia when it had twenty-five members. Clearly they could not have been providing him significant financial support. Likewise, St Gregory, Stoneham could exist as an independent congregation while Fr Liias, the retired TEC clergyman, was their leader but since he retired it has had to merge with the local diocesan PP parish, St Athanasius.

The purchase of an old building, especially one whose maintenance was probably skimped on in the past as closure loomed, is a risk. The November newsletter hints at some potential structural problems. Caretaking duties are being undertaken by volunteers which may be a false economy. So I agree that things are not rock solid at St John the Baptist.

Perhaps you are right that this step reflects a desire to suggest that there is momentum in the OCSP despite appearances to the contrary. Regarding the demographics, there are children in some of the pictures of the post-service reception at St John Baptist. Furthermore, I recall a line of the art critic Robert Hughes', apropos of the fact that we were told for decades during the Cold War that the Orthodox Church was being stamped out in Russia and no one attended but little old ladies, "Little old ladies are a renewable resource."

Well, little old ladies may be a renewable resource, but disaffected Episcopalians and "continuers", their numbers always exaggerated, are not. TEC membership is steadily declining, and not because they're moving to the OCSP. The hard core TEC Anglo-Catholics, significantly in Philadelphia but elsewhere too, are in "affirming" parishes who disagree with the Church's teaching on marriage and sexuality. The "continuers" are disappearing even faster. If they were thought to be a market in 1993 or even 2010, this is no longer the case.

If the current pastor in Bridgeport isn't being paid an amount consistent with normal standards for diocesan secular priests (I occasionally see numbers in the range of $30,000 per year, though this includes paid housing at minimum), this isn't being factored into "stability" as a criterion. Should Fr Ousley retire at age 70 and the parish be unable to pay his successor, this would probably result in the parish's closure, since the diocese had presumably already determined that it wouldn't be sustainable with a diocesan priest, even part time.

The same would apply to parish volunteers serving as housekeepers and gardeners. At some point, this is going to get old. And when the pastor of our previous diocesan parish had to lay off the school custodian, yes, a volunteer took up the slack, but this was one more sign for us that the parish was failing, and it was time to move on.

My regular correspondent followed up,

Starting a new venture is challenging. Some people have special skills in this regard, naturally or as the result of practice. Someone at the beginning of a managerial career who is launching a new initiative will be motivated to acquire expertise on this subject in a hurry and thus demonstrate readiness for greater responsibility.

Msgr Steenson fell into none of these categories. In addition he had one paid employee, his personal assistant, about whose skills I will say nothing except to note that she is no longer with the organisation, and was carrying a significant teaching load at St Mary's Seminary.

He clearly had no ability to identify talent, surrounding himself with incompetent volunteers whose bad decisions, like acquiring the ParishSoft system, are still causing problems for the Ordinariate. I see that his "Letters to the Faithful" have been deleted from the OCSP website, although the heading still remains, which is too bad, because these randomly appearing missives, personally revealing but generally lacking a sense of message, audience, and purpose, offered a lot of insight into the start-up problems of the OCSP.

Now a fresh start has been made. Financial and HR functions are in professional hands. Consistent adherence to canonical requirements is being expected. Common goals are being articulated. Addressing the Ordinariate's fundamental branding problem is a more fundamental problem, of course, and that is the key to its survival.

It's significant that my correspondent is using a corporate-managerial metaphor here. The problem is that there are ways to advance in corporations that don't involve competence, and being a member-in-good-standing of the club is only one of them. Another is to make cosmetic changes in one assignment and, as a rising star, quickly move on, leaving the less visible problems for someone else to clean up. "Pump and dump" could be another way of putting things.

It's getting harder for me to avoid thinking that it's in Bp Lopes's interest to create an appearance of success by glossing over more fundamental issues in places like Scranton and Bridgeport, leaving the inevitable need to address those to a successor.