The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society And Anglo-Catholicism

I've given more thought to yesterday's post and the one at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog that prompted it. I certainly go along with the sentiments here, which say

The administrator at the Catholic Answers Forums tells me that she sometimes fantasizes about banning the subject of women's clothing as a topic of conversation on the forums because there are few topics more likely to start flame wars.

It seems to me that the issue is not whether to breast feed during mass, but whether the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society is any sort of authority on the subject. Clearly Mrs Gyapong and Mr Schaetzel feel they are -- and I know from experience that the moderators at the Society's blogs allow only comments they approve of, so the one comment on the post, from Mr Schaetzel, is clearly endorsed by the powers that be.

Let's look at the Society's position on Catholics and sin:

There are some Catholics who take avoiding a “near occasion of sin” to such extremes that they create a whole new set of rules to put a hedge around such occasions, and then act as if violating one of the “preventive” rules is also somehow sinful.

Well, let's take a look at what "some Catholics" believe about near (or proximate) occasions of sin. Per the Catholic Encyclopedia,

Theologians distinguish between the proximate and the remote occasion. They are not altogether at one as to the precise value to be attributed to the terms. De Lugo defines proximate occasion (De poenit. disp. 14, n. 149) as one in which men of like calibre for the most part fall into mortal sin, or one in which experience points to the same result from the special weakness of a particular person. The remote occasion lacks these elements. All theologians are agreed that there is no obligation to avoid the remote occasions of sin both because this would, practically speaking, be impossible and because they do not involve serious danger of sin.

As to the proximate occasion, it may be of the sort that is described as necessary, that is, such as a person cannot abandon or get rid of. Whether this impossibility be physical or moral does not matter for the determination of the principles hereinafter to be laid down. Or it may be voluntary, that is within the competency of one to remove. Moralists distinguish between a proximate occasion which is continuous and one which, whilst it is unquestionably proximate, yet confronts a person only at intervals. It is certain that one who is in the presence of a proximate occasion at once voluntary and continuous is bound to remove it.

What we're seeing here is that, while circumstances and individual proclivities may differ, yeah, if you're drawn to sin by near occasions that you can avoid, then you're sinning, and if you keep doing it when you're able to avoid it, the confessor must deny absolution. Neither Mrs Gyapong nor Mr Schaetzel is especially precise here, but clearly Mrs Gyapong disdains the idea of putting "a hedge around" near occasions of sin, when it seems to me that a good confessor would urge just that. The typical example of avoiding near occasions of sin is for a person who has a problem with alcohol to avoid walking into a bar. Awfully good advice, as far as I can see, but Mrs Gyapong says, on behalf of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society,

I am going to pronounce right now that this kind of thing is not part of our English Catholic/Anglican Patrimony going forward.

This is a problem I've seen with Anglo-Catholicism from the time I first asked Fr David Miller about it in TEC confirmation class and got his reply: Anglo-Catholics want to have the prestige of calling themselves Catholic without paying the dues Catholics have to pay. Certainly we can dispute whether it's a good idea to breast feed during mass, though I would ask why we almost never see it, at least at the half dozen or so parishes where I've gone, and whether the same people who advocate it would also advocate changing diapers in the pew.

But the point here is that, notwithstanding specifics about modesty and decorum, Mrs Gyapong is making statements about faith and morals. As my regular correspondent puts it,

Leaving aside the fact that her experience of Anglicanism was confined to mid-life membership in a small "continuing" denomination for a decade or so, she displays an eclectic range of "pick and mix" liturgical enthusiasms, combined with a conservative political outlook, which are of course no crimes unless you are purporting to edit a blog which is a semi-official organ of a society dedicated to "promoting the Anglican Heritage and Common Identity within the Catholic Church" in which case the lack of rigour is rather unsettling.

On Mr Schaetzel, my correspondent earlier noted,

I personally don't regard Mr Schaetzel as having an Anglican bone in his body. He is a right-wing evangelical, now Catholic, a very common profile. Passing briefly through TEC, which gave him a taste for traditional liturgy. But he is far more animated about his family-values, "subsidiarity" agenda and similar concerns than he is about Anglican Patrimony, about which his ideas are entirely superficial and romantic.

Yet these folks, with fairly minimal exposure to Anglicanism and as far as I can tell, even less to Catholicism, presume to tell us what part of Catholicism we Anglo-Catholics can follow and what we shouldn't.

Fr Bergman, as I understand it, you're a member of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. Do you feel you have any duty to correct any of this? Does Bp Lopes?

Nursing Mothers In Our Parishes: Not Just Unique?

My regular correspondent sent me a reference to a strange post by Ms Gyapong at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, which I normally avoid. In it, a correspondent rants that in the tiny OCSP chapel group she attended,

there were complaints about me breastfeeding my baby without covering her with a blanket in church. I was accused of being immodest.

She then offered several justifications for why she absolutely had to do this. The woman and Ms Gyapong then agree that breast feeding in public and without covering is part of the Anglican patrimony! Yes, I think that happened all the time in Jane Austen -- Sense and Sensibility, all those descriptions, right? And the great breastfeeding scene in Middlemarch! Shame on those philistines for not recognizing the great Anglican tradition, centuries long, which reached its peak in Victoria's reign, of boldly asserting female reproductive capacity!

Apparently it's those prudish ultramontanists who spoil the fun, according to Ms Gyapong and her visitor. Petty concerns about near occasions of sin, the sort of thing you only find in the act of contrition nowadays. You don't like it, then don't look!

I'm not sure where to start. Ms Gyapong and her visitor cite centuries of Catholic art depicting Christ's Mother breastfeeding. OK, centuries of other Catholic art depict Christ's Mother posing with the Holy Infant on her lap, with Mary discreetly pointing to the Child's penis. This is meant in both cases, as far as I can see, to make the theological point that Christ was fully human but did not sin. It does not imply that mothers should bring their infant boys to church to show off their private parts. Indeed, sometimes infants need a change of diapers while in church, but so far, I've never seen anyone make the change right in the pew.

For that matter, there are many depictions of the angel visiting Mary. But this appears to have been a very private event. This is art. Lots of rapes, massacres, battles, murders, and whatever else take place in art. Doesn't mean we're supposed to do them.

Actually, I've only occasionally seen anyone breastfeeding in church, and in my almost five years as a Catholic, I've never seen it, although Ms Gyapong's visitor says it happens at her new flip-flop and halter top parish, where they're cool with it. One thing that strikes me is that there are lots of infants and children at Catholic parishes -- of course. But in our area, many parishioners are from the Philippines and Latin countries. Frankly, I can't imagine any of them just pulling it out and giving suck.

I think there are two issues here, modesty and decorum. This site quotes Pius XII:

Decency involves the "proper consideration for the sensitivity of others to objects that are unsightly, or, above all, as a defense of moral honesty and a shield against disordered sensuality."

Both Ms Gyapong and her visitor take the position that if you have a problem with having to turn away from a bare breast, there's something wrong with you -- in fact, there's something wrong with you if you think it's something you're not supposed to look at! Where does consideration for the sensitivity of others figure in here?

Beyond that, there's the question of decorum. I think this goes to having a reverent atmosphere in church, among other things. For the same reason that loud social chit-chat in the nave is inappropriate, other things like public breastfeeding probably aren't appropriate, either. Think of why travel during the holidays can be difficult: the prevalence of infants and toddlers tends to make all public space a nursery. But ordinary standards of decorum mean that not everything infants and toddlers do is appropriate in public. Certainly the same kind of people who want everyone to eat crunchy granola also want everyone to accept that all public space should be a nursery, but I try to avoid that sort of situation.

So yeah, I can imagine, say, Gloucester in 1883, with ladies just swingin' down the street, a child at each breast, headin' to morning prayer or some such. It's the Anglican patrimony after all, one of its precious spiritual treasures, which those prudish continental Catholics just can't accept. It's that awful non-Anglican priest leading that little gathered group which just doesn't understand these things. Why, they drove her to a new flip-flop and halter-top parish with awful music and a priest who sounds like Kermit the Frog, but at least they've got no problem with her boobs.

I keep coming back to the insight of Abp Siller-Garcia: these people don't want to be unique, they want to be separate.

Christmas Masses And A Question

My regular correspondent e-mailed me a week ago wondering if the close proximity of Advent IV and Christmas could prove a problem for some OCSP communities, and this turned out to be prophetic:

Fr Kennedy was too ill last Sunday/Monday to offer mass at St Timothy, Ft Worth, so services for Advent IV and Christmas were cancelled. According to the bulletin of SMV, Arlington TX Fr Kennedy is the only priest on staff there besides the Pastor, so things must have been stretched at SMV too. St Timothy's has been without an ordained parish administrator since Fr Stainbrook was reassigned to St John Vianney, Cleburne in July, 2016. The major news items posted on the St Timothy's FB page are the final illnesses/funerals of long-time parishioners. The parish website has remained untouched since April 2017. Manpower is of course an issue, but Our Lady of Hope, Kansas City, where Ed Wills was ordained as a transitional deacon this summer to assist Fr Sly, did not even bother to post Christmas mass times this year. The FB page looks up to date only because the most recent post is pictures from Christmas 2016. There will apparently be many ordinations in the OCSP in 2018, but if we see that the new clergy are deployed as leaders of tiny communities-in-formation they have put together in random small towns, while the first generation of incoming parish groups quietly folds, I think the whole future of the enterprise will look very precarious. As you have commented before, clergy with the entrepreneurial/pastoral skills to build up a thriving parish from a handful of initial members---clergy like Fr Phillips---will always be few and far between. The core strength will always come from competent men who can maintain and build on established communities. If even these cannot be found, things do not look good.

Well, if it had been important to hold Advent IV and Christmas masses at St Timothy, couldn't available OCSP priests have been found in Texas? The four-hour drive from Houston would be tough but doable on all but minimal notice, and overnight stays with a parish family seem like a reasonable possibility. This raises serious questions, among those we've already seen, about the stability of the OCSP.

Here's a question I've been pondering. Ex-Anglican (and Anglican is very flexibly defined) priests who want to be ordained Catholic in the US have two options, the Pastoral Provision and the OCSP. The usual assignment process for the OCSP is for the candidate to take over tiny groups-in-formation without a stipend. In fact, some must take diocesan, though often non-pastoral, jobs to pay the bills. Why are we multiplying entities? Cut out the little Potemkin village groups, take the candidates in via the Pastoral Provision, and give them diocesan jobs, which they'd probably need anyhow?

If you think about it, the ex-Anglicans would probably wind up better occupied, with less time on their hands for mischief, more closely supervised, and have better formation while working closely with diocesan clergy.

A New Angle On The Oxford Movement

I got a very worthwhile book as a Christmas gift from our niece, Simon Jenkins, Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations. More than an enthusiast coffee-table book, Jenkins, a major figure in the historic preservation movement, has quite a bit to say about architecture and social context. He doesn't mention Tract 90, and Newman had almost nothing to say about railways, but Tract 90 appeared in 1841, just as the technological and commercial success of railways was initiating the Railway Mania.

Established historical analysis places the Oxford Movement in the context of the 1832 Reform Act, which granted civil rights to non-Anglicans. But the Reform Act itself occurred in a wider context, and the first successful English railway on the modern paradigm was the Liverpool and Manchester, which opened in 1830. More than expanded suffrage, railways in the first half of the century represented a much more direct threat to English cultural norms. Jenkins points out that the architecture of railway stations, the most direct interface people had with the new technology, had to represent something unthreatening and reassuring.

Thus railway station architecture tended to display historical eclecticism, deliberate archaism, and even escapism, for both commercial and political reasons. The Oxford Movement is a parallel tendency, a response to the industrial revolution, social upheaval, and the commercialization of society. Not only did stations have to draw in customers, but they had to be satisfactory to the local landowners, on whose lands they were often built, and whose properties the railways needed to cross.

Jenkins points out, in fact, that the unique style of 19th-century English railways, one of archaism and eclecticism, has proven exportable in the form of the enormously popular Thomas the Tank Engine and JK Rowling franchises. The Oxford movement has been similarly exportable -- but I think we need to recognize that it's a franchise, a stylistic product, in considerable measure an escapist fantasy.

Jenkins sees English railway stations certainly as an effective fantasy, one that can now contribute to renewed social cohesion -- but they're nonetheless a commercial product, and indeed a social construct, even a form of propaganda. (They're now owned by the government.) The UK railway system acted to reinforce social cohesion during two world wars. As did, of course, the Church of England, which found eclecticism and archaism suited its purpose for much of the same period.

One feature of Protestantism, at least the Lutheran-Reformed version, is that it proved from the start amenable to state control. Anglo-Catholicism is, let's face it, a version of state-controlled Protestantism that is not really compatible with Roman Catholicism. I don't think Cardinal Law recognized this, and I don't think Bp Lopes does, either.

In the end, though, it's a style, something that emulates the thing, not the thing itself. It's a means to an end, not the end itself.

Holy Martyrs Temecula?

My regular correspondent sent along this news:

Starting January 7, Fr Bartus will be celebrating an 8 am Sunday mass here. The venue looks less than ideal and the time will make for a long day for Fr B, who has two morning masses in Irvine and a 6 pm mass in Pasadena. For whom is he getting this group up and running, I wonder?

The site, Monteleone Meadows, is a wine country-style wedding and banquet venue, not a Catholic church. My correspondent continued,

On further inspection of the map I see that it would not be possible for the same person to celebrate the 8 am in Murrieta and the 9 am in Irvine. We await particulars. The fact that the first Sunday get-together is a mass tells us that the attendees are expected to already be practising Catholics, like the 349 members of the "Events" group are, judging by their names, jobs, etc. Another exercise in faux evangelism.

The group's Facebook page is here. Fr Jack Barker was Pastor of St Martha's Catholic Church in Murrieta until his retirement in 2013. However, the new gathered group in Murrieta so far doesn't have any visible connection with that parish and for whatever reason is not meeting there. Murietta is 58 miles from Irvine via a highly indirect route. It's possible that Fr Barker is taking the 9 AM Sunday mass in Irvine while Fr Bartus celebrates in Murietta, or Fr Barker may take the Murietta mass on a more permanent basis. On the other hand, it's hard to understand why the mass is at 8 AM at all, unless Monteleone Meadows has a conflict with any later time.

My regular correspondent observes,

Fr Bartus collects groups of Catholics who have never met an Anglican to celebrate DW. Not only do OCSP groups divert ordained men needed more urgently elsewhere, they divert cradle Catholics and those who entered the Church years ago. We are told that the Ordinariate is preserving the splendours of some ill-defined "patrimony" for the Catholic church, although when one seeks details it seems to consist of everything from Christmas crackers to pink chasubles. "Ordinariate" worship and parish culture runs the gamut from guitars and keyboards to Palestrina, OF to DW, cupcake rosaries to simnel cake. Even if we could define the project I am sure that it means nothing to the average Catholic bishop, and that goes for the current Bishop of Rome, in my observation. And why would a bishop wish to encourage parishioners who were supporting a parish in his diocese to start diverting their contributions to another Catholic jurisdiction, even if he cared that Thomas Cranmer was a great prose stylist? The formation issue is probably the least of his worries; he is already probably dealing with many clergy ordained in Third World countries who are struggling with English. But at least their parishes are supporting his diocese.

It's also troubling that the California efforts are spread so thin. There seem to be groups of a dozen or two now in Pasadena, Murrieta (in formation), and San Diego, with only the Irvine group showing any potential for growth. Are the efforts to gather little cliques of oddball Catholics diverting attention from the need to find a permanent home for the Irvine group?

Also troubling is a pattern that's starting to emerge, that small and distant groups suffer from lack of effective supervision, so that potential scandals can develop out of sight until they become unmanageable. Each of the four California groups is in a different diocese, which makes it likely that problems in any will escape the attention of diocesan authorities who might otherwise be in a position to notify Houston.

As we saw with the Athens, GA group, announcements are made before a permanent venue can be located. This seems like a slapdash way to set things up, perhaps playing to an audience in Houston, not to serious parishioners in the geographic location.

We're departing more and more from the original Anglicanorum coetibus model of established groups of Anglicans, originally meant to be whole parishes or rumps thereof, coming into the Church and catechized with their original clergy. That model didn't last much past 2012. Now we're starting to get cliques of cradle Catholics who for whatever reason can't find satisfactory parishes in their dioceses, notwithstanding the existing variety of Latin mass, music programs, devotional activities, social opportunities, and celebration styles available there.

And we'll be in a situation, if a scandal develops (it seems like we're getting close here and there), the diocesan bishop will have to do some sort of explanation for the 5 o'clock news about how yes, these are Catholics, but they aren't his Catholics.

Cardinal Law

Cardinal Bernard Law, as I'm sure most know, passed away yesterday. The obituaries all portray him as the face of the sex abuse scandal, but of course, this was endemic, and Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles was eventually barred by his successor from functioning in a public role due to equivalent complicity in the scandal. But Law was also a prime mover in the Anglican ecumenism project, which will almost certainly not be mentioned in the media.

This blog is about St Mary of the Angels, and Law was a key figure in initiating the bizarre recent history of that parish we've been following here. We know from Fr Barker's account that Law was familiar with the trends that led to the 1977 Congress of St Louis and the quixotic "continuing Anglican" movement. I don't believe Fr Barker has ever given a full account of when contacts between him and Law, or Law's surrogates, began, and as far as I know, it isn't completely clear what role Law may have played in encouraging Fr Barker to take the parish out of TEC.

Whether Law first whispered an idea in Fr Barker's ear, though, is less important than the practical result: the parish filed revised articles of incorporation in January 1977 to remove itself from TEC; TEC filed the first lawsuit the following month. Forty years and three lawsuits later, the fate of the parish is still unresolved.

Certainly by late 1977, according to Fr Barker, Law's people were actively discussing the idea of a personal prelature that would incorporate the St Mary of the Angels parish and the limited number of others that saw such a move as an option. But the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision was not authorized until 1980, while the St Mary's parish was badly divided and embroiled in an expensive lawsuit. Either Law didn't foresee such a result, or he didn't care; he certainly never provided, and likely never advised, a more prudent option for the parish.

Once the first lawsuit was resolved, Law was unable to secure a favorable reception of the parish into the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Neither Cardinal Manning nor his successor, Cardinal Mahony, accepted the parish's petition, Mahony in particular questioning whether the parish could accept Catholic authority if it couldn't accept TEC. In light of subsequent history, Mahony had a point.

But there's an additional question. The Anglican ecumenism project, irrespective of its practical lack of success, did represent a momentous shift in policy. Such policy changes need to be thoroughly prepared, and those affected need to be brought on board. It appears that Law never did this with Cardinals Manning and Mahony, who were key figures that clearly held a veto over the early test of the project that St Mary's represented. I've had the impression that, although St John Paul approved the Pastoral Provision, he always took an arm's-length position, and I would guess that his view would have been that if Law wanted it that badly, he could bring Manning and Mahony around himself.

Instead, I wonder if Manning and Mahony thought Law was trying to interfere with their archdiocese, telling them without saying so in words what priest and parish they needed to bring in. But I think there's a concern that mostly isn't addressed, why should a bishop bring in a former Protestant priest whom he hasn't fully vetted? Might this be behind the apparent resistance to bringing in OCSP priests in Rochester and St Petersburg? Note that Matano in Rochester seems to have changed his mind when offered the possibility of a celibate Catholic seminarian, while the Bishop of St Petersburg seems to have resisted an OCSP group but had no objection to the same candidate coming in under his own supervision.

Let's also keep in mind that Law, from accounts we've heard, maintained contacts with Jeffrey Steenson and other dissident TEC figures in the late 1980s. We don't know what was on his agenda (or for that matter Steenson's) at that time, but I think it's safe to say not much good came from it then. But the 1993 meeting between Ratzinger and TEC figures Pope and Steenson was facilitated by Law and meant to pursue the idea of a personal prelature, which St John Paul had rejected once already at the time of the Pastoral Provision.

We may assume that the personal prelature was intended to fix the original problem posed by the St Mary of the Angels fiasco, but clearly this didn't happen. St John Paul was still not well disposed, and even when Ratzinger as Benedict was able to establish it on his own, the project was too poorly resourced to succeed. No matter what's been tried so far, the parish still hasn't come in, and if it were up to me, I'd advise the parish and Abp Hepworth to hold out for a better deal, given the extremely valuable property they bring to the party.

My regular correspondent reflected the other day,

"450,000 Anglicans to join Catholic church." Right. How desperately do we think the Vatican wishes that Pope Benedict had never come up with Anglicanorum Coetibus? If you are correct in your surmise that Fr Kenyon left Calgary under a cloud---and the fact that he appears to be under a form of house arrest certainly supports this idea -- [complaints] regarding his would-be replacements must be the last thing they want to hear about.

Leaving the sex abuse crisis entirely aside, there are reasons not to eulogize Cardinal Law. He had direct responsibility for the 40-year St Mary of the Angels disaster, fostering the break from TEC but unable to secure its reception into the Catholic Church, but he also bears some behind-the-scenes responsibility for the whole "continuing Anglican" boondoggle.

Not a happy record.

Fr Kenyon's Current Status

My regular correspondent reports on what reference can be found to where Fr Kenyon is currently serving. A few weeks ago, a Stockport observer relayed news that he had been assigned to a "team ministry" in the Shrewsbury diocese, but his exact role there is still not completely clear:

As you will see on page 3 of the newsletter here, Fr Kenyon is putting in a full schedule of Ordinariate liturgies at St Aidan's Wythenshawe: daily Morning and Evening Prayer, Confession and Mass, plus a Vigil and a Sunday celebration. Given the number of OF Sunday masses offered in the St Bonaventure's Missionary Area, he may be saying one of them as well. He is living in a nearby suburb. But he is not listed as a member of the Wythenshawe Clergy Team, and only has a personal email address and phone number. The St Aidan's parish office is "closed until further notice." What gives? There is no local Ordinariate group listed on the OOLW website , other than the Manchester group led by Fr Starkie for which Fr Kenyon preached some months back. As I mentioned previously, most of the church of St Aidan, Northern Moor was converted into social and community space, leaving a relatively small worship space as a mass centre.

In a subsequent e-mail, my correspondent characterizes this as "a form of house arrest". It's hard to think other than that Fr Kenyon has a very low profile, with duties closely circumscribed even within a "team ministry". I would guess that most of the DWM liturgies he celebrates are for himself exclusively. It would seem that Fr Kenyon's return to the UK has primarily been a headache to his new bishop, adding to and not relieving his workload and that of his priests. This simply can't reflect well on Bp Lopes or the OCSP.

I've put out feelers to Stockport contacts, but so far have heard nothing back.

Diocesan Background Checks

My regular correspondent sent me a 2009 USCCB document, Background Evaluation Methodologies, which, although it focuses mainly on child and youth protection, gives an insight into background checks typically performed by US dioceses. Entries generally look like this:

The background check used by the Diocese is through HIRERITE, Inc. It consists of a seven year criminal record check in all states resided, a sex offender‘s registry search, and social security number verification.

This sounds roughly like what I went though as a lay volunteer who completed the Virtus program. I would assume that background checks for clergy might, formally or informally, need to be more comprehensive. In particular, a juvenile conviction, which could certainly indicate criminal tendencies, might not appear on such a search, either because juvenile records are sealed, or simply because it took place more than seven years earlier.

I also heard from a visitor who went through the background check and psychological evaluation for clergy in the OCSP during the Steenson era. He noted that he'd been in the military earlier in life, and in the course of that service, he'd had FBI-style background checks for security clearances. (I've had the same thing; they do in fact go through your friends, acquaintances, co-workers, neighbors, and ask detailed questions.) He said the background checks for OCSP clergy were, at least in his case, performed by the local diocese where he lives and were nowhere near as thorough as the FBI checks he'd had. The OCSP being what it is, we can't necessarily expect consistency, though.

It's worth noting that his experience with the psychological evaluation was not as good. He was coming from an Anglican denomination that was friendly to same-sex marriage, and he gave that to the psychologist conducting the interview as one reason that led him to consider the Catholic priesthood. In other words, he conformed to the teachings of the Catholic Church. However, the interviewer apparently then told my visitor that he was openly gay, and he accused my visitor of being a "homophobe" and a "hater".

I suppose we must recognize that even diocesan screening procedures can be flawed. (It wouldn't surprise me if seminarians in that diocese learned informally how to answer questions from psychologist x, information that might not have been available to my visitor, who effectively was a walk-on candidate.) Michael Voris ain't just blowin' smoke, it would appear.

Again, though, if seminarians normally come from diocesan parishes, where their progress toward formation can be fostered and observed through much of their youth, this would serve the purpose of a detailed FBI check. In addition, from what I've learned of the clergy sex abuse crisis, the conduct of the bad priests had often been generally known or suspected by fellow clergy. The problem was that the offenders were shunted around to get rid of the problem as quietly as possible, rather than facing the issue directly. Thus background checks per se weren't the issue; the backgrounds were in fact often known and understood -- the question was the remedy.

But this would be much less the case with candidates coming to the Church already ordained as Anglicans. They wouldn't have been known to the diocese (or the prelature) from their time in seminary or before. There's the additional problem of jurisdiction-hopping. If a priest is being carefully eased out of an Anglican denomination, especially in such a way as to avoid scandal there, the Anglican bishop has a motive to give the bad apple an enthusiastic recommendation, or at least not to mention the problem issues that could result in his staying right where they were trying to get rid of him.

So, whatever background check on an OCSP candidate a diocese might perform, it could be adequate as a way of vetting a lay volunteer or employee, but it might well not be due diligence for clergy, who see the most vulnerable in their weakest times. I seriously question whether this issue has been adequately addressed, simply in the basic architecture of Anglicanorum coetibus. It assumes that Protestants essentially do things the same way Catholics do, which is dangerous.

Hold On! Somebody Else Is The Last Of The Gilbertines!

A visitor e-mails:

As far as I know +William Paul Vincent Hains-Howard a Canadian Old Catholic bishop styled himself the last of the Gilbertines. So there is a Canadian connection.

One of the more Anglican bishops up there told me that he used to wear a huge pointy miter at various functions. LOL!

I think he’s been departed since the late eighties, early nineties.

In all this I don’t understand +Lopes. Lean and mean would be a better approach rather than replication of officialdom. Everyone forgets that Episcopalianism started out in a house church in Scotland.

Google isn't much help here. The only reference I can find is on the site of the Neo-Luciferian Church, which describes itself as Apostolic and Gnostic, and frankly, that's about as far as I prefer to go.

There are certain sections of the Anglican patrimony. . .

I've asked a few of my contacts if they have other info on Bp Hains-Howard, but so far, nothing's come up.

Back To The Matter Of Habits And Titles

A visitor with a background in canon law remarks,

I’m not aware of anything in the Codex Juris Canonici that stipulates who is or is not entitled to use the titles of “brother” and “sister” — but theologically, these titles actually are proper to every baptized Christian. With God as our adoptive father, we all are siblings in our Lord, which is why religious orders, in seeking to live the gospel more fully, started using them.

Naturally, a pastor may often address us as "my brothers and sisters" in a homily, and this would not be inaccurate or in any way reprehensible. Nor, as far as I'm aware, is there anything in the canons that prevents me from wearing a Franciscan habit if I choose, especially in the back yard. Nor, as far as I can see, especially if I can come to mass in shorts, flip-flops, and a torn t-shirt, is there anything that prevents me, canonically, from coming to mass in a Franciscan habit.

However, in the case I covered here of the ACA priest who styled himself OSA though he had never been an Augustinian, the regional superior of the Augustinians whom I consulted made it clear the guy was not entitled to say he’s OSA. And if I were indeed to go to mass dressed in a Franciscan habit and call myself “Brother John”, I believe Fr Bob would, er, take me aside, notwithstanding there’s no dress code and we’re all brothers and sisters.

Some things are misleading and could represent a danger to the flock even if the canons have no opinion.

The Church Of Torres Strait

In a recent e-mail entitled "A Microcosm of Anglicanorum coetibus", my regular correspondent reports,

In comments on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog Mr Guivens has twice called recent attention, (with no response) to an article in the latest issue of the Portal, the monthly magazine of the OOLW, on the Church of Torres Strait. This was a TAC member body composed of former members of the Anglican Church of Australia who left over some jurisdictional issue involving the appointment of an indigenous bishop. As first reported they wished to enter the Church via Anglicanorum coetibus as a distinct Ordinariate, with thousands of potential members on the islands and in the diaspora.

Eventually this was scaled down to potential membership in the Australian OOLSC, but apart from occasional announcements that negotiations were ongoing nothing more has been heard since the OOLSC was established five years ago. Occasionally they are in the news when Peter Slipper, Hepworth's protégé, pays a visit but otherwise few reports. Now it appears from the Portal article that they have "abandoned this ecumenical effort" and are being led "down a different path," with the exception of a single congregation, or part thereof, on the island of Duaun.

This group, however, does not have a clerical leader, so they have become members of the OOLSC parish in Cairns (which is led by the former Vicar-General of the Church if Torres Strait, ordained in the OOLSC in 2013). "The journey to Duaun from the Australian Mainland involves two or three flights and a short sea passage by inflatable dinghy" (you couldn't make this up) and costs approx AUS$2000. I am sure Fr Barnier has a faithful following at Holy Cross, Duaun, but this arrangement typifies the lack of resources at the disposal of the Ordinariates and the precariousness of their existence. And of course the discrepancy between the preliminary hype and the reality.

This brought to mind the Roman Catholic Diocese of Juneau, where priests must presumably rely on boat and plane to say mass, but the circumstances there must certainly be more routinized and cohesive. Instead, I think again of St John the Evangelist Calgary, 2116 miles and a four-hour flight from Houston. Observers on the ground in the Diocese of Shrewsbury are firm on the point that SJE's former pastor, Fr Kenyon, requires close supervision, but he clearly never had it in Calgary.

Again, we're dealing with something like Robert X Cringely's 30-day airplane, probably something that as a practical matter can't be done and shouldn't even be tried. My guess is that Calgary, with no effective supervision over some very sketchy clergy, will, within a fairly short period of time, erupt into a situation that will bring down the OCSP.

Court Session On Bush Group's Appeal of EDD Decision, Case BS152017

In May, I covered a court session regarding the Bush group's appeal of the California Employment Development Department's ruling that Fr Kelley was entitled to unemployment compensation for his "termination" by the group.

Fr Kelley made the claim based on his termination as rector of St Mary of the Angels by the Bush group after they seized the property. The Bush group alleged that Fr Kelley had stolen funds from the parish. Administrative judges repeatedly ruled that there was no evidence for this allegation, and Fr Kelley was finally awarded full benefits. Even after Fr Kelley was paid, the Bush group has continued its appeal.

In May, Mr Anastasia requested that the judge move the case forward another six months, to December 6. The EDD agreed. This was part of he Bush group's strategy to delay its appeal of the main case against Fr Kelley, which it had lost in 2015, and then ask that all related actions be postponed until the appeal was resolved. The session on December 6, this past Wednesday, was expected to be yet another request to delay the case again. As a result, Fr Kelley told me the session was likely to be just like the short May session, with attorneys calling in by phone, and the judge allowing another continuance. As a result, I decided not to attend.

However, Fr Kelley did attend, and there were a few surprises. Fr Kelley reports,

In the course of the mysteries in court, this came up:

09/01/2017 at 09:31 am in Department 86, Amy D. Hogue, Presiding
Motion to be Relieved as Counsel - Granted

Further,

Judge Amy Hogue began by making the point that under CA Law, a Corporation MUST be represented by an Attorney. She then revealed that Anastasia had abandoned the Plaintiffs. (I had not observed that on line previously...)

So Lancaster & Anastasia had quietly been relieved as counsel for the Bush group and others in all the related cases over the summer. The reason is presumably the same as the other requests to be relieved, non-payment.

The Judge replied that she couldn't act summarily, but had to give "them" another 90 days to appear -- March 7, 2018, at which time, if they did not, she could consider "abatement" or "dismissal" of the case. (She was wracking her brain for the former term, uncertain that she'd hit upon exactly the right term.)

She inferred that it might be possible to submit a Motion (for Summary Judgment??) by Pal, to clear it all up prior to March 7.

That's where proceedings ended.

It appears that the Bush group's agenda has slowly been coming apart, primarily in recent months for lack of money to pursue legal cases. We know that in August 2014, following the appeals court's ruling in the legal vestry's favor in the Rector, Wardens, and Vestry cases, the Bush group took out a $575,000 mortgage on the parish property, presumably to pay legal bills. But by October 2015, the previous tenant of the commercial property had moved out, and by early 2016, the Bush group had been evicted, leaving them unable to raise additional funds.

In their July petition to be relieved as counsel, Lancaster & Anastasia said they hadn't been paid since 2015. Whatever may have happened to the $575,000, it doesn't seem to be available to pay counsel now.

No Advent Lessons And Carols In Divine Worship Missal

My wife and I attended an Advent festival of lessons and carols at St Mary of the Angels this past Sunday. This was very well done and shows how well Dr Kathleen Moon, the music director, has held the program together though several years of extreme difficulty. Clearly the service was following a liturgy, and the liturgy was good enough that it was making me think better of the DWM, that is, if the DWM had a liturgy for an Advent festival of lessons and carols -- a uniquely Anglican Advent celebration. So I posed the question to Fr Kelley, who replied,

The format for the Lessons & Carols was created by Bishop Edward White Benson, when he was the brand new Bishop of Truro (a newly created diocese, ca. 1877). He wanted to establish some "traditions" for the new diocese. The original format had 9 lessons, but we've kept to seven here. King's College, Cambridge, still keeps to nine, as do most of the English cathedrals. King's is the one the BBC usually broadcasts live each year. The Bidding Prayer is basically that composed by Bp Benson. . . .

So, no, the Lessons & Carols isn't found in the Ordinariate sources; but there's no reason why it shouldn't be incorporated in some future edition. It is very flexible, in terms of what can be incorporated, both in the lesson selection, and in the musical opportunities. The Magnficat is not a "standard" part; but given the Visitation Gospel lesson, which is an alternative in the lists, it seemed perfectly appropriate to include a Magnificat said to be one of Pope Benedict's favorites, & to do it as a Solemn Magnificat, in the best St. Mary's tradition.

As far as I can tell, the dicasteries had something like a dozen people on this thing, and they managed not to think of the Advent festival of lessons and carols. Given the history Fr Kelley gives, this is an authentic treasure of the Anglican spiritual patrimony.

UPDATE: A visitor notes,

The service known as “Lessons and Carols” does not have a rite in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, either, and thus does not have status as liturgical prayer even within the Anglican tradition.

Since “Lessons and Carols” does not involve any sacrament, there is nothing that precludes any Catholic parish or other congregation from holding such a service. Canonically, “Lessons and Carols” is a pious devotion.

However, worthwhile as such a service can be, so far, I note that nothing is being said about it this year by the people at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog. A good question would be how many OCSP communities are holding this at all.

What's The Formula?

Regarding yesterday's post, my regular correspondent comments,

I have no magic secret for managing a diocese in such a way as to ensure that charismatic leaders are matched up with appropriate local resources. But the administrator of St Thomas More, Toronto announced his retirement last June. Toronto is the largest city in Canada, and the local Anglican diocese is one of the largest in North America. The Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto was the Episcopal Delegate from the Holy See in the formation of the Ordinariate in Canada. Why has no replacement been found to take over STM?

This raises at least two worthwhile questions. The first is, irrespective of whether there's a secret to linking leaders with resources, success seems to breed success. Our diocesan parish, over 100 years old, seems to have maintained this tradition -- the Los Angeles area began to expand beyond its core only after about 1900, and this community was one of the earliest. As far as I can tell, it's had a succession of strong pastors over that time, and I would assume that the archdiocese knows from long experience where to put good resources.

A factor that I've begun to glimpse is the ingredient of having a "good rectory", referring to the quality, interaction, and mutual support of the priests who live there. In this case, it appears that not only parish staff, but retired priests and those in diocesan staff positions also prefer to live there. These men take masses and contribute to the general atmosphere. Married priests, with the evidence of what happened in Stockport in mind, showing the need to empty a rectory to accommodate a family, could well eradicate the possibility of a "good rectory" helping a parish.

But second, you can't put good resources anywhere if they don't exist. The OCSP is incongruously in the position of having a surplus of priests but a dire shortage of deployable men. One issue is that the bishop must often move not just the priest but his family, including the need to find work for his wife. Add to that the fact that most OCSP communities can't support a priest and are unlikely to grow to the point where they might in the future. This in turn means that, after the initial optimism of 2010-11, few men have seen desirable career opportunities in the OCSP, and for the few good positions, there's clearly a waiting list where the good candidates have long since taken numbers. So what you get is the rag-tag second tier of latecomer opportunists and wannabes that we see, who are unlikely to grow a community.

So Bp Lopes can't move anyone to Toronto unless the diocese can offer him (and probably his wife) a day job. And let's keep in mind that Cardinal Collins's attitude toward Anglicanorum coetibus cooled distinctly in late 2011, to the point that he apparently vetoed the idea of a separate Canadian ordinariate. I'm not sure if the OCSP is in a position to ask him for any favors. But if the STM group showed actual promise, these obstacles could probably be surmounted. The problem is that, like the great majority of OCSP communities, it is unlikely to grow. But then, the Toronto area apparently hasn't been able to turn up even a Bayles or a Baaten.

You need resources even to build a Potemkin village, after all. If there's no budget for false-front buildings, and no ready-made ones on the distress market, you can't even have those.

Msgr Steenson's Status

My wish for a tell-all (or something similar) from Msgr Steenson yesterday prompted this update on his status from my regular correspondent:

The Ordinary Emeritus has been quite banished from the scene, moving from Houston to St Paul, MN where as "Priest Scholar in Residence at " he has a small teaching load at the St Paul Seminary and no connection with a local parish that I can ferret out. (He is leading an Advent meditation at the Cathedral today; bio omits any mention of OCSP). Nor with the small OCSP group in Minneapolis led by Fr Treco. Even if the long-term plan was always to have Steven Lopes take over as Bishop Ordinary I think that Steenson was expected to lay a far firmer foundation than he was able to do. The Davises, as we explored, were encouraged to pour considerable resources into his administration and got very little for their money, IMHO. Presumably it was difficult for those outside TEC/ACC/"Continuing" Anglican culture to assess what a motley collection they would be dealing with and how little relevance Steenson's experience would have to the challenges he faced. As a result I think his tenure was brought to a premature close and Lopes was forced to take over a struggling operation that has yet to achieve stability. . . . And while Bp Lopes seems to be slowly getting out to visit some of the smaller and more far-flung groups, he does not seem to be developing any vision for either growing them to sustainable size or rationalising his clergy deployment to create communities with potential to become sustainable.

As time has gone on, my sympathy for Msgr Steenson has increased, especially as what we see under Bp Lopes shows little change. I think this goes to the basic miscalculations behind Anglicanorum coetibus, and there's only so much Bp Lopes can do.

UPDATE: A visitor adds,

I’m not sure how much the leadership of the OCSP can do to whip things up, if your contentions that it was based on way overblown popularity estimates are correct. I’m saying this because it seems to me the most vibrant Catholic parishes achieve that due to a capable, charismatic pastor and a well-managed laity team, without much help from the diocese. It seems to me there are always “going places” parishes and less active ones in town.

As it is with the OCSP: you have a very few, active and probably growing parishes—OLA, OLW, SMV, couple others, arguably good leadership there, and then you have the rest. Hard to see how Bp. Lopes can do a lot to change that.

I think that Catholic parishes vary widely is something that certainly argues for this. But the impossibly small size of most OCSP groups pretty much keeps them from even making a credible start.

Take A Closer Look At The Chronology

One thing that's escaped me until I looked at the chronology behind the issuance of the DWM missal is how closely it corresponds to Bp Lopes's arrival as Bishop of the OCSP. Per Wednesday's post,

On 29 November 2015, Advent Sunday, the new missal went into use. The Book of Divine Worship was retired on 1 January 2016.

Per Bp Lopes's Wikipedia entry:

On November 24, 2015, the Holy See announced that Lopes would be the first bishop of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter for the Anglican Use. In assuming that responsibility, he succeeded Monsignor Jeffrey N. Steenson, a former Episcopal bishop appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to the position of "ordinary" in 2012.

A little higher up in the Wikipedia entry, we see

Starting in 2012, Lopes served as the secretary of the Vatican commission Anglicanae Traditiones, which was formed with the goal of developing a missal that would hybridize Anglican and Roman Rite liturgical elements for the use of the personal ordinariates.

I think this makes it a little plainer that Bp Lopes, clearly a protégé of Cardinal Levada, whom he "served as a personal aide. . . from 2005 to 2012", was on the fast track and had been in line for this appointment from the start, even before Steenson's 2007 move to Rome. There was nothing sudden about the appointment, and it probably had little to do specifically with Msgr Steenson's performance..

However, I've got to think that the CDF has expected more than it's seen so far. I'm also sorry that we'll almost certainly never get a tell-all from Msgr Steenson. I wish I could chat with him the way I've chatted with Abp Hepworth.

More On OLA Liturgy And Pew Missals

A visitor pointed me to this announcement on the OLA Website:

Revised Liturgy Coming

October 19, 2015 by admin

Last year, His Eminence, Cardinal Müller, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, conveyed to Bishop Vann, Pastoral Provision Delegate, that “the parishes of the Pastoral Provision have permission to use Divine Worship: Occasional Services, and in the future, you can expect similar permission when the Missal is published.”  With the pending publication of the new Divine Worship Missal slated to be released in Advent, Fr. Phillips wrote to Bishop Vann to inquire if permission has been extended from the Holy See for this parish.  The response from the Bishop’s secretary is in the affirmative, and a formal letter will be sent.  More information will follow.

So on one hand, there's the origin of the parish's 2016 use of DWM while still in the Pastoral Provision. The visitor also notes,

I missed the meeting, but having asked the instituted acolytes after Mass the changes are mainly postures for the congregation where the rubrics supposedly indicate "according to custom". Customs apparently vary between parishes, which is usually the case between parishes within a diocese.

The parish will also start using their acolytes in the role of sub-deacon. I don't know If any of the Ordinariate parishes had instituted acolytes before Bishop Lopes was installed, even if it has been provided for in the Missal.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds,

Bp Lopes simultaneously scheduled the first training weekend for instituted acolytes in 2016 and informed OCSP groups that no one but a priest, deacon, or instituted acolyte could function as a sub-deacon at a high mass. I believe that this had not been the case previously.

Regarding printing the text from DWM in pew missals, my regular correspondent says,

When the DWM was first published, groups were warned that the text was copyright and could not be reproduced. At first there was some discussion about whether even the day's propers could legally be printed for congregational use---the first advice was that they could, if they were collected at the end of the mass! This policy has never been officially changed, as you can see from the wording of the second announcement here. "[O]ther Ordinariate communities have persisted printing a comprehensive: liturgy guide" definitely implies that these communities are flouting the rules But it also implies that STM is one of the few that has tried to get by with distributing just the propers and/or the congregational responses, rather than a "comprehensive liturgy guide," despite the fact that no copyright license for the latter has been issued. Of course the CTS has asked for trouble by not making an affordable legal version available for the last two years, nor even giving a firm date when one is likely to be available.

I notice that many OSCP congregations also print the words to hymns in the service leaflet without any indication that they have paid the requisite licensing fee, although in most cases these licenses are readily available.

While I'm not an expert on Anglo-Catholicism, our previous TEC parish, St Thomas Hollywood, brought in its current rector, Fr Davies, from All Saints Margaret Street in London, which I've been told is the "gold standard" for Anglo-Catholicism. Previously, Fr Barbour purchased bulletins with the Sunday propers from a Lutheran publisher, and he was proud of how much he saved by doing this. Fr Davies instituted a new practice of publishing a new bulletin each week containing, as yesterday's visitor suggested, a full "liturgy guide" with the propers, collects, responses, hymn music, and announcements each week in a pamphlet that probably runs a dozen pages.

This is also elaborately decorated with sentimental clip art and looks very much like bulletins that have been posted from St John the Evangelist Calgary and St John the Baptist Bridgeport, so I assume this sort of thing is "gold standard" Anglo-Catholic practice. All I can think is that Houston is looking the other way for OCSP parishes that do this. (A disadvantage of this practice is that Fr Davies at St Thomas feels free from time to time to make tasteful emendations to the text of the liturgy in the pew missal -- in fact the liturgy he started with was never quite out of anyone's BCP in any case. But this comes with the Anglo-Catholic package.)

Another visitor notes,

I attend a diocesan (Novus Ordo-only) parish in East Texas. My pastor does "the whole fuss and feathers routine" every Sunday at two of his morning Masses. It takes away nothing from the significance of special feasts. It's worth noting that every single Sunday is a special feast, which is why as Catholics we are obligated to attend Mass on that day. And it is only right and just to give the greatest glory to God that we possibly can, at every opportunity. This is a good, Catholic feature, not a Ordinariate bug.

I'm a little surprised to hear of this in any diocesan parish anywhere, and certainly I can't condemn it. But I would also say that this confirms my impression that diocesan parishes vary widely in the reverence of their liturgy, and any stereotype of flip-flops and halter tops is incorrect.

More Questions On OLA Liturgy

A visitor with a background in canon law notes,

It seems most likely that Catholic canon law actually prohibited the Parish of Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, Texas, from changing its celebration of mass from the previous Book of Divine Worship to the new Divine Worship missal until the new pastor assumed his office.

Later, the visitor remarked,

Perhaps you can check the dates more readily than I can, but my recollection is that Archbishop Garcia-Siller formally removed Fr. Phillips from the position of Pastor of the Parish of Our Lady of the Atonement well before the promulgation of the Divine Worship missal. Now that Fr. Lewis is the pastor, he has the authority to legislate the actual change within the parish.

This sent me to Wikipedia, whose entry on Divine Worship: The Missal says

On 29 November 2015, Advent Sunday, the new missal went into use. The Book of Divine Worship was retired on 1 January 2016.

A visitor from OLA notes, with reference to yesterday's post,

The pew missals [at OLA] were updated in 2016. The new front cover was changed to read "The Order of Mass according to the Divine Worship Missal". I wonder why it was not fully implemented.

This raises an interesting question: DWM, according to Wikipedia, is "used in the parishes and other communities of the personal ordinariates for former Anglicans". However, OLA did not enter the OCSP until the decree was issued in March of this year, which means it remained a Pastoral Provision parish until that time. It would appear that the replacement of the BDW by DWM applied to the two remaining Pastoral Provision communities in 2016 as well, if this chronology is reflective of the actual circumstances.

In any case, as best we currently understand it, OLA had the authority under Fr Phillips to implement DWM in 2016 while he was still pastor, although I assume Abp Garcia-Siller would have had to approve it as well. However, my regular correspondent points out,

DWM is currently available only in the altar format, at approx US$400, which explains why there are no copies in the pews at OLA. A[n approved] pew version is apparently in the works, but no date has been given.

The first visitor here notes,

As to printing liturgical booklets for the use of parishioners, I have visited quite a few parishes that print their own worship aids. Such parishes can put everything (hymns, readings, responses, antiphons, etc.) in the actual order in which they occur in the liturgy so the parishioners don’t have to go fishing back and forth between the rite itself, the propers, and the hymns and other musical selections to find all of the elements of the liturgy. The copyright licenses required to do this actually are quite inexpensive, so it may actually cost less than the published paperback booklets distributed through normal commercial channels.

Yes, I've seen this too, and in fact it's much preferable to the cheapo paperbacks like Breaking Bread, which as far as I can tell is actually pretty expensive. Some OCSP parishes have in fact issued their own pew booklets with the DWM order of mass, and it appears that OLA did this in 2016. But a remaining question is exactly what was in those pew missals at OLA that represented themselves as "according to the Divine Worship Missal". Did Fr Phillips insert incorrect liturgy, or did he ignore what was in them and simply do things his own way?

Any further information will be most appreciated! Maybe this would indeed require a meeting to sort it out!

Meeting On Liturgical Changes At Our Lady Of The Atonement

An OLA parishioner writes,

It was reported in the bulletin again about the changes to the liturgy. Part of what was stated:

While the Divine Worship Missal has some flexibility in its rubrics, it still promotes a normative way for the liturgy. Thus on the first Sunday of Advent, we will conform our liturgy to the rubrics of the Divine Worship Missal and to the normative practices it promotes.

There will be an informational meeting this Tuesday.

Here's something I don't quite get. The Sunday liturgy changes from week to week -- different readings, and those also change from year to year. The colors of the vestments change. In our parish, incense is used on major feasts, not at other times. In some seasons and on some days of obligation, the gloria, sanctus, acclamation, and agnus dei are sung in Latin. Sometimes there's the full general confession, other times the kyrie. In Lent, the gloria and alleluia are omitted, and there are no flowers. Our pastor, for whatever reason, doesn't feel the need to call a meeting every time this happens.

I don't know exactly what the changes at OLA are -- unfortunately, the OLA bulletin doesn't seem to be available on line. If it means restoring the peace, or putting it in a different place, I'm not sure what would be upsetting about it -- certainly mentioning it in the announcements after mass for several weeks beforehand might be a good idea, but why a meeting?

This is actually something that's been at the back of my head for a while. Our diocesan parish just had All Saints' Day and a Thanksgiving mass, both of which had the whole routine with incense, taperers, and so forth that Anglo-Catholics would find familiar, along with Latin on All Saints, plus the Liturgy of the Saints in Latin on that day, which they would not. But why do Anglo-Catholics do the whole fuss and feathers routine every Sunday? Doesn't this take away from the significance of the special feasts?

And might this make it more difficult to countenance any change at all? I just don't get why they need to have a meeting.

UPDATE: A visitor notes,

OLA needs to have a meeting because they were out of compliance with the rubrics of the rite approved by the Bishops and the Pope as Divine Worship the Missal. You might remember you thought it odd there were two separate committees working on creating a “Mass” rite that were not communicating with each other until the official version was promulgated. Apparently, Fr. Phillips and Co. were on the wrong side and did NOT conform their Mass to DWM even after they had the opportunity to do so when they joined the Ordinariate.

Some of the changes you referenced in your parish that do not require meetings are simply options allowed the priests within the rubrics of the Mass or are dictated by the liturgical season. The point at OLA must be that the changes they will now encounter are substantially different from what they have been doing and the changes need to be explained. I wondered why Atonement did not opt to purchase parish copies of the DWM Sunday missals (similar to almost every other parish in a regular diocese has for the Novus Ordo Mass). It seemed to me to be a waste of money to keep printing those silly paper booklets when a permanent form was available. Now I know why. They were still doing their own thing. It’s that separate and unique theme again. God bless Fr. Mark. He has his work cut out for him.

My regular correspondent comments,

Perhaps the crowd at OLA is unduly resistant to change of any kind, including change for the better. "In heaven'ly love abiding/No change my heart shall fear; / And safe is such confiding,/For nothing changes here." as the Anna L. Waring hymn puts it---a battle hymn for a certain kind of parishioner probably over-represented at OLA.

It's worth pointing out that resistance to change -- Anglicanism was never "orthodox" -- was a major factor in the "continuing Anglican" movement, to which Anglicanorum coetibus was meant to appeal.

Homily From New Priest At Stockport

A parishioner at Our Lady and the Apostles e-mailed me with the suggestion that I view the homily in the parish's recorded mass for November 26. You can find it by going to the Live page at the parish website. Then click on Recordings below on the page. Then click on Sunday Mass 10:00 26-11-2017. The homily begins at about 23:00. This appears to be an international mass, in which some of the readings are in other languages, so this may be confusing, but the mass is mostly in English.

I haven't been able to discover the name of the new priest, as the web site isn't yet updated to reflect it. The visitor who e-mailed me recommends it as explaining "the difficulties encountered within the last few months", and it's worth noting that the new priest compares them to the burning of the predecessor parish building during anti-Catholic riots and going through two world wars. I will keep the parish in my prayers.

The Traditionalist Appeal

One of the potential points of attraction for Anglicanorum coetibus has been the idea that some cradle Catholics would be drawn to the pre-Conciliar style of worship imported to the Church from Anglo-Catholicism, although the Roman style in Anglicanism dates only from the mid-19th century and must be considered an affectation. In fact, far from being "treasures" of the "patrimony", many of these traditions violate the XXXIX Articles, and the use of Roman vestments was made illegal when introduced. A visitor noted some weeks ago:

I think honestly, most of the Catholics drawn to the old school type rituals propagated by the Ordinariate, both those celebrating the Mass and those assisting at Mass, are big fans of the traditions of kneeling at an altar rail and receiving communion on the tongue.

So there might be hope, in light of the disappointing reaction of Anglicans themselves to the project, that traditionalist Catholics might make up the difference. But the same visitor in a later e-mail sees reason for caution:

I was thinking about your blog and wondering why Pope John Paul II (who essentially created the Pastoral Provision in 1983) was so reticent to move to the Ordinariate stage, why Pope Benedict XVI pulled the trigger, and subsequently, why Pope Francis hasn’t pulled the plug. It seems to me a case study in skepticism, optimism and opportunism. Taking the first two, I liken Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict to Sts. Peter and Paul. Both were very holy men with very different temperaments and very different methods of how to achieve personal holiness. Both are necessary to understand the fullness of our faith, one through outward, physical expression, one through inward, spiritual contemplation.

When it comes to the Ordinariate, I think JPII saw the worldly problems of expecting whole Protestant communities jumping ship. (America was founded by protestants and that pretty much embodies the American Way—nobody tells Americans what to do and Americans want to vote on everything, that is why is is soooo hard to be Catholic in America. Protestant communities around the world have a very similar outlook, they also want to have their cake and eat it too!) I suspect JPII thought independent-minded groups giving up their power and independence just wasn’t realistic.

I think Pope Benedict saw the potential for enormous spiritual growth of groups of Christian brethren and did not want to be a barrier on their way, even at the risk of looking personally foolish.

So then we get to Pope Francis. What’s his deal? Only time will tell, but I suspect he is simply taking advantage of the opportunity to have it both ways. If large groups of protestants begin to convert, he is a hero. Or, Pope Francis’ background with Liberation Theology ( I know he has officially condemned it, but he still has a nasty penchant to praise socialism and denounce capitalism) gives him a different take on things official. Sometimes, communists set up freedom type traps to see who jumped into them. That way, the officials could see who was disloyal by having them essentially out themselves. Given Pope Francis’ obvious dislike for the faithful who exhibit Pharisee-like qualities, leaving the Ordinariates as a place for more troublesome traditionalists to jump into may not be a bad thing in his eyes.

Maybe it’s both ways. Who knows? Maybe my tinfoil hat needs adjustment.

I know a few visitors here have a suspicion that some of the traditionalist Catholics -- and they are certainly few -- who come to OCSP groups-in-formation are people who've made themselves unwelcome in diocesan parishes. A bottom-line issue is that, as we seem to see with the California groups, they so far aren't supporting them sufficiently in pledges to let them move to permanent quarters. Liking something on social media is one thing, writing a check is another. This is a theme to which Fr Z constantly returns; if you want something, go to the bishop with concrete proposals and money.

This may be another take on having things both ways.

So Where Is Anglicanorum Coetibus Headed? -- II

I ended yesterday saying that the Irvine Newman group, like many of the other OCSP groups-in-formation, is a Potemkin village. Let's just start by asking why, if it has the 200 families/600 members that a stalwart recently claimed, the group isn't working purposefully to move out of its converted garage with a capacity of 65. The OCSP Guide to Parish Development specifies that a full parish must have a location that is "Secured (ownership or long-term agreement)". My regular correspondent has often suggested that the chapel area in the Busch facility, in addition to being inconveniently arranged for parish use, is subject to the corporate whim on how the space will be used. Mr Busch himself, age 62, is mortal, and whenever he departs the scene -- or possibly before that time -- corporate priorities can change, and the space can be given to other use, irrespective of its small size for a group claiming Irvine's numbers.

In fact, so far, instead of any announcement of a building campaign, we have a constant trickle of small projects, some of which were outlined last year at Mr Murphy's blog:

Newman Academy is a co-ed Catholic parochial day school planned to serve Orange County. We will start with a K-3 and 60 students and add grades as we grow. The academics are based on the seven liberal arts and the spirituality is firmly within the Catholic faith. Faculty and staff will annually promise fidelity to the Magisterium, daily Morning Prayer and Mass according the Ordinariate’s liturgy will be offered, the academic standards will be high, and character formation will be higher. And yet Newman will not form isolated students but well-prepared and well-rounded students who will make a change in society due to the formation they themselves have received.

Not. This project has apparently been canceled for lack of interest.

Kings Cross is a Catholic, monthly Bible study central to the campuses of Orange County. We exist to introduce college students to Jesus Christ and His Church and call them to walk with Him for a lifetime. KX meets every third Monday from September through May in the Queen of Life Chapel in Irvine.

This is apparently not happening as of this year.

Theology on Tap Orange County meets at Valiant Brewing in Orange and is an outreach of Blessed John Henry Newman parish in Irvine.

I don't know whether the Tappa Keg house is still meeting there, but it's apparently no longer promoted as an outreach of BJHN. How much of an outreach was just to the beer mug is an issue in any case.

Again, what we see is grandstanding over short-lived projects, as opposed to any sort of substantial effort to build a parish in a stable, more appropriate location. But I don't mean this as a specific criticism of the BJHN group -- it's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The problem is that there's a small number, maybe half a dozen parishes, that can sustain a priest and a family. Whatever the actual financial picture at BJHN -- of 200 families, how many pledge? -- Fr Bartus has a day job teaching school. That's not going to change in Irvine. Nor is it going to change at any of the other groups-in-formation, and we know that if only because when their current priests move or retire, the groups simply shut down or, with extraordinary effort, go dormant for a period of years. This says in turn that these groups exist as entry-level career opportunities for their priests, and not to minister to the faithful in any stable way.

The priests at the groups-in-formation are in a holding pattern, waiting for openings at the half dozen or so parishes that are worth serving. Thus you have grandstanding efforts like those most prominently at BJHN, but the ephemeral nature of these efforts should be self-explanatory -- and that we see no effort at more stable future planning should also indicate Fr Bartus's own estimate of the group's actual resources and potential.

Bp Lopes is an intelligent man. I assume he recognizes this. Beyond that, I would guess that Mr Busch recognizes this as well. As my regular correspondent points out, although Bp Lopes spoke at the Napa Institute in 2016, he apparently wasn't invited back this year.

So Where Is Anglicanorum Coetibus Headed? -- I

I've had some thoughtful e-mails from two correspondents over the past few days that are leading me to ponder how the Anglican ecumenism project is likely to develop. It's worth pointing out that 2017, in addition to being the 500th anniversary of the 95 Theses (which were never nailed to the church door), is also the 40th anniversary of the Affirmation of St Louis (which is now essentially forgotten). But this year also marks 40 years of St Mary of the Angels attempting, and so far failing, to become a Roman Catholic parish. The initial failure in the 1980s is generally acknowledged to have been an impetus for the 1993 meeting of TEC Bp Pope and Fr Steenson with Cardinal Ratzinger that led to Anglicanorum coetibus, which, whatever problem it was trying to solve, did not solve the problem of how St Mary of the Angels could come in.

So St Mary's Hollywood is an important player, if only in a negative sense. But let's start out by looking at an OCSP community that in many ways parallels St Mary of the Angels, the Blessed John Henry Newman group currently meeting in a converted garage in Irvine, CA. The group was started in 2011 by Andrew Bartus as a secondary project when he was still curate of St Mary of the Angels. (He was terminated from that position in April 2012 following discovery of plans by the dissidents and the ACA to seize the parish and place him as rector.) His Newman group first met at the Blessed Sacrament TEC parish in Placentia, CA, and subsequently moved to two different Catholic parishes before finding a longer-term home in the Busch Group's unused garage in its Irvine business complex.

The Busch Group is headed by Timothy Busch, a major Catholic philanthropist who has funded the Diocese of Orange's acquisition of the Christ Cathedral property, the Napa Institute, the Catholic University business school, and Catholic schools in the Orange County area. It would appear that support of the Newman group is not high on this list, for whatever reason. This brings us to the question my regular correspondent asks, why, with so many potential advantages, the Newman group hasn't advanced to the status of a full OCSP parish.

My regular correspondent seems to have asked this question most recently after reading a November 4 comment by Newman stalwart Greg K Herr on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog:

With an enthusiastic, cobbled together group of Anglicans and Catholics, we somehow formed, sang Evensong, took catechesis (Evangelium), and, on July 3, 2012 were received as a Catholic community with 17 people. Today, we are about 200 families.

Mr Herr elsewhere identifies himself as a member of "the Board of Directors for Orange County’s newest Catholic parish, an Anglican Ordinariate church, which he helped to co-found five years ago." However, the Newman group is not a parish and does not, at least canonically, have a board of directors. So it's worth looking more carefully at anything Mr Herr tells us. To start with, a rule of thumb correspondents have given me from time to time is that a "family" in terms of parish size translates to three people, so if we follow Mr Herr's version, there would be 600 people registered with the Newman group and meeting in the former garage. (I will appreciate any firmer clarification on what a Catholic "family" translates to in individuals.)

The OCSP, unlike many dioceses, does not publish official membership or registration statistics. But I asked my regular correspondent if any comparable numbers could be found to measure where the Newman group stands with reference to established OCSP parishes. The reply came piecemeal:

About a year ago Fr Bergman reported the membership of STM, Scranton as "215 souls"

and

OLW, Houston publishes previous week's attendance in the Sunday bulletin, as here. Sunday mass November 5: 745

and

Two years ago Bp Lopes came to Incarnation, Orlando to administer Confirmation and First Communion They expected "a large group of 120+ people" to attend the pot-luck following, so this gives you a sense, at least.

and

St Luke, Washington became a parish with an ASA of about 125 while sharing a building with a diocesan parish.

Another visitor gave this estimate for the size of Our Lady of the Atonement, although according to Fr Lewis, the initial OCSP membership drive resulted in only 300 families:

The nave of the OLA church building has a capacity of not much more than 500, though there could be another 100 in the cry rooms and choir loft. The 9 and 11 am Mass would seem to have the best attendance, though Latin Mass might be close. If a pew is full, it's usually due to 2 or 3 children with parents. A number of pews have only 2 or 3, so my guess is about 2/3 full or 350 or so at Mass. The 4 Sunday Masses therefore likely have 1,200 or so attending on a somewhat normal Sunday, which is likely between 350 to 400 families.

So if Mr Herr's figure of 200 families is correct, this would certainly place the group among the half-dozen or so largest OCSP parishes, not just communities. But my regular correspondent asks,

So why are they worshipping in a chapel which holds 65?

Although there's a Saturday vigil mass and two Sunday masses there, it's hard to say how well they're attended. And according to my regular correspondent,

All four [California] groups were invited to the Sunday mass celebrated by Bp Lopes last month, followed by a pot-luck lunch, and they seemed to fit into the Queen of Life chapel.

I think a preliminary conclusion, which I'll investigate further tomorrow, would be that the BJHN Irvine group is a Potemkin village little different from the other groups-in-formation. I suspect too that Mr Busch, if he were assessing the situation comparably to the master in this past Sunday's gospel, would have awarded talents to the group comparable to its abilities, and the talent he's given them in comparison to other projects may reflect this.

But why should Potemkin villages be so characteristic of the OCSP?

Trial Setting Conference Continued To January 4

The trial for the damage suit brought by the vestry against the ACA, the ACA Diocese of the West, and some individuals was postponed last month due to the wait for the appeals court's decision on the Bush group's appeal of Judge Strobel's 2015 decision. The session before Judge Murphy today was changed from the trial itself to a new trial setting conference.

However, with the appellate decision still pending, Judge Murphy continued the conference again, now to January 4, 2018. Of note, Mrs Bush, "Bishop" Rhys Williams, and Mr and Mrs Creel from All Saints Fountain Valley were in court this morning. Williams represented the DOW and noted for the judge that they were "interviewing" attorneys but had not yet retained one. Nobody represented the Kangs and Frederick Rivers, the individual defendants.

Some Thoughts On 1993 And 2006

The 1993 meeting between TEC Bishop Pope and Ratzinger, and the 2006 meeting between TEC Bishop Iker and Law, revisited yesterday, are prompting me to reflect on the essntial miscalculations behind Anglicanorum coetibus. In the accounts we have of the 2006 meeting, it is much clearer that some influential people in the TEC Diocese of Fort Worth had it in mind to take the entire diocese over to Rome -- but there would be major unmet criteria involved.

As of 2006, there was no structure under which the diocese could be admitted or governed as a Catholic body, nor a formal pathway for petition. Cardinal Law told the Fort Worth group to "make a proposal", but he allowed things to remain there for two years. Meanwhile, the draft of Anglicanorum coetibus from 1993-4 remained in Benedict's desk, and there's no evidence that Law, who must certainly have known about it, mentioned it to the Fort Worth group.

On the TEC side, entering the Catholic Church would have required a vote of the diocesan convention -- this is what in fact did happen with the decision to go into the ACNA. Beyond that, the diocesan standing committee would have to have been on board with the idea of bringing it up. The entry on "standing committee" in the TEC Episcopal Dictionary of the Church concludes ominously,

It also receives the bishop's resignation.

Bishops can also be suspended or deposed under TEC disciplinary procedures. It's hard to think that the overtures from the TEC side in 1993 and 2006 were anything other than blowin' smoke, inchoate at the very best -- had the presiding bishop or the standing committee heard of their import, there seems little question that either Pope or Iker would have been removed forthwith. It's worth comparing the extreme care with which Jeffrey Steenson engineered a simple resignation in 2007 to the recklessness of the 1993 and 2006 meetings.

Iker in particular took six priests with him to Rome in 2006, any of whom could have unintentionally blurted the substance of the meeting to the wrong parties. He then allowed these priests to spend two years in a freelance effort concocting a half-baked "proposal", which Law also seems to have allowed them to do without providing any background on the draft of Anglicanorum coetibus that might have given them some guidance.

By 2008, reality seems to have caught up with Iker to the extent that he saw that even the rumor of a proposal to the diocesan convention that they would petition to become Catholic would result in his removal, and he backed off the actions of the priests he'd allowed for two years to live in never-never land. But this naturally also speaks to the quality of those priests.

The more I think about this, the more I shake my head at the amateurishness on both sides in developing what became Anglicanorum coetibus. Further to this, my regular correspondent notes of Wayne Hankey, one of the figures in the 1993 meeting,

Anything involving Wayne Hankey must be highly suspect. He is a brilliant and charismatic man but also unscrupulous and manipulative. As I perhaps previously mentioned, he lost his previous academic post and his ACC license over a relationship with a male student. One could argue homophobic over-reaction but that would not take into account his provocative recklessness which I think came from a bad place. A long time ago now but I suspect he has never lost the conviction that the rules do not apply to him by virtue of his superior gifts. Clarence Pope and others in the original negotiations who looked to him as an ally are undermined in my estimation by their confidence in him.

Bp Lopes seriously understated the situation in his September interview when he said,

Initially, there was perhaps a presumption – warranted or not – that there would be a continuous stream of whole parishes entering into the Ordinariate. This is actually very difficult for a number of reasons. There are complicated questions of property and ownership, and many people are very attached to their parish churches. There are other issues of pastoral life when only a percentage (even when it’s a large percentage) of a parish decides to seek full communion with the Catholic Church.

These issues might have been resolved more favorably had the whole enterprise been less half-baked and not so absurdly understaffed, at least not with capable people. It seems to me that Bp Lopes is actually speaking from an understanding of why at least one whole TEC diocese, not just some individual wealthy parishes, couldn't make it in. Instead, what we clearly have now is a dozen ex-Episcopalians here, a dozen there, coming in for their little services in basement chapels. I think the CDF must somewhere recognize this is not worth anyone's time.

More Thoughts On Coetus

I more or less sat up in the middle of the night with a new idea of what was in Cardinal Ratzinger's mind when he supervised the drafting of Anglicanorum coetibus in the decade or so before he became pope. Let's go back to the inception of the idea, at a 1993 meeting he had with TEC Bishop of Fort Worth Clarence Pope and Jeffrey Steenson, then a priest of that diocese. I've discussed this meeting at various times, especially here. A later post here gives more details on what may or may not have been discussed:

Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth Clarence Pope was the lead participant from the Anglican side at the October 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger. While there are formal minutes of this meeting in existence, apparently matters were discussed that did not make it into the minutes, and exactly what other items may have been discussed or promised by Ratzinger, and what Bishop Pope's response may have been, is not fully clear.

What we know is that a year after the meeting and on his retirement as an Episcopal bishop in 1994, Pope converted to Catholicism with the expectation of then being ordained as an Anglican Use Catholic priest. A liberal Episcopal blog gives one interpretation of these and subsequent events:

He had denied he was leaving The Episcopal Church right up until the day he left. When he made the announcement, he said he planned to seek ordination as a Roman priest. He told us he had known for the previous two years that he would go to Rome. This led some here to question whether or not he’d earned his quite substantial salary as bishop by fraud for those two years.

There is no question that the substance of the October 1993 meeting was kept highly confidential, and one part of the written record indicates that Pope requested communications from the Vatican be sent to his home, not his office. Wayne Hankey, a participant in that meeting who drafted the semi-official minutes, in his 1997 letter to the editor of The Tablet strongly implied that Cardinal Ratzinger had made some type of promise to Pope, which he was subsequently unable to keep.

Whatever the basis, Pope became extremely bitter and returned to The Episcopal Church in 1995.

With several years' reflection on this account, I'm more and more convinced that Big Things were mooted there that were not in the minutes but remained on various agendas even when St John Paul was hesitant to endorse them. We know that Pope was bitter about the eventual outcome. We also know he was anxious to keep the whole matter highly confidential. Nobody in that meeting was wearing a feckless rainbow stole and singing kumbaya, or it would have been public.

Fast forward to 2006 and the peculiar game of footsie Cardinal Law played with Clarence Pope's successor as TEC Bishop of Fort Worth, Jack Iker. I cover it here.

• April 2006: Six priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, along with Bishop Iker, meet in Rome with Cardinal Law to discuss causes of Catholic-leaning Episcopal dissatisfaction. Law requests that the group make some type of proposal. The sketchy account of this meeting does not mention any specific discussion of the 1993 proposal, except that Law is quoted as saying,"What was not possible twenty years ago may be possible today."
• * * *
• June 16, 2008: Four priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth meet with Roman Catholic Bishop of Fort Worth Kevin Vann, with the knowledge and approval of Bishop Iker, to present a proposal for Catholic unity, which they say is the result of two years of discernment, presumably the outcome of Cardinal Law's 2006 request.

  The document states that the overwhelming majority of Episcopal clergy in the Fort Worth diocese favor pursuing an “active plan” to bring the diocese into full communion with the Catholic Church.

• August 12, 2008: Bishop Iker backs off the meeting, saying "in their written and verbal reports, [the four] have spoken only on their own behalf and out of their own concerns and perspective. They have not claimed to act or speak, nor have they been authorized to do so, either on behalf of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth or on my own behalf as their Bishop." He adds that the meeting with Vann will not affect the business of the upcoming diocesan convention.

These events took place in the context of the upcoming 2009 formation of the ACNA, in which several TEC bishops, including Iker, took significant parts of their dioceses into the ACNA. It's hard for me to avoid thinking now, as the question of what constitutes a coetus comes up, that Ratzinger, with Law at his ear, had been encouraged to think that one or more TEC dioceses would petition to become Catholic as a body. It seems credible that both Bp Pope and Bp Iker may have had something like this in mind, although Iker seems to have had second thoughts fairly quickly.

i would say that Iker recognized clearly what Law and Ratzinger didn't, that Anglicanism had a substantial low church faction that would never accept even a whole diocese going to Rome. I'm currently leaning toward a view that Ratzinger, later as Benedict, was governed by wishful thinking in this area. But not only were the numbers of US Anglicans who went into the OCSP a disappointment, still greater was the fact that no diocese had anything remotely like that intention. Certainly the timing of Anglicanorum coetibus, promulgated in 2009, suggests it was hoped that the option would be attractive to full dioceses dissatisfied with TEC.

I would guess that Bp Lopes must recognize that his assignment is to do whatever he can to retrieve what must be perceived in the Vatican as a disaster. He's a junior guy, and if he screws up, it won't be a big blow to the CDF.

UPDATE: After posting this, it also occurred to me that St John Paul's unenthusiastic response to Ratzinger, when he first proposed the idea in 1993, may have been connected to the idea that this would mean bringing in one or more full TEC dioceses, or substantial parts of them. I can't imagine that John Paul would have thought an idea that meant bringing in a dozen ex-Episcopalians at a time into basement chapels would be worth anyone's time. The other could well have been construed as poaching big time, though -- some basement chapel evening prayers, not so much.

Depends On What A Coetus Is

A visitor sent an e-mail that raises several worthwhile points. I'll start in the middle:

As for the CDF fundamentally misunderstanding Anglicans, I think too many people seem to misunderstand Anglicanorum Coetibus. The very first sentence of AC states,

In recent times the Holy Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately. [emphasis the sender's]

This tells me that the target for AC is not an individual here or there, who happens to be Anglican, looking to become Catholic (which would surely be better served by the RCIA or personal priest process) but rather multiple people converting simultaneously. The “individually” and “corporately” says to me that these groups of Anglicans can convert as individual groups (meaning with or without their clergy) or as an entire corporate parish group (meaning with their presbyter and/or clergy and presumably their property).

This brings up something that had been on my mind, the meaning of the Latin coetus. This definition gives these possible meanings:

assembly coition coitus company congregation connection connexion crowd gathering group join meeting

In an ecclesiastical context, I would tend to pick "assembly", "congregation", "gathering", or "meeting", where "meeting" might also be seen as a type of Protestant parish. This would also carry the implication that these specifically Protestant groups are organized in some established, pre-existing way that might lead to the use of these words in a certain defined sense. But since we're talking about Anglicans in particular, I would be expecting a meaning rather closely echoing canonical parishes or missions.

This has been by far the exception in the history of the OCSP, something Bp Lopes dodges in his September interview:

We continue to experience good growth, for which we give thanks to God. Initially, there was perhaps a presumption – warranted or not – that there would be a continuous stream of whole parishes entering into the Ordinariate. This is actually very difficult for a number of reasons. There are complicated questions of property and ownership, and many people are very attached to their parish churches. There are other issues of pastoral life when only a percentage (even when it’s a large percentage) of a parish decides to seek full communion with the Catholic Church. Parish groups continue to enter – we have had 2 since I became bishop – but this is less common. More common is for our existing parishes to found a mission community starting with a group of Ordinariate parishioners that have to drive a long distance for Sunday Mass, a mission which begins to grow and develop on its own. We have started four of those in the last two years. Additionally, we sometimes receive a request from current or former Anglicans to begin a community in a certain area. When we are able to send a priest or deacon to assess the situation and begin ministering to their needs, a group grows up very quickly. Many former Anglicans who have become Catholic over the years welcome the opportunity to reconnect with the heritage, liturgy, culture, and “style” of parish life they knew before becoming Catholic.

So I think my visitor is correct in saying that what's actually happening in the OCSP has moved quite far afield from what had been the original intent of Anglicanorum coetibus, especially in light of Bp Lopes's own remarks. On the other hand, when I first started working as an editor, my boss told me a story of a student who got a bad grade on a paper because the professor noted he'd misused a word. The student looked it up and found that, in fact, his use of the word was covered by definition 2 in the dictionary. He took the dictionary to the prof, showing him definition 2. The prof's response was to take out his pen and cross out definition 2. By then, I'd dealt with plenty of profs like that.

I assume bishops and popes have the same discretion, so we'll probably have to look to developments as they take place as a better refutation of how things have been done. The visitor, probably aware of this, continues,

The next two sentences of AC read,

The Apostolic See has responded favourably to such petitions. Indeed, the successor of Peter, mandated by the Lord Jesus to guarantee the unity of the episcopate and to preside over and safeguard the universal communion of all the Churches, could not fail to make available the means necessary to bring this holy desire to realization.

The Apostolic See (meaning the Pope) is responding to group requests by Anglicans to join the Catholic Church, not the Pope looking for ways to poach protestants, thus AC was created and promulgated to accommodate this. AC continues on, blah, blah, blah, then when you get down to the fifth paragraph of AC it says,

In the light of these ecclesiological principles, this Apostolic Constitution provides the general normative structure for regulating the institution and life of Personal Ordinariates for those Anglican faithful who desire to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church in a corporate manner. [emphasis the sender's]

I see nothing in AC that says the purpose is to accommodate individuals, or to organically grow a group of individuals who may or may not have been Anglican in order to populate an Ordinariate. Since each of the Ordinariates are essentially self-funded, I have to think it matters more to the Apostolic See and the CDF that the option for groups of Anglicans is available rather than extreme growth in numbers of former Anglicans; however, if over the next x number of years( x number to be supplied by the CDF), no actual groups of Anglicans join, I don’t imagine the Ordinariates will survive much beyond the lifetimes of the present clergy. Of course, the CDF might just leave the structure in place to accommodate future groups from other disciplines. Who knows? Who is the Ordinariate/AC hurting? Nobody really. I believe that as Anglican converts through AC grow into their new communion with Rome, the Anglican patrimony will become more like window dressing as opposed to the actual “meat and potatoes” of their faith. My opinion only.

This is completely consistent with my regular correspondent's view, that the OCSP could well die out with its current clergy or simply result in an alternate canonical structure for what would be ordinary Catholics. But if ether is the case, we will have multiplied entities for no good reason -- except to further the careers of a small interest group of former Protestant clergy, of course.

My visitor started the e-mail with these comments:

Maybe it’s just me but it seems there is some confusion about the responsibility of parties to each other here. The laity are not responsible for holding their bishops accountable, that is the job of their brother bishops and the Pope who are all ultimately accountable to the Holy Spirit. The laity are responsible for following the magisterium, not individual bishops because bishops can be, and frequently are, wrong. If your local bishop is out of step with the magisterium, you still obey the magisterium. If the issue is NOT a magisterium issue, of course you obey your bishop.

Paragraph 88 of the Catechism defines the Magisterium as

The Church's Magisterium exercises the authority it holds from Christ to the fullest extent when it defines dogmas, that is, when it proposes, in a form obliging the Christian people to an irrevocable adherence of faith, truths contained in divine Revelation or also when it proposes, in a definitive way, truths having a necessary connection with these.

Well, OK, all Catholics, not just laity, have this responsibility. But as used in my visitor's e-mail, and also from another visitor I quoted yesterday, it seems to me that it's tautological in this context -- all Catholics are obligated to be Catholics. But what should Catholic laity do in certain specific situations in which priests or bishops appear to be in error -- which my visitor acknowledges can happen? "Follow the magisterium" in that case is unhelpful, and brother bishops or the Holy Father may not be inclined to step in.

I would point to numerous recent cases, specifically one in which the pastor of a New York parish embezzled parish funds to pay a gay prostitute boyfriend. Parish laity attempted to resolve the problem through ordinary channels, but the effort was blocked by corruption in the archdiocese. The issue eventually reached the press and law enforcement before it could be resolved, with the priest sent to Rome to undergo laicization. I would say that, even if laity do not have a canonically defined responsibility to hold bishops accountable, there are certainly situations in which a natural-law obligation must clearly apply. This would be a basis, whether or not there is any other, on which laymen like Michael Voris operate.

My basic purpose in this blog has been to understand what happened in a situation I've been living through, the epic bungling of the St Mary of the Angels attempts to enter the Catholic Church as a parish. Bishops are entitled to pay attention to what I say here, or not, at their discretion. But the more I discover, the more what I find interests me.