A letter to parishioners from Charles Wilson, a founding member of the parish, was posted on the Save Atonement! website, but now seems to have been taken down. It indicated that canonical proceedings had been begun to defend Fr Phillips, who according to the letter and to other social media is in fact in the process of being removed as the parish's pastor. However, Fr Z has pointed out in the context of all the priests he mentioned the other day, "Some of the priests have had successful recourse to Rome, but the damage to those priests is done."
I would suggest that the damage to the parish is already done as well. There are two issues here: one is that the whole Anglican ecumenism project was begun under flawed assumptions. The Pastoral Provision began in the context of the 1977 Congress of St Louis. Let's keep in mind that Cardinal Law and his representatives fostered and encouraged the idea at that time that St Mary of the Angels should leave The Episcopal Church, with inchoate and unenforceable assurances that it could in some way become Catholic. We know how that one turned out.
In 1993, the same Cardinal Law put through a new effort at a do-over with what we might characterize as a new set of Episcopalian patsies. Bishop Clarence Pope and Fr Jeffrey Steenson met with then-Cardinal Ratzinger and drafted the proposal for Anglicanorum coetibus. The rationale this time was that a quarter million disaffected Episcopalians were champing at the bit to come over, complete with their priests and parishes. We know how that one turned out: by land large, Bishop Iker of Fort Worth was happy to see the clique of bunglers behind the move leave. (Bishop Pope eventually became unstable in the wake of his failed attempt to become a Catholic bishop and at various times clearly felt betrayed in the proceedings.)
And this leads to the second issue: even after replacing the lead bungler and all the assistant bunglers of the original Fort Worth group, the San Antonio move has clearly been bungled by the new team as well, though it seems to me as though Fr Phillips may have brought these problems on himself, possibly by giving his parishioners the impression that they'd get a better deal on his replacement from Bp Lopes. I've got to think that the parish and Bp Lopes made canonical moves before they made sure Abp Garcia-Siller was aware of their intentions and on board with them, which is an unforgivable sin just about anywhere.
The Wilson letter posted and now apparently withdrawn from the Save Atonement! site pretty clearly ties Houston and Bp Lopes to this fiasco -- quite possibly that's why it's been taken down. A comment here carries a quote from that letter:
The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter was erected with Our Lady of the Atonement in mind. The Ordinariate wants us to become a parish and we want to join, just as diocesan parishes in Houston, Fort Worth, Scranton, Omaha and elsewhere have done.The full text is in another comment here. Posting stuff and then pulling it down again in a panic is another sign of the amateurishness involved here. This is an enormous black eye for Lopes. I'm beginning to think the CDF should be moving to put this whole project out of its misery.
