One summer during my college career, I worked at Wickes’ Lumber in Sarasota, Florida. Our motley crew made trusses — the triangular fabrications of two-by-fours that hold up the roofs on single-family dwellings. We nailed on the galvanized steel squares that held the joints together on the trusses, and then we fed the trusses into the great rollers that mashed them down onto the soft American pine. Oh, how those rollers made a frightening machine! Just to think of getting one's arm caught in them was the subject of nightmares.On one hand, I've certainly seen people with no religious affiliation chewed up by corporate mergers and takeovers, or indeed by secular politics -- Rome is not unique here. On the other hand, the whole Anglican ecumenism project has been remarkably contentious and even dangerous for many parishes and individuals. (Note how carefully Cardinal Law's representatives guided Msgr Steenson through the process of leaving TEC. Not everyone was treated this well.)Witnessing what little we know of the abrupt treatment that the pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement has recently received at the hands of the hyphenated archbishop of San Antonio has brought this memory to my mind. It appears that the great and terrible Roman Catholic machine has reached out and fed Fr. Phillips and Our Lady into the massive rollers of the Church to crush it and make it conform to a shape palatable to the vaunted Latin leadership.
One impression I've begun to gain from following the Anglican ecumenism project for nearly five years now is how reckless Cardinal Law, Fr Barker, and the St Mary of the Angels parish were in undertaking the business of leaving TEC without any clear, assured, or enforceable path into the Catholic Church. This was not a "pioneering" effort -- it was a reckless one that could well have been foreseen and perhaps was by insightful individuals at the time.
The process has also been dominated by opportunists and careerists. The other side of the coin is that Catholic saints have suffered within the Church. I keep reminding myself that much of what we know about St Patrick comes from a document he submitted in his own defense during some ecclesiastical proceeding against him.
My own conclusion continues to be that becoming Catholic is a personal decision in any case. Trying to create an institutional path for Protestants to become Catholic risks syncretism -- if the OLA example is instructive, it is certainly an illustration of how congregationalism can find its way into a Catholic diocese.
