Fr Kenyon's earlier history prior to his move to Calgary comes up here and there in web searches, mainly by my regular correspondent. He turns up as one of several hundred Church of England clergy signatory to this 2008 letter objecting to the consecration of women bishops published in the Guardian. At the time, he listed his title as “Assistant Curate, S.Cuthbert, Darwen with S.Stephen, Tockholes”, which, if they were not actual places, would seem more to belong to the fictive worlds of Anthony Trollope or Kenneth Grahame. As far as my regular correspondent can determine, this was his sole pastoral appointment in the Church of England. It appears that later in 2008, he moved to Calgary, although my correspondent points out that women have been ordained as bishops in the ACC since 1994.
This post at the Anglican Wanderings blog from 2007 shows him substituting as a deacon, visiting from St Cuthbert's, at a typical fuss-and-feathers Anglo-Catholic mass. The most recent post at that blog is 5 July 2009. The blog's title is Anglican Wanderings, with the subtitle, "Passionately Anglican. Unapologetically Catholic." Since these are Anglican priests saying this about themselves, it's self-contradictory to the point of meaninglessness, at least if one takes these words in any sort of conventional sense -- think just of Apostolicae curae.
If you don't take it literally, then it has contextual meaning, or perhaps several contextual meanings. One might be, "We want to be Catholic priests, but we don't like the Church's teachings on sexuality, so we're glossing that over without apology." That's a variation on what the TEC priest told me in confirmation class, "We want the prestige of calling ourselves Catholic priests (unapologetically in this case), but we don't want to pay the dues real Catholic priests have to pay." This goes as well to Frederick Kinsman's observation that the brilliance of the Anglican compromise was that it allowed some Anglicans to fancy themselves Catholic if that's what they chose to do.
This early stage of Fr Kenyon's career arc corresponds closely to the general Anglo-Catholic hype in the runup to Anglicanorum coetibus and the erection of the ordinariates. It was most prevalent in blogs -- the list of Anglo-Catholic blogs on the Anglican Wanderings blogroll is long indeed, but certainly some of the publicity bled over into the Catholic and even the general press. Then-Bp Steenson left TEC and moved to Rome in 2007, the same year the TAC issued the Portsmouth Petition. Considering the clubby nature of the Anglo-Catholic world, impending events must have been known to groups like the one of which Fr Kenyon was a member, and enthusiasm was building.
The puzzling thing is how quickly the Anglo-Catholic blogs began to die out, fairly soon after this first wave. Anglican Wanderings ceased to update even before Anglicanorum coetibus was issued. Mr Chadwick notes that two important Anglo-Catholic blogs, the eponymous one and that of Mr Smuts, ceased to be interesting in 2012, the same year the US-Canadian ordinariate was erected -- although significantly, the idea of a separate Canadian ordinariate had already died in the womb. The Catholic and mainstream press, behind the curve as usual, continued to hype the ordinariates well past that date. In November 2014, the National Catholic Register published this:
A former Anglican priest said, ‘Every now and then, a momentous event takes place. Few if any since the Reformation have more significance than Anglicanorum Coetibus.’The question is why the hype began to taper off even before the OCSP got going. The answer is probably close to the expressed expectations from some in the TAC at the time of the Portsmouth Letter, that Rome would simply declare itself "in communion" with the TAC, which implied that Rome would recognize the episcopal actions of the TAC, the TAC would recognize Rome's, and everything would be fine -- Fr Joe Schmo of St Charles King and Martyr Podunk would become a Catholic priest, wife and all, his assorted Freemason and thrice-civilly-remarried parishioners would become Catholics in good standing, and they'd recognize the same of Our Lady's down the street.
The issuance of the complementary norms probably killed this idea for good, if the text of Anglicanorum coetibus itself didn't. The problem, it seems to me, is the fantasy that Kinsman recognized was built into the Anglo-Catholic project. Some number of priests in effect brought the TAC assumptions into the Church with them, even if they didn't canonically come from that denomination. By ordaining them priests, the Church was effectively recognizing all of their petty Anglicanisms, not insisting that they reject those and become fully Catholic.
I think this was a game Fr Phillips had been exploiting all along, running an operation that his bishop in terminal exasperation called not just unique but separate. It's significant that as sort of a fin de siècle excrudescence of Anglo-Catholic hype, Mr Murphy covered in his blog (now also discontinued) the effort of Mr Alex Trevino, a wannabe filmmaker, to produce a documentary on the "sufferings" (their word) of Frs Phillips, Kenyon, and Bartus as they fought the evil Anglican establishment to become Catholic priests. (My regular correspondent has given this project the working title My Struggle.)
All mention of this project, in the post at Mr Murphy's blog and the crowdfunding site, has long since been deleted, and as of now, only Fr Bartus remains an active priest in the triumvirate. The hype was based on what we're seeing increasingly as comical assumptions. But consider as well that, needing for whatever reason to find a replacement for Fr Kenyon, a major figure in the OCSP until some kind of glitch came up, Bp Lopes has been forced on one hand to rely on the highly unusual step of ordaining a permanent deacon to the priesthood, and on the other to accept as a candidate for ordination a gentleman who probably would not be accepted as a diocesan parish volunteer, much less admitted to a Catholic seminary.
The wheels are coming off this thing.
