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.

Rainbow Stoles?

A visitor wrote me last week regarding the post in which I suggested that "ecumenism" meant rainbow stoles and so forth:

[Y]our remarks about the official Catholic position with respect to ecumenism are completely off the mark. The Catholic doctrinal underpinning of ecumenism is No. 15 of the dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium on the Church, promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. The boldfacing of critical points and removal of internal citations mine.

“15. The Church recognizes that in many ways she is linked with those who, being baptized, are honored with the name of Christian, though they do not profess the faith in its entirety or do not preserve unity of communion with the successor of Peter. For there are many who honor Sacred Scripture, taking it as a norm of belief and a pattern of life, and who show a sincere zeal. They lovingly believe in God the Father Almighty and in Christ, the Son of God and Saviour. They are consecrated by baptism, in which they are united with Christ. They also recognize and accept other sacraments within their own Churches or ecclesiastical communities. Many of them rejoice in the episcopate, celebrate the Holy Eucharist and cultivate devotion toward the Virgin Mother of God. They also share with us in prayer and other spiritual benefits. Likewise we can say that in some real way they are joined with us in the Holy Spirit, for to them too He gives His gifts and graces whereby He is operative among them with His sanctifying power. Some indeed He has strengthened to the extent of the shedding of their blood. In all of Christ's disciples the Spirit arouses the desire to be peacefully united, in the manner determined by Christ, as one flock under one shepherd, and He prompts them to pursue this end. Mother Church never ceases to pray, hope and work that this may come about. She exhorts her children to purification and renewal so that the sign of Christ may shine more brightly over the face of the earth.”

The entire decree Unitatis redintegratio on ecumenism promulgated by the same council on the same date unpacks this paragraph and provides direction for the way forward. You would do well to read this document in its entirety. In a nutshell, this document is the complete antithesis of “people wearing rainbow stoles and so forth singing kumbaya.” Rather, the Catholic Church holds that there must be true unity based on common in faith, manifest by universal acceptance of the whole of Christian doctrine as taught by the Catholic Church, before we can restore full communion with a separated body.

I'm commenting here only as a new Catholic who's been drawn to look more closely at the Church following a particular failure in implementing Anglicanorum coetibus, which Bp Lopes has defined at least since 2014 as "ecumenism in the front row". Clearly I've never seen Bp Lopes wearing a rainbow stole or singing kumbaya. On the other hand, I've been posting to a specialized audience here for five years now that this particular ecumenical effort has been deeply flawed -- and it seems to me that by forcing many of the much-vaunted first wave of prestigious ordinands, including the first ordinary, into retirement during this time, Bp Lopes and the CDF have acknowledged this.

Later in his e-mail, the visitor says,

I’m not sure where the statement that “the Anglican Communion occupies a special place” among the separated ecclesial communities of the West in No. 13 of Unitatis redintegratio stands today. The fact that several provinces of the Anglican Communion, including The Episcopal Church (TEC) here in the States and the Anglican Church in Canada to our north, have abandoned doctrinal orthodoxy is clearly troubling: they may well be in a state of apostasy now. On the other hand, that abandonment clearly does not extend to the provinces of the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON), including the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Nevertheless, it’s the province of the magisterium of the Catholic Church — not you or me — to sort out those issues and their implications for ecumenism.

I have a serious concern that those involved with developing Anglicanorum coetibus fundamentally misunderstood Anglicanism. Unlike the Church, Anglican bodies have traditionally been hesitant -- indeed, unable -- to enforce any sort of orthodoxy among laity or clergy. This probably dates to the original Tudor agenda, which essentially said that as long as English Christians acknowledged the supremacy of the State over the Church, by following the minimal legal requirements for this, they might privately believe what they chose. It's hard to distinguish what the ACNA believes from TEC, since they use the same BCP, and both ordain women. (Even Rome has gay bishops, after all.)

But in addition, Diarmaid MacCulloch has made the important point that Anglicanism, unlike most Protestant denominations, retained bishops and cathedral chapters and used them as instruments of State political patronage. Anthony Trollope based much of his fiction on his insights into the particularly secular political nature of Anglican parish and diocesan life. In the OCSP, we're seeing echoes of Anglican careerism even in the way groups-in-formation are established merely as vehicles to justify ordaining favored candidates, but as soon as the candidates move to a better opportunity, their original groups fold. Fr Vidal is simply the latest example. The cynicism here is hard to miss, though the CDF may be doing so.

I think the simplest version of my position is that for Anglicans and any others, the usual path for non-Catholics to enter the Church, RCIA or other preparation by priests, is far more widely available and, since it involves a more regular integration into Catholic diocesan and parish life, likely to produce more complete formation in any kind of long run. I don't see how I'm trying to say anything against the magisterium here. On the other hand, it is in fact the responsibility of laity to hold bishops accountable.

Competing Agendas

Regarding whether or not intinction or a vernacular mass in made-up archaic English is "traditional", a visitor commented,

The desire for cradle Catholics to return to some of these pre-Vatican II traditions is not all wrong-headed. I am sure at least some, if not most, of the Catholics attending Ordinariate Masses are all on board for forced intinction for the very reason they ARE cognizant of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine. Sadly, too many priests and Catholic faithful are willing to overlook the little particles of the Body of Christ that become trampled during the communion lines; out of sight, out of mind I suppose.

This actually applies to very specific conditions in fewer than half a dozen of the largest OCSP parishes I don't know if anyone has counted exactly how many use intinction, but some communities do administer the sacrament kneeling at the altar rail where possible, whatever other conditions, like basement chapels, shabby environments, or lack of music, apply. But these are less likely to attract enough traditionalist Catholics to make the smaller groups viable. Naturally, altar rails are hard to find where the communities must use diocesan facilities.

In fact, the smaller groups are proving to be highly unstable. Despite a surplus of OCSP clergy, these men are largely undeployable, since the small groups can't pay them and make a move across hundreds or thousands of miles worthwhile. So if a priest leaves a smaller group, the group folds. This has recently happened in two cases, St Anselm. Corpus Christi TX and of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Savannah GA. Fr Lou Lindsey, according to my regular correspondent,

was formerly Bishop to the Armed Forces of the Episcopal Missionary Church, whatever that is. In any event he has been on the staff of a diocesan parish in Savannah since his ordination and the Ordinariate group seems to have failed to thrive. Fr Lindsey is no longer saying mass for them. . . . A group put together as a stepping-stone to ordination, IMHO.

My correspondent estimates the number there as never more than a dozen. St Anselm's has closed as anticipated following Fr Vidal's move to St Luke's.

Apparently there were about 10 members at St Anselm's---approximately the same number as there were when Fr Vidal arrived and subsequently brought it in from the Pastoral Provision. Again, a pretext for something. This appointment came after he was on the staff of Mt Calvary, Baltimore for a few months prior to its entry into the Church. So this brings the number of closures to four: five if we include St John Fisher, Arlington VA supposedly "merged" with St Luke's, Washington. I would identify another five as very fragile, if not actually circling the drain.

So one problem for the OCSP is that it was not intended for large numbers of cradle Catholics, whether traditionalist or not -- and even if the very flexible qualifications for "membership" allowed them in, it apparently hasn't attracted more than some hundreds total, adding up those in any community.

But beyond that, the numerous groups-in-formation, often numbering a dozen or so members, seem to exist primarily as justifications for ordaining their priests, and if-and-when those priests move on, or simply lose interest, the groups close. This is something I've noted here in the case of the new Pasadena group, cobbled together from whatever Fr Bartus could dig up, primarily to justify ordaining now-Dcn Bayles, like many of the newer candidates, a marginal guy.

Of the groups now on life support, my correspondent notes,

St Benedict, Edmonton AB; Christ the King, Tyendinaga ON; and St Gregory, Mobile AL are ministered to by local diocesan clergy. Should they fully retire or be transferred it is uncertain whether they could be replaced. The congregations are very small. Good Shepherd, Oshawa ON; Our Lady of the Sign, Fredericton/St Bede, Halifax NB; San Agustin, Pinecrest FL; and St James, St Augustine FL are very small congregations in small markets led by clergymen past (clerical) retirement age. Finding a replacement when they retire will be challenging. Our Lady of Walsingham, Maple Ridge BC is also a very small congregation led by an elderly priest, although if it relocated to downtown Vancouver it might be possible to replace him when the time comes, and attract new parishioners. Maybe the Bros would like to return home.

Several other groups do not seem to be growing towards sustainability but currently have younger priests with other jobs to support them, so they are not in danger at the moment.

The conclusion I would draw is that although a few OCSP parishes may prove to be serendipitous for cradle Catholics looking for reverent celebration, many OCSP communities are too small, poor, and unstable to provide this, and the sparse geographical distribution of the best communities makes them unavailable to nearly everyone who might be looking for them as a solution.

Unfortunately, looked at from the perspective of what problem it's trying to solve, the OCSP exists to justify ordaining a small special-interest group of former Protestant clergy, not to provide a reverent worship environment for cradle Catholics looking for this. On the whole, I believe Fr Z's advice to such Catholics, to work with their dioceses and make it plain that they will support such efforts in attendance and money, is by far the best approach.

Some Gotchas

A couple of visitors have sent interesting, and partly puzzling, additional information on intinction, chapel veils, and the sign of peace. One referred me to the USCCB norms for reception of communion, which provide

49. Holy Communion may be distributed by intinction in the following manner: "Each communicant, while holding a Communion-plate under the mouth, approaches the Priest who holds a vessel with the sacred particles, with a minister standing at his side and holding the chalice. The Priest takes a host, intincts it partly in the chalice and, showing it, says: 'The Body and Blood of Christ.' The communicant replies, 'Amen,' receives the Sacrament in the mouth from the Priest, and then withdraws."

50. The communicant, including the extraordinary minister, is never allowed to self-communicate, even by means of intinction. Communion under either form, bread or wine, must always be given by an ordinary or extraordinary minister of Holy Communion.

This raised two questions for me. I asked the visitor exactly what is meant by a "communion-plate", and he replied that it must be a paten. This led me to the question of whether communicants bring their own or draw one from some sort of supply that's made available, but on searching church supply firms, I could only find patens sold in sets with chalices. So I just don't know how this works -- the norm seems to imply that the communicant turns up in front of the priest and extraordinary minister already with the paten under his mouth, and the priest and EM, pre-positioned to do this, then administer the sacrament via intinction. So on one hand, if anyone has seen this done, I'd like to hear the details. On the other, I don't see how this squares with the use of intinction sets at OLA, OLW, and possibly other OCSP parishes.

I raised this with my visitor as well, who replied,

I saw "intinction sets" like these in one or two parishes of the "Polish National Catholic Church" (one in Massachusetts, the other in Connecticut) in 1976, 77, or 78, long before I ever saw them in a "real" Catholic parish. I can't assert that "intinction sets" are a PNCC invention; on the other hand, the PNCC began to give communion in both kinds, by intinction only, by the late 1940s or early 1950s, when it was simply "not done" in the RC Church. I agree that they "don’t seem to meet the criteria in the USCCB norms, and I don't think that I have ever seen them in any Catholic parish of the Diocese of [redacted], where I live, although I have seen them in the Archdiocese of Boston, MA, where I am from. I saw them in use in the PNCC cathedral parish in Lancaster, NY, just outside of Buffalo, when I walked into it late on Sunday morning about 4 years ago when driving home from a historical conference in Toronto.

So this leaves open the question of how intinction sets entered the culture of lah-de-dah in the big Texas OCSP parishes. But further to lah-de-dah, another visitor noted,

When I went through Episcopal confirmation class in about 1968, chapel veils were absolutely required. The priest told the girls they were not to go into the nave without one. There was a ready supply of “throw-down” veils in case someone forgot hers. I know my mother always wore one in those days and not just in a “high-church” parish. This was a “communion once a month” parish. I think that changed by the mid-70s. Also the ringing of the bells during the eucharistic prayer was the signal to get down—really crouch down—in the pew. As far as intinction goes, the reason that I thought people resorted to that was out of concern for other parishioners, if you had a cold or something. That was the only Episcopal reason I ever knew of. Finally, you are probably aware that not all RC churches offer the parishioners the chalice. My most recent parish in Houston does not, nor my parish back in Plantation, FL. That saves a LOT of time.

But as I've noted before, the Catholic Church has no policy regarding head coverings for women. Wear them or not, chapel veils or not. Hats of any sort are a minority in our diocesan parish, veils even less common. But beyond that, if in some parish, women all thought it proper in some way to come to church wearing Eleanor Roosevelt type hats, I suppose this would be something they could agree on among them, but it wouldn't make anyone more or less holy. Heck, in my first TEC parish, it was thought proper not just to wear suits, but Brooks Brothers suits. However, I don't see the point of bringing the lah-de-dah side of Episcopalianism into the OCSP.

Finally, the first visitor brought up Vatican policy regarding the Sign of Peace:

82. The Rite of Peace follows, by which the Church asks for peace and unity for herself and for the whole human family, and the faithful express to each other their ecclesial communion and mutual charity before communicating in the Sacrament.

As for the sign of peace to be given, the manner is to be established by Conferences of Bishops in accordance with the culture and customs of the peoples. It is, however, appropriate that each person offer the sign of peace only to those who are nearest and in a sober manner.

There are extensive concerns regarding the placement of the Peace in the novus ordo mass, explained in an article in Crisis here.

Thankfully, the Roman Missal has allowed consecrating priests to omit the gesture of peace among the people. The Vatican’s Circular Letter reaffirmed that the gesture is indeed optional, meaning that those who choose not to participate in the gesture when invited and those who intellectually disagree with its placement in the Mass are in no way challenging Church hierarchy on liturgical instruction.

However, the article points out that those who refrain for these reasons do risk appearing churlish. More locally, I have the impression that Filipinos, of whom there are many at our parish, are less culturally inclined to shake hands than Americans, and while I'm sensitive to this, we do smile and say the peace.

I will welcome further insights into these matters! UPDATE: A visitor adds,

In the OCSP masses I’ve been to, a minister stands beside the priest who is offering communion, carrying a thing that looks like a golden ping-pong paddle, and he places it under the chin of the communicant as the dipped communion wafer is placed by the priest on the communicant’s tongue. I suppose this is to catch any drip or crumb. Those devices are then ceremonially wiped down along with the ablutions at the conclusion of communion.

I of course never saw that in any Episcopal church.

So we still have the issue that this is not any sort of Anglican tradition -- it seems to have begun, as far as my visitors suggest, in the PNCC and is fairly recent in the Catholic Church itself. But it is being adopted in some OCSP parishes, rather clearly as a way to avoid the use of EMHCs and force reception on the tongue, and in the name of what seems to be a faux "traditionalism".

Intinction

From a visitor:

Before the Body and Blood of Christ was made available under both species to everyone assisting Mass after Vatican II, intinction was used to do so for special occasions. Parishes simply did not have the extra communion chalices and accoutrements required until the provision was made to allow it and parishes began implementing the change. Now, because the Body and Blood is regularly available under both species in every Mass via multiple chalices, intinction is considered an onerous way to meet the same end and less desirable for the reason you mentioned. I’m sure you can get the exact rubrics for intinction from the USCCB or the General Instructions for the Roman Missal (GIRM) but I don’t think that is really the issue with these parishes.

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. The USCCB has made it clear that communion cannot be denied to a communicant if they wish to receive the host reverently in their hand or on their tongue nor can it be denied to a communicant if they wish to receive standing or kneeling even if no one else in the parish receives that way.

Priests like Fr. Phillips can use intinction to ENSURE that all communicants must kneel and must receive on their tongue because any other way would be messy and sacrilegious. It is sort of a passive-aggressive way to prevent altogether the need for extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist and for the receiving under both species separately. In short, it circumvents the intentions of the USCCB through a technicality. I would say this is another example of why Archbishop Garcia-Siller thought Atonement seemed to be “separate and not just unique”, from the rest of the archdiocese.

This also raises the question of how Anglican both intinction and chapel veils actually are. In my 30 years as an Episcopalian, I attended mass at four Los Angeles parishes and probably a dozen others while traveling, these representing high, low, and broad-church. The only instruction I had in my confirmation class in 1981 was to receive kneeling and on the hand (or standing if unable to kneel). Intinction was something I very rarely saw, and only after the AIDS epidemic became a major issue -- but most understood this was false delicacy, since the alcohol in the wine kills any germs. TEC Bp Bruno only normalized it here in the early 2000s. I don't believe it was ever done at St Mary of the Angels.

By the same token, I never saw chapel veils as an Episcopalian. I very rarely see them as a diocesan Catholic, although our parish is fairly traditional, retaining an altar rail and statues, though communicants always receive standing. Latin is used on special occasions. I would say that women who wear chapel veils in diocesan parishes tend to come from backgrounds where they are traditional, especially Latino. They are not an Anglican practice, at least as I've seen it in the US.

As a result, OCSP parishes who maintain these practices really aren't preserving "precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony". Even in the rare cases where people wanted intinction, as eventually normalized by Bp Bruno, it was voluntary, signified by leaving the host in the palm, when the priest or deacon with the chalice would then pick it up, dip it in the chalice him or herself, and place it on the communicant's tongue. There was no special set of intinction vessels in use. So this isn't even the Anglican practice.

So let me see -- the "old school type rituals propagated by the Ordinariate" aren't very Anglican and are based on recent practices in any case, including very recent revisions of the novus ordo mass to include quasi-archaic language. The only really Anglican part of this is letting people fancy they're something other than what they are!

Liturgical Changes At Our Lady Of The Atonement

From a visitor:

This was in the bulletin:

Beginning Dec. 3, 2017, the first Sunday of Advent, we will begin to conform our liturgy to the Divine Worship Missal. We have new pew missal booklets that conform to the Altar Missal.

Several men will be in the Narthex after each Mass to present the changes to the liturgy and to answer questions. Please stop by to chat with them.

My thoughts:

The changes that are forthcoming will be in order to conform to the Divine Worship Missal. What's confusing is that the pew missals were updated in 2016 precisely for that purpose. Indeed the front cover of those booklets proclaims "The Order of Mass according to the Divine Worship Missal". Apparently, what wasn't changed is the rubrics concerning when to kneel or stand. This begs the question, why not? If the DWM was formally issued, what right did we have to pick and choose? From what I understand, the posture at Mass in the Anglican Use Mass is no different from the Novus Ordo. I searched for a copy of the DWM, and I found this.

I briefly scanned it. One thing I noticed was on page 19, under "The Peace", it says "The people may offer one another a sign of peace". Although practiced at OLOW, the sign of peace has never been part of the liturgy at Atonement, and was omitted in the revised pew missals of two years ago. Again, why? What right did Dcn. Orr or Fr. Phillips have to alter this? A greeting of peace is also prescribed in the BODW.

While searching rubrics, this article from Chuck Wilson came up.

In that, I found this:

The responsibility of conferences of bishops to make necessary decisions on matters left to them by the was reiterated. "8.... They are to decide on .... the faithful's movements, standing, kneeling, and sitting during Mass; . . . how the sign of peace is to be given; . . . " (SC Divine Worship, Instruction , 20 Oct 1969).

I've stopped watching football when they started taking a knee. I have often wondered if the players knew why they were taking a knee. I have to say, at least Fr. Lewis is clearing up some of the house-blend confusion by conforming to what is actually put forth by the Catholic Church!

I'm still puzzled at the use of intinction at the big Texas parishes. My understanding of the USCCB position is that communicants are to choose whether to receive in the hand or on the tongue. Intinction makes receiving on the hand problematic at best, since it presumably leaves a spot of Christ's Blood on the hand whose disposition may not be certain. Does anyone know how intinction squares with the USCCB? (I assume it must be OK if church supply firms sell intinction sets.)

A Quick Look At The ACA

I paid one of my occasional visits to the ACA web site and found the press release of the Anglican Joint Synods held in Atlanta last month. Of note,

The Anglican Joint Synods concordat establishes full communion among the Churches, known as “communio in sacris.” The signed Agreement states that each Church acknowledges the others to be orthodox and catholic Anglicans holding to the faith of the Undivided Catholic Church and the Seven Ecumenical Councils.

I don't understand. These fringe groups hold to "the faith of the Undivided Catholic Church", but they're divided from said undivided capital-C Catholic Church. I suppose if you asked Marsh or the others about this, you'd get some sort of mealy-mouthed evasions.

Now checking the ACA Diocese of the West, we find it's down to five parishes and missions in three states. The most recent loss is the Church of the Epiphany in Phoenix, which took place sometime over this past summer. St Columba Lancaster closed earlier in the year. Of the remainder, only the California parishes in Auburn and Fountain Valley have their own buildings.

This collapse is another installment of the story I published in this post, which showed the DOW shrinking from 21 parishes and missions in 2010 to 11 in 2012.

There are may reasons for this decline, and there have been losses in the Diocese of the Missouri Valley and the Diocese of the Eastern US, though not as precipitous. But the failure of leadership over St Mary of the Angels has been nothing short of catastrophic for the DOW, and it hasn't helped the ACA. Let's not forget the apparent effect on leadership of bringing Mrs Bush onto the Standing Committee.

Msgr Newton Excluded

Via a news aggregator, I somewhat surprisingly ran into this item at the UK Catholic Herald:

Mgr Keith Newton was reportedly not invited to ecumenical events commemorating the Reformation

The head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was snubbed from last week’s ecumenical commemorations of the Reformation, a leading Ordinariate priest has said.

In a letter to the Catholic Herald, Fr Ed Tomlinson asks why Mgr Keith Newton, who serves as ordinary of the group for former Anglicans, was not invited to be “part of the numerous ‘reformation celebrations’ taking part in the ecumenical landscape this week”.

Fr Tomlinson also wants to know why Mgr Newton had not been asked “to join the ARCIC [Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission] conversations despite his obvious importance as a former bishop of the Church of England now leading a body, the ordinariate, whose entire purpose is to enable Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining a distinctly English spirituality/patrimony”.

In the six years since the creation of the ordinariate, Fr Tomlinson says, “we have been routinely undermined by those in authority over us. Not a single church has been gifted to the ordinariate despite several closing each month. Why are so many of our clergy used to plug diocesan gaps instead of being enabled to flourish within the vision to which we were called?”

As usual, I guess my take on this is going to be contrarian. For starters, I wasn't even aware that ARCIC still existed until I checked last week to discover it's made some sort of statement about Mary. I assume such statement is anodyne, at best unilluminating, and certainly unenforceable for any Anglican. So that suggests that for a small group of former Anglican Catholic clerics, there might be many better uses for their time than ARCIC. Unless, of course, they have free cycles to devote to something like this, which may in fact be the case.

Second, it all depends as well on what the meaning of "ecumenical" is. Mostly I envision some people wearing rainbow stoles and so forth singing kumbaya. It can also mean a tacit agreement among denominations not to poach or proselytize -- one reason attributed to Cardinal Mahony's rejection of the St Mary of the Angels application to become Anglican Use in his archdiocese was it was not an "ecumenical" move, although Mahony had, and expressed, better reasons than that.

Either way, I've got to think that Catholics have better uses for their time than being those sorts of "ecumenical". As we reflect on 500 years of Protestantism, I call on what minimal knowledge I have about 500 years of Arianism and the Church's response, sometimes off the mark, as when it tried to accommodate or compromise with it.

But then, at least in the summary piece quoted here, Fr Tomlinson complains that "Not a single church has been gifted to the ordinariate". But in the US, dioceses haven't "gifted" churches to OCSP parishes. A small number have been sold. Of those, some of the parishes have struggled to make the payments and maintain the properties. How many OOLW communities could afford maintenance and utilities on properties "gifted" to them, much less make payments?

And why change the subject that way? Reminds me of an associate at our parish who said that, as a younger priest, he'd gotten involved in a campaign to have the archdiocese pay priests a "fair" salary, but on reflection, he realized there are many ways to waste one's time. I'm wondering if Fr Tomlinson has yet to arrive at this conclusion.

St John Vianney

My friend who often prompts me to revisit my thinking e-mailed, in response to the story of the students who lined up to have their confessions heard by a deaf priest,

I’m not persuaded that your construction of validity of the Sacrament of Reconciliation squares with that of the church. If a priest could not grant absolution validly because he was deaf and thus could not understand the sins confessed by the penitent in order to provide effective counsel, the bishop would bear the obligation to suspend his faculty to grant absolution. For better or worse, the magisterium of the Catholic Church has never even remotely suggested this, and suspending faculties of priests who are deaf to hear confessions on that basis has never been the normative practice. And, to the counterpoint, I know more than a few priests who are quite willing to grant absolution to penitents who confess in languages that they don’t understand — Navajo, Swahili, or whatever — as a matter of normal pastoral practice.

That said, there is a clear difference between what is sacramentally valid and what is spiritually most advantageous for the faithful. The fact that Option A may be spiritually more advantageous than Option B does not intrinsically make Option B in valid. I benefit spiritually from driving to a Benedictine abbey located about ten miles from my home, where the monks’ homilies consistently challenge me to grow in faith, for Sunday mass rather than going to any of the half dozen or so parishes that I pass en route where diocesan clergy parlay clear scriptural texts into sentences of vacillation and paragraphs of double speak devoid of spiritual content. Nevertheless, the masses celebrated in any of those parishes are just as valid as the mass celebrated at the abbey.

To which I replied,

I’m not suggesting the bishop should suspend the priest’s faculties. As I said in the post, it’s a question of the recipient’s intention. Also, the visitor didn’t say if the confession was face to face, in which case even a deaf priest might read lips, and the students may not have understood this. But my understanding is also that going to an SSPX chapel for mass meets the Sunday obligation, but it’s much better if it’s because you’re traveling and have no other option. If you have a diocesan parish mass available at a convenient time but routinely go to the SSPX mass, that’s a different matter. By the same token, if your only option is to go to confession with a deaf priest – or a priest who doesn’t speak Vietnamese – that’s fine. But if you routinely avoid one who isn’t deaf or does speak Vietnamese in order not to have the priest hear what you say, that’s different and presumably goes to intention.

But then I woke up last night reminded of our pastor's Sunday homily on the gospel reading, where he pointed to the example of St John Vianney.

When he began his priestly duties, Fr. Vianney realized many were either ignorant or indifferent to religion as a result of the French Revolution. Many danced and drank on Sundays or worked in their fields.

Fr. Vianney spent much time in confession and often delivered homilies against blasphemy and dancing. Finally, if parishioners did not give up dancing, he refused them absolution.

He spent 11 to twelve hours each day working to reconcile people with God. In the summer months, he often worked 16-hour days and refused to retire.

While some priests do just get by, those who strive to do more can become saints. I still question why, with a surplus, Houston recruits more priests of at best the just-get-by variety.

UPDATE: The visitor who told the story of the students adds,

I after reading today’s post I felt an obligation to reply to the discussion of the intentions of the high school penitents I wrote about. I think I did not make my point sufficiently clear. The students intended to make good confession, do their prescribed penance and had the resolution to sin no more, the conditions for valid confession. What the students had, but is not required for valid confession, was shame. Contrary to what most people outside the Church might think, shame or feeling bad for committing a sin is not required, only the knowledge that what was done was wrong and contrition. A person is not required to “feel bad” that they enjoyed any particular sin. Hey, that’s why we keep sinning, not just because we are weak but because we enjoy doing some of those sins! In the case of these students, the shame of their sins prompted them to go to Fr. Blacklege. My larger point was meant to be that given the choice between a VALID confession with limited pastoral benefit and a student NOT going to confession at all because they were ashamed, the choice is a no brainer.

The same thing holds for the Ordinariates. I still believe even a marginal priest who brings someone to Christ through the sacraments is better than no priest/no sacraments at all. Of course, intention is critical to both scenarios. If the intentions of certain cradle Catholics are to hide inside a special “membership” and distance themselves from regular bishops, then God knows what is in their hearts and will judge them accordingly. Just like God will have little mercy (and a LOT of just punishment) for priests and clergy who knowingly lead any of the faithful astray for whatever reason or “intention” they may have. Because one thing is for sure, the road to Hell is paved with good “intentions”.

The Most Favorable Interpretation

A visitor provides what I think is the most favorable interpretation \of what's going on in the OCSP:

I have been reading your blog posts lately and I had to chuckle a little to myself thinking about my experiences as a cradle Catholic in the confessional. It made me also think the ordination/membership issues in all the Personal Ordinariates are somewhat similar if the expectation is that squeaking by with the minimum is better than not making it all with more robust catechesis to follow at a later time.

I remember at my Catholic high school, we had access to confession every week during our lunch hour on Fridays. We always had a visiting priest, usually retired, who had this interesting job. I say interesting because you can imagine the quality of soul searching that was involved in the penitents who were avoiding going to their home parish priest who would surely recognize them as they confessed their transgressions with Suzy or Billy or other sins of impurity or fill-in-the-blank whatnot typical of high school kids. The line was ALWAYS the longest on the Fridays with Fr. Blacklege (God rest his soul). You could confess ANYTHING and his demeanor never changed. He lovingly chastened you to try harder to live the faith and absolved you from your sins not because he was such a holy, understanding, gentle man (which he truly was), but rather, he was pretty much stone deaf. Whew, talk about dodging shame bullets!

Just because Fr. Blacklege did not dispense any case specific nuggets of deep wisdom or explain complex doctrine to his penitents doesn’t mean he wasn’t helping them. We all knew what our sins were, why they were wrong and were appropriately ashamed enough of them to be resolved to sin no more. I also know, a lot of kids would have stayed in the state of mortal sin and away from the strengthening grace of the Holy Eucharist if it wasn’t for deaf priests like Fr. Blacklege. I would like to think this kept someone, maybe even just one kid Catholic long enough to “grow into their Faith” and then later seek out a priest who would know them and be able to offer them better, specific counsel in the confessional.

Well, we're getting into issues of intention here, at minimum. If the kids in this school had the intention of repenting their sins and doing better, fine. But naturally, this isn't necessarily what happened in every case, and we don't know what was in individual hearts.

A sacrament, after all, must be valid in form, matter, and intention: ". . . in adults, the valid reception of the sacraments presumes that the recipient has the intention of receiving it." If I go to a deaf priest knowing he won't hear what I say and thus think I can get away with something, naturally, this makes the sacrament invalid. And of course, these were students.

But we're speaking here of adults, by and large, and in fact, adult cradle Catholics who for whatever reason choose to go to a mass with newly-minted former Protestant priests, and possibly confession as well. All we can do is ask "What's up with that?" and hope for the best, I suppose. But we're easing back to the issue that Abp Garcia-Siller raised, of whether ex-Anglicans operating under a special provision may feel they aren't just unique but separate -- and why some cradle Catholics would be drawn to this.

The visitor continues,

I regularly see “members” of Our Lady of the Atonement in line for confession in my home parish. Is it because the time is more convenient or is it because they know they won’t be recognized or is it because they want better counsel in the confessional? Does it matter as long as they are availing themselves of the opportunity to be in closer communion with Christ and His Church? The good news is that they are at confession; the bad news is that newly minted Catholics may not understand these distinctions and are, as you think, likely being cheated out of a much better/longer lasting reconciliation experience.

I do believe there is much rejoicing in heaven over recovering even one lost sheep. If the Ordinariate brings only one soul to the true Church, it could be argued it was worth it.

My regular correspondent, who follows these things, reports that the public Facebook pages of many people connected with the California Our Lady of Grace and Bl John Henry Newman groups indicate that they're also highly traditionalist, Latin-mass cradle Catholics. I think the consensus among priests who are conservative-mainstream is that there's a danger here of substituting private judgment. If I go to a special mass, I'm above the great herd of the unwashed and misguided. We can't know what's in individual hearts, but I feel uncomfortable with where this might lead, and whether some of these former Protestants may be manipulating weaknesses for their own ends. Certainly a suspicion about the potential here pervades some of the accounts I've heard of Our Lady of the Atonement under Fr Phillips and Dcn Orr.

It's also worth pointing out that traditionalist TLM types aren't in the target market for the OCSP, were specifically discouraged by Msgr Steenson, and aren't eligible, strictly speaking, to be "members" -- although I assume flashing one's OCSP membership card on entry to the pearly gates avails nothing.

Let's take a parallel case, though. Let's say an adult Catholic who's had the sacraments of initiation but has fallen away from the Church years earlier for some reason attends a high-church Anglican mass and is inspired by it to go to confession in the Church and resume Catholic mass attendance. The Anglican mass wasn't a valid sacrament, of course, and while it had a good effect, so might seeing a Rembrandt painting in a museum or watching Bl Fulton Sheen on YouTube. There is rejoicing in heaven over any of these.

A sacrament is valid even if the priest is a sinner or just plain dumb. But naturally, it's incumbent on Catholics to find the best spiritual direction they can.

Yes, But Isn't This More Than A Career Move?

My friend who often prompts me to clarify my thinking has made a number of points regarding yesterday's post.

I cannot speak to any specific case, but I can tell you that the Vatican is willing to bend considerably to accommodate particular circumstances of Anglican and Protestant clergy who seek Catholic ordination following full reception into the Catholic Church.

He points specifically to the first three receptions and ordinations in OOLW, who resigned their Anglican orders on December 31, 2010, and were received, ordained transitional deacon, and ordained priests by January 15, 2011. However, I question whether any was serving as a parish priest and hearing regular confessions -- they were higher in the food chain in a startup role. And for whatever reason, Msgr Steenson's schedule was much slower, received in December 2007, ordained a transitional deacon December 2008, and ordained a priest in February 2009 -- though again, he was not a parish priest hearing confessions or doing counseling, and to tell the truth, I'd feel much more comfortable going to a diocesan associate for confession than Msgr Steenson, then or now.

He notes, regarding the secrecy issue with Mr Bayles,

The bottom line is that any public disclosure that a clergyman of any denomination is seeking reception into another typically would be sufficient cause for immediate dismissal from that condition. This could have the consequence of depriving a man of income that he needs for subsistence and support for his family, and it also could become impossible for a man to remain as pastor to a congregation that would come into the Catholic Church with him. This is why Episcopal clergy typically say nothing more than that they are “exploring the option” until they actually make the move. However, Anglican and Protestant clergy who are “exploring the option” frequently are heavily immersed in studies to prepare for Catholic ordination following their receptions into the full communion of the Catholic Church. And for this reason, the Catholic Church and the ordinariates make no public announcement whatsoever until the reception into full communion actually takes place.

Well, OK -- but recognize that the Facebook "announcement" of Mr Bayles's reception last month did not in fact mention his name and featured the back of his head -- clearly this was meant to be confidential, even though the guy was going to become this group's priest! What's up with that? Had he not yet resigned as an Anglican chaplain? We simply don't know.

But let's go a little farther. While Msgr Steenson by his own account was exceedingly careful to inform Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori of his intent while forestalling any pre-emptive move to remove him as bishop, he certainly left a bad taste among his TEC colleagues, who felt he violated his consecration vows and in effect had become a TEC bishop under false pretenses.

One problem I see in my friend's interpretation is the difference between a career and a vocation. I can certainly envision situations -- CS Lewis's move from Oxford to Cambridge might be an example -- where a high-level career move might be carefully choreographed to avoid stepping on toes while averting abortive disclosures and slip-ups. But this involves a move from one job to another of the same kind, professor to professor, lawyer to lawyer, corporate officer to corporate officer.

A move from Protestant priest to Catholic is a move from one kind of thing to another. The doctrines and expectations are radically different. These days, a TEC priest can easily move to a Lutheran parish as a simple career move equivalent to a lawyer going from one firm to another. For a Protestant priest to become Catholic is a different thing -- when Ronald Knox moved from Anglican priest to Catholic, his father disinherited him, for instance. When Frederick Kinsman resigned as a TEC bishop to become Catholic, his old schoolmates at St Paul's in effect had to defend his sanity. Jeffrey Steenson's colleagues clearly saw the insincerity implicit in his move -- how could he insist on doctrinal purity over women in the priesthood, for instance, when he himself concelebrated mass with women priests?

This kind of move entails risks, and while the Church does what it can to avert risks to the faithful -- one thinks of Pius XII doing what he could to avert catastrophe for the faithful in Europe during World War Ii -- it can't always succeed. Martyrdoms, and lesser calamities, happen. We simply don't know the reason for continued secrecy in Mr Bayles's case; the announcement of his reception by name didn't come from Houston but from acquaintances in Pennsylvania -- and the continued secrecy leads to questions.

Another issue is that Mr Bayles's position as a chaplain in the Air Force Reserve was at best part-time, and for the past several years, he appears to have had a series of secular jobs, most recently as a real estate agent. It's worth pointing out that the OCSP has at least reportedly required candidates for ordination to attest to their financial independence, and I would have to assume this would take into account any loss of income from a Protestant denomination. To a considerable extent, Mr Bayles is responsible for managing his secular financial situation, and any risks attendant to becoming Catholic must be risks he assumes fully understanding what he's undertaking.

While my friend points out that the Church is "willing to bend considerably", this is certainly something I've acknowledged here all along. The problem is that it seems in the case of the OCSP to bend to the point where there is no effective policy. I saw in last Sunday's parish bulletin that a guy named Joe Schmo or something had been representing himself as Fr Joe Schmo and trying to function as a priest in certain parishes. The archdiocese was intent on making it clear that Joe Schmo was not a priest of the archdiocese, and if he turns up anyplace, call the vicar for clergy.

If someone is wearing clericals and calling himself Fr Whatever in a Catholic parish, we've got to assume certain minimal qualifications are being met. These qualifications depend on policy. The Church can be flexible on some matters, but if I'm dealing with an obscure branch office a long way from headquarters, I have a right to want to be sure policy is being followed. With the most recent cohorts of OCSP ordinations -- not just Mr Bayles -- I'm not so sure.

I would not go to any of these men for confession in circumstances other than grave necessity. I have serious doubts of their ability to give sound counsel in a Catholic context. I question the judgment of people who think going to these men for confession is a good idea. But hey, maybe they don't go to confession anyhow.