"I wish to acknowledge your letter of October 14, 1986," wrote Mahony, "with respect to your desire that St. Mary of the Angels Church community be received into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. The history of your parish community is not paralleled with any other similar Episcopal community which has been received into the Roman Catholic Church in our country. Your letter to His Eminence, Cardinal Bernard Law, does not reflect the long and very volatile public legal proceedings which you took against the Episcopal Diocese, a process which proceeded through both the Superior Court and the Appellate Court. This factor distinguishes your history from every other application of which I am aware. You indicate that your numbers continue to dwindle, and there is still division and divisiveness among the community. In addition, you seem to require that a major focus be upon the physical plant of St. Mary of the Angels community. All of these considerations compel me and my consultants to look negatively upon your interest in union with the Roman Catholic Church as an Anglican Use community. I am hopeful that this letter will help to crystallize once again the problems which have been so prevalent in the past efforts of your community to seek union with the Roman Catholic Church."Whatever one may think about "Red Roger", I continue to believe that he and the consultants to whom he refers came to an insightful appreciation of the dilemma posed to a Catholic bishop by "Anglo Catholic" parishes seeking what they clearly will always expect is some type of special status in the Church -- not simply unique, but separate. But, of course, always with the ability to call themselves "Catholic", with the prestige that brings.
The other characterization that now will stay with me is Judge Murphy's in the courtroom yesterday, who, clearly frustrated and quite exercised, called "ridiculous" any effort to continue legal actions in the Third Lawsuits. I would say at this point that not a whole lot of blame attaches to Fr Kelley and the current vestry, who on one hand were playing the cards they'd been dealt over almost 40 years of history, and on the other made a good-faith effort to enter the OCSP but were thwarted by various combinations of bungling and duplicity.
Certainly Fr Kelley expressed to me yesterday, and Mr Lengyel-Leahu expressed to the judge, that the appeals court decision instant leaves an enormous loose end, the fact that the 2014 appeals court decision recognized the vestry the parish elected in 2012, and there will be no legal way in which the ACA can somehow cancel this out and place Mrs Bush and other associates in as a new vestry. But what about the years of litigation and additional millions it will cost to fix this through the courts? And for what gain?
The original intent of the parish in 2011-12 was to enter the Catholic Church via Anglicanorum coetibus. As a new member of the parish at the time, I had no reason to believe this was anything but a good idea -- indeed, a near-millennial sort of development. This is certainly what all the Anglo-Catholic blogs were saying, but of course, those blogs almost all disappeared within a year of the OCSP's erection, the bloggers scattered to the four winds.
I'm not sure if anyone asked Msgr Steenson, or Cardinal Müller, or then-Msgr Lopes, what any had in mind as to a plan for what would happen after the sale. The complementary norms envisioned parishes entering the prelature as whole entities, or something close. This didn't happen on anything like the scale that would justify setting up even the skeleton chancery that we see. In fact, the OCSP, in size and makeup, is pretty much just a clone of a small "continuing" denomination, and among the characteristics it shares with "continuers" are poorly formed, even sketchy, jurisdiction-hopping clergy, tiny and unstable parish units, and slapdash, make-it-up-as-we-go-along policy decisions.
As Herbert Stein's Law puts it, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." As I said yesterday, I think an outcome that might reasonably be planned for in thinking of a potential future for the parish in the OCSP, if this were now in any way possible, would be that the OCSP will conceivably be dissolved, and the parish, with maybe a dozen others, would revert to a territorial diocese, with the other little chapel groups suppressed. But from a diocesan perspective, this is unrealistic. The St Mary's nave has an optimistic capacity of maybe 100, there is minimal parking available, and a diocesan parish is already only a few blocks away.
Latin masses are available at St Victor's West Hollywood, about five miles away. There's no real need that the parish would fill if it were not in a separate prelature, but even there, if the parish did not have a commercial property it can rent, it would not be viable. In fact, it seems likely that its value, either to the ACA or the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, would be the multimillions that can be realized through its sale.
With this in mind, in light of what could be realized if the ACA were to acquire clear title, the best course would be to find a way to make all parties whole in the form of some generous settlement. The history of bungling, greed, and duplicity here makes this unlikely.
