I Can't Link To What Ain't There!

I just got an e-mail from my regular correspondent with the title "Publicity". I figured it was going to link to a belated piece in the Register or some other major Catholic organ covering the first mass and confirmations at Holy Martyrs Murrieta, though I had briefly (and maybe conveniently) forgotten that Bp Lopes wasn't there. But the e-mail said only

Four men being ordained to the priesthood at OLW, Houston today. I find it hard to fathom why this is not being publicised in any way, unless we count the local parish bulletin.

This takes me back to when I used to work for a living, and there'd be coffee-break gripe sessions on the latest that Mahogany Row was or wasn't doing. The odd thing is that, in retrospect, the subjects involved were often on point, and when the gripes became focused, they tended to be followed, independently but fairly soon, by ominous stories in the Wall Street Journal talking about impending things like indictments, hostile takeovers, layoffs, or whatever.

Not long ago, I posted on the story that should have been released about Bp Lopes's visit to the first official mass at Holy Martyrs. Now my regular correspondent is wondering why four ordinations aren't being publicized. In the spirit of coffee-hour gripes with the usual low-level management types who actually had to get things done, I've got to think there are two explanations:

1. Mahogany Row is full of incompetents, and there's no reason why these optimistic deveopments aren't being publicized
2. There's actually a reason why potentially good news is being suppressed.

Neither, of course, is good for the organization. Early in Msgr Steenson's tenure, ordinations were publicized with some frequency, although they were often in diocesan organs, because the applicable diocesan bishop was doing them. Now that Bp Lopes is able to do his own ordinations, that possibility is gone, while under explanation 1, nobody who works for him now is able to write a press release.

Under explanation 2, there may be an emerging concern among bishops that the OCSP is potentially a separate and competing overlapping jurisdiction. Bp Lopes may be concerned that publicity over ordinations or new communities could be irritating to bishops who have this view.

At this stage, I would say that either is a credible explanation, or there might be another that I haven't thought of. But based on life experience, I would say that speculation over what ought to happen but hasn't is not a good omen for what might come up sooner rather than later.

More From Guelzo On Anglo-Catholicism

I ran across another trenchant passage in For the Union of Evangelical Christendom, his history of the Reformed Episcopal Church:

The Reformed Episcopalians, like other Anglo-American evangelicals, sought to bend the weapons of reason to their own defense; Anglo-Catholicism sought to escape secularism by eluding, rather than affirming, the trammels of reason. As it turned out, neither in the long run could successfully fend away the shrinking walls of the house occupied by religion in the Victorian world. One telltale but subtle measure of the real intellectual distance between both parties occurs in the peculiar vocabulary of English and American Anglo-Catholicism. Like so many other nineteenth-century imperlialisms, Anglo-Catholicism invented a new language, full of arcana to Protestant ears, larded with "the Blessed Sacrament", "Father" as a term of clerical address, sanctuary lamps, ciboriums, crucifers, and so forth. The aggressive and provocative implications of Anglo-Catholic language are usually treated simply as one more instance of their urge to break lances with Protestant culture, and as such they leave little doubt about Anglo-Catholicism's inherent imperialism. What is more likely to be missed is how this clutter of terminology actually functioned as a short-circuit around rationality. The thicket of Anglo-Catholic religious language is, after all, strangely matched to the dearth of serious Anglo-Catholic religious speculation -- unless, of course, Anglo-Catholic language is recognized for what it was, an active and conscious repudiation of the theological rationalism so beloved of the Evangelicals, in favor of a dialect based on religious sentiment. (p 270)

I'm told that Prof Guelzo has been, at least off and on, a Reformed Episcopalian himself with definite Evangelical bias, and I attribute this at least in part to the view he takes here that Evangelicals are rationalist, which I simply don't see. On the other hand, in 30 years as an Episcopalian, I never heard anyone, clergy or lay, recommend that I read Aquinas, or for that matter (other than conventional references to the Confessions) Augustine. Certainly the appeal of Anglo-Catholicism in the 21st century is largely an emotional one, closely linked to prosperous upscale urban communities.

What Guelzo doesn't mention is that Catholic apologetics have been the most rationalist of any; I would cite only Ven Fulton Sheen, Patrick Madrid, and Bp Barron as recent examples. I would also say that Catholic priests strike me as remarkably matter-of-fact in talking of the sacraments -- the "precious Body and Blood" are generally not mentioned, but Protestant practices like feeding leftover consecrated bread to the birds are disparaged as just being kinda dumb.

And -- well -- every time I visit Fr Hunwicke's blog, I seem to hear faint strains of "Rule Britannia".

Latin Mass Again

A visitor writes:

I don’t understand the connection between the groups you blog about (Anglican/Catholic hybrid) and those who believe Vatican II liturgical changes were a mistake. I see the political advantage: two groups, each wanting to worship in their own way. However, if you gave truth serum to someone from the Latin mass group, they would tell you that the new mass isn’t “really” a mass, that the only way to raise their children Catholic is to take them to Latin masses, and their pipe dream is to revoke Vatican II, liturgically at least, and make the Tridentine mass universal. And what is the Anglican tradition but an early version of the Vatican II changes? The Tridentine mass was created to be a bulwark against Protestantism. So I don’t really “get” why these groups are forming even tentative alliances.

The other contrast between these two groups regards the priests. The priests who want to celebrate Latin mass in each diocese are firmly embedded in the diocese hierarchy and their sole obedience is to their own Bishop. And these priests are very careful, no matter what the laity think, to speak respectfully of Pope Francis, and they only celebrate the Latin mass at the directive of their Bishop. It does seem a huge mistake to ever make the chain of command for Anglican groups separate, rather than folding them into existing dioceses.

I came across your blog because a Latin mass Facebook page posted the Church Militant link about those nuns in Texas. And recently I came across a post in a private Latin mass FB group where someone from the Anglican camp was putting out feelers (see screenshots). She did not get any takers but it seemed odd that she thought she might.

In 2012, Msgr Steenson, the first OCSP ordinary 2012-15, issued a pastoral letter clarifying Rome's position on how the Tridentine mass relates to Anglicanorum coetibus. Intrestingly, it no longer appears on the OCSP website, but I was able to find the applicable part of its text here:

We have therefore asked that the congregations of the Ordinariate follow this direction. Some of our clergy want to learn also how to celebrate according to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. They are certainly encouraged to do so, under the provisions of Summorum Pontificum and under the supervision of the local bishop, to assist in those stable communities that use the Extraordinary Form. But as the Extrordinary Form is not integral to the Anglican patrimony, it is not properly used in our communities. The Ordinariate will remain focused on bringing Christians in the Anglican tradition into full communion with the Catholic Church. We also are pleased that the Church has provided for the continuing use of the Extraordinary Form, particularly as a pastoral response to traditional Catholics, and regard all of this as a well-ordered symphony of praise to the Blessed Trinity.

I think the visitor raises a valid point. Bp Lopes has at least leaned in the direction that the "Anglican patrimony" consists almost entirely of the 17th-century BCP liturgy, although it's worth noting that its own survival is due to accident -- an attempt to revise it in the 19th and early 20th centuries stalled for lack of consensus. And it's definitely worth noting that Episcopalian and Church of England interior furnishings, as well as Catholic-style vestments, are a 19th-century innovation. Altars, reredoses, candles, crucifixes, albs, surplices, cottas, copes, chasubles, incense, servers, and the like date only from the 1840s and later. Church of England and Episcopal interiors prior to then looked much more like modern Baptist interiors, with priests normally wearing just black cassocks and sometimes academic gowns while preaching.

Clearly what we've been observing here is that enthusiasts of the "Anglican patrimony" share perhaps more with sola sciptura types than they do with truly devout Catholics -- they show the same willingness to freelance what the Anglican patrimony consists of as scriptural fundamentalists do in interpreting the Word. To the extent that traddie enthusiasm for the Latin mass and the "Anglican patrimony" are affectations and inauthentic, the two groups certainly share a lot.

But the visitor is also correct in seeing the two groups as more or less separatist, and especially with the Anglicans, at risk for trying to set themselves up as a separate and overlapping jurisdiction, since they have their own bishop. I would say the centrifugal tendency is there in both groups, but the visitor does see that the Latin mass is done entirely in the context of the diocese.

This was also the case with the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision, and the largest OCSP parishes came from diocesan jurisdictions under that provision. Even then, though, the relationship of Our Lady of the Atonement with its archdiocese was not smooth.

Something's Missing

It took some concentrated web sleuthing by two people over several days last week to figure out what the whole story was with Holy Martyrs Murrieta. But it brings me back to the same question I had at the start: this was the official first mass at a new facility, a first for the OCSP. Bp Lopes shoiuld have been there, especially since there were confirmations -- first confirmations for the new group at the new facility.

Not only was Bp Lopes not there, there was no serious publicity -- a couple of random posts on two Facebook groups. No explanation of why this was significant. Here's what we should have seen, someplace in the Catholic press:

• News of Bp Lopes's visit to open the new facility at the Pentecost mass
• Photos of Bp Lopes in procession, however unfinished or temporary the arrangements -- makes it more significant to the story
• Photos of Bp Lopes confirming the confirmands -- essential
• Photos of the crowd
• Quotes from Bp Lopes on why this is a joyful occasion, which in theory it must certainly be
• Quotes from Mr Truax II on his journey from TEC to Catholicism and his hopes to share the Anglican patrimony in the Temecula Valley
• Another iteration of the purpose of the OCSP
• Quotes from other new OCSP members
• Quotes from Fr Bartus on his wishes for the new enterprise.

And so forth. This is something any journeyman PR writer could come up with. In fact, Houston has previously engaged Mr Jesserer Smith of the Register for exactly this sort of thing. Why this wasn't done is a puzzle. I can think of two possible explanations.

The first is simple incompetence. Nobody in Houston has the basic good sense to do this, and Houston lacks the resources routinely available to territorial dioceses. I can't completely rule this out.

The second is that Bp Lopes may feel he needs to keep a low profile. Publicizing the start of the Holy Martyrs group, including calling attention to Mr Truax II's role (assuming Mr Truax is OK with this), could have offended Bp Barnes and quite possibly others in the USCCB. Bp Lopes's physical presence in Barnes's diocese, and calling attention to it in the Catholic press, could also have been impolitic.

This suggests to me that, irrespective of whether the CDF can shove some things down diocesan bishops' throats, not all are comfortable with the whole idea of a separate, overlapping, and competing jurisdiction, especially with half-baked communities calling themselves "Catholic churches" in their territories. I can't disagree.

I notice from the Holy Martyrs website that Theology on Tap is coming to the Temecula Valley! Nothing like a mug of draft beer to go with your catechism, huh? Can beer breakfasts and whiskey-and-cigar barbecues be far behind? Er, how many of these things does Fr Bartus have on his weekly schedule?

Know what? I'm gonna ask our pastor why we can't have beer with our Bible study!

Here's The Rub

A May 1 report in the Inland Catholic Byte goes into detail on the April 5 joint letter from Bps Barnes and Lopes on the Murrieta OCSP "mission".

Holy Martyrs of England and Wales Catholic Mission has established a presence in Temecula Valley and will begin holding Mass in a Murrieta gymnasium on Pentecost Sunday, May 20. This faith community was formed by several families in the Temecula Valley that had been traveling to Irvine to attend Mass at Blessed John Henry Newman Parish.

That parish community falls under the jurisdiction of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a non-territorial diocese that allows communities of former Anglicans in the United States and Canada to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. It is under the episcopal leadership of Bishop Steven Lopes. . . .

Efforts by Holy Martyrs of England and Wales to market itself in the local communities initially created some confusion among some Catholic parishioners and priests. . . .

Bishop Lopes and Father Andrew Bartus, pastor of the new community, met with Bishop Barnes and priests and parish leadership from the Hemet Vicariate of the Diocese on Jan. 29. It was an occasion to learn more about the plans of the Ordinariate and more clearly define jurisdictional relationships.

I suspect "some confusion among some Catholic parishioners and priests" is a nice way of putting things. The impression I have is that most bishops don't seem to mind too much if a dozen or two ex-Anglicans get together for a 1 PM mass in a basement chapel. On the other hand, if a potential major donor like Mr Truax starts to put big money into a new parish facility not under the bishop's jurisdiction, that's a horse of a different color.

Let's note the outline of circumstances as we see it in the report, which echoes the bishops' April 5 letter, vs what we're coming to learn:

• The report mentions "several families in the Temecula Valley that had been traveling to Irvine" as the reason for the startup.
• However, it seems increasingly likely that Bernie Truax II is funding an effort to remodel a facility that must be 10,000 square feet and is meant to attract hundreds.
• The report is calling the Holy Martyrs project a "mission". However, a visitor notes

  The Codex Juris Canonici (Code of Canon Law) defines only “parishes” (Canon 515) and “quasi-parishes” (Canon 516), although Canon 516 also allows the bishop to provide for the pastoral care of communities that cannot be erected as the latter in another way (for example, by appointment of a chaplain per Canon 564). Although not formally recognized in the Codex Juris Canonici, the term “mission” is commonly used in the Catholic Church for a segment of a parish that worships in another location, often where there’s intent to split the parish when the segment becomes self-sustaining.

  Nor, as we've noted, is the term "mission" used as one of the formal categories in the OCSP's Guide to Parish Development.
• There can be little question that the Holy Martyrs facility is many times the size, and has attracted many times the financial support, of the BJHN chapel. However, BJHN is not a "parish" that would normally be "split", and at this point it is probably less self-sustaining than Holy Martyrs, though the Holy Martyrs future is uncertain.
• This has almost certainly been well known to Bp Barnes for many months; the actual scale of the project appears to have been outlined in the fall 2017 information meeting in the Truax Building.
• It seems to me that this would raise legitimate concerns for Bp Barnes and others in his diocese as to whether the expressed intentions of Mr Truax, Bp Lopes, and Fr Bartus are completely sincere,

On the other hand, the source I linked yesterday gives a size comparison for the actual growth occurring in the Diocese of San Bernardino:

The growth of the Catholic church is evident in the region. In April, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta parish moved from its decade-long home in a French Valley Moose Lodge to its $6.5 million sanctuary a short distance away.

That church dedication, which was led by Barnes, attracted an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 worshippers and onlookers.

On one hand, Holy Martyrs Murrieta is just a pinprick, and one suspects that Mr Truax's potenbtial donations to the diocese would not be of much overall consequence, considering a real new parish in this case gets a multimillion-dollar permanent facility.

On the other hand, especially if Mr Truax has had a history of being an irritant, the possibility of competing and overlapping jurisdictions in the Church here may not be completely remote, and especially since a bishop's job is to be worrying as well as cheerleading, this matter should have Bp Barnes's attention -- and I would guess that his colleagues in the USCCB are paying attention as well.

Yet More On Holy Martyrs Murrieta

Different research directions between my regular correspondent and me seem to have converged, so that the puzzle is beginning to become clearer. The first major find was the probable angel who is financing the project, Bernie Truax II. I had earlier speculated that the angel could have been Timothy Busch, although the project seemed to be somewhat outside his area and possibly too small for him. Mr Truax, who has been a major figure in real estate and construction in Riverside County, as well as a philanthropic figure, is clearly a much better fit.

My regular correspondent ran across the name in looking at the prospectus for a St Francis College Prep High School. Truax's thumbnail as a member of the school's board of directors listed him as a Past Senior Warden, St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church and Chairman of Board of Directors, St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. So there's clearly an Anglican connection, and it would explain a philanthropic motive in the Holy Martyrs project.

However, I discovered separately that the St Francis High School project ran afoul of Bp Barnes in 2016. At the time, there were two competing plans for a Catholic high school in the Temecula-Murrieta area, and the other one, St Jeanne de Lestonnac school, which was already a K-8 institution run by the Order of the Company of Mary, Our Lady, gained Barnes's support.

The St Francis plan seems to have been independent of the Church, sponsored by "groups of local parents", although the history on the web site suggests it couldn't quite get its act together, at least until Mr Truax, presumably a convert to Catholicism, got involved. But in 2016, Bp Barnes threw his considerable weight behind the St Jeanne proposal.

St. Francis Preparatory High School had named key members of its administration and governing board, and it vowed to open in temporary buildings in the fall.

Planning for St. Francis had been under way for more than a year before its backers persuaded developer A.G. Kading to repurpose a project of his that is ready to leap off the drawing board.

Kading’s 13-acre site west of Interstate 15 in Murrieta had been planned as a $50 million mixed-use college project. But Kading has agreed to instead make the complex the home of St. Francis if that plan takes shape.

St. Francis supporters welcomed newspaper interviews and invited a reporter to a Nov. 19 event aimed at spotlighting their plan and introducing their key players. St Francis supporters, who include some prominent Catholics and community leaders, have continued to press forward as they contemplate offering classes this fall in temporary buildings.

Although the St Francis web site still exists, the FAQ page says, in response to the question "When will St. Francis College Prep begin classes?"

St. Francis College Preparatory High School is currently researching Community Support and demand to determine the most feasible date and location for the start of classroom operations. Information will be shared as soon as it becomes available! Please visit our Homepage and fill out the “Contact Us” page to join our mailing list and be included on future communications regarding St. Francis College Prep.

I would think that from Bp Barnes's perspective, the St Francis project would not have seemed stable, while the sisters could build on existing programs and experience, so this could have been an easy call for him. Interestingly, late 2016 marks the time of the initial discussions leading to the startup of the Holy Martyrs Murrieta project.

One suspects that there may be some distance and mutual mistrust between Bp Barnes and Mr Truax, and that the Holy Martyrs Murrieta project would not be under Barnes's jurisdiction could well have been a point in its favor for Mr Truax. An Ordinariate information night was held at the Truax Building in Temecula, a major asset of the Truax firm, on September 20, 2017. My regular correspondent noted that pictures of the meeting posted later seemed to feature easels with floorplans.

Since the Truax firm specializes in construction and project management, I would assume that the renovations to the former gym are being done as an in-kind donation. I also wonder if the building itself is owned by Truax, or if the ownership is in some way connected with Truax interests, so that the considerable rent for such a facility could also be underwritten.

Truax, influential as he may be in the Temecula-Murrieta area, is not a player on the same scale as Timothy Busch. In addition, he's been associated with one iffy project, the St Francis High School. And if his curent support of Holy Martyrs Murrieta is intended in any way as a thumb in Bp Barnes's eye, this doesn't bode well for its ultimate success.

More Information On Holy Martyrs Murrieta Trickles In

My regular correspondent reported,

Glowing Facebook review (presumably on the closed group) from a satisfied Holy Martyrs attendee: "Best church I've ever been to in this area" says someone who, as a Grand Knight of the KofC, has presumably been to a number. A shout out to someone else involved in getting HM started, who pops up giving a five star review to a Catholic school in Murrieta four years ago. So if Bp Barnes was concerned that this would involve poaching local parishioners I think his fears were well-founded.

Recently someone complained on the FB page that after seeing FB pix of the renovations he had googled to find out more but all he could find was a brief article about the takeover of the former gym which mentioned "Catholic" but said nothing about the Ordinariate. Presumably this is the article referred to. There is a link to the parish website in it, but that website differs little from the BJHN site.

The link is to an article in the on-line Temecula Valley Development newsletter, which is dated April 5, almost not coincidentally the same date as the letter from Bps Barnes and Lopes. It quotes an "official on site" -- presumably speaking for the contractor -- saying that the church will be adding a restroom and redoing the interior.

This says that a good deal of money was being spent, and work had begun, some time prior to the April 5 letter. Even so, publicity so far, nearly two months after the article, has been minimal. I think it's safe to say there's a lot we don't know, and we might speculate that we don't know it for a reason. I betcha Bp Barnes knows a lot of it, though.

Secret Sauce

A visitor commented on yesterday's post:

You ask the question if the Murrieta situation is a poach job. I don’t know about that but I do recognize the “secret sauce”. This looks, feels and smells like the OLA formula; a few disgruntled Anglicans, a charismatic (mega fundraiser)-type pastor, big-money-little-known donors from outside the area, lots of younger traditional Catholics with multiple kids (hungry for conservative Catholic education that are willing to home school if necessary). Bam! Instant OCSP parish.

I ran this by my regular correspondent, who replied:

My only demur is that Fr Bartus is neither charismatic nor a mega-fundraiser. Four years after founding OLA with 18 people, including small children, Fr Phillips had attracted 40 families, they had purchased property, and were beginning construction of a church. Six years after its founding BJHN is still camping out in its third borrowed chapel. The Rosary Chapel at the Santiago Retreat Center and the Newman Academy came to naught. Now someone has funded the major renovation of a former gym in a shopping center, but this is not exactly on a par with OLA or even the "pseudo-Wrightian hall" in which OLW, Houston began. SMV, Arlington was constructed with a million dollar contribution from a single donor.

But apart from that the recipe seems familiar. There is no suggestion that this is an evangelising effort. As you point out, the attendees are already card-carrying Catholics. Clearly Bp Barnes had reservations---hence the cancellation of the inaugural mass at the wedding venue and the personal visit from Bp Lopes. So was he (Bp Barnes) scammed by having this described as "several families" previously worshipping at BJHN, nothing for St Martha, Murrieta to worry about? And now the Trojan Horse has been welcomed in, can Fr Bartus deliver in Murrieta what he failed to do in Santa Ana, Fullerton, and Irvine?

I also come back to the possible parallel I thought of with the distant rich dad who buys his son a Porsche. Maybe it was a cash deal, so the kid doesn't have payments, but he's got to buy insurance on an expensive car, and I recall Porsche fans who've remarked in the past that you need to get them expensive tuneups as well. This brings up the question of whether the disgruntled millennials who seem to make up the Murrieta group are willing to support the enterprise with their pledges -- the distant rich-dad donor who bought the renovations in the former gym probably isn't going to pay the rent, untilities, insurance, cleaning, and whatever else. And Fr Bartus wants to lose the day job teaching school, I'm sure.

And I'm scratching my head about the idea of a home-school co-op. Frankly, I can imagine this as being a circle of hell lower than dealing with a residents' association. So Tiffany Throckmorton is going to teach the kids math? What do you do when you discover Tiffany can't even balance a checkbook? You get what you pay for -- I can only think some of these disgruntleds mostly don't want to pay Catholic school tuition and think a co-op will be a bargain.

My regular correspondent sent an update on a related topic:

Fr Bartus has posted more pictures from last Sunday's mass in Murrieta on his personal FB page. Two show a row of young people at the altar rail, with a row of people behind them placing their hands on their shoulders, as Fr Bartus faces them and reads from a text and raises his right hand. In a later picture they are kneeling at the altar rail with their sponsors(?) behind them. Confirmation? He also asks if anyone has pictures of Fr Barbour's first mass at BJHN. Does it help him to show that it was packed, or sparsely attended?

This goes to my earlier remark that the style of the Murrieta enterprise is social-media desultory. I commented on a photo posted Sunday night on the Holy Martyrs Facebook page showing a crowd in the hall but asking where were first communions or confirmations -- a few days later, we get a photo of some confirmations the same Sunday on a different Facebook page. Well, this answers some of the legalities in the Complementary Norms, but it's plain that not enough adults are putting out anything like a real bulletin or website, where scheduled events are announced and explained, and some sort of consistent public image is presented.

The problem is that Fr Bartus is at best a junior priest who's going to get in farther and farther over his head, with nobody to mentor him and lots of leeway to screw things up.

So, Is Holy Martyrs Murrieta A Poach Job?

Of course it isn't. How could anyone possibly think that way? Just this past April 5, Bp Barnes of San Bernardino and Bp Lopes of the OCSP jointly signed a letter saying it's nothing of the sort -- just "several families from southwest Riverside County" who didn't want to drive all the way to Irvine for Sunday mass or something. Nothing to get all bent out of shape about, and in fact, joint letters from the relevant bishops acknowledging the existence of ordinariate groups are routine. These have been issued in Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina, Nebraska --

Oh, you mean they haven't? You want to see these joint letters? Well, Maybe they're too sensitive to release. Or maybe there's a dog here that isn't barking, or a cat that is. I keep trying to put the puzzle pieces together, but I never quite come up with a picture, or at least, not the picture that's on the cover of the box.

Let's start with this: a gathered group-in-formation, like the one we receently saw in Georgia, begins with a former Anglican priest assembling a small group of Anglicans with the intent of all becoming Catholic together. The priest goes through some abbreviated formation, while the laity goes through catechesis. At the end of the process, the laity are received in a confirmation rite. One big dog -- I'd want to say an Old English Sheepdog, except it ain't one of those -- that isn't barking here is that the Murrieta group has been celebrating mass in its new facility from the start. No catechesis, no reception. They're already Catholic.

Well, of course, you dummy, they went in with the Irvine group, and as the bishops explained, they're just several families who didn't want to make the drive to Irvine, so they're setting up a little mission. You sure are dense, Mr Bruce.

I know, but there are things I still don't get, so bear with me here. Fr Bartus set up the Holy Martyrs Events Facebook page (a closed group, currently 365 members) in October 2016, according to a visitor who is a member -- you can't see the membership list unless you're a member. The visitor provided me with a screen shot of just the first page of the list; it would take more than 30 screen shots to get the whole list, but what we see is at least enough to ask how many of these folks are former Anglicans, or fourth cousins twice removed of Anglicans, or whatever:

Now here we're getting into very uncomfortable questions of ethnic "purity" or something close to that, and it's not something I would ordinarily do, except that Anglicanorum coetibus and the Complementary Norms are basically forcing this question for us. A "member", the term used in the norms and one I don't like at all, is basically someone with an Anglican connection, or a Catholic who hasn't completed the sacraments of initiation. But look at the names of the members in the Facebook group here: Nunez, Barroso, Witz, Sola, Tessier, DelGiudice.

My guess is that a lot of these folks are diocesan Catholics who've attended mass at a Diocese of San Bernardino parish in the Temecula-Murrieta area. For very many of the 365 to make the Sunday trek to Irvine, you'd have to charter several buses. Something isn't fitting here, the puzzle they've sold me in the box isn't the one whose picture is on the cover.

In addition, there must have been well over 100 people at the Pentecost mass, all -- I get the impression -- eligible to receive the sacrament. I can't imagine that very many at all came into the Church via the Irvine group, since the chapel there holds only 65 on a good day. Nobody's said anything, as far as the member of the Facebook group who's informing me of these things knows, about when Evangelium classes will start for 100 or so that might be coming in here.

So this is big -- planning has been going on since October 2016 at least. My guess is that it had come to Bp Barnes's attention well before the abortive kickoff announcement was made last December, and Bp Barnes saw things to be concerned about. A group of 350-plus disgruntled folks planning to bolt one or more parishes would probably concern me too, if I were a bishop. The secretiveness behind this -- closed Facebook group, almost nothing said publicly otherwise -- should disturb anyone.

Not only that, but this is both big, far bigger than the usual OCSP group-in-formation, and it's attracted major money in some form, possibly from Mr Busch, possibly elsewhere. And here's Bp Barnes in a diocese whose population has been growing explosively, who could certainly use equivalent money to serve Catholics in his territory better, but it's going to a whole new thing that calls itself Catholic but looks like it will take people away from his own parishes, and it isn't under his supervision.

In fact, it's being "supervised" by some ex Protestant in Houston. The bishop there doesn't quite want to admit what it is and doesn't seem to want to show his face in Murrieta.

And I'll bet this is just the tip of the iceberg. Bp Barnes, I would lay odds, has been hearing a lot more. This isn't over.

Cognitive Dissonance

I'm still trying to fit the puzzle pieces together over the Holy Martyrs Temecula mission, or group, or quasi-parish, or whatever it is. Here are just a few of my questions, in no particular order, in part because it's hard to discern whether there's a plan here at all:

• This is a major construction project, and as far as I can see, it's the first one for the OCSP where ground has been broken, at least figuratively speaking. Big bucks are going into remodeling a large space. Mass is being held in the unfinished interior. Yet, although the Holy Martyrs whatever-it-is appears on the parish finder, there's been no announcement of this big event from Houston. Wouldn't a bishop normally be cutting a ribbon, wielding a shovel, or some such thing? Wouldn't this be a really important milestone for the putatively growing and prospering OCSP? Why the radio silence?
• For such a major project, which considering the size of the Pentecost crowd, could potentially become a top-ten parish almost immediately, the parish finder gives only an e-mail and phone number. Call for mass times, I guess. The web presence is a closed Facebook group, with incredibly amateurish content.
• We don't know what's being done behind the scenes (which is a big part of the problem anyhow), but from the visuals, a major Church resource, Fr Hugh Barbour, is being used only as a supply priest to say mass for a few dozen people in Irvine. This brings to mind the Clintons using uniformed military officers as cocktail waiters at White House soirees. God is not mocked.
• Why the huge disparity between the Pentecost crowd in Murrieta and the very sparse attendance at other California groups? The San Diego group I'm told on Easter Day drew ten people, Palm Sunday about the same. Following Sunday, mass was canceled. The Pasadena group is on hiatus entirely
• What's the plan for Irvine? One would think that this group had the potential to outgrow its small chapel, yet it seems to have taken a distant second place, while a big new facility with no prior activity suddently emerges 50 miles away.
• Now, this is new and all, but my impression of the crowd in Murrieta is they are mainly millennials. And this is the season for confirmations and first communion, at least in diocesan parishes. Pentecost Sunday at our parish, there were about 50 first communions at three masses. Not in Murrieta. Something's missing here. (Heck, how many confirmations took place total in the OCSP? First communions?)
• Why Murrieta, of all places? The explanation from the bishops' letter is that a few families got tired of the drive to Irvine for Sunday mass -- fine. But all of a sudden, we have something really big, a major startup of a very important OCSP community, from all indications. But the population of Riverside County, a very large area that includes Murrieta and a lot of desert, is 2.6 million. The population of Orange County, a more compact area that includes Irvine, is 3.1 million. Murrieta's population is 111,000. Irvine's population is 266,000. Wouldn't an equivalent effort in the Irvine area have been more justifiable?
• The style of the whole enterprise is social-media-desultory. That it should revolve around a closed Facebook group reflects a clubbiness that doesn't bode well.
• For something that's shaping up as such a major, big-bucks project, Houston seems oddly hands-off -- no publicity, no scheduled visits. It's a little like a rich and distant dad buying his son from a first marriage a Porsche but not paying much attention otherwise. Resources from the Busch Group itself or possibly the Diocese of Orange (probably not San Bernardino, though) seem to be involved for planning, vendor selection, and project management -- but are skill sets being transferred to Houston at all?

I keep wanting to impute a plan and a vision to Bp Lopes here somehow, and I keep finding pieces that might almost make a puzzle picture, but it never quite comes together.

Calfiornia Recalibration

In addition to my regular correspondent's comments on the Facebook page of the Murrieta group, another visitor remarked on the size of the project, which drove me to take a closer look. If you haven't had a look, go here and scroll down. Don't be put off by the random photo of Chesterton or the campy St George, you have to dig a bit. One thing that's made it hard for me to take the project more seriously is the amateurishness behind this presentation.

In fact, the photo of the Pentecost mass shows a crowd filling the space. However, some pieces of this puzzle don't quite fit. My regular correspondent points out that the work being done on this space represents a major financial outlay, and I agree. In fact, it seems to indicate that an experienced contractor and an architectural firm are involved. This would be what a diocese would require in such a project -- in poking around the web, I've seen diocesan guidelines for construction projects, which require serious planning, review, and approval. For comparison, this is what's required in current expansion plans at our diocesan parish.

Houston simply does not have these resources, which makes me think that this project is being supervised and financed with the help of channels outside the OCSP. This is clearly something bigger than has otherwise been undertaken by the OCSP. I'm now beginning to realize that this is what caused the joint letter from Bps Lopes and Barnes -- the size of the project must have come to Barnes's attention, and it probably led to a serious sit-down over what was going on.

However, to call the project a "mission", which is the word used in the bishops' letter, is disingenuous. As my regular correspondent points out, "the term 'mission' is not used in the OCSP, which has three categories: group-in-formation, quasi-parish, and parish." I'm not sure exactly what a Catholic canonical mission consists of, but an Anglican mission is not financially self-sustaining, and its budget and decisions come from the diocese, not a vestry. If the size of the Murrieta facility is any indication, if it's a "mission" of the Irvine group, the tail is wagging the dog.

So this is a big deal, and my guess is that Bp Barnes saw this before any lay observers did, and there had to be a sit-down to get it past him. One issue is how little publicity there has been about this project, despite its size. This is another indication of the amateurishness behind the OCSP. If this is something worthy of the effort and investment, why is it such a secret? Shouldn't this be the subject of a professional announcement from Houston? If they don't want to upset Bp Barnes by making a big deal of it, why bother with the effort at all?

My guess is that the money behind this is coming from Mr Busch of the Busch Group, which owns the building where the Irvine group has been meeting. An adult -- indeed, a wealthy philanthropic adult -- would require adult supervision of a project that is clearly going to run close to seven figures. One thing that's going to have to change at some point is the guy who publicizes the effort with campy St Georges is going to have to be told to put his efforts in places where they can be more effectively used, and Houston is going to have to wake up to this.

Someone must have gone to Mr Busch, or some equivalent donor, with a serious proposal that included realistic projections. The size of the Pentecost crowd suggests there may have been some basis for these. This may be reflected in the apparent association of Fr Barbour with a renewed California effort. We'll have to see.

On the other hand, God is not mocked. The same guy whose idea of outreach has previously been beer breakfasts and whiskey barbecues is going to have to be serioused-up or put in a much subordinate role. Houston is going to have to become a much more professional operation to sustain something like this as well.

California Realignment?

My regular correspondent, an avid reader of OCSP Facebook tea leaves, reports on apparently related developments at the Blessed John Henry Newman group in Irvine and the new Holy Martyrs storefront in Murrieta -- again, these are more than an hour apart even in Sunday morning traffic. The report:

The BJHN, Irvine FB page has announced that Fr Hugh Barbour, O. Praem will be "regularly" celebrating the Sunday 11 am mass there as of this Sunday. Fr Barbour is described as the "long time prior of the Abbey from 1995-2017...now current chaplain to Catholic Answers." FB post also mentions that he grew up in South Pasadena and is a convert from the Episcopal Church. Any more interesting details are omitted.

Fr Barbour is something of a heavyweight in Catholic circles. His official thumbnail reads,

Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem., is a Norbertine of St. Michael's Abbey in Silverado, California. He grew up in South Pasadena and is a convert from the Episcopal Church. After earning a bachelor’s degree in classics from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Fr. Hugh entered St. Michael's in 1982 and was ordained a priest in 1990. He earned a license in patristic theology at the Augustinianum and a doctorate in philosophy at the Angelicum in Rome. He has taught philosophy at St. Michael’s to the Abbey's junior professed seminarians studying for the priesthood since 1992 and was prior of the abbey from 1995 until 2017. Fr. Hugh has been active over the years in weekend parish ministry and in giving talks and retreats; he has served as chaplain of the St. Thomas More Society of Orange County and as censor deputatus of the Diocese of Orange, and he is a knight commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre. He began his chaplaincy at Catholic Answers in September 2017.

Starting with just that information, he puts any OCSP priest other than the bishop to shame. In fact, given his experience as a religious superior, it seems to me that he's the sort of person who should be much closer to the bishop than he is -- or indeed, at least someone who might be giving serious guidance to the sketchy collection of ex-Protestants Fr Bartus has been assembling in California up to now. Fr Barbour is also a son of the late Fr Carroll Barbour, the revered, although openly gay, rector of St Thomas Hollywood, our former TEC parish. Fr Hugh delivered the homily at Fr Carroll's retirement mass.

What this means is difficult to say. It appears that Fr Hugh was ousted from his position in the abbey last year, although he is only 58, still quite young for a Catholic priest. He appears no longer to live at the abbey and is currently listed in bulletins at Our Lady of Grace, El Cajon, CA, as "in residence". I take "in residence" to mean that he lives in the rectory and takes masses and hears confessions according to a schedule there, but he has a day job elsewhere in the Church. El Cajon is 91 miles from Irvine and a 90-minute Sunday morning drive.

Fr Jack Barker, retired from the Diocese of San Bernardino, also continues to celebrate masses at both BJHN and the new Murrieta storefront. However, Fr Barker is in his seventies and has had health issues.

What this means for Fr Bartus is difficult to say. Fr Barbour is more than a supply priest, and it's difficult for me to imagine him taking orders from Fr Bartus, given his age, experience, and education, although my impression of Barbour -- by coincidence, I sat in the same row with him once on a flight from LAX to New Orleans with a young boy traveling unaccompanied between us -- is that he's a very patient and good-humored man. But I don't think I'd mess with him.

My regular correspondent says,

The seating capacity of the Queen of Life chapel is only 65, and Fr Bartus is presumably still celebrating the Saturday vigil and the Sunday 9 am mass. Holy Martyrs looks potentially larger and the renovations and fittings---pews, altar rails, pulpit, altar with reredos---must be costing thousands of dollars. Instagram page shows an organ with six singers around it, labelled "choir practice."

There will be three weekday DW masses in addition to the Sunday celebration. Website outlines plans for Religious Ed, KofC, as well as the home school co-op. My bet is that the plan is for this to be the flagship location of the "SoCal Ordinariate." Of course this has yet to come to fruition, but the renovations and furnishings represent the only significant financial investment SoCal has made in six years other than some very fancy vestments.

However -- I double checked -- the Sunday morning masses at BJHN are 9:00 and 11:00. If we assume the 9:00 mass -- not sure if it has music, or if it's DW -- takes at least 45 minutes, this means it lets out at 9:45 or later, which doesn't allow Fr Bartus much time to make the hour's drive to Murrieta. So I'm dubious about the idea that he can do a 9:00 mass in Irvine and an 11:00 in Murrieta.

Also, the official word from the bishops implies that the Murrieta group is small, and the group is a mission:

Several families from southwest Riverside County who come from this tradition were traveling to Irvine each week to attend Mass at Blessed John Henry Newman. Based on this observed interest, Holy Martyrs of England and Wales was established as a mission of Blessed John Henry Newman in the greater Murrieta area.

We'll have to see what develops. But if there is a way for Bp Lopes to make productive use of Fr Barbour's talents, which may not be fully deployed right now, it could be a game-changer for the OCSP.

What Problem Was The Reformed Episcopal Church Trying To Solve?

George David Cummins, the leader of the 1873 break by the REC from TEC, was an unlikely candidate to be its first presiding bishop. He was only an assistant bishop in Kentucky, so he wasn't a major figure in TEC. In addition, as Guelzo points out, Anglo-Catholicism represented a major shift in agenda and market within TEC. In the first part of the 19th century, building on the Second Great Awakening and the rise of Jacksonian democracy, TEC, led by its Evangelical wing and with what looked like a strong church polity, seemed likely to become the most influential Protestant denomination, and at that point, there weren't that many Catholics to factor into the equation.

I think Guelzo's insight, that Protestantism, especially its more fundamentalist wing, was severely challenged by Lyell on geology is key. Edmund Gosse, recounting the crisis as it struck his father, mentions Lyell but Darwin far less, if at all -- the scientific basis for "old earth" appears to have been an earlier, and possibly stronger, challenge to Biblical literalism. By the time of The Origin of Species in 1859, the loss of influence by the evangelical wing of TEC was well under way.

By the same token, railroads, as a very visible early manifestation of technology, appeared in the US and the UK at roughly the same time in the 1830s, and in demonstrating the superiority of materialist technology -- and let's not forget, raising relative living standards, as all subsequent industrial technology would do -- undermined the traditional unworldly claims of religion. I've said before that the simultaneous successes of rail technology and the Oxford Movement aren't a coincidence.

My own somewhat idiosyncratic view is that William James's 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience was the first effective response to Hume, Lyell, and Darwin, at least by American Protestants, to this development, arguing that the hope of heaven was not the only solution that traditional religion offered to the human condition. The religious impulse is built into human nature, and it is meant to address problems beyond simple poverty and disease. Aquinas, of course, would not disagree.

But James was too late for the REC. I agree with Guelzo that the swift rise and dominance of the Anglo-Catholic faction in TEC reflected a shift in social class orientation, whereby Jacksonian primitive republicans were abandoned in favor of new elites made wealthy by industrial technology. The new style was friendly to wealth and ostentation, although Guelzo is also correct in saying it proved a distraction, not an answer, to the fundamental questions posed by the rising tide in living standards that lifted all boats, combined with the materialist threats to spirituality.

I think there are many similarities to the 1873 REC break and the "continuing" movement a century later. The biggest is that in both cases, as Douglas Bess pointed out with the "continuers", TEC took no notice. The REC had no focus beyond a certain class-based resentment against the TEC majority, and it quickly subdivided into its own conflicts over liturgy and vestments. The "continuers" have fared no differently, with the original ACC splitting over personalities and the other splinter groups oriented mainly toward personal agendas and almost cult-like followings.

By the 21st century, both the REC and the "continuers" have sought to join larger groups, with the remnant REC going into the ACNA and presumably accepting the 1979 BCP, which would have been anathema to Cummins and Cheney, while four of the biggest "continuing" groups are now proposing some type of merger with the PNCC. It's worth pointing out that if this were to take place, the numbers involved would be some multiple of the membership of the OCSP, which has not made a significant dent in the "continuing" movement.

This brings me to my question here: what problem was the REC trying to solve? I would guess that a major part of the REC's failure was that it never clearly defined what the problem was -- Cummins and his allies apparently resented the success of the Anglo-Catholic movement, but resentment isn't a program. On the other hand, the real problem, the one Guelzo identifies posed by Hume, Lyell, and Darwin, went far beyond preferences in liturgy and vestments but doesn't seem to have been clearly identified by either side.

Anglicanorum coetibus is rather plainly trying to appeal to the resentment wing of Anglicanism. Resentment is not a program, and it isn't a selling point.

Anglo-Catholicism And Darwin

Just yesterday I ran across a remarkable passage in Guelzo's For the Union of Evangelical Christendom:

The publication of Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (three volumes 1830-1833) and then of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 turned the entire Baconian, empirical, common-sense, natural-law apologetic completely on its head by showing on precisely the same Baconian, empirical, common-sense, natural-law principles as those espoused by Butler, Paley, Hodge, and McIlvaine that the description of the creation and providence of natural world found in the Bible was simply unthinkable. From that point on, the Evangelicals were thrown on the defensive, and a stampede to Romantic escapism in American culture commenced. . . . Many historians have chronicled this movement into Romantic revolt in terms of individuals or movements, but they have usually missed how perfectly it was embodied in one of the largest, wealthiest, and most influential of American institutions, the Episcopal Church. Anglo-Catholic ritualism served for late Victorian Anglo-American culture the same purpose that the Paley-Butler-Hodge gospel of rationality had once served in the heyday of commercial capitalism, in that the silver plates and rich brocades of Anglo-Catholic ornament reflected the transition of capitalism from the limited horizons of eighteenth-century commercial capitalism to the unprecedented power of industrial capitalism and the new patterns of international finance that accompanied it. The sacred symbols of the Anglo-Catholics -- such as Ralph Adams Cram's Gothic cathedrals -- were also the ultimate symbols of Victorian affluence, and taken together they represent a new attempt to rationalize the aggressive power of the industrial marketplace without wholly repudiating it. (p 190)

I am about 85% with Guelzo here. The threat modern geology, including fossil evidence of wholly extinct kinds of animals, posed to evangelical Christianity was covered in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907), whch I studied as an undergraduate, as well as Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. We've talked about Ralph Adams Cram recently here, and I saw in St Thomas Fifth Avenue precisely what Guelzo seems to see. The Lambeth Conferences began in 1867 in direct response to Darwin's Origin of Species.

However, I don't think there's ever been a whole lot of empricism or rationality in sola scriptura - sola fides Protestantism, which Guelzo seems to conflate with a greater spectum of Christianity. Retreat into romanticism isn't the actual Catholic response to the challenges of Darwin and Hume, if it is in fact the Anglo-Catholic response. Ven Fulton Sheen seems to have seen Freud and Marx as greater threats to Catholic Christianity by the time of his 1950s broadcasts -- to which, as a Thomist, he offered authentically rationalist responses -- but an equivalent rationalist response to Darwin and Hume is certainly available.

Edward Feser and Bp Barron, both Thomists, have dealt extensively with the opposition to natural religion offered by Hume and Kant -- see Feser's Five Proofs and Barron's numerous YouTube videos on the "new atheists".

Effective opposition to Darwin has begun to emerge since the 1990s from a number of quarters, although it appears that the Intelligent Design movement, an essentially deist position, has begun to lose steam amid controversy. Paley's watchmaker argument, to which Guelzo indirectly refers, may be challenged by Darwin, so I'll go along with him there, but Paley is a Protestant, not a rationalist, and Darwin can be seen to fail on the basis of rational inconsistencies.

As Berlinski, a non-observant Jew but a scientific rationalist, points out, Darwinian natural selection is not a scientific theory in that it cannot be expressed mathematically. It cannot be confirmed via empirical testing or reproduction of results. It violates established scientific principles like the second law of thermodynamics. As Fr Ripperger, a Thomist, points out, it violates rational principles like the principle of sufficient reason, while Feser points out that Paley's explanation of teleological purpose is insufficient, since it reflects an incomplete understanding of first cause.

Guelzo is chronicling the position of Evangelical Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism as formative influences in 19th and 20th-century American culture, so I can't really fault him, and he is correctly pointing out the ultimate failure of both the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic approaches to the intellectual threats to Christianity that emerged by the first half of the 19th century. He's also quite correct in recognizing that Anglo-Catholcism was much more successful in offering a solution that allowed elites to temporize with the problem by retreating into historical fantasy, alhough in the process, the fantasy misrepresented actual Roman Catholicsm.

The actual Catholic responses to Hume and Darwin have been much more robust, addressing them (with non-Catholic support) on scientific and rational grounds. I think we need to go to these responses for further progress in re-Catholicizing the culture -- but I think Guelzo's observations suggest that Anglo-Catholicism, as an essentially inauthentic development within Protestant Christianity (and it arose prior to the arrival in the US of many more Catholics in the late 19th century), is not a resource the Church can rely on.

This is yet another reason to shut the ordinariates down and redirect the resources, however minimal they may be, elsewhere.

Anglicanorum Coetibus And Lack Of Seriousness

Respondoing to an earlier post on how available weekday masses and other devotional resources are to OCSP members, my regular correspondent noted, "About half of the OCSP parishes/groups have a mass at least four days a week other than Sunday," but added, "Those which do not have regular weekday masses tend not to have irregular ones either, even on holy days of obligation."

My surmise is that if you asked Houston about this sort of thing, either you'd get a reply saying "we don't keep track of this," or if they did, they'd find a reason not to give an informative answer. A reasonable next question, though, would be to ask if those OCSP priests who don't offer mass on holy days of obligation take the trouble to point out that Catholics must still attend mass on those days and suggest they find a nearby diocesan parish that offers them, typically at several convenient times.

Actually, I'd say that if some of those members did go to the 12:15 All Saints' Day mass at a diocesan parish, they might discover a whole new dimension -- our parish has music at that mass, with cantors of professional-level talent. They wouldn't find this at their storefront or basement chapel. Why isn't this happening? Certianly nobody on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog has mentioned it. I'm wondering if lack of seriousness is involved here somewhere, or perhaps spiritual sloth, which would be a close relative.

And a reasonable follow-up might be to ask of the lay members whether they actually do this. And here, I'm just not sure. The impression I have from the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, which, let's face it, is about the only visible web presence from OCSP laity, is that it seems to be conducted by members of the smallest groups with the least options for observance -- yet they're the most publicly enthusiastic. The little Pasadena offshoot, for instance, which is the one with which Mr Coulombe is associated, is now on hiatus pending the ordination of its permanent priest.

If I were to raise this in a question-and-answer with someone from Houston, I suspect I'd get an answer along the line that "Well, we're growing. And we're growing quickly! It's true that as many as half the new groups can't offer weekday masses, or even masses on days of obligation. But they'll soon be able to!"

It would be churlish to keep insisting in such a session that I don't see this growth, that in fact the startups often just stop when the priest retires or moves on, and the groups, even if they continue with two dozen members, don't grow and don't move into better quarters.

There are various facets to Anglo-Catholicism -- most recently I've been looking at medieval romanticism, but I still keep coming back to Fr David Miller's remarks in my TEC confirmation class, that Anglo-Catholics want the prestige of calling themselves Catholic without paying the dues real Catholics have to pay. To what extent is Anglicanorum coetibus trying to appeal to a market of unserious people?

Reflections On An Amateur Show

I haven't dwelt on this constantly, but posts over the last few weeks have brought me to reexamine the events of 2012 as they applied to St Mary of the Angels. Let's look at some of the facts as we now know them, based on the education I've had over a six-year period:

• Msgr Steenson appointed Mrs Chalmers, a canon lawyer without corporate experience as far as I can tell, as "chancellor" of the OCSP. Apparently Steenson didn't understand the difference between a chancellor in an Anglican diocese, who is the general counsel, and a Catholic chancellor, who is not a lawyer but is a notary and archivist -- or maybe he thought Mrs Chalmers could be both.
• Nobody, at least not among the St Mary's vestry or Houston, seems to have understood the actual value of the St Mary's property. Various chats I've had with vestry members indicate they relied on assessed property value in the early years of the story, usually talking in the range of $8 million. It's likely that if the property were to sell for redevelopment as luxury condos, the value would be considerably more. It wasn't until Abp Hepworth got involved that anyone began to factor in the value of the Della Robbia altarpiece, which puts the total value of the property in the high eight figures.
• I simply don't know what sort of resources the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange has put into the acquisition and remodeling of the former Crystal Cathedral property. It's worth more, but the value of the St Mary of the Angels property required something much more like the attention the Diocese of Orange has put into their project. One assumes the legal work wasn't done by a canon lawyer married to a member of the Houston clique.
• The reason Houston put the admission of the St Mary's parish into the OCSP on hold in early 2012 has never been completely clear. Statements from Canon Morello of the ACA at the time suggest he had been in communication with Houston. Other statements suggest that at least a tacit arrangement had been reached with Msgr Steenson that the ACA would get rid of Fr Kelley, solve non-existent financial irregularities, and at some later date turn the parish over to Houston with Msgr Steenson's fingerprints kept off the purge of Fr Kelley. The priorites here couldn't be more confused.
• I can't imagine a competent attorney experienced in high-value real estate transfers allowing this kind of amateur game-playing, and the result was only to be expected. Msgr Steenson, apparently without competent advice, allowed himself to be had by Canon Morello, himself a rank amateur.

What I'm coming to see is that there's been a continuity in Houston between Msgr Steenson and Bp Lopes. When I look at what I'm learning of how things are done in a Catholic diocese, I recognize that the dioceses have institutional knowledge, as well as the ability to rely on specialists, including specialists in fields like art and real estate law. Msgr Steenson had zero experience in a Catholic diocese, and he didn't have staff with institutional knowledge to give him any sort of useful advice.

Houston belatedly recognized that the ParishSoft implementation failed because the OCSP somehow assumed that lay leadership in vestries, as well as competent lay staff, that could be taken for granted in TEC, would l also be available to the OCSP, but it wasn't. (For that matter, most OCSP clergy weren't experienced top-tier TEC clergy -- they were also-rans in TEC or "continuers" with tiny groups.) Even now in Houston, there doesn't appear to be staff with experience and institutional knowledge of how things like vocations are handled in Catholic dioceses.

I haven't carefully reviewed Bp Lopes's vita, and I don't have the experienced Catholic's ability to read signs in these cases. But I have the impression that he got his parish ticket punched as a diocesan associate but moved pretty quickly into the Vatican bureaucracy. As a result, I question how much diocesan experence he's had -- in looking at more typical bishop careers, they seem to cycle first into assistant bishop positions, where I would think they're exposed to a wide variety of practical situations that occur in dioceses.

Instead, Bp Lopes seems to have made his career primarily as a liturgist, and a specialist in one of the more esoteric fields of liturgy at that. This is probably one reason why we don't see a whole lot of change between the Steenson and Lopes regimes -- both men are amatuers at running Catholic dioceses. Things might be better if you put a real bishop in the job -- but what real bishop, looking at a situation where no seriouis resources are available, would want to get involved?

Everyone's Out Of Step But Us

My regular correspondent comments,

It is possible members of a small group meeting for Sunday DW mass in a cafetorium or whatever to participate in learning, worship, and social opportunities offered by the diocese in which they are living, to augment the paucity of what they find within the OCSP. The websites/FB pages of some OCSP groups do try to mention diocesan activities of potential interest. A bigger obstacle than the size of the community is the attitude that "regular" Catholic parishes have got it wrong when it comes to liturgy and catechesis---that "out there" all is sloppiness, irreverence, and doctrinal liberalism. That is presumably the common bond between OCSP members and TLM types that Msgr Steenson tried to damp down, because of predictable blowback from many dioceses where the latter are a thorn in the bishop's side. "Everybody's out of step except us" is a common theme on the AC blog, for example.

I think the CDF has never fully appreciated the social implications of Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism. According to Guelzo's history of the REC, the opposition to Anglo-Catholicism in TEC from the 1840s through the 1860s was based in part on suspicion of Catholic immigration from Ireland and Germany. On the other hand, Anglo-Catholicism itself represents a "sanitized" version of Catholicism acceptable to the old American establishment, which could explain how it gained such popularity in the same period, compatible as it was with the medieval romanticism associated with the elites who felt threatend by industrialization. Mark Twain made fun of those enthralled with Sir Walter Scott.

It's worth noting that a similar development in the 1930s was the moderation of anti-Semitism among the Manhattan elites surrounding figures like Rockefeller Jr, allowing so-called "Episcopalian Jews" onto museum boards or into exclusive apartment buildings. "Episcopalianism" was (and to some extent still is) as much a style and signifier for social segregation as a Protestant denomination.

It's certainly worth asking whether such attitudes have bled through into how laity, and perhaps even some clergy, see Anglicanorum coetibus, although the normal posters at the Anglcanorum Coetibus Society blog are clearly wannabes and nothing like true elites. (Having known both types, I find them equally unpleasant.) But this could explain why at least some OCSP factions, all wannabes in any case, might wish to fantasize themselves "Episcopalian Catholics", and the last thing they'd ever want to do would be to mix with Catholics whom they see as low-status in diocesan parishes.

,Anglicanorum Coetibus And Catholicism 102

After five years as a Catholic and getting more involved in activities at a successful parish, I would say that in discovering new aspects of Catholicism like weekday masses and adoration, I'm moving toward Catholicism 102, although it's clear that I really haven't even gotten to the sophomore level yet. And there are many levels to go.

One thing that struck me at yesterday's Saturday morning mass was that it included awards for servers who were graduating from the server program and moving on to college. The mass was celebrated by the diocesan vocations director, who is in residence at the rectory and takes regular masses at the parish. He had a great deal to say about the parish server program -- from what I heard, I believe there are about 80 kids in it altogether, of whom about 40 were at the mass, and about a dozen were graduating.

I've read elsewhere that servers make up a pool of potential vocations. Our parish has two schools connected with it, and many of the servers are also students at the schools. The vocations director clearly had this in mind when addressing the servers, encouraging those graduating to continue involvement with the Church at the Newman Houses on their college campuses. This also brought me again to the recognition that Catholicism is normally a generational effort.

I've wondered, for instance, how Catholic parents can keep their children from going off the rails in current social condiitions. An answer I'd had for a while was to send them to a good Catholic school, as well as to set good examples at home and be sure the kids are instructed in the faith at home. But I'm realizing that to get the kids into a server program, especially if it's connected with the parish school, would be an additional help. But the only OCSP parish where this is remotely possible is Our Lady of the Atonement, although up until recently, the kids would need to have avoided Dcn Orr.

And this brings me to an additional problem: liturgy is only a small part of Catholicism, especially the parts you begin to learn about in Catholicism 102. But the routine explanation for Anglicanorum coetibus is almost entirely liturgical. Well, OK, let's grant that maybe some Anglicans (though not very many as things have shaken out) will feel more comfortable with becoming Catholic if they get a liturgy that mimics the BCP in some respects. But that's just the tip of the Catholic iceberg.

Where do these new Catholics go to get Catholicism 102? They're isolated in tiny communities, of which only a few have the resources to do much beyond clebrating DW mass in a basement chapel or storefront, whereas across town, there's probably a successful Catholic parish with maybe a school, a server program, licensed catechists, effective Bible study, frequent confessions with experienced confessors, weekday masses, and more. Yet the two dozen OCSP members seem to be told, at least tacitly, that they don't need to bother with this stuff, they'll get all they need at the storefront.

Now, let's say that one day I get to attend a quesstion and answer with Bp Lopes. I might pose a question to him based on this -- Bishop, of the several thousand OCSP members who are calling themselves Catholic, only a few hundred can avail themselves of resources in their communities that are routinely available to diocesan Catholics. What can be done to encourage them to go find these resources at parishes across town that provide them?

And more to the point, why shouldn't these new Catholics be registering at those parishes and getting with a serious program? Why are you doing this at all?

Late-Stage Schism And The Law Of Gravity

As well as the Creeds, I also believe in the law of gravity. I don't think either makes me someone who "yearns for authority or infallibility", as Mr Chadwick suggests. I think it just makes me prudent. I'll have more to say below about Mr Chadwick's posts.

At the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, Fr Seraiah refers to "someone who wants the Ordinariates to fail". I simply don't know if he has me in mind, but I will discuss the question of whether I want them to. I have a great deal of respect for Fr Seraiah, since he's been through a lot in becoming a Catholic priest, and he's one of a very few in the OCSP who've performed successfully in both diocesan and ordinariate roles -- and of that small number, in the short time we've seen them, two have so far failed utterly. So I have no beef at all with Fr Seraiah, and he and all other priests continue in my prayers.

But here we see Mr Wile E. Coyote in a typical moment of recognition that the law of gravity is about to apply to him in yet another case. Do I want him to fail? No -- nor do I think anyone in the audience wants him to fail, simply because the audience has a different set of expectations. Given the universe of circumstances governing him and the road runner, he is inevitably going to fail, and the audience will laugh in watching the inevitability play out.

It's hard for me not to think -- amd I'm sure he recognizes this himself -- that Fr Seraiah came out better than might be expected given the outcomes in 2012 for many other OCSP candidates. The denial of votum for David Moyer was simply the most public of those treated less well, and it led to the observation that the OCSP was dominated by a clique surrounding Msgr Steenson. I think the impression continues that those who proceeed to ordination aren't necessarily the best qualified, or indeed qualified at all, but simply happen to be in a position to make the OCSP look good for a particular moment.

If an organization, secular or holy, runs this way, the law of gravity is going to catch up with it. I don't "want" it to, any more than I "want" Mr Coyote to fall, but it's going to happen. In 2011-12, I wanted very much for St Mary of the Angels to go into the OCSP, but in large part due to factors within the OCSP itself, it's a very iffy question whether this will happen, or even if it does, whether it will happen in any way to allow the parish to continue viably. I still would like this to happen, but I have my doubts. I believe those doubts are prudent and realistic, which is why I just got back from Saturday morning mass at a diocesan parish.

Now let's get to Mr Chadwick, who lives in France but is somehow qualified to psychoanalyze me at a distance of roughly 5600 miles. He says,

We should begin by imagining the ideal world of this fellow. The entire planet is a suburb of some great American city in the 1950’s, every clean and in order. It is the collective society in which everyone followed the same curriculum through college, high school and university and joined the same grey lines to the rat race. The tensions between the churches – Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant and fundamentalist – largely follow the kind of cars people have and the plants they display in their windows. . . Individualism only began to enter the scene from the late 1960’s when the post-war order was challenged for its baseless certitudes.

I don't know what TV show he got this from; certainly it came from something like TV, although if someone now pays $60,000 a year for a college education, they'll still hear it there, too. But let's look at media figures in the US in the 1950s: Hugh Hefner. Liberace. James Dean. Marlon Brando. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ven Fulton Sheen. Billy Graham. Lenny Bruce. Elvis Presley. Chuck Berry. Fats Domino. Er, where's the conformity? What about literature? Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956). Kerouac, On the Road (1957). Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959). I was too young to read them right when they came out, but I did read them a few years later, like millions of others. Where's the conformity? Film and TV? High Noon (1952). Shane (1953). Vertigo (1958). The Wrong Man (1956). The Twilight Zone (1959). Where on earth is the collective, the gray lines in the rat race?

I notice that several bloggers seem to want to characterize me in the context of stereotypes about the US, when I question how much they know about the country at all, or for that matter, me. If they'll drop that stuff, I'll take them seriously. But in Mr Chadwick's case, I can't understand how he thinks the outcome could be other than it is for the G-4, the PNCC, and any other fringe group he might choose to join. The law of gravity applies to all of us. Isn't this at the basis of Aquinas's thought? But as he puts it, sin dulls the intellect. Best to get to a place where you can find sound teaching and valid sacraments.

Ordinariate Stew

A visitor remarks,

I have been following your blog and am always fascinated by the Anglican, Continuing, TEC, ACA, APA, DHC, etc, alphabet soup of Anglican Patrimonies. It occurred to me while considering them in light of the OCSP/Pastoral Provision what a lost opportunity this experiment has been for so many souls. It seems rather similar to the problem we seem to be having in America assimilating immigrants. When I was in grammar school (this will really date me) we learned that America was a great melting pot of ideas and cultures, the idea being when you came to America, you joined in, contributed your metal and became an indistinguishable part of the amalgam.

Nowadays, it seems they are teaching children America is more like a stew and each culture is like a chunk floating around and contributing flavor, still part of the soup but still able to be separated from it. Sadly, this new idea completely fails to uphold the American experiment at its core, E Pluribus Unum. I believe some in the OCSP and the Anglicanorm Coetibus Society types (represented by Fr. Hunwicke) are “stew mode” Catholics, whereas the join-in-and-be-fundamentally-changed by-the-Church people (represented by Fr. Longenecker) are now indistinguishable “amalgam” Catholics. With the growing animosity between the Ordinariates and the regular Dioceses, they become ever more separate.

The opportunity for run of the mill Catholics to experience the “fluff and feathers” during a Mass and regain a deeper appreciation for the Catholic Church as a patron of the Arts and of Sacred Music and how those things can enrich their spirituality becomes lost as regular Dioceses push back on the “traditionalist” mentality. The opportunity lost for the newly minted, hyphenated Catholics (or even those who still consider themselves Anglican in communion with the Holy See) is the wondrous spiritual richness of 2000 years of accumulated Roman Catholic tradition, devotions, and networking.

Both types of Catholics lose out in “stew mode”. The only winner I see in “stew mode” is the Roman Catholic hierarchy (the broth). The broth of the stew will remain long after the one or two chunks have been consumed, disintegrated or flicked out of the soup.

One question I continue to have that's under the "why are we doing this?" tab for Anglicanorum coetibus is that diocesan parishes typically observe a range of local customs derived from the nationalities or ethnicities represented among their membership. In California, uniquely Latin celebrations for first communion and the day of the dead are common. In our parish, there's a committee that advises the pastor on uniquely Filipino traditions. My wife and I simply find these a great deal of fun, and we're also honored when we can participate in some way.

For that matter, the papacy of St John Paul II brought a greater awareness of Polish traditions into the Church at large, with the veneration of new Polish saints. Our own parish, with few Polish members, has a recently-added shrine to St Faustyna Kowalska, as well as at least three statues of St John Paul himself. Statues of St Lorenzo Ruiz, a Filipino tortured by the Japanese in the 1600s, are common in our archdiocese. Why has no one proposed granny flats for Poles, Mexicans, or Filipinos? Why must there be a special compartment for Anglicans?

I would say that roughly half the hymns sung at our mass, from the standard hard cover missal, come from the Anglican tradition. These have clearly been absorbed into Catholic worship without any special treatment. On the other hand, it seems to me that the deliberate archaisms and Cranmerian prayers in the DW missal would not go over well at all. In part, this may be due to the Jacksonian leaning of Catholicism in the US, with thees and thous preferred mainly by the old Republican establishment -- but we need to be acutely aware that circumstances are changing, and the Ivy-educated, sociologically Episcopalian snobby elites are no longer Republican, while working-class ethnics, as well as legal immigrants, are no longer Democrat.

I think this misunderstanding of the US from bloggers in Canada, France, and the UK is partly behind reactions to my recent posts here. Barring more urgent developments, I'll address some of these in subsequent posts, although news from Mrs Bush, Mr Andrews, and Bp Marsh would cause a pre-emption.

Late-Stage Schsim?

My regular correspondent commented on yesterday's post:

I am sure that former REC clergy and others educated at non-denominational Protestant seminaries who have been ordained for the OCSP fully intended to accept the Catholic position on the sacraments, along with the other tenets of the Catechism. I would imagine that intellectual acceptance is not entirely a substitute for a lifetime's Sitz im Leben, but one has to start somewhere.

I would not completely rule out the possibility of one day having a chat over coffee with our archdiocesan vocations director about this issue, although I recognize that realistically, he would need to have a great deal of trust in me to discuss such matters openly. However, several things bother me about my correspondent's view. I recall a priest saying that he had a New Testament course in seminary from a very learned Jewish professor. The man probably knew Paul's epistles better than anyone -- but as the priest put it, he probably didn't believe a word of them.

The mere time span that seems to be involved in accepting some very Protestant OCSP candidates for the priesthood -- often a matter of months -- suggests that whatever evaluation they receive is minimal. On the other hand, seminarians who go through a diocesan vocations program are evaluated over a much longer period of time, and I would think that an experienced vocations director has his own secret recipes. I'm sorry, just because Joe Blow has been to a Reformed seminary, couldn't get a career going as a Protestant, but suddenly becomes available to lead a storefront OCSP group in Podunk, doesn't make him just the thing as a Roman Catholic priest, no matter what he's been coached to say in interviews.

And remember, as far as I can see, the ex-TEC priests filling in as "vocations directors" in the OCSP aren't equivalent to the vocations resources available in dioceses. As are most other resources, such as expertise in acquiring serious objets or valuable property transfers, that Houston simply doesn't have. My correspondent continues,

My bigger issue is the motivation behind the initial investigation of the claims of the Catholic church, and how it affects these men's ministry going forward. My impression is that many were drawn to "continuing" or fringe denominations because standards were falling, everything was going to hell in a handbasket, etc. Nobody's got it right except this little group. Except that this little group is getting littler. The claims of the Church, combined with its size and power, made it worthwhile to reexamine Catholic doctrine from a more accepting standpoint. But the real attraction is what the Church has in common with the basement chapel pro-Diocese of North and South America: rules, and ways of dealing with people who don't follow them.

Huddling in the OCSP is a good way to avoid dealing with the reality that the Church is a diverse, messy organisation not unlike the one we are reading about in the Book of Acts this season. Coming to terms with the difference in style between Pope Benedict and Pope Francis has been a struggle; lots of posts about congenial leaders like Cardinals Sarah and Burke. Unlike assenting to, say, Marian doctrines, or baptismal regeneration, the yearning for unquestioned authority comes from a deep, life-long place.

I would exclude some OCSP clergy from this analysis, of course. Many were always Anglo-Catholics. But a significant number are simply opportunists.

I would also refer to Fr Dwight Longenecker's roughly decade-long struggle to become a Catholic priest. Our parish is currently on Numbers in Jeff Cavins's Great Journey course, and it's clear that Israel didn't reach the promised land without a great deal of testing, punishment, and false starts. Fr Longenecker seems to have had equivalent testing, but at the end of it, he speaks as a Catholic priest without a qualifier, not one occupying the granny flat for the Anglicans.

I put the OCSP in the context of Bp Hewett's address to his "continuing" synod. Hewett is recognizing, and apparently speaking from a consensus of his colleagues in the G-4 and the PNCC, that they're learning what life is like in late-stage schism, but they seem to have some inchoate notion that if they come up with some kind of new organizational structure, they can survive, or at least postpone collapse to some point beyond their retirement.

It's a little like the alcoholic who thinks that maybe if he moves to Idaho, things will get better. How is the OCSP any different from the new organization Hewett, Marsh, et al will concoct with the PNCC? I suspect the Catholic part of PNCC will gain them some sort of borrowed prestige -- but I think this is also a motive for those who've clutched to Anglicanorum coetibus for a life ring as well. They like the prestige of being Catholic, but they're still at heart hyphenated Catholics hoping to keep their special little group afloat in some form, at least until they can retire.

I commend for reflection remarks just the other day from Fr Hunwicke:

I am very much tempted to think that Ordinariate members should see themselves, not as "former Anglicans", but as "Anglicans", yet more proudly qualifying that already proud term by the phrase "in full communion with the Holy See".

I gather Melkites rather like calling themselves "Orthodox in communion with Rome".

This is the most prestigious blogger in any of the ordinariates, but he sees himself quite clearly sitting in the granny flat and happy as a bug with it. I am lucky that circumstances will almost certainly prevent me from ever getting within an ocean and a continent of this guy.

Which Anglican Patrimony Do You Prefer?

Until we hear more from Mrs Bush, Mr Andrews, and Bp Marsh, let's return to Allen Guelzo's For the Union of Evangelical Christendom, his history of the Reformed Episcopal Church. A very illuminating point he makes for me is that the Evangelical movement that caused explosive growth in TEC in the early 19th century had very little to do with what we would now call "low church" -- in my time as an Episcopalian, I went to parishes high, low, and broad, but with few exceptions, the parish and clergy were essentially with the program. There might be no stained glass in New England, but there were stations of the cross on the wall. Or the architecture could be 1950s yucch, but the clergy were vested as usual, and whether the eucharist was Rite One or Rite Two, it was from the prayer book.

The Evangelical Episcopalians of the early 19th century had much more in common with what we would now call "non-denominational" Protestant churches. Liturgy and doctrine were seen as unnecessary impediments to the working of the Holy Spirit. The Evangelical Episcopalians had a very Reformed outlook on the sacraments; they did not effect any spiritual transformation. Baptism was effectively going through motions of what would hopefully occur later on, the direct "born again" experience. Communion was in effect no different from a Civil War reenactment, simply a historical exercise meant to make something more vivid.

A major point of contention was wording in the prayer book and the XXXIX Articles on whether baptism makes the believer "regenerate". There was particular objection to the prayer book passage that read, "We call upon thee for this Child (or this thy Servant), that he, coming to thy holy Baptism, may receive remission of sin, by spiritual regeneration." According to cases discussed by Guelzo, it was common for Evangelical TEC clergy simply to omit the sentences in the baptismal service that used the word, and bishops tended to look the other way.

This is in contrast to more recent opinion that "low church" Anglicans take the XXXIX Articles seriously (or literally), while high- and broad-churchmen ignore them. The 19th century Evangelicals felt they contained latent Catholic doctrine and rejected them. For that matter, the Evangelicals tended not to use the BCP liturgy at all, preferring more free-form prayer meetings.

The Oxford Movement, however, gained immediate acceptance in many TEC circles when it began to emerge in the 1830s, a time that in the US corresponded with Andrew Jackson's presidency from 1829 to 1837. While the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the Reform Act 1832 influenced the rise of medieval romanticism and Anglo-Catholicism in the UK, Jackson's populism had a very similar impact in the US. Frontiersmen, immigrants, small farmers, and the working class tended to favor Jackson, while respectable middle class and establishment people favored the Whigs, who eventually became the contemporary Republicans. Similar divisions in the US persist, reflected in more recent strong feelings over figures like Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Trump, both of whom had and have strong populist appeal.

Guelzo points out that much of the nascent Anglo-Catholic style that developed over the mid-19th century had an element of deliberately baiting the Evangelicals. There were also equivalent movements in both the US and the UK to revise the prayer book (and in the UK, the law) to prohibit Anglo-Catholic vestments and rubrics. In TEC, the matter came to a head in the case of Charles Edward Cheney, an Evangelical rector of a Chicago parish, who was suspended, tried, and depoased in 1869 for telling a Baptist colleague that he deliberately omitted the wording about regeneration in the baptismal rite.

His bishop, a contradictory figure who had favored the Confederacy in the war but who had begun to adopt a Republican Anglo-Catholicism, rigged the trial to ensure Cheney's conviction. Cheney and his attorneys argued that it wasn't unusual at all for Evangelical clergy to omit wording in the baptismal rite, but bishops normally looked the other way over it. The bishop prevailed, but it caused a rift in TEC that led to the formation of the REC.

Regardless of the outcome, this provides additional support for Frederick Kinsman's remarks two generations later that as a practical matter, Anglican bishops were unable to enforce doctrine. And unquestionably, in the view of the CDF, clergy applying to become priests in the OCSP from either the REC or TEC are equally Anglican. One might answer that these are old controversies that no longer interest anyone, but as Fr Longenecker points out, a more realistic view would be maybe they do, maybe they don't. What do the OCSP candidates who went to Reformed seminaries actually believe, anyhow? Do we care?

So which Anglican do we prefer, or are we in the end broad-church? And if so, why are we bothering to become Catholic?

The Second Time As Farce?

I've had a day to reflect on Mrs Bush's abortive visit to the May 6 St Mary of the Angels parish meeting. I've chatted about it with my wife, a retired attorney, but I haven't discussed it with anyone at St Mary of the Angels, and I want to clarify again that I'm not a voting member of the parish, I'm not on the vestry, and I don't have any specific knowledge of its legal strategy or the advice they've had from counsel. And I'm not an attorney.

But here are some thoughts.

• The visit from Mrs Bush came almost six years to the day from the first seizure of the parish by the dissident group and the ACA in 2012. This occurred in the context of a temporary restraining order from a judge enjoining the parish from holding a meeting and granting the ACA control of the property. The curious thing is that the letter from Tyler Andrews, relatively new to the case, threatens an equivalent injunction, but none has so far occurred.
• The dissidents and the ACA in 2012 came armed with the injunction. This time, they didn't have one. Instead, Mrs Bush came with some of her few remaining adherents -- Mr Omeirs now seems to be unavailable for such efforts, and the Kangs have long since dropped away. Even Bp Williams seems to have been too busy, when in 2012, Bp Strawn appeared with Canon Morello.
• So what did Mrs Bush and her small coterie expect to accomplish? They handed out a packet of letters, and they uttered some brief objections to the meeting before being encouraged to leave. The parish then proceeded to revise its bylaws in a way that will complicate the ACA's legal situation. How was this worth the time and mileage for anyone in this group? Even the letter from Mr Andrews doesn't seem to have had an effect on the advice the parish has received from its counsel.
• Let's add to the mix that by Mr Lancaster's account to Judge Murphy, he hadn't been paid by the Bush-ACA group since 2015, when Citibank moved out and stopped paying rent. The Bush-ACA group doesn't seem to have money to spend on attorneys -- it's hard to see how the attorneys who argued the appeal with the Appellate Division of LA Superior Court were paid, and it appears that Mrs Bush is being very careful about spending more from her personal resources.
• My wife thinks that one reason she and the ACA didn't come armed with an injunction this time -- even though Mr Andrews has threatened it -- is that my wife estimates that an ex parte hearing to obtain one would cost in the neighborhood of $10-20,000, but especialy in light of Judge Jones's reversal on the arguments of the 2012 injunction, their chances of getting it would be iffy.
• Mrs Bush and her group no longer have standing to sue as a putative "rector, wardens, and vestry". The ACA would need to be the plaintiff itself in any further legal action. Interestingly, Mrs Bush's stated objections to the May 6 meeting don't seem to have involved any denial of her particular rights or those of a putative vestry; she appeared to speak, insofar as she was coherent, only on behalf of the ACA, although Bp Williams was not there to back her up.
• For the ACA to bring suit against the parish, apparently mainly for past actions regarding Fr Kelley and whatever the elected vestry may or may not have done under legal authority, would in effect require the ACA to reprise legal issues it raised unsuccessfully in 2012-14 -- that as the "highest ecclesiastical authority", its rights supersede those of the parish's founding documents under neutral principles of law. However, the state court of appeals established that legal precedent means the issue must be resolved according to neutral principles of law, and this has already been litigated.
• The ACA might still bring a suit, but, as I discussed this with my wife, it would require many, many hours for new attorneys to review six years of litigation, at least half a dozen cases, and an enormous cache of documents to familiarize themselves with the case. My wife points out that when Mr Lancaster left the case, he took a great deal of institutional knowledge with him, which new attorneys would need to re-learn before they even brought suit.
• The cost of this would be hundreds of thousands. The queston is where Mrs Bush could come up with this money -- she's well off, but broadly speaking, she's still middle class, and she's 88 years old. The ACA, by the admission of Bp Marsh's colleague Bp Hewett, is on the verge of collapse. Even if it had a realistic chance of seizing the St Mary of the Angels property, this would be many years in the future, at a time when the ACA might reasonably be expected not to exist in anything like its current form.

These are remarkably stubborn people.