More Thoughts On The Instant Ordination

The visitor who sent me the copy of the St Luke's bulletin added the comment,

To be clear, Fr Whitehead seems like a good man and I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him... so this is not a referendum on his qualifications or suitability for Holy Orders.

Another visitor e-mailed,

Well there WAS St Ambrose :)

The link said,

He was a catechumen preparing for baptism when the bishop of Milan died in 374. A chaotic crowd formed outside the cathedral to elect a bishop, and Ambrose, who had gone out to the crowd to quieten them down, was unanimously acclaimed bishop of Milan after a child cried out “Ambrose for bishop! Ambrose for bishop!” He was thus baptized, confirmed, ordained a deacon, a priest, and then a bishop all on the same day.

Well, this predates the Church's more recent policies, still many centuries old, on ordination. In addition, we must assume that the crowd that insisted on Ambrose for bishop had an intuitive, and possibly Spirit-guided, sense of his suitability. He turned out to be a saint and Doctor of the Church, after all. I assume Bp Lopes can't just say the Spirit told him to ordain Fr Whitehead -- in these times, the Spirit would normally work through a diocesan vocations director, after all.

But let's back up. The first OCSP ordinary, Msgr Steenson, attracted criticism from both Anglican and Catholic observers for the way in which -- especially having met with Cardinal Ratzinger to explore a personal prelature for Episcopalians in 1993 -- he nevertheless continued as a TEC priest and then became a TEC bishop, only to jump ship for Rome at a time convenient to himself, having exploited his rise to episcopacy to accomplish this. What did this say about Steenson's integrity?

He was kind of a sneak, huh? Maybe a bit of a weasel?

What of Fr Whitehead? Looks like he undertook some sort of secret process, however abbreviated in his case, to move from the REC to the Catholic Church, having presumably not informed his REC superiors of his intent. At least Whitehead's parents knew about the ordination in advance. The REC, probably not. Surprise!

A bit of a sneak. A weasel? Reminds me of what good priests say to Catholic women who think about sleeping with their boyfriends: You're going to sleep with a guy who admits by his actions that marriage isn't that important. Fr Whitehead seems like a good man, says my visitor.

And I think of men like Fr Longenecker, who resigned his Anglican orders and struggled for nearly a decade to become a Catholic priest, supporting himself with secular jobs in the meantime. Or very good men who resigned Anglican orders in anticipation of joining the OCSP who were never accepted in the end and now have moved on to secular careers.

But Bp Lopes thinks it's a good idea Whitehead should be a Catholic priest. So good an idea he can't even miss a single paycheck.

No Kidding, There's Been At Least One Instant Ordination

A couple of months ago, in response to an apparently incoherent complaint about me sent to our parish by a visitor who'd sussed out what parish that might be, a diocesan priest asked me about this blog. In part of my explanation, I blurted out the words "instant ordinations". I meant them as hyperbole, in implied air quotes, and I think the priest understood them as such. In any case, he seems to have decided I was neither bitterly angry nor crazy, and he moved on, musing on whether the complainer spoke English as a native.

Note to semi-literate complainers: I keep information like our parish confidential in large part because Fr ____ has better things to do with his time.

But since that discussion, I haven't been entirely satisfied with those words, since while I meant them as a rhetorical exaggeration, I still didn't feel like I'd been completely fair. Now, not so much. A visitor sent me the May issue of The Epistle, the bulletin of the St Luke's OCSP parish in Washington, DC. We read, in part:

When Matt Whitehead is ordained a Catholic priest on May 31st, it will be the culmination of a moving story: from Baptist to Catholic priest. Whitehead will be ordained by the Most Reverend Steven J. Lopes, bishop of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston, Texas. . . . Matt will be received and ordained at the same time.

I'm sorry, this is an instant ordination, without quotes, air or otherwise. That the details are buried in the story, even by a writer probably not well catechized at that, suggests some measure of shame that this has taken place. The details suggest, but aren't completely clear in the story, that now-Fr Whitehead had been in the US Army Chaplain Corps under the sponsorship of the Reformed Episcopal Church, where he had been ordained since about 2009.

According to the article, he attended Dallas Theological Seminary, which says of itself, "every ministry degree program at DTS covers all 66 books of the Bible and devotes an entire semester to studying the Trinity," Quick question, Father -- how many books are in the Bible? Best bet, he'll answer, "Gosh, I know there's a different answer there, but I'm just not sure." Instant ordination.

It gets worse. From what I can determine, a Catholic seminarian who normally sees a vocation as a military chaplain completes the usual program of seminary formation and is ordained in his diocese following the sequence of ordination first as a transitional deacon. After that phase, which is effectively an additional probationary period, he's ordained a priest and then serves three years in diocesan parish work before moving to the Archdiocese for the Military Services, although he remains incardinated in his original diocese or order.

So by ordaining now-Fr Whitehead a priest the same day he's received as a Catholic, Bp Lopes has bypassed:

• The usual informal evaluation of candidates that takes place in parish and diocesan settings for young men discerning vocation
• The usual evaluation of seminarians by professional vocations directors, over a period of years
• The RCIA or other catechetical process that would be expected for laymen before reception
• The normal requirement that OCSP candidates resign their Protestant orders as part of the application process
• The requirement of remedial course work often imposed on other ex-Protestant candidates for the priesthood in the OCSP
• The additional requirement of ordination as a transitional deacon before ordination as a priest
• The normal requirement of three years diocesan parish work after ordination to the priesthood for those wishing to become chaplains.

This is literally an instant ordination. No quotes. This may not be the only one.

Now, "experts" will object that of course this must be done -- a military chaplain must be sponsored by his denomination, and if he does stuff that would normally be expected of an OCSP candidate, like resign his REC orders, he'd lose his chaplain's job, and what good would that do? Bp Lopes has absolutely no choice but to receive him, ordain him a deacon, ordain him a priest, and turn him back loose as a Catholic chaplain the same day, so his paycheck isn't interrupted! Look at all the kids he has to feed! Mr Bruce, you're both uninformed and obtuse.

Well, a bishop can ordain a baked potato, and in this case, he pretty much has. But I would turn around and ask what good Whitehead had been doing as an REC chaplain, which he apparently was, versus the additional good he might now do as a Catholic chaplain. The Archdiocese for the Military Services says,

Because military service requires extraordinary sacrifices of those who serve and their families, chaplains strive to make themselves available and present, day or night, to offer guidance, education, and direction on Church doctrine or simply to listen.

We have absolutely no assurance -- I repeat with no exaggeration, absolutely no assurance -- that now Fr Whitehead knows the first thing about Church doctrine. He's just as qualified to "listen" as he'd been as an REC chaplain. Indeed, since imams are chaplains too, he's as qualified to listen as an imam. He can say mass. He can hear a confession and give absolution, but I wouldn't go near the guy unless I were in combat. In fact, he can give the general absolution that can be given to soldiers about to enter combat without confession, except I betcha he doesn't know that, and even if he did, he'd probably have to call Houston to find out how to do it, except I'm not sure if anyone there could help him.

Someone can say, "What's wrong with that? At least some soldiers will get the sacraments." I would say that's fine for zombie Catholics, but it disrespects the Church. We have to expect better things.

Cui bono? Not Whitehead. Not anyone in the Army who wants to know Catholic doctrine -- and I've heard from the same priest I mentioned at the start of this post, himself a former chaplain with combat deployments, that he had to explain Catholic doctrine to soldiers and Protestant chaplains every day. And remember, he was living that doctrine by example every day.

I'm increasingly convinced that what's going on in Houston can't last. And I don't think simple incompetence explains why so much of Houston's activities goes unpublicized.

"Why The Fr. Luke Reese Scandal Is Everybody’s Business"

A visitor brought to my attention this post at the blog of Mrs Simcha Fisher, a Catholic writer and blogger who brought the Reese case to light last February after it reached the court system. (Although she was accused of detraction for doing this, she was reporting on a court case, which is public information.) It turns out that Reese's case will come up for trial this week -- observers had assumed that it would be pleaded out in some way, with Reese being treated as a priest with no prior record, and the whole thing would quietly go away. Apparently not.

Mrs Fisher raises some important questions, some of which I've also tried to address here.

Will Holy Rosary be reconsecrated, since the crimes alleged would clearly constitute desecration? The congregation has a right to know if their church and altar have been desecrated, just as they’d have a right to know what happened if someone stole the tabernacle, broke a window, or embezzled funds from the soup kitchen. It is their church.

In a prior post, she covers the canonical issues in detail. The upshot is that it's up to the bishop, but a reconsecration isn't something you do on the spur of the moment.

“Before any action is undertaken, the local Ordinary would first need to establish what happened. Right now the priest has been charged but his case has not yet gone to court. It is not unusual in Canada or the United States for Catholic ecclesiastical authorities to hold off canonical action until criminal charges by civil authorities are resolved.”

Vere [a canonist] said it would be unusual for reconciliation and reconsecration to take place without the inclusion of the congregation, “because liturgy is the Church’s public prayer and thus generally open to participation by the faithful,” and because the story is now public, and thus “many of the faithful have been affected.”

“Pastorally, these are the people the Church will want to reconcile by the liturgical action prescribed,” said Vere.

So far, we don't know, and matters may not be addressed until the court case is resolved. But what happened is a serious matter, and according to the post, if a reconsecration were to take place, it would involve not holding mass at the church until reconsecration could take place, removing decorations from the altar, and parishioners being urged to receive the sacrament of reconciliation at another facility. If the matter is this serious -- and the canonists she quotes suggest it is -- then it is inappropriate for the ordinaries in this case to minimize it.

Next good question:

Fr. Reese is a member of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. . . . Will the Ordinariate, which has authority over Fr. Reese, pay his legal fees? When Reese was ordained, the archdiocese of Indiana said that “leaders in the ordinariate and the archdiocese have worked to make sure that he’ll be able to financially support his family through what he’ll earn through his priestly ministry.” If the couple divorces, as the Reeses plan to do, will the Ordinariate or the Archdiocese of Indianapolis be legally responsible for Mrs. Reese’s alimony? If Reese is removed from ministry, will the Church help to support the Reese’s seven children? If he is convicted, is the Church legally responsible for what their priests do, especially if they are done inside the church building?

The OCSP appears to be struggling financially. Observers from this end think the OCSP will be at least partially responsible for the continuing support of Reese's wife and children, and divorces alone cost money. For that matter, someone could well be on the hook for counseling for the wife and children, relocation expenses, and a great deal else. Prof Jordan Peterson, not a Catholic authority but often a source of good general advice, warns those considering divorce that this will cost half a million dollars and ten years of your life. Someone besides Reese is going to be on the hook here.

Next question:

The Ordinariate can ordain its own laymen as priests, but it primarily receives former Anglican priests and then forms and ordains them as Catholic priests. This was the case with Fr. Reese.

What kind of formation do these formerly Anglican priests receive before they are ordained in the Ordinariate? Is their formation as extensive and comprehensive as seminarians not in the Ordinariate?

The Catholic Church makes an effort to filter out seminarians who are psychologically or temperamentally unfit for ordination. If an Anglican priest wants to join the Ordinariate, does the Catholic Church do its own vetting process, or does it rely on the vetting the Anglican Church has already done? Are priests sometimes hurried through the process, either as a courtesy to the Anglican Church, or because there is such a dire need for vocations in the Catholic Church?

I'm aware of at least one case where an individual with detailed knowledge of the conduct of a recent OCSP ordinand while an Anglican priest but prior to his reception into the Church reported matters to Fr Perkins that ought to have caused serious concern, but apparently did not.

Indeed, it appears that Fr Perkins was so clumsy and indiscreet that he allowed the ordinand to discover the identity of the complainant, and the ordinand then made threats against the complainant. The complainant considered reporting this to Fr Perkins as well but decided not to, I think in part because it would cause the complainant more distress, while there would be no assurance Fr Perkins would take things any more seriously. Houston has a problem here without a doubt.

In another case, a recent ordinand was only baptized in 2009, two years before entering an Anglican seminary. Once ordained an Episcopal priest, he was given only minimal make-work responsibilities, apparently as some kind of favor. But he's got the green light to wear Catholic clericals now.

The ordination of very sketchy candidates to the OCSP is simply not unusual. Mrs Fisher's concerns are fully justified in my view. I plan to notify her of the issues that have come to light for me.

If more information on the outcome of the Reese case comes to light, I'll report it here.

What About The Hebrew Patrimony?

Regarding Anglican Papalists, my regular correspondent notes,

A lot of the impetus behind (British) Anglo-Papalism was snobbery, IMHO---either personal or imputed. Clergy did not want to be involved with "Wogs" from the Continent, or they assumed that British people as a whole were not ready for that. So a sort of parallel jurisdiction was created---Roman Catholicism, English-style. Some of this ethos remains in the OOLW, where an Ordinariate priest takes over a diocesan parish and the OOLW group comes in to redo the interior, "fix" the rubbish music and sloppy serving, and serve better coffee and refreshments. These people have generally used the OF and versus populum celebrations for decades and have no interest in DW.

There is almost no tradition of this approach in North America. Plenty of Anglican clergy adhere to what is often known as the "Branch Theory" of Catholicism, but it did/does not involve using current Roman Catholic liturgy and generally behaving as though Rome were setting the rules. Anglo-Catholic churches in North America generally favour the BCP or the English Missal and a conservative liturgical approach. This is why there is so much cross-over between the TLM crowd and the OCSP. Msgr Steenson was an "Anglo-Papalist" only insofar as he became a convinced Catholic at some point and was biding his time until he could jump ship in a personally advantageous way. He in no way tried to replicate current Roman Catholic practice in his own parishes or diocese at any point in his Anglican career.

Back to the larger issue of what aspects of the "Anglican Patrimony" the Ordinariates can legitimately lay claim to as Catholic quasi-dioceses, I go back to the naming of Ordinariate parishes. What aspect of "Anglican Patrimony" is reflected in St Thomas More or any of the other Catholic Martyrs? One could argue that the liturgy of Cranmer is an insult to the memory of those who died rather than accept it, and its implications, or those who in later, less harsh times, forwent education or preferment rather than attend an Anglican service even once a year. And if St Aelred, St Bede, etc are part of "Anglican Patrimony" how is this different from Catholic patrimony? There are St Bede Catholic Churches all over England, not to mention everywhere in the US from California to Virginia.

This goes once again to the basic confusion over what constitutes the Anglican patrimony with its precious spiritual treasures. Some Anglicans are mildly interesting, like CS Lewis and Jonathan Swift, but John Milton, John Bunyan, and Isaac Watts, as well as secular figures like William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, were not Anglicans. And in terms of interest, none is Augustine or Aquinas. So enthusiasts for the ordinariates are perhaps living in a granny flat but confusing it with a first class cabin.

But there's a bigger question here. Our parish is midway through the Jeff Cavins Great Journey course, which I'm assuming has at least some elements of what would be an Old Testament course in seminary (or at least, a good seminary). It covers salvation history, and it stresses the Hebrew history of which Our Savior is the fulfillment. If the very junior ex-Protestants in the OCSP are making such a big deal of the Anglican patrimony, are they unaware of, or at least giving short shrift to, the Hebrew patrimony?

And this leaves out Augustine and Aquinas, very close to Plato and Aristotle at the base of Western thought. Who on earth are the Anglican thinkers who are on such a par with Doctors of the Church? Or are the guys newly ordained as Catholic priests after 30 seconds in the microwave trying to sell a Tolkien-y hipsterism to a couple dozen confused millennials, with the tacit approval of the taxi squad in Houston?

Anglican Papalism

I got a couple of interesting reactions to yesterday's post. In response to my stated desire to challenge Fr Hunwicke on whether the Anglican patrimony, which is essentially Protestant, exempts Catholics from the call to holiness, a knowledgeable visitor said he had known Fr Huwicke for decades, and finding him "a totally committed Anglo-Papalist (in both doctrine and morals) since his early teenage years, I have no doubt about him on that score." My regular correspondent expressed somewhat similar reservations about my general concerns over OCSP priests.

Let's go back to this interesting notion of Anglo-Papalism or Anglican Papalism, which I take to be synonymous usages on either side of the Atlantic. If I were an inquisitor, which is what people in the CDF used to be, I would want to interrogate self-identified Anglican Papalists on exactly what they believed, but failing that opportunity, I will propose that they claim in some way to be both Anglican and Catholic, in particular from the Papalist side acknowledging the authority of the Pope.

But this is contradictory, a lot like the folks who more recently acknowledge that they have chromosomes characteristic of one gender, but identify as the other, or both, or something else. A Catholic who'd been reading St Alphonsus Liguori might reasonably conclude there are issues relating to the sixth commandment in operation here that probably make the protestations less than sincere. What's behind the contradiction in the case of Anglican Papalists?

My visitor has characterized Fr Hunwicke as an Anglo-Papalist, and Msgr Steenson has elsewhere been characterized as an Anglican Papalist, so for convenience, I'll refer to them that way, recognizing they may dispute this themselves.

At basis, we're multiplying entities. An ordinary Catholic is defined as such in the Catechism, but we're creating a secondary category called "Anglican Papalist". Why? This certainly implies that, for example, Fr Hunwicke or Msgr Steenson had some special qualifications for this category beyond my neighbor Vinny, who goes to St Ipsydipsy. Beyond that, my other neighbor, Chadwick, comes from a recusant family in the UK and is not an Anglican Papalist either. And Stanley, behind me, is a high-church Episcopalian who's happy in his parish with Mother Susan as his rector.

So there is some need to multiply the entities, but we're not sure what it is -- I think we're still in the territory of those who advocate for 57 genders. We've multiplied entities largely due to certain private reservations that are never clearly expressed.

We also have the issue of what happened to Anglican Papalists after 2011-12. Did they all go into ordinariates? Did they all automatically become Catholic in any case? Let's take Chichester, a cradle Anglican who later in life identified as an Anglican Papalist. Even given the option of becoming a Catholic in a newly-erected ordinariate, he still would have needed to go through catechesis and receive the sacraments of initiation. Did he? Is he still entitled to call himself an Anglican Papalist if he didn't? Probably. After all, "Anglican Papalist" is never clearly defined anywhere and is always a matter of private judgment, just like which of the 57 genders one might feel like that day.

Let's take the specific problems raised by Fr Hunwicke and Msgr Steenson. At the time they became Catholic via Anglicanorum coetibus, did thy cease to be Anglican Papalists and become simple Catholics? I would say most certainly not. They seem to consider themselves a special new kind of Catholic, judging at least from external impressions. Isn't this a little like the guy who goes through transgender surgery and won't keep quiet and just live as a woman? Instead, he's going onto TV shows to plead his case that he's something special.

Apologists for whatever Anglican Papalists are, precisely, in the post-Anglicanorum coetibus world, are going to insist they bring something special with them, precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony. In other words, they don't seem to want to shut up and go to confession. They point instead to some vague business that amounts, as a visitor exposed to an OCSP group described it recently, to Tolkien-y hipsterism.

I think there's a great deal of reason not to trust this. I'm not sure why the successors to the Grand Inquisitor ever thought this was a good idea.

The English Reformation And Bp Barron

A visitor sent me a link to this article, which begins,

In 1991 Diarmaid MacCulloch famously argued that the English Reformation happened – in the face of a persistent myth which denied it. That much is perhaps now widely accepted.

This brought to mind an adult education session I had when I was still an Episcopalian, led by TEC Suffragan Bishop of Los Angeles Diane Bruce (no relation). Among the points she made were that the separation from Rome led by Henry VIII was political only, and not doctrinal. Clearly this would be in opposition to MacCulloch's point, which strikes me as the correct one. This fed a disquiet that led me to leave TEC within months. Both Anglican and Catholic divines appear to be behind the times here. The article I cited above says later,

The first plausible point we might want to mark as an anniversary, then. . . is 1525. . . .It is the year of the puzzling case of Roger Hachman, the Oxfordshire man accused of heresy for stating that ‘I will never look to be saved for no good deed that ever I did’ but only by merely asking God’s mercy: how Hachman came by such Lutheran-sounding ideas is a mystery, but a portentous one.

This, of course, marks the emergence of sola fideism and its variants in an "Anglicanism" separate from Catholic doctrine, which in fact are present in the text of the 1664 BCP and arguably in the Cranmerian prayers inserted in the Divine Worship mass. The separation of the Church of England is in fact doctrinal and not just political -- and it's hard to imagine it could be otherwise. Kings' powers are never absolute; Henry had his own deep state and needed its support if he was going to make a break from Rome.

This brought me to Bp Barron's most recent YouTube presentation, on Chapter 7 of Amoris Laetitia. He points out that Francis has been influenced by "virtue ethicists", who follow Aristotle and Aquinas in stressing the importance of developing habits of virtue.

As a recent convert, this strikes me as a central element of Catholicism vs Protestantism. Protestants insist that human nature is depraved, and we are saved only by some variant of grace, mercy, or faith. The Catholic view is that we are saved by both faith and works, and as our pastor pointed out in last Sunday's homily, we are called to holiness. We reach holiness by, as Bp Barron says, a long, constant process involving development of virtuous habits. We are assisted in this by prayer and the sacraments.

I continue to wonder how much of this the ex-Protestants whom Bp Lopes ordains after 30 seconds in the microwave understand -- indeed, if I ever had the chance, I would press the likes of Fr Hunwicke on whether the Anglican patrimony, which is essentially Protestant, exempts Catholics from the call to holiness and the imperative of developing virtuous habits.

Hepworth And The Blogs

Regarding Abp Hepworth, my regular correspondent writes,

I agree that the process of Hepworth's removal as TAC Primate was a kangaroo court, shall we say, but I am somewhat sympathetic to the predicament of those who must deal with the sort of person who feels that he was demonstrably innocent of any financial wrongdoing at the parish of Gleneig, because "the bishop refused to confirm anything," while never retracting his allegations against Msgr Dempsey despite his being formally cleared by police, Department of Public Prosecutions, and Church investigations during which Hepworth was interviewed eight times. The term "pathological liar" is too lurid, but we have all met the sort of person for whom the truth is an entirely subjective concept unsusceptible to objective refutation.

Campbell, Smuts, and Chadwick were conspicuous spokespersons for Hepworth's version of the truth until it gradually dawned on them that they had been taken in by a fantasy. But many more private people must be attempting to understand their own similar experience. The fact that Samuel Prakash deposed him, the head of the entirely fictional 400,000 member Anglican Church of India which constituted the bulk of the "450,000 Anglicans to Become Catholic" back in 2011 is an irony worthy of the pen of Evelyn Waugh. And that ubiquitous headline is the founding nightmare from which the Ordinariates are still trying to wake up, IMHO.

Hyperbolic expectations, a small and uncertain reality. Apparent leadership, including Pope Benedict, Hepworth, (and Frs Phillips and Hurd to a lesser extent), which evaporated almost instantly, leaving a kind of taxi squad to take over and try to figure out what this was all supposed to be about. The UK and North American Ordinariates are pursuing two entirely different visions. Pope Francis clearly could care less about the entire thing.

I'm somewhat more favorable toward His Grace than my correspondent, primarily because I met him personally with lowered expectations. I saw immediately that he had the gift of blarney, which I noted here -- but as an adept persuader, which I think most will agree he is, I think he recognized that there was a range of assertions I'd accept and a range I wouldn't, and he stayed within the good range in our encounters. And vested, celebrating, and preaching, he does remarkably good Anglo-Catholic.

It's also worth pointing out that numbers in the hundred thousands as potential intake from "Anglican Catholics" weren't limited to Hepworth. TEC Bp Clarence Pope, presumably uncontradicted by Jeffrey Steenson, who was present in that 1993 meeting, gave Cardinal Ratzinger an estimate of 250,000 Episcopalians who would come in from the US, which would not be inconsistent with Hepworth's estimates in the range of 500,000 worldwide.

Finally, if we take the Church -- in this case, the "continuing" branch of the church universal -- as something of a family, it's worth applying the notion that you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your relatives. In the case of St Mary of the Angels, Hepworth has, shall we say, had the generosity to admit paternity, when he certainly had the option of not doing so and washing his hands of the business. So far, I've had the impression that it's been a positive development for the parish, whatever its eventual fate turns out to be.

Which is not to overlook the fact that His Grace sometimes overpromises.

The Last Anglican

A visitor sent me an e-mail with the subject "The Last Anglican" noting, as I sometimes have here, the disappearance of "Anglican Catholic" blogs in the wake of the 2012 implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus. He asked me for my thoughts on why this happened.

As I thought about this, the image of an altarpiece came to mind at what Mr Chadwick believes is St Agatha's Portsmouth, UK, that he posted on his blog last month. (Click on image for a larger version.) In the lower right, it depicts Abp Hepworth standing next to Pope Benedict XVI in heaven. Clearly this was done in the context of the 2007 Portsmouth Petition from the TAC bishops and the 2009 promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus. But rather clearly it couldn't have been done after Hepworth's 2012 expulsion from the TAC College of Bishops. Indeed, Mr Chadwick himself attended the 2007 Portsmouth meeting as an enthusiastic supporter of Hepworth, but he has since renounced him. This is an indication of how quickly the climate changed; the altarpiece is also an insight into the eccentricity of "Anglican Catholics", from whom Mr Chadwick himself now seems to want to separate -- well, at least from Abp Hepworth and his ilk.

Think about it -- a parish seems to have decided to spend a significant amount of its limited budget on a new altarpiece, however tasteless, that would go out of fashion in a brief matter of years and is now nothing more than a curious artifact. There are, of course, theological difficulties in its portrayal of heaven, with Abp Laud and Charles I ranged above Benedict and Hepworth, all surrounded by cherubs and dogs in the fluffy clouds. I assume that pre-2012, Mr Chadwick and many others would have endorsed the sentiments enthusiastically. Here are the factors that changed so quickly:

• Abp Chaput's denial of votum for ordination to David Moyer, followed by Moyer's de facto expulsion from the ACA. I think observers saw this as sausage-making political maneuvering taking place with unseemly haste in the wake of Anglicanorum coetibus.
• By the same token, the ACA's immediate dissolution of the Patrimony of the Primate was a final indication of the cynicism with which Bps Marsh and Strawn tolerated "Anglican Catholicism" within the ACA for only as long as they could get away with it.
• The subsequent "trial" and expulsion of Hepworth from the TAC was a transparently cynical and opportunistic action from a group whose own founding in 1991 could be seen as an attempt to evade canonical action against Abp Falk.
• The total of these events irreparably damaged the ACA's and TAC's reputations even before the legal actions it undertook against St Mary of the Angels in May 2012. Bloggers who had previously associated themselves with the TAC, including Chadwick, Campbell, and Smuts, saw their credibility decline.
• The legal action by the ACA and a dissident faction of parishioners against St Mary of the Angels led to the start of this blog, which further exposed malice in the ACA and at best cliquishness, poor judgment, and arbitrary decision-making in the OCSP. This also damaged the credibility of "Anglican Catholic" blogs that refused to recognize these issues.
• The decision by Fr Phillips in early 2012 to keep Our Lady of the Atonement out of the OCSP was originally seen as a black mark against Msgr Steenson, since in the runup to Anglicanorum coetibus, Phillips was by far the most prestigious of its US promoters. This damaged the optimistic outlook for the ordinariate, although Steenson's designation as ordinary put a colorless and uninspiring figure at its head as well.
• However, subsequent developments regarding Our Lady of the Atonement, Fr Phillips, and Dcn Orr brought to light long-standing conflicts with the Archdiocese of San Antonio that at best called Phillips's judgment into question, leading to further deterioration in the prestige of the "Anglican Catholic" movement.
• The continuing failure of the original Anglicanorum coetibus model to attract existing "Anglican Catholic" parishes -- especially prosperous and successful TEC ones -- into the OCSP has effectively destroyed any initial optimism about the project. This is reflected in the disappearance of "Anglican Catholic" blogs that had been optimistic about the project.

No Rhyme Or Reason

A visitor with experience of the early intake process for ex-Anglicans in the OCSP reacts to yesterday's post:

There was never . . . a clear set of guidelines and responsibilities for candidates and the organization. We were told once at a meeting that we were canonically the equivalent of seminarians, but never pointed in the direction of what that actually entailed. I presume that everything was done on the fly and very much based on ad hoc application of rules to accomplish ordination/ deployment based on the whims and personal likes/dislikes of Steenson, Hough and the now laicized former TEC priest [Hurd] provided by the Archdiocese of Washington.

My regular correspondent registered something like the same puzzlement:

Jonathan Mitchican, former rector of Church of the Holy Comforter, Drexel Hill was received into the Church last summer, as we read here. He, however, was not forced to "gather" half a dozen potential converts to say Evensong in his living room under the patronage of St Swithun to justify his eventual ordination. Instead he was given a job working on "special projects" with Fr Sellers at St John XXIII Preparatory School on Katy, TX, also doing supply teaching and assisting the Chaplain, another OCSP priest, Fr Scott Blick. I think that this indicates that Mr Mitchican is seen as having real potential. Certainly this account is more reassuring than Mr Tipton's prose.

My correspondent in fact clarified that Mr Mitchicam was a TEC clergyman for 11 years and had become a rector. He also relocated with his family to the Houston area, which suggests that other possibilities may be in line for him in the OCSP. Even so, given his experience in real pastoral leadership, he's underemployed in "special projects" and substitute teaching. This says that even if his talents are recognized, there's currently no place where they can be effectively used, while rather sketchily qualified candidates are being ordained and put in charge of the Potemkin groups.

I think it's probably correct to say there's no real vision in Houston for where things might be taken, nor how existing talents might best be used. I would agree with the visitor who sees little change between Steenson and Lopes in this regard.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent notes, "Mr Mitchican was ordained deacon earlier this year and is scheduled to be ordained priest August 22, 2018. I think they have plans for him." Still, it's hard to see how Blake/Gregory Tipton and Mitchican seem to have been on roughly the same schedule for ordination -- Tipton possibly even faster -- when Mitchican had 11 years of real TEC pastoral experience; Tipton had only been baptized in 2009.

More Developments Regarding Dcn Orr

I heard from a visitor who had been searching the web for information on the former deacon at Our Lady of the Atonement, James Orr, and possible violation of Church guidelines regarding protection of children. The visitor had been connected with the Atonement Academy in the past and ran into a former student there, now grown. The visitor had apparently been unaware that Orr was since "retired" from the parish and that there is apparently now pending legal action. However,

Her classmates told her that Deacon Orr had invited three of her male class mates (they were in high school) to his home to “fix” his computer. The students reportedly found child pornography on his computer but did not dare to inform police.

After hearing this from [the former student] I immediately submitted a tip to the FBI online. An officer got in touch with me the following day. I gave him all the information I had but of course he needs to come into contact with the individuals themselves.

If anyone has contacted you with information about this incident please have them contact the San Antonio FBI, officer Jeffrey Allovio.

Jeffrey Allovio
Badge #624
FBI San Antonio Child Exploitation Task Force
(210) 650-6238 FBI office
(210) 777-0730 mobile

Thank you for publishing the information you have and calling on others who are in a position to do so to act.

From the incomplete information I've heard up to now about Orr's conduct, this appears to be a new allegation, but it certainly gives perspective to prior actions by the archdiocese in ordering Orr's retirement, as well as subsequent actions by the archdiocese in announcing a credible allegation of misconduct, and by the archdiocese and later the OCSP in barring him from the property, at least in theory -- this report from last March indicates he attends mass there whenever Fr Phillips celebrates it, and his apparent special relationship with Fr Phillips clearly continues.

Since at the time of this apparently new allegation, Phillips and Orr lived in homes on adjacent properties that were connected by a back gate, it's hard to imagine that Phillips did not know of students at the school being invited to Orr's home.

The visitor reports a "tense and strange environment" at the school at the time the visitor was there, which is borne out by other reports from OLA members. It's hard not to surmise that the availability of the school, and the exclusive "Episcopalian" atmosphere of the parish, led at least some parishioners to look the other way over the creepier aspects of parish life. It's also hard for me to avoid thinking that the OCSP priests who are trying to replicate the "Phillips model" of parish growth may be getting a bit too much in that bargain.

Yet More On The St Aelred Group

I got a long, informative, and insightful e-mail from a visitor who, while not a member of the Athens, GA group, is clearly quite familiar with it. To comment adequately on the e-mail, I'm going to break it up and discuss its observations separately.

In general, I think you make some insightful and important points, however, at other times I think you may be speculating a little too wildly. For instance, the name Aelred was chosen very intentionally, with a full understanding of the gay connection in the Anglican communion, because of the members’ particular devotion to his works “Spiritual Friendship” And “Mirror of Charity.” There was, I think, some idea of “reclaiming” the saint from affirming groups that motivated their decision. . . . it was clear that Houston was aware of the connection, and had encouraged the group to proceed carefully. (To that, I should mention, my Spiritual director was very happy with the decision, who as a Cistercian has a great love for Aelred.)

We're nevertheless looking at a very young ex-Protestant long on naive enthusiasm and short on experience and, we might surmise, caution -- and Houston's response is to "proceed carefully". Indeed. My regular correspondent's reaction is

"Reclaiming" St Aelred is a mug's game; miscommunication on the one side, antagonism on the other.

I agree that the situation seems ripe for one set of listeners to hear one thing about "spiritual friendship" and another group another, and this is complicated by the contemporary idea that there is something called "being gay" that's separate from, but in the view of some justifies, same-sex conduct. I would say that a priest who's quite a bit older and probably quite a bit smarter should be handling this sort of thing. Prudence is the queen of virtues. I don't see it anywhere near this situation.

The visitor continues,

You also seem to be confused as to the level of formation and parish involvement the community has. I believe they all attended RCIA at St Joseph’s in Athens, and now attend mass there together (until a weekly DW Mass can be offered). From the outside, they really just look like a group with weird liturgy sponsored by the parish. Mr. Tipton himself is being mentored by the two priests in Athens, and the pastor of St. James in Madison (about 20 minutes away). The Pastor at St. James, I’ve been told, is getting permission to say the DW form for the community.

My regular correspondent comments,

Nobody was suggesting that the core group of new Catholics at St Aelred's was not adequately prepared. They went through the RCIA process at St Joseph's and have been attending the parish OF mass there, except when Fr Perkins visited and celebrated DW. The point is that there is no way that group has seventy people in it. That would have been a number of receptions greater than all but two or three incoming OCSP groups of the last six years. Ten or twelve is a more typical number; many have been smaller. So most of the recent DW attendees were longer term Catholics looking, as your correspondent strangely put it, for a "less Evangelical Mass."

This puzzled me, too, and I followed up with the visitor on what he meant by "less Evangelical". He replied,

I don’t use evangelical negatively, I’m talking more about musical choice, prayer postures and such which bear a resemblance to Evangelical protestant worship. When I see guitars, contemporary music, people holding up their hands, etc. That is, in my mind, an Evangelical expression of worship. It’s not inherently irreverent, and can of course be very reverent. There just exists in that area a sizeable minority who would prefer a more solemn expression of worship.

So now we're in fact changing the subject, and we've gotten off Anglicans and reclaiming St Aelred and onto cradle Catholics who don't like hand-waving and guitars in mass. It seems to me that this is a problem with an entirely different remedy, especially since all but a few parts of the country lack the option of a nearby DW mass -- and even there, as my regular correspondent points out, many OCSP groups have only guitars themselves, and doubtless they wave their hands as well. So this is a straw man argument, and it misses the point.

Guitars and tambourines in mass reflect no formal music program, and that reflects no money for a formal music program. My visitor replied,

Huh. I’ve never drawn the connection between guitars and low funding. It makes sense, organs and singers get expensive.. but at the same time, there are certainly well funded programs that still use contemporary guitar music- think Bishop Barron’s word on fire conferences.

But in any case, before anyone decides to go the 3 PM DW mass route in the next county, the appropriate place to address this is with the parish pastor, the parish council, and the parish worship committee. As Fr Z puts it, you have to be wiling to support your preferences with a monetary contribution. If there's no organist and you want to hire one, this is clearly a major project. A group would need to undertake this with strong leadership and serious backing. I get the sense that people who sorta-kinda might want to go to a DW mass if someone else pays the organist aren't that kind of serious -- on the other hand, if they are serious, they don't need to go outside the parish and the diocese.

Now we get to the crux. My visitor concludes,

Their medievalism can be a little pretentious (they really are sort of Tolkien-y hipsters), but they’re generally well meaning and open to newcomers. I was in the area for Fr. Perkins’ Mass, and my understanding was that the 70+ was a blend of their members and local Catholics who were looking for a less Evangelical Mass, something I could never find when I lived there.

I think the bottom line is that a mixture of Tolkien-y hipsters and cradle Catholics without the fortitude to improve their worship environment in their own parishes isn't a recipe for success. Certainly when I anticipated what the OCSP would be in 2012, I never thought this was what it would turn out to be.

What's In The Name?

Regarding the St Aelred group, my regular correspondent notes,

The Rev'd Mr Tipton's blog of which you can read an example here is not overtly "affirming." I am sure that the name was chosen in an effort to add Olde Englishe tone. Frankly the blog reminds me of Fr Bartus' early efforts: Anglophilia, Wikipedia-level biblical/theological/historical insights, social activities involving Pimm's No 1 cup and bbq wings. Harmless, but sophomoric. In a normal Catholic parish a neophyte priest would be mentored by an experienced pastor.

Even if he had to be in charge right out of the seminary, often the case for TEC clergy, he would inherit experienced lay leaders and parishioners with institutional memory. In this case someone whose clerical experience was functioning briefly as a university chaplain is now in charge of making it up from scratch. I am sure the pastor of the host parish is available for advice, but frankly if we assume that the majority of the "70+" are/were his parishioners we can't really expect him to spend a lot of time mentoring Mr Tipton. And Houston is a long way away.

Regarding names, when Houston told St Timothy's, Ft Worth to move to the Diocesan Center chapel they were also told to choose a new name, according to their website. There is an OCSP St Timothy's in Catonsby, MD and a TEC St Timothy's, Ft Worth, so I can see why it was a good idea. The fact that this has not happened is another indication to me that the community is being allowed to wither away. There is already an OCSP St James, in Florida, but the other common TEC names are up for grabs.

The selection of someone who died rather than become an Anglican as the patron of an OCSP parish strikes me as odd, but there are two St Thomas More's and were two St John Fishers until the one in Arlington, VA folded, not to mention Holy Martyrs. [But why stop there? St Oliver Plunkett is available, too! --jb]

Mr Tipton strikes me as the sort who was trying to choose between St Aelred and St Swithun. Probably made a bad call.

Another possible parallel with Fr Bartus is that Mr Tipton probably also had no serious future with TEC. Nice kid, but the rectors, search committees, vestries, and bishops probably had plentiful supplies of better candidates. But that I should mention St Aelred and get almost immediate replies from several people concerning the (spurious) gay connection in TEC circles also indicates a tone-deafness. And as my correspondent puts it, Houston is a long way away.

Another visitor notes,

I thought the bit about St. Aelred blog sounding like wanting to be a part of Middle earth was funny! . . . But I suspect St. Aelred, which worships at 3 on Sunday, will be guided (or controlled) by the narrowly focused, and perhaps acute and opinionated members who make up their inner circle. Sometimes, it is my feeling that, in such communities, that growth is actually not wanted. Because if there is growth, then there is change. And then someone might say, "you know, we should have a think about the name of our parish". . ."and about this Middle Earth motif".

I think the surmise, that this guy is not a strong leader and probably tone deaf, is not a good augury for the future, and I can't avoid thinking this was a reaction in TEC. But Houston's the place that's going to put him in the microwave for 30 seconds and ordain him.

Who Indeed?

My regular correspondent pointed me to the web page of the St Aelred's group in Athens, GA. (St Aelred?? Give me a break.) The question:

Who are the 70+ who turned up at St Aelred's to attend Fr Perkins' celebration of DW?

It seems to me that the mediocre ex-TEC guy waiting for his 30 seconds in the microwave to get ordained should have the answer, and if he doesn't, I would suggest Houston not press the START button. It's also a question Bp Lopes should be ready to discuss with the local bishop.

UPDATE: A visitor agrees on the preciousness of the "St Aelred" name, and I think it extends to the whole enterprise. If you visit the blog, you can see the 19th-century retreat into medieval fantasy written all over the thing, which is also part of Tolkien's appeal. You'd think the Ordinariate is a branch office of Middle Earth. And note the condescending tone. Certainly I remember people who went to the stuffy TEC parish on Wilshire Bl eager to be told what to wear by their social betters -- but the betters had been Episcopalians from the start.

Here we see wannabes who've been on the waiting list for some matter of months apparently lording it over newer wannabes with their mastery of Catholic Hobbitry.

UPDATE: Actually, two visitors have pointed out that St Aelred has a pretty strong gay connection, at least among Angicans. The site for Integrity USA, a TEC gay group. says

St. Aelred is the Patron Saint of Integrity USA. Born in 1110 in Hexham, England, Aelred became a monk whose teachings on "spiritual friendship" have been revered for centuries. He is widely considered to have been gay, although the modern concept of homosexuality did not exist at the time.

For over 25 years, Integrity USA has celebrated the Feast of St. Aelred (January 12) as a special day for chapters and parishes to hold Eucharistic services in St. Aelred's honor. In 2012, Integrity's Connecticut chapter developed the resources below to aid in these services.

Are Bp Lopes and the CDF aware of this connection? Is this the message those involved with the Athens, GA group are trying to send? This might be an answer to who the 70+ attending the April mass are.

Catechesis And "Anglican Catholics"

My regular correspondent replies to yesterday's post,

Mrs Gyapong would probably argue that lifelong Catholics are not normally required to undergo any kind of formal catechesis past junior high age. All too often their understanding of key doctrines is fossilised at this stage of intellectual development, and/or subsequently rejected, even if they continue to attend mass. This is presumably behind statistics like 50% support among Catholics for women priests, or 95% of sexually active Catholics of reproductive age using artificial birth control. At least those who joined the Church in her ACCC pariah were prepared as adults by a Catholic priest and had to make an explicit acceptance of Catholic doctrines.

In an essay on "The Changing Pattern of Heresy" Karl Rahner argues that whereas in the past there was consensus about the way in which one examined questions of truth, today that consensus has disappeared. Heresy, once a deliberate choice, is now "latent." "The individual system of values certainly present and freely constituted as [the Christian's] own is not fully and with absolute certainty accessible to introspection." He does counsel catechesis as the remedy, but I am not optimistic. To me it is evident that the mentality of "we are the only ones getting it right" which characterised Mrs G's church as a "continuing" Anglican parish is still there now that they are Catholics, at least if Mrs G is typical. The "outlier" mentality is still dominant. Insofar as Anglicanorum coetibus has facilitated that it was a huge mistake.

"Lifelong Catholics" are required to attend mass weekly and go to confession once a year. I can't argue that every homily they might hear will effectively teach the faith, but there's at least the chance. Between the homily and the readings, if they go to Sunday mass, they will also hear the most significant scripture over a three-year period. If they engage in examination of conscience and make a sincere confession, they will probably also get some sort of refresher.

Most parishes have some sort of marriage preparation classes. I see with some frequency observant Catholics marrying non-Catholics who go through catechesis and are received into the Church as well. At least in our parish, couples are required to attend a seminar on Catholic family planning as part of marriage preparation.

Naturally, "50% support among Catholics for women priests" isn't necessarily a meaningful statistic. Does the survey screen for weekly mass attendance, registration, and pledging to a parish as well, for instance? Otherwise, you're saying something like "Catholics who aren't well catechized aren't well catechized", which is a tautology.

In addition, the catechesis given to groups going into the OCSP has often been slapdash, and I'm not sure if the authors of Evangelium understood their audience. Anglicans are Protestants. Low-church ones take the XXXIX Articles seriously. Others don't take much of anything seriously. There is a certain amount of "grace alone" in the 1928 BCP mass -- look at the confession:

We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee In newness of life. . .

Compare that to the confession in the current Catholic mass:

I confess to almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; and I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God.

There is much less dwelling on sin and guilt and a much more optimistic picture of the way out. This is an entirely different world view, and the idea that Anglicans and Catholics see most things the same way is superficial. I would say that it is probably easier to catechize an unbaptized adult than it is to catechize an Anglican who thinks she already knows it all.

I don't think the CDF ever looked at this very closely, or if it did, recognized the extent to which Anglicans need to be re-educated. But this says nothing of the inability of the ex-Protestants Houston has been ordaining after 30 seconds in the microwave to conduct a catechism.

Thoughts On The "Anglican Catholic" Blogosphere

The community of blogs that might once have been called Anglo-Catholic has undergone quite a bit of change since Anglicanorum coetibus. I think this reflects some of Patrick Madrid's reservations about "Anglican Catholics". Some of the most popular blogs pre-2011-12, like Mr Smuts's and The Anglo-Catholic, have become inactive. Indeed, as it's been outlined to me, Mr Campbell, a driving force behind that one, came into the OCSP with the small Incarnation Orlando parish but has since devoted more effort to the SSPX, something Mr Madrid seems to have anticipated.

I'm not sure if Fr Seraiah has stopped blogging entirely, but his profile is certainly lower, which probably suits his superiors, and it probably also reflects the fact that real Catholic priests in dioceses have a lot to do and can't afford to spend time on social media, at least in idle chat. The bloggers remaining from the pre-2012 era seem to be those connected with the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society and Mr Chadwick. Why is this?

I think in some measure this is because, whether Pope Benedict intended it or not, Anglicanorum coetibus was a put-up-or-shut-up. Within a year or two, the minimal response from the intended coetus, i.e., existing groups of Anglicans who'd already been petitioning, was a disappointment at best. Whatever the traffic to the blogs, which could never have been more than hundreds per day, the former bloggers must have begun to feel they were addressing, and speaking for, much smaller audiences than they'd envisioned.

I think Anglicanorum coetibus also complicated the question of exactly what does an "Anglican Catholic" believe. This is a question Fr Longenecker had to address late in the story arc of Anglo-Catholicism: late in his youth as an evangelical, he saw the Anglo-Catholic light and went straight to Oxford for his training. He became a Church of England parish priest on the Isle of Wight. But he began to see the contradictions in the "Anglican Catholic" position: "Catholic within Anglicanism" is the thing-which-is-not. Anglican "tradition" goes back 500 years, but if you cross the Channel, Catholicism goes back another 15 centuries. The C of E move to ordain women was a pinprick that popped a much bigger balloon for him.

There's also the bucket of snakes the Catholic Church has brought into the picture in raising a thing called the "Anglican patrimony". Nobody can say quite what this is. Anglican music and hymns -- for that matter, German Protestant music and hymns, and American Evangelical music and hymns -- have been incorporated into Catholic worship long before Anglicanorum coetibus. So it isn't music. Cranmerian prayers sprinkled into a novus ordo mass translated into archaized English rings about as true as an evening at Medieval Times.

And are we trying to resuscitate pre-Reformation English Catholicism in any way? I don't see it; the Divine Worship mass looks back mostly on 1664 while ignoring context like the XXXIX Articles. The "Gilbertines" in Calgary are a small family of opportunists who had their current title suggested to them by Houston.

Is it copes, incense, and birettas? I've got to say that after five years in Catholic diocesan masses, the Anglo-Catholic fuss and feathers, while certainly nostalgic, strikes me as over-the-top. Its appeal is limited and always will be.

So what we're left with is remnants -- the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog and Mr Chadwick's. Mrs Gyapong, as it's been explained to me, is a former Evangelical who came to "Anglican Catholicism" in midlife, but whose actual catechesis has clearly been minimal. Mr Chadwick, by his account, got as far as ordination to the Catholic transitional diaconate (if that's what it was), but for whatever reason, the transition didn't take, and he never had a licit, and quite possibly never a valid, ordination as a priest. The episcopi vagantes with whom he associated himself were, by his account, disreputable and corrupt.

My regular correspondent asks what Abp Hepworth saw in Mr Chadwick that he would "recognize" his ordination. Good question, I can't answer it here. Nevertheless, having apparently failed at his only parish assignment, without a licit, and possibly not a valid, ordination to the priesthood, having left the Catholic Church without formal laicization and subsequently married, and now representing himself as a "priest" (who says "mass" apparently only in his garage), he claims both the prestige of Catholicism and Anglicanism on his blog.

I can't imagine that many serious Catholics take much interest in this "Anglican Catholic" stuff. At basis, I think it's been a major error for the CDF to open the door to it. I think the only way to correct it, at least in North America, will be for Bp Lopes to begin a major program of catechesis.

The "Anglican Catholic" Nightmare

Yesterday's court session for some reason brought me to a greater recognition that the St Mary of the Angels saga is central to the whole question of "Anglican Catholics", a subject Patrick Madrid addressed on his radio program that I linked here. Mr Madrid felt, I think correctly, that it wasn't separate from other questions like episcopi vagantes, and as I noted in my post then, he calls it a "nightmare".

Thus we have the sometime episcopus vagans and "Anglican Catholic" Mr Chadwick taking out after this blog with some regularity. What do Mr Chadwick and Mrs Bush have in common, when you get right down to it, other than a certain opposition to Mr Bruce? I think it goes to the basic question of what an "Anglican Catholic" purports to be, and this takes me back to the quote at the start of Allen Guelzo's history of the REC, that I referred to last month:

You are an Anglican if you think you are. The terms are comprehensive. You are most incontrovertibly an Anglican if you have been confirmed by an Anglican bishop and go regularly to an Anglican church. . . . But you are just as much an Anglican if you go regularly to an Anglican church, unconfirmed; or if you go intermittently; or if the church you would go to if you ever went is Anglican; or if it is an Anglican church that you go to for rites of passage, or that others look to on your behalf. . . . It [the Anglican Church] is already unhostile to departures from doctrinal orthodoxy.

But it isn't quite that simple. The basic point for Mrs Bush, after all, is that some Anglicans are not as good as others, and Fr Kelley, the vestry, and the members in good standing of the St Mary's parish are definitely not as good, to the extent that she will litigate endlessly to prove her point. Notwithstanding the St Mary's parish left its original Anglican denomination 40 years ago and has left two others since, she clearly feels there's a "right" denomination it belongs to, and she's a member.

So one part of this brand of "Anglicanism" is that it isn't actually live-and-let-live, no matter it's unhostile to departures from doctrinal orthodoxy. This applies as well to Mr Chadwick. Several people have brought me up to date on his wanderings and departures. By his account

I became a Roman Catholic in 1981 through the traditionalists, and immediately wanted to become a priest. After some unplesant experiences, I studied theology at university level at Fribourg in Switzerland and joined the Institute of Christ the King in Italy, in which I remained for five years. I was ordained a deacon in 1993 in the seminary chapel by Cardinal Pietro Palazzini. I was assigned to parish work in France in an extraordinarily difficult situation and left in 1995.

He is conveniently vague on what "left" means, but we may assume he left the Catholic Church as this is generally understood. He was ordained a "priest" in 1998 by Bishop Raymond Terrasson, who was consecrated by Clemente Dominguez Gómez, a bishop of the Holy Palmarian Church, "a small schismatic Catholic church with an episcopal see in El Palmar de Troya, Spain". Chadwick's account continues,

This ordination was recognised as valid by Archbishop John Hepworth when he accepted me into the Traditional Anglican Communion in 2005.

Another visitor points out, however, that Chadwick omits from his current biography that he was "consecrated bishop" in 2000 by Bishop Lucien-Cyril Strijmeersch, who was consecrated by Jean Gérard de la Passion Antoine Laurent Charles Roux - the very bishop Chadwick maligns in his essay here.

Jean-Gérard Roux is someone who has caused a tremendous amount of harm to the movement of independent traditional Roman Catholicism. Wherever he has been, a trail of destruction has been left: people cheated out of sums of money, but more importantly, he has left scandal and bitterness among Christian believers and clergy alike.

Though I have learned a certain amount concerning his sordid personal life, that information is of no interest to me, and will certainly be of no use to my readers. What is important is that he is going around telling people that he was consecrated a bishop directly by Archbishop Ngô-dinh-Thuc in 1982. If the Archbishop really did consecrate such a person, that would mean that the Vietnamese prelate was worthy of no credibility on the part of honest Catholics, having already made prudential errors, particularly in regard to the Palmar de Troya sect.

A visitor concludes that Chadwick had reason to believe that the Roux sub-lineage from the Thuc lineage is suspect. He only asked to be regularized as a priest by Archbishop Hepworth, both because he doubted whether his consecration was valid (even within the standards of the sort of people who accept the Thuc lineage as valid) and because he did not want to function as a vagantes bishop.

It's worth noting, though, that he attached himself to Abp Hepworth for only about as long as he attached himself to Palmarians, dissociating himself from Hepworth with bitterness not much less than he exhibits with Roux. Now he's with the ACC, for however long that will be.

In the quote above, Mr Chadwick apparently speaks for "independent traditional Roman Catholicism", whatever that is, though it definitely seems to involve episcopi vagantes and at least allegations of sordid personal stuff. (The odd thing is the off-and-on relationship Chadwick himself seems to have with it.)

And whether or not he was a real Catholic deacon for a couple of years and subsequently some sort of "independent traditional Roman Catholic", he now seems to identify as an Anglican again, since he's a priest in the ACC. So this is the position of authority from which he tells John Bruce to piss off and change his diapers!

The bottom line, though, is that the "Anglican Catholic" project is full of soi-disant authorities ranging from Mrs Bush to Mr Chadwick -- but including, I fear, not a few priests and candidates for ordination in the OCSP. People like this are "Anglican", or "Catholic", or "Anglican Catholic" if they think they are (although what they think is subject itself to change!). Somehow they reason from this that they're authorities and can decide who else is a good one, whatever a good one is at that moment. I would say that the visible arbitrariness of ordinations in Houston contributes to the picture among people attracted to "Anglican Catholicism" that the Church is endorsing their position.

Court Session Friday, June 6, Department 86

I attended a court session this morning for case BS-152017, before Judge Amy Hogue in Los Angeles Superior Court Department 86. If you're keeping track, this is the case in which the Bush group is appealing the California Employment Department's decision to award unemployment benefits to Fr Kelley following his constructive termination in May/June 2012. Fr Kelley is not directly affected by the case; the defendant is the California Employment Department, and Fr Kelley has long since received his benefits.

A wrinkle, however, is that the Bush group in its appeal is representing itself as the Rector, Wardens, and Vestry of St Mary's, which the courts since 2014 have ruled that they are not; the valid vestry is the one elected in February 2012. There is a serious argument that the Bush group does not have standing in the case, which Fr Kelley, as a "real party of interest", has consistently tried to argue to the judge, but so far has been unsuccessful.

In a succession of hearings on this case since last year, Mrs Bush has attempted to appear on behalf of the non-vestry in pro per. The judge has consistently told her that by California law, a corporation, which is what the Bush group purports to be, must be represented by an attorney. In court documents up to this morning, no attorney was listed for the Bush side, and there was some expectation that the judge would finally dismiss the case.

However, the Bush group found an attorney at the last minute, who claimed that he was "substituting in" on the case. This means, as far as vestry members at the session understand this, that he is appearing temporarily on behalf of the Bush group but does not represent them. Their last attorneys, Lancaster & Anastasia, withdrew from the case after being unpaid since 2015.

This was enough for Judge Hogue to set a trial date for the appeal on January 4, 2019. Significantly, nobody caught the name of the attorney who was subbing in, and he probably won't appear again on the Bush group's behalf. He had Jimmy Carter-era sideburns and did not seem impressive, although the St Mary's senior warden estimated his appearance would have cost Mrs Bush several thousand dollars.

This brings up the question of what the Bush group's strategy is, if they have one. Although Tyler Andrews, Mrs Bush's sometime attorney, wrote a threatening letter to the parish prior to its May 6 meeting, there has been no word from him since then. Since the Bush group had been notified of the meeting, the appropriate course, as far as I can see, would have been for Mr Andrews to secure a restraining order prior to the meeting, which in fact the ACA and Mr Lancaster did in 2012.

Instead, Mr Andrews wrote an angry letter, and so far, that's where things stand. My wife feels that it would have cost Mrs Bush $20,000 or more for Mr Andrews to get the restraining order, but of course, this would have been only a first step in trying to re-litigate the whole 2012 case. I would guess Mrs Bush has become reluctant to spend more than minimal amounts to keep the various cases going, and an overall strategy will be to delay as much as possible while spending as little as possible to kick the can down the road as needed.

This leaves the vestry and the parish in charge of the property, while Mrs Bush, 88, gets older with no strategy for a quick resolution. The ACA is presumably preoccupied with joining the G4 and the PNCC. On the whole, I do not favor a strategy of speed for the parish in trying to join the OCSP in any case. This probably works to the benefit of the parish and Fr Kelley over the medium term.

Let's You And Him Fight!

With some frequency, probably because I've become a frequent subject on Mr Chadwick's blog, someone e-mails me about a new post there taking me to task for whatever. It's come to remind me of one of the games discussed in Eric Berne's 1964 pop-psychology classic Games People Play, "Let's you and him fight", which he handily acronymizes LYAHF. I frequently answer that I'm flattered that he takes me so seriously -- I'd hate to try to estimate how many words he's written responding to this blog.

My regular correspondent referred me to the post I linked just above:

Not sure what his beef is, and his commenters are mostly obvious whack jobs, but his recent posts on priestly formation, contra Bruce, are not completely irrelevant. The pre-Vatican II model, where the seminary was a sort of monastery with no access to the outside world was not particularly good preparation for parish ministry, IMHO. Conversations I have had with men who attended in those days---not embittered ex-Catholics, by any means---and books I have read, some of whose authors probably would fit that description, describe cloistered, authoritarian regimes of unquestioning obedience where deviants got ordained while sensible men got out.

Things are obviously better now, but it is by no means a smooth, well-oiled machine cranking out a consistent product. Msgr Steenson taught at the seminary in Houston. Now Mrs Kramer is going to be Associate Director of Pastoral Formation. It's relevant to point out that men have been ordained for the OCSP with very sketchy credentials. The Canadian VF has no accredited divinity degree of any kind and didn't even do the on-lime course given to the first wave of ordinands. But it is not necessary to idealise the Catholic seminary to make this point.

I simply can't speak for pre-Vatican II, since I was in my mid teens when it happened and still a Presbyterian. It isn't my intent to idealize any part of Catholicism. My wife and I went through RCIA at a shrinking parish run by a shrinking order, and we eventually felt a responsibility to find something better, which we did only a few miles farther away. So far starters, I have empirical evidence that the products of priestly formation are not uniform, and I'm not claiming they are.

However, I have two reactions to my correspondent's comments. One is that Ven Fulton Sheen's formation and earlier career took place pre-Vatican II, and the evidence from his public discourse is that he studied in Paris, traveled extensively, and had wide experience of the secular world. His origins in the Peoria, IL area were humble, but it appears that his abilities were recognized and he was promoted in this supposed dark age. Also during this dark age, the Catholic Church had much greater influence on Hollywood -- how is it good that so much of Post-Vatican II media is essentially pornographic and getting worse by the week?

I would also say that the John Jay College study of child sex abuse in the Church traces most of it to post-1960s, which is to say post-Vatican II social attitudes. I think it's a mistake to try to move the crisis back to the 1950s and earlier, when the extensive public records available on the web, for instance here, trace the vast majority of instances to priests ordained post Vatican II. I won't try to say Vatican II was a cause of the social attitudes that led to the problem, but we are in fact talking about a distinctly different social environment.

On the other hand, our parish has the archdiocesan vocations director in residence at the rectory, and he takes regular masses and confessions there. He is an outstanding priest. Our parish has a seminarian ordained in the archdiocese more years than not, so something about it is encouraging vocations. Our archdiocese just ordained nine new priests this past Saturday, of which one was from our parish. All I can say is that, if my correspondent has spoken with people who didn't have a good experience in seminary, I see counterexamples myself, often more than once a week. Is this supposed to be disqualifying?

Let's go briefly to the case of Mr Chadwick. At the end of a not entirely coherent apologia pro vita sua, he says,

As an experienced priest and a man of nearly 60, I look back at it all. Perhaps I should not have become a priest, but I did, and I have a Bishop who expects much from me. You don’t put your hand to the plough and look back! Such is often the state of those priests whom Bruce might despise but who are men of quality in their own way, seeking to fulfil God’s will, and being “given a break” by those responsible for clergy selection and training.

This verges on word salad. He recounts an experience in Catholic seminary leading to ordination as a Catholic deacon (as best I can make out, I'll be happy to be corrected), but at some point, based on overall conclusions people have drawn from various accounts he's written, he left the Catholic diaconate and in fact left the Catholic Church. I don't believe he was ever ordained a Catholic priest, and it isn't clear if he was ever formally laicized. Exactly what denomination ordained him he doesn't say, but in later years he has been associated with the TAC and is now with the ACC. However, his implication is that he's a "priest" irrespective of denomination, which isn't a Catholic position. The "Bishop" he refers to is in a comic-opera "continuing" sect.

In fact, a good Catholic who is properly laicized is expected not to identify himself subsequently as a "priest" in any other denomination. So at this point, a good Catholic, which, having gone to RCIA and been received, I naturally try to be, should not be taking Mr Chadwick's claims of being a priest very seriously, and in fact, prudence would suggest this situation be taken as something of a red flag. I recognize that Mr Chadwick would prefer I not do this and not espouse this view, but there we are, and perhaps this is near the root of his beef.

So I am granting my correspondent's point, and indeed Mr Chadwick's point, that not all vocations are equal. But if Catholics have the opportunity, it seems to me they should be seeking out the best catechesis, preaching, and confessors they can find. If some priests are less good, this means others are better, after all. That some priests without authentic vocations have been ordained in error, as they always have, doesn't take away from this. And some, having been laicized, should not be pretending to be priests at all.

That, of course, is not my problem. It does seem to be Mr Chadwick's problem.

UPDATE: Still curious about the exact what, where, when and how of Mr Chadwick's canonical status, I knew I had this somewhere, and a past e-mail from my regular correspondent sets things straight:

Chadwick is in delict of schism on several counts. He converted to Catholicism as a young man and later became a "continuing" Anglican; this would incur the delict of schism even in a layperson. In the interval he became involved with the SSPX and later with some group associated with Bp Ngo Dinh Thuc under whose auspices he was ordained and later styled himself Monsignor. The details escape me but his orders are valid enough that his subsequent "attempted" marriage would also incur canonical penalty. When he met Hepworth he had become disenchanted with the sedevacantist Catholic group and was a one man denomination with a chapel in his garage. Hepworth invited him into the TAC, for whatever reason.

"We Go Where We're Sent."

In this week's bulletin, our pastor announced that we would be losing not one associate (which was announced the previous week), but two. They're outstanding priests who've taught me a lot in the confessional. On one hand, the pastor announced they'll be replaced, and since the diocesan vocations director is in residence at the rectory, it's a good bet they'll be good ones, too.

On the other hand, the pastor's tone was just a bit wistful about losing them both, but he recognized his job was to keep the parish up to speed, and he concluded, "We go where we're sent." It seems to me that this is a major factor that's missing from the OCSP: most clergy can't be redeployed. But also, it doesn't matter much: who would want to send most of these guys anywhere?

Notice too one point of the story my regular correspondent told yesterday about St John Vianney: the community failed to thrive under two priests, but when Fr Stainbrook was redeployed from St Timothy's, Ft Worth, things changed. Celibate priests are important -- so why is the OCSP continuing to ordain married mediocrities with poor track records in multiple Protestant denominations?

Even so, married Anglican priests do move around. But market forces are at work, and the successful ones will move on to parishes that can afford to support them and their families. The less successful ones find other careers. Some, presumably in desperation, even apply to go into the OCSP.

Six years on, very few OCSP communities have grown to the point where they can suppport the redeployment of a married priest. But redeployment seems to be one of the few hopes available to communities that aren't thriving.

How Seriously Should The Church Take A Reformed Background?

Reflecting on Prof Guelzo's history of the Reformed Episcopal Church, I'm convinced it's an important book for Anglicans, and in fact for Catholics curious about Anglicanorum coetibus. Among other things, it calls to mind Diarmaid MacCulloch's formulation that Anglicanism is a Reformed denomination that retained bishops and cathedral chapters as instruments of political patronage. It also brings to mind the remark of one Flannery O'Connor character to another that the Protestants "reformed all the nonsense" out of Christianity.

Guelzo's story starts with eighteenth-century Anglicanism and the US Protestant Episcopal Church hewing to their Reformed theological roots, hospitable to evangelicalism, with an episcopal polity working as an effective means of governance. The Oxford Movement served as a distraction, dangling a bright, shiny object of Ritualism in front of churchmen who'd lost sight of their evangelical mission. One difficulty that Guelzo points out is that, by leaving PECUSA, the REC also abandoned the rationale for bishops or a stable theology as outlined in the XXXIX Articles, which later national conventions wished to amend to XXXV. But if you get right down to it, the REC was true to its Reformed origins in doing so.

Guelzo in fact gave me a refresher on my Presbyterian confirmation class, which was largely anti-Catholic propaganda. Only two sacraments are authorized in scripture, and the Catholics have bizarre ideas that marriage and ordination should be sacraments, to say nothing of -- aaargh! -- confession. The actual sacraments are just sort of a declaration of intention and a memorial anyhow. Bishops are an outdated medieval and anti-democratic institution. We are saved by grace, not by works. Guelzo takes things a step farther to remind us that in Reformed theology, all believers are priests, and what Catholics mistakenly call a "priest" is just a presbyter. Vestments are just vain display.

This is a mindset. I look back on my elite-school education, which, while nominally secular, retained a great deal of Reformed world-view: if doctrine and liturgy are obstacles to the true working of the Spirit, then the sincerity of your intent overrides outward appearances, which are hypocritical anyhow. Thus we got the 1960s in all their aspect. True religion, for that matter, is something that's only partly manifested in outward forms like creeds or crucifixes. In fact, Buddhism in that way is much more pure than Christianity -- something I believed myself for several years there.

To come out of this was a journey. Something similar, for that matter, was a journey for St Augustine. And it was a journey for Reformed converts like Peter Kreeft, Scott Hahn, and David Campbell. Hahn and Campbell resigned their Presbyterian orders, in fact, and became Catholic lay apologists. This reinforces for me the idea that a few seminary makeup courses -- or in fact a few more years in seminary -- aren't enough to make an ex-Presbyterian into a fully believing Catholic. It requires a real change in world view, and I respect people like Hahn and Campbell who seem to have felt that a Presbyterian vocation did not automatically transfer to a Catholic one.

The ordinations the other day of yet more second-tier OCSP candidates brought this back into focus for me. Fr Bayles, for instance, went to a Reformed seminary, and he's made his mediocre career on a Protestant denominational carousel. How much of any doctrinal changes have any ex-Reformed OCSP priests taken seriously, especially if they've already had a history of trimming doctrinal sails for one or another Protestant denomination?

But Wait! It's On Facebook!

Strictly speaking, my regular correspondent's remarks yesterday that there was no publicity on the forthcoming ordinations of four opportunists wannabes priests in Houston were correct, although there was publicity afterward.

I eat my words. If you have two hours and three minutes on your hands, you can go to the OCSP website and be linked to the FB video of the entire ordination service. Provided you're on FB, I guess. Otherwise, you can read the one sentence (plus "Ad multos annos!" ) descriptor.

There are many things one can say about Facebook. I had to get on it to do something or other on the web maybe half a dozen years ago, but I've even forgotten how to log on and what my password may have been, so I'm not tempted. In general, I would say that it's one of the worst venues for abusive social media that are out there, and as a medium, it's at best passé and certainly not thought of as serious. Yes, if you want your Aunt Matilda to see the photos, I guess it works, but is it something that will impress upscale Episcopalians on the brink of coming over? I don't think so.

But let's look at the men who were ordained yesterday. My regular correspondent has done the usual thorough research:

As I have said before these candidates are the second tier. Two (Joseph Reffner and Matthew Whitehead) are military chaplains who will not be associated with DW or an Ordinariate group until they retire, probably decades from now. If ever, that is---at least one former military chaplain ordained for the OCSP is now in full-time diocesan ministry. One of the other two is the administrator-in-waiting of Our Lady of Grace, Pasadena, a group started by Fr Bartus apparently entirely as a make-work project for then-Mr Bayles. Now Fr B has turned his attention to Holy Martyrs, Murrieta -- of the 472 Facebook friends of OLG, exactly one has been added since January, 2018---and OLG has not held a service for several months. It was drawing 20 or 30 people under Fr Bartus' leadership; although it is moving to a larger room in the high school for its Sunday morning celebrations I do not see Fr Bayles drawing a significantly larger crowd. In any event, the venue will not be available during the week, presumably, limiting parish activity. School chapels have not been a recipe for success at St Augustine, San Diego or St Anselm, Greenville (now closed) although two others are still meeting.

The other is Ed Wills, former CEC colleague of Fr Randy Sly, later a lay assistant at a Catholic church in the diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph. This article from two years ago describes the denominational merry-go-round in greater detail. Our Lady of Hope, Kansas City was a Pastoral Provision parish whose priest subsequently went into full-time diocesan ministry. Now Fr Sly combines his leadership of the group with being the pastor of the host parish and an associate pastor at another parish. The Ordinariate group has limped along for four years under two successive priests, as it limped along in the PP for the previous four (story here) and I do not foresee any new influx of energy from the future Fr Wills in his priestly ministry. Fr Davis was a lifelong Episcopalian before his conversion but the current OLH leadership has no real Anglican connection and seems to have treated the Ordinariate merely as a stepping-stone to ordination.

Unless someone else can find some serious coverage of the Pentecost mass at Holy Martyrs Murrieta, this event, probably the most significant for the OCSP in recent months, remains unmentioned. Yesterday's ordinations, on the other hand, represent just more of the same.