Has Stetson fallen out of favor with OD? No OD site has mentioned his death or funeral. Wikepedia is a weird place to get that kind of info.Actually, my regular correspondent heard about this from an indirect source, and I went to Google to confirm it. The only mention was in Wikipedia, but the indirect source where my correspondent found it struck me as credible. So this certainly raises a worthwhile set of questions. A Google search today also brings up no further mention of his death. It's entirely possible that only the small group of now-Catholic clergy who'd previously worked with him as Anglicans felt his passing was worth noting, although I've been told that Fr Phillips hated Stetson, and the feeling was mutual.
Stetson, born in 1931, would have been 87 at the time of his passing. He would have reached 75 in 2006. According to Wikipedia, he was put in charge of the Catholic bookstore ("information center") in Washington in 2004, but left it in 2007 to continue to serve as secretary to the Pastoral Provision in Houston, where he remained until 2010. Meanwhile, Abp John Myers of Newark was made delegate for the Pastoral Provision in 2003, replacing Stetson's patron, Bernard Law, who left the country. (We may assume that Law, once he got to Rome, focused his efforts on Anglicanorum coetibus.)
It appears that Stetson left his position as secretary, what must have been a de facto retirement, before Bp Kevin Vann replaced Myers as delegate in 2011. At the same time, Stetson moved to Los Angeles. The Wikipedia account, almost certainly written by Stetson himself, makes no mention of a main reason for the move, which would have been to supervise the reception of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood Anglican parish into the to-be-erected North American ordinariate in early 2012. Abp Gómez also was installed in Los Angeles in 2011, and Stetson has sometimes been called a confidant of Gómez.
On one hand, finally receiving St Mary of the Angels into the OCSP would have been a key focus for Bernard Law, who had dealt extensively with its then-rector, Fr Jack Barker, in the late 1970s, and he would have seen it as a major piece of unfinished business in the context of Anglicanorum coetibus. But Stetson, 80 years old by the time this project began and effectively retired from any Opus Dei position (even that of bookstore manager) for several years, was probably not the best choice.
I wouldn't rule out that Stetson felt he didn't have enough to do and approached Law for some role in setting up the new ordinariate. Law may have given him something where he felt he couldn't do too much damage, and far enough away from Houston that he couldn't meddle with Steenson, but even there, Stetson managed to bungle things.
The visitor above asked another question:
I'd love someone to do research on Chicago. Did Stetson blackmail Bernardin to get that parish? There has to be something.My money would be on Law. Law was just as liberal as Bernardin -- something both the visitor here who knew him has pointed out, as well as Philip Lawler in The Faithful Departed -- and I would guess that Law arranged the project for Stetson, who might already have been on shaky ground in Opus Dei. Law and Bernardin were close; no blackmail necessary. But others may have insights.
Since St Mary of the Angels never went into the Church, Stetson never had a chance to serve as "chaplain" to the parish during its transition, and in fact, although the original plan had been for every parish coming into the OCSP to have a Catholic priest serve as a temporary pastor while its Anglican rector waited to be ordained, as far as I'm aware, this almost never actually happened. But also, David Moyer, the ACA bishop over the parish, seems never to have been consulted by any Catholic authority for his insights, which I believe he had, and which I think were perceptive, over both personnel and physical plant.
Stetson, as far as I'm aware never a parish priest or a pastor, wouldn't have been a good choice to lead the parish in any case. From what anyone can gather, he and Jeffrey Steenson relied instead on Anthony Morello, a disgraced ex-TEC priest then in the ACA (he passed away in 2013), and Andrew Bartus, a fresh Nashotah House graduate who couldn't manage to get ordained as an Episcopalian, for whatever advice they had.
It's hard not to conclude that Stetson owed whatever career success he had to his patron Bernard Law, but in spite of that, his record in very secondary assignments appears to have been less than stellar.
