Vaughn Treco Resurfaces

My regular correspondent reports,

Vaughn Treco has informed his GoFundMe supporters that he and his wife are attending a new Catholic parish where "a few people know our names." He was one of the people, or should I say the men, who had his foot washed---and kissed---on Thursday night. "For those familiar with the old ways, the significance of this act should be apparent." Presumably he is a priest forever after the order of Melchizidek in the eyes of his new pastor, not to mention a Catholic in good standing. I have a feeling that Treco will not be going gentle into that good night. An ongoing source of potential embarrassment for the OCSP. Whatever Msgr Steenson's limitations, he was probably prescient in wishing to avoid having the Ordinariate identified with "Traditionalists."

I wasn't able to come up with a direct reference on a web search, but I believe I've seen a discussion to the effect that a laicized priest, besides being unable to wear clericals, call himself "Father', or celebrate the sacraments, is under some obligation to leave his former community altogether in order to prevent confusion among the faithful. Treco, although his duties as a priest were apparently always quite low-level, had a bigger social media presence, which is apparently what got him into trouble when errors in a posted homily were noted outside his community.

Beyond that, I've seen references to Treco being excommunicated, although I don't think there are direct public sources for this. I simply don't know what someone does to lift this type of excommunication, nor whether it's been done in the context of his new parish. If someone can clarify this, I'll appreciate it!

I would think it would be better all around, for the sake of Treco's spiritual outcome as well as for the sake of those whom he may have misled as a priest, for him to renounce any social media presence and maintain a low profile going forward. It appears this may be too much to ask.

I agree with my correspondent that this could be an "ongoing source of potential embarrassment" for Houston, though certainly not the only one. Treco became Catholic well before Anglicanorum coetibus, and it seems to me that he has something in common with the cradle and longer-term Catholics who are finding in the OCSP not a route into the Church for Anglicans, but a route out of their dioceses, or indeed out of the Church, for Catholics who should know better.

A Wider Angle On The California Groups

Responding to yesterday's post, my regular correspondent comments,

Our Lady of Grace's move to Covina must have been somewhat spur-of-the-moment, because they (or a donor) commissioned a new portable altar of some artistic pretension for the high school cafetorium in Pasadena where they previously met. It was delivered last June. [Now they're renovating the sanctuary of the Covina building, so one wonders what happened to the other altar.] As we recall, Fr Bartus regularly celebrated Sunday mass at OLG until Fr Bayles was ordained, but he seems to have had little or no direct involvement since. He is likewise conspicuously absent from Blessed John Henry Newman, unless a visit from Bp Lopes is taking place.

Any idea that Holy Martyrs, Murrieta was a chapel of ease for parishioners of the main community, BJHN, is contradicted by the fact that its regular Sunday congregation appears considerably larger than that in Irvine and Fr Bartus is the regular celebrant, while we know the maximum capacity of the Irvine venue is 65. Murreita alone had the full complement of Triduum and Easter Sunday services. BJHN had a 9 am mass on Easter Day, but no 11 am.

BJHN and St Augustine of Canterbury in San Diego were established with a core of former Anglicans who accompanied their clergyman into the Church. The latter community seems to have dwindled from perhaps three dozen to around ten under Fr Baaten's leadership. BJHN has been effectively off-loaded onto supply clergy, and remains a mission.

OLG seems to have been "disaffected Catholics" from the get-go, gathered as a pretext for the ordination of Fr Bayles. Hard to know if it has potential for growth without consistent pastoral leadership. HM is likewise mostly disaffected Catholics, but for whatever reason Fr Bartus feels it has potential that none of the others displayed, so he has decided to focus his efforts there. My impression is that his efforts are not really bankable.

The SoCal Ordinariate to this point is a Potemkin village, or maybe I mean a Big Store. As you point out, people like Ms Nicolosi are wasting their time in these congregations with little to offer and less of a future, instead of contributing time, talent, and treasure to existing parishes. Bad enough, without adding insult to injury by claiming on Facebook that the entire Archdiocese of Los Angeles is uniformly a disaster area. "We are here to show you how it should be done" is a risky approach, especially in a situation where resources are scarce.

Speaking from brief experience as a "continuing" Anglican parish treasurer, I'd be interested to learn what the pledges at these groups look like. I think one among several of Fr Barker's errors of judgment at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood was to acquire a major income property for the parish in the 1980s. The eventual result was that none of the parishioners had any real skin in the game -- they were squabbling over a massive resource that none had built. Several of the most prominent dissidents in 2011-12 didn't even pledge.

Fr Bartus, whose first clergy assignment was at St Mary of the Angels, seems not to have learned a key lesson, that a parish needs to be a cooperative effort. Instead, he's relying on angels, like the Truax family in Murrieta, or the willingness of the Busch company to host the Newman group in Irvine -- both probably relieve their groups of costs they'd otherwise have to pay. I have no idea what the arrangement is for the aging facility in Covina, although I have a sense the owner would like to unload it and is allowing its use on generous terms in hopes the group will eventually be able to buy. Yeah, right.

The sense I have is that these groups think they're getting something on the cheap. Again, it's just a sense, fed by my experience at St Mary of the Angels: not only do they get to associate with an exclusive group of like-minded people (that won't last), but they get to be big fish without paying big-fish dues. It's just a guess, but again, my estimate from St Mary of the Angels would be that an average weekly pledge of $20 is on the high side, but other than the angels themselves, there won't be other serious givers. (If the treasurers of any of these groups would like to disagree, I'll gladly listen.)

Why else is Fr Bartus turning to a garden party in hopes of identifying new angel donors? In our parish, the pastor regularly stresses the importance of sacrificial giving in his homilies, and even in the regular exhortation to "reflect on our sacrificial giving" before each mass's offering. It shows. But for whatever reason, Fr Bartus -- and Bp Lopes is clearly on board -- is looking toward hypothetical new philanthropists, not his own parishioners, to expand.

Just before everything went south at St Mary of the Angels in 2012, I met with the parish's then-accountant. I stressed my concerns that the parish wasn't relying on pledge income, and instead assumed the rent from the tenant on its commercial property would always be there. He agreed. He reminded me that business conditions change, tenants move or go out of business. In 2012, the St Mary's tenant was a bank in a rapidly changing industry, and soon enough it moved out.

By the same token, the wealthy families of angel donors aren't always of the same mind. The angel can suddenly pass on, and the family or the business managers may have other ideas about the facility that's been provided for the ordinariate group. I think Fr Bartus and Bp Lopes must be aware of this, but clearly the solution can't be to go looking for backup angels.

The problem is that the target market they're serving now is in effect "continuing Catholics" who don't like their dioceses and want exclusive groups to suit themselves -- without paying the dues real Catholics have to pay. This is not a recipe for success. I don't think it's a coincidence, actually, that Bp Lopes didn't rise to his position through a diocesan promotion process. As visitors have commented now and then, dioceses have become what they are through centuries of experience in what works.

"Continuers" of any flavor, not so much.

More On California's Holy Week

My regular correspondent noted that the California groups (none of which is a parish) seemed to have some difficulty in covering a full Triduum schedule. A Facebook post by a member of the Our Lady of Grace group in Covina (thanks to my correspondent for the heads-up) provides some background. The poster, Barbara Nicolosi, is extremely prolific. This is from April 18:

Our beloved Anglican Ordinariate parish is not having services for today and tomorrow because our priest got sent off to serve our country as a military chaplain. (We miss you Fr. Aaron R. Bayles!!!) So, despite all my prior resolves to avoid the scandal of banality which is the local N.O. parish - the last nightmare was a bizarre Lenten Mission which I'm still trying to block out - I decided to get over myself and go there for Holy Thursday Mass tonight. I love the Triduum, and missing it is a source of pain. I walked in, and as I passed through the vestibule, I noticed what looked like a mountain of caramels stacked up on a tray. I moved closer and realized it was plates full of leavened bread which was all cut up and ready to be crumbled all over the church by the legion of well-meaning but liturgically unschooled not at all "Extraordinary" ministers. So, I asked the usher who I know, "Larry, what is this?" He said, "Oh yeah, they did that last year too." And I said, "But they can't. It's illicit to use chunks of leavened bread at Mass." And he shrugged, "Do you want to talk to Father? It's kind of late now...." I stood there shaking my head. I had braced myself for the inane, ugly music. I had prepared myself for a dumb homily. I was ready for the irreverence and the socializing of peace. I was even ready to see the priests putting their hands all over the bare calves and feet of a bunch of women at the washing of feet. But I wasn't ready for chunks of the Blessed Sacrament to get passed into people's dirty hands, with crumbs flying everywhere. I walked out. So, now, I will spend one hour with Jesus by ourselves, sitting in my living room. No Eucharist. No sharing in the second most beautiful liturgy of the year. I'm so sick of the Church in Los Angeles.

This is peculiar for what it says, and what it doesn't. I don't know where Ms Nicolosi lives, but I assume she travels some non-trivial distance to get to Covina. But unable to attend Holy Thursday there, she defaults to her local diocesan parish, which she calls a "scandal of banality".

Whew. Isn't she setting herself up for something here? This is 2019. All she needs to do is say "Catholic Church" into Google on her phone, and it'll bring up several within a few minutes' drive, with a map and directions. If she has an extra 10 or 15 minutes, she can do a little more browsing and come up with other candidates by looking over their websites. I've simply never been to a Catholic parish, in Chicago or California, that used Presbyterian style bread -- but beyond that, parishes all vary in their atmosphere. Why can't she find one nearby that's more to her liking?

Instead, she simply says, "I'm so sick of the Church in Los Angeles." This, however, goes to an issue I'm working through. I certainly read the usual news about Catholic priests busted for public indecency, hanging gay pride banners in the sanctuary, or whatever, and Los Angeles does have its share of this sort of thing, which Randy Engle excoriates in The Rite of Sodomy. On the other hand, if our own and surrounding parishes are any sample (which I think they must be), they're serious places run by devout and hard-working priests who in fact set inspiring personal examples.

Indeed, the archdiocesan vocation director is in residence at our parish, and he takes masses and confessions there. He is a serious and inspiring guy, not the sort you'd imagine if all you read was opinion pieces to the effect that they're all in the lavender mafia. And he's choosing his associate directors, who appear to be serious people as well. That gives me the impression that day to day, there must be other serious people running things in the chancery.

So my next question, after why Ms Nicolosi didn't just google other nearby parishes, is why didn't she report the illicit sacrament to the serious people in the chancery? Now, if I ran into a situation like that, I wouldn't know exactly how to report it, but I could do a web search and find out what other people might have done, or I could ask another priest about it, or I could maybe just call the chancery and ask how to report it. It could well become a good learning experience.

Instead, she's just playing Ain't It Awful. Beyond that, to say, as she pretty much does, that the whole Archdiocese of Los Angeles is like that is the sin of rash judgment, if not calumny. And I'll bet the two dozen folks who show up for DW mass in Covina reinforce her in that, too. I wouldn't go near that place, I'd sooner try to do something about the illicit sacrament in the diocesan parish.

But here's another issue. She mentions that Fr Bayles, who became a Catholic Air Force chaplain when he was ordained in the OCSP, left when he was deployed. But that was last year, when the group was still in Pasadena. Since then, my regular correspondent has found that masses for the Our Lady of Grace group are covered by Fr Barker, who is retired from the Diocese of San Bernardino and who has helped out at California ordinariate parishes since then.

So the issue is more complicated than Ms Nicolosi makes out. For the time Fr Bayles was involved with the group in Pasadena, he was commuting from the San Luis Obispo area. For saying mass, he would have been entitled to mileage reimbursement and a stipend. San Luis Obispo is 192 miles from Pasadena or 384 miles round trip. At 54.5 cents per mile, he would have been entitled to $209.28 for mileage alone, without considering the stipend. Two dozen people attending DW mass would have to put over $20 each in the basket just to pay Fr Bayles, not counting any other costs for the group. My experience as a "continuing" parish treasurer is that an average pledge of $20 is up there.

My guess is Fr Bayles, once he was called to active duty, is being paid as an Air Force Major, with full benefits. It must have been a relief to get away from the Pasadena group. Without him, the group has to rely on the good nature and continuing good health of Fr Barker -- but for some reason, the California OCSP groups were down one priest for Holy Week. (What happened to Fr Barbour, who'd been taking masses in Irvine? It looks like Fr Barker had to cover for him there.)

The bottom line is that there ain't no free lunch. The total number of OCSP members in four California counties can't be more than a couple hundred, yet up to very recently, they were served by Frs Baaten, Barbour, Barker, Bartus, and Bayles. The only one of these who is getting anything like full pay is Fr Bartus. Inevitably, others are going to be out of the mix, to the point that they won't realistically be able to cover high-demand periods like Holy Week. If nothing else, Fr Barker is a septuagenarian, and his health can't hold indefinitely. Fr Barbour, who is a major figure in his order, seems to have been called elsewhere.

And the California groups are holding a garden party in hopes of preserving the status quo. Good luck. Ms Nicolosi seems to have confused the Catholic Church with a Disney attraction.

But They Still Want Big Donors

Regarding the Holy Week schedules at the Southern California OCSP communities, my regular correspondent notes,

While attendance appeared scant at St Augustine's at least there were services to attend, other than an Easter Vigil. Apparently Our Lady of Grace, Covina had the latter, but nothing Thursday, Friday, or Easter Sunday morning. Oh, I see Fr Baaten celebrated the Easter Vigil at Blessed John's. Who was at Covina?

Nevertheless, the last we heard, Our Lady of Grace was trying to raise $1.5 million to buy a building. If nobody shows up for one of the busiest Sundays of the year, I've got to say good luck.

I can't avoid thinking this is context for the garden party hopeful big-donor schmooze at Blessed John's June 1.

My phytoplankton friend from last week has reassured me that he only seems angry in e-mails, but he isn't angry. Nevertheless, he's quick to reprove me for assuming he goes to mass at an ordinariate parish, when in fact he actually said in his e-mails that although he goes to confession with OCSP priests, he doesn't go to mass at their parishes. Now, clearly it's dangerous to assume when dealing with not-angry self-identified phytoplanktons, I nevertheless have to ask what part of the country has multiple ordinariate priests in or near a single diocese, and a big candidate would be Southern California.

So, do phytoplanktons who only go to confession at a particular parish, but not mass, ever donate money there? Sounds like even a $5 bill sent anonymously in the mail would help some of these groups out.

Relaxed English Garden Party!

My regular correspondent sent me a screen shot of this Facebook post from the Bl John Henry Newman group in Irvine, CA (click on the image for a larger version):

The first thing that strikes me is the Union Jack in the image. The second thing is that this is to be a Choral Evensong and Garden Party. The Catholic part is buried down in the text.

The third thing is that it's "a developers event. . . . to discern if you can assist us in forming an investors & development team, for future fundraising. . ." My regular correspondent comments,

" 'Featuring' The Most Rev. Steven J. Lopes." What an expression. "Dress: Business casual." Let's just say this is going to stand in the same relationship to an English garden party as the Toad Hall Restaurant at Disneyland Paris stands to an English manor house. More importantly, this community, which has been meeting for eight years, (six at its current location), has apparently still not met the relatively low standard for OCSP parish status nor realised any of Fr Bartus' other projects.

I suspect this initiative, despite its pretentious kick-off, will fare no better than the school or the Rosary Chapel. BJHN is, of course, doing better than St Augustine of Canterbury, Del Mar, whose members were received at the same service as BJHN, back in 2012.

I sense an air of desperation here. The target market seems to be Anglophile philanthropists with money burning holes in their pockets, eager to schmooze with a Most Rev of Polish and Portuguese background. Will there be a dialect coach to polish Bp Lopes's Received Pronunciation, I wonder?

I'm not a professional fundraiser by any means, but I do have a sense that major donors are not recruited via public invitations like this one. And if I wanted major Catholic donors, I think the guys to schmooze with would be Gómez, Vann, or Barron. Where are Carl and Lois Davis in Houston, or Timothy Busch, right down the hall in the facility they're using in Irvine? Are they not on board? You don't recruit them with a garden party on the patio, though.

I'm not saying they might not already have such people lined up, but I do get a feeling that they're casting about at random here for some loose millionaires who might be interested, but they don't yet know about.

A real bishop has fundraising experts on staff or on retainer. These were engaged, for instance, in cooperation with the archdiocese for our parish's current building campaign. I don't have a sense that anything like this is going on in Irvine, or Houston, for that matter. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

More On Houseling Cloths And A Presbyterian Ordinariate

A visitor e-mailed me saying the only time he ever heard of houseling cloths in use was at an FSSP parish in Rome, discussed here in 2009 at the blog of the Latin Mass Society's chairman. It has a photo of the servers deploying the cloths prior to use. The visitor says, "They're trying so hard to reenact." The blogger said in the post,

These customs, which remind me of medieval English customs, in fact survive in a number of places on the Continent.

Except that in the tract I quoted yesterday, Percy Dearmer said

Before the Reformation there were no communion rails, and houseling cloths or 'Easter towels' were held by assistants under the hands of communicants as they knelt for their annual communion.

Which goes yet again to the fact that people add what they will to fantasies of Olde English Catholicism, or Anglicanism, or "Angelicanism". But wait, there's more!

My regular correspondent pointed me to this story of a Presbyterian parish in Ontario that decided it, too, needed houseling cloths. This usage has a long and twisted history that in part doesn't match my childhood memories of Presbyterian services.

In 1830 in Scotland, Rev. Thomas Chalmers found himself with a dilemma most 20th century ministers would welcome. He was drawing so many people to Sunday worship, the celebration of Holy Communion was becoming a time-consuming practice. And the customs of the congregation were not designed for speed.

. . . Chalmers' solution? Make tables out of pews. Strips of linen or 'housling' cloths, were placed on each pew. The bread and wine were passed from the end of the pews, the large cups of wine refilled from flagons carried by the elders.

Well, at least by the 20th century in PCUSA/PCUS, communion was celebrated with little glass thimbles of grape juice and tiny cubes of Wonder Bread. No wine. And this was fine, since the Real Presence wasn't involved, and if the grape juice was spilled or a cube of bread fell, not a biggie, it'd be wiped up with a Kleenex or vacuumed later. Exactly why a houseling cloth would be needed is obscure, although even among Catholics, patens made them superfluous if not an impediment. But:

The congregation of Knox Church, Burlington, Ontario, began using housling cloths in 1927 under the leadership of Rev. Robert Moorehead Legate. Legate's ministry to the congregation came to an abrupt end when he resigned over the session's refusal to change a Communion date so he could attend the Church of Scotland General Assembly on behalf of the national church. The use of housling cloths at Knox continued, however, and today, they are used at four Communion services yearly.

This meaningful and stately custom does not come without cost. There is a lot of work involved. The linen must be washed, ironed, rolled and placed on each pew using small, metal clips.

After 70 years, it is obvious Knox Church finds the work worthwhile, and the fabric of the congregation strengthened through its use of housling cloths.

An illustration at the link isn't entirely clear, but it looks like the entire back of each pew is draped with fitted white linens. But at least in the US, there are little wooden brackets with holes on the pew backs where communicants place their grape juice thimbles after they've been distributed, as well as after the communion, so they can be picked up, washed, and stored. Either Canadian Presbyterians have some other method of dealing with the thimbles, or some method of reaching the wooden brackets under the houseling cloths has been devised and taught to catechumens at that parish.

But this is all the more reason to consider a Presbyterian ordinariate in North America. The practices at Knox Presbyterian, Burlington, ON, should be made universal. Consider as well the decline in apparent interest we've seen at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog. The Society's good offices can now be put to use considering the myriad customs and doctrinal points that attach to the whole question of houseling cloths -- and once ordinariate members have mastered the issues relating to chapel veils, they'll certainly be in a position to advance to houseling cloths at all their parishes.

So, Why Not Houseling Cloths?

The idea of a houseling cloth on the communion rail stuck with me after yesterday's post. A web search brings up remarkably few results ("Did you mean housing clothes?") Now and then someone posts on a forum that within living memory, such a thing was done, and some people seem to regard it with the same nostalgia as ad orientem celebration, the 1962 liturgy, and chapel veils. However, they don't seem to appear even at FSSP or SSPX venues now.

An exception is Fr Z, who installed them at his home parish, but even he was stumped at how they were normally attached to the rail. The most authoritative discussion, at least as it relates to Catholic practice, is here:

In modern times the Communion cloth was called for in the Roman Ritual and Missal, although the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the Communion paten as an alternative. Apparently this was considered an abuse, for roughly ten years later the Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments issued a decree requiring the cloth, and allowing the additional use of the paten. The paten was to be larger than the paten used at the altar, and unconsecrated. At first it was given to the laity to pass from communicant to communicant, but often came to be carried by the server.

As employed during the 20th century, the cloth was handled by the acolytes for the reception of Communion at the altar, and was extended to full length for use at the altar rail. It obviously was not treated with the same minute attention as the corporal was at the altar, although the priest would have carefully recovered any visible fragments if a Host were dropped on to it. In practice, a Communion cloth was sometimes semi-permanently attached to the sanctuary side of the altar rail, and flipped over it at Communion time. This practice may have led to the exclusive use of the paten, as being less likely to scatter Host fragments.

The Communion cloth is mentioned by rubricists and remained in Ritus servandus (X. 6) of the Roman Missal until the 1960 revision of Pope John XXIII. Curiously, the Rubricæ generales (XX) of the earlier Missals did not mention the cloth among the items prepared for Mass at the credence table. The 1960 Missal removed the Confiteor with its associated prayers as well as the Communion cloth from X. 6, mentioning a Communion paten on the credence in Rubricæ generales 528.

Interestingly, the discussion never quite comes to a conclusion as to exactly what purpose they served. The illustration from Fr Z's blog that I carried here yesterday shows the communicants with their hands under the cloths, but apparently this was never a requirement, and not everyone did this. Perhaps more important, as far as I can tell, houseling cloths were never an Anglican, or even Anglo-Catholic, usage. Can someone confirm or deny this? In any case, while some still living do remember them, they pretty clearly disappeared even before the post-Conciliar revisions.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent points me to a 1929 tract by Percy Dearmer on liturgical linens:

Of little more than antiquarian interest are the houseling cloth and the font-cloth. The latter was almost entirely given up because fresh water was used for the Prayer Book service of baptism. [It was retained into the nineteenth century in five churches to my knowledge, where it hung over the cover like a pointed extinguisher.] The use of the former continued as a local custom in one or two places, and has been revived in recent times. Before the Reformation there were no communion rails, and houseling cloths or 'Easter towels' were [7/8] held by assistants under the hands of communicants as they knelt for their annual communion. When they are used at the present day they are generally laid on the altar-rails; and, being mere strips of linen, there is nothing more to be said about them, except that they do not serve any practical purpose and have little or no aesthetic value, though they may perhaps act as a reminder that the primitive Eucharist was a sacred meal eaten round a table.'

Hmm. By pretty much general consensus, a useless item that may or may not prove something.

So that shouldn't keep the North American ordinariate's "Angelicans" from installing and using them, should it? And just to be sure, everyone should be keeping their hands under the cloth, this should not be just an option. That'll fit well with the compulsory chapel veils, baskets full of them in back in generous allowance for those who might embarrassingly have forgotten them. Forsooth, even if this is not part of our Anglican patrimony, we ought to declare that it is!

Frankly, I wonder why Fr Barker hadn't implemented this back in the 1970s at St Mary of the Angels -- they had patens even then, but no houseling cloths. An omission that Fr Bartus should be eager to correct!

"He’s Under The Impression That The Anglican Church Is Protestant."

A visitor sent me a link to one of the many Anglican blogs on the web -- which one actually doesn't matter -- with the question,

Have you read this gentleman’s blog? He’s under the impression that the Anglican Church is Protestant. The opposite of you Ordinariate folks.

This goes to one question that's long been forming in my head. I think back to probably the one sensible and factually correct statement I heard in any lecture as an undergraduate, a professor who said people have bought into a fantasy of Jollie Olde England, the Spectator, and the Pickwick Papers, when the English were actually murderously efficient people.

And this goes to some of the balderdash I was taught in graduate school, including EMW Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture, which asserts that Ulysses's "Take but degree away. . ." speech in Act I Scene iii of Troilus and Cressida shows that "Elizabethans believed" in a Great Chain of Being in which everything is ordered from lesser to greater. (Ulysses in the medieval tradition was a trickster.)

Except that Henry VIII broke with an ordered universe in leaving the Catholic Church, and his daughter Elizabeth, arguably a bastard heretic, was a regicide. Both, though, were murderously efficient. I did hard time in graduate school.

There's a fantasy that's still sold of Jollie Olde England, most recently with Harry Potter but certainly exploited by Disney with Sleeping Beauty's castle and The Wind in the Willows, of this sort of mythic comfy-cutesy place, and I think it carries over into a popular view of Anglicanism. Why don't we get all weepy about the Precious Treasures of the Presbyterian Spiritual Patrimony, after all?

This leads to a question I got from reading a post on Fr Z's blog yesterday, regarding the proper way to receive the Host kneeling on the tongue. He includes this handy diagram:

Fr Z notes that there is a “houseling cloth” draped over the rail in the illustration showing the Right Way to do things. In 30 years as an Episcopalian, in some very hoity-toity parishes and even some Anglo-Catholic ones, I've never seen a "houseling cloth", although all distributed the Host kneeling at the communion rail. Maybe this was because they were really Protestant, or maybe even the Anglo-Catholic ones never figured this out themselves.

The impression I have, most recently from my phytoplankton visitor, is that Ordinariate parishes do things the Olde Englishe Way, except insofar as they use the new 2015 liturgy instead of the 1962. So why haven't they adopted the houseling cloth? I would say that their observance of the Precious Treasures of the Anglican Spiritual Patrimony is slipshod indeed. But I'm a novice when it comes to the Catholic branch of "Angelicanism".

Maybe my phytoplankton friend can help me figure this one out.

"Angelicanism" Is Spreading!

A visitor sent me a link to the Glory of God Angelican Church in Cocoa, FL. Looking at the page in the link, it appears that this is a new incarnation of the former Gloria Dei Episcopal Church at the same address. The visitor comments,

Looks like the use is spreading. Will an angelican ordinariate be established to help some transfer out of Bishop Lopes’s jurisdiction?

The fact that the "Angelican" parish occupies the same property as the former TEC made me wonder if "Angelican" is a legal dodge -- What I've sometimes seen is when a parish leaves TEC and is able to negotiate to keep its property, TEC inserts a clause that prohibits the parish calling itself either Episcopalian or Anglican. I know Mrs Bush used the similarity as a gimmick to open at least one bank account in the St Mary of the Angels Angelican name to be able to deposit checks written to St Mary of the Angels Anglican accounts.

Virtue Online had this 2012 story on the Glory of God Angelican parish in Cocoa:

A church congregation north of Cocoa completed its split with an Episcopal diocese in 2007 following a national feud in the Episcopal church over the Bible and sexuality.

The Glory of God Anglican Church bought the property the congregation has worshiped at since the 1960s from the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida for $875,000, according Beatrice Sorensen, church administrator.

The diocese had informed the church it was no longer interested in leasing the property at 3735 Indian River Drive, which was the site of Gloria Dei Episcopal Church before the amicable split.

Glory of God Angelican, by the way, is 7.5 miles from the St Patrick's Anglican Cathedral in Cocoa, an ACA parish. Glory of God is Convocation of Anglicans in North America. It's 49.6 miles from the OCSP Church of the Incarnation in Orlando.

I'm overjoyed that there's so much choice among churches celebrating the precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony in central Florida, and there's so little difference! I agree with the visitor, perhaps the CDF could set up an Angelican ordinariate that would appeal to the Cocoa churches!

UPDATE: The visitor points out that there is also an All Saints Epicopal Angelican Church in Ozone Park, NY. (I always loved that name, up there with Poison Lake, CA).

"Angelicanism" And Catechesis

I discovered a new denomination, "Angelican", when the 2012 dissidents seized the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish and declared that it was "Angelican" on the outside sign. On one hand, I thought, probably correctly, that they were ignorant and at best poorly catechized. But then I realized that they were simply freelancing what they thought was Anglican anyhow, adding and subtracting whatever they chose. So I now realize that "Angelican" has wider use than might be applied to some knuckle-dragging "continuers'. In fact, I am now going to expand my use of the term to apply to the traddies who run the chapel veil Polizei at ordinariate communities.

Here's why. Yesterday I tried to explain Anglicanism to a diocesan Catholic curious about the activities, including those of the Polizeibeamte at a nearby ordinariate group. Based on 30 years as an Episcopalian in parishes high, low, broad, and Anglo-Catholic, some years of graduate study including English history, and more recent active research into the issues surrounding Anglicanorum coetibus, I did my best to explain what is actually more like an MC Escher drawing, translated into quasi-religious doctrine.

Even after that, the visitor had still more questions, including, "Are there tabernacles in their churches? How would the Sacrament be reserved?" Wikipedia has a good answer:

Some Anglican parishes use tabernacles, either fixed on the altar, placed behind or above it, or off to one side. . . . Among those Anglicans who identify as "Anglo-Catholics," the Protestant Reformation is often considered one episode in church history which no longer defines their faith as Anglicans. After the Oxford Movement, reservation became commonplace in large parts of the Anglican Communion, and some parishes also perform services of solemn benediction and/or other forms of Eucharistic adoration.

I would say, though, that in the last part of my working career, I traveled extensively and went to Episcopalian churches in many areas. Tabernacles and reservation of the Sacrament were uncommon, and since they are always optional, this was never an issue.

In fact, on a work assignment in Connecticut, I went to an Episcopal parish that, in New England style, had plain glass multipane windows. Beyond that it had no altar, just a wooden communion table on a dais. (it's worth recognizing that before the Oxford Movement in the 1840s, this was very much the norm in Anglican churches. No tabernacle, it goes without saying.) However, it had enormous paintings of the 14 stations of the cross along its walls, a distinctly Anglo-Catholic feature. But during the announcements, in Episcopalian style at the offering, a congregant stood up to offer testimony. This is all perfectly Anglican.

Another visitor became quite exercised at my depiction of Anglicanism -- and it's worth recognizing that I was explicitly answering the first visitor's questions about Anglicans and their response to the ordinariates, not Catholics. One thing that puzzles me is that this angry entity didn't identify even as one of the 57 genders, but instead in xer e-mail address self-identified as a phytoplankton. Whatever.

The phytoplankton objected:

{Y}our correspondent asks, I also wonder how confession is done in the Ordinariate.

By going into a little room with a grate, kneeling down, confessing one's sins to the priest, and receiving absolution according to the sacramental norms of the Roman Catholic Church.

However, the full question was different:

I also wonder how confession is done in the Ordinariate. I'm assuming that there can't be a rite from the Anglicans. Do Anglicans confess to their priests?

I responded to the full question by saying that Anglicans only very rarely observe the sacrament, and Anglican priests are not trained in it. (For instance, Anglicans have no equivalent standard usage like "Bless me, Father. . .") This was the basis for my answer, and it was in the context of saying that an ordinariate priest who had come over from an Anglican denomination would be no more familiar with confession than a lay convert.

But then the phytoplankton supplied the answer I "should" have given: "By going into a little room with a grate. . ." Of course, the little room with the grate is sometimes used in the Catholic Church. I believe, however, that Catholics have the option of confessing behind a screen or face-to-face (respecting the preference of the priest), just as they have the option of receiving the host in the hand or on the tongue. And even in a parish (like ours) with the traditional grates, if there are too many people in line, or if it's a penance service, face-to-face in the open is perfectly acceptable, no little room, no grate.

The phytoplankton then went farther,

I understand that your concern is about the catechesis provided to incoming members of the Ordinariate, and all I can say is that Ordinariate priests and laity that I've encountered in my diocese appear to be more orthodox in belief and practice than an equivalently sized random sampling of their non-Ordinariate brethren.

This left me puzzled as well, since ordinariate priests in almost any diocese are the thing which is not. He seems to know many. And these seem to be of the behind-the-screen variety (but how many ordinariate facilities even have traditional screen type confessionals, since many use diocesan parishes?) I have a sense that my phytoplankton correspondent -- I assume he is actually human, since the Church is not meant for phytoplanktons -- is of the chapel veil, communion kneeling-on-the-tongue persuasion.

But these people seem to think Anglicanism -- actually "Angelicanism" -- is some sort of cure for what ails the Church. They have a picture of Anglo-Catholicsm as something that the Catholic faithful should emulate, not understanding that this is largely an observance of form alone, and quite often a campy observance of the form at that. And it's something optional for Anglicans that, in their little alternate-universe groups, they seek to make compulsory for Catholics.

And, if my phytoplankton correspondent is any sample, they're angry. Just like the "Angelicans" I know.

Informed Update On The Notre Dame Fire

I discovered a remarkably even-handed and well-informed YouTube commentator on the Boeing 737 Max crisis. He's offered a new, similar opinion on the Notre Dame fire:

Anglican Holy Week

A visitor asks a pertinent question:

I've never been to an Anglican or Episcopal service so I know absolutely nothing about the liturgy. But since this is Holy Week, I was wondering what type of liturgies are celebrated. For the RC Holy Thursday ends with exposition of the Eucharist ending at midnight. Obviously, that wouldn't have been possible in the Anglican tradition because the Eucharist is a symbol (I'm assuming).

Do the those worshipping in the Ordinariate that aren't cradle RCers believe that the Eucharist is indeed the Body & Blood of Our Lord?

I've assumed that the Ordinariate is made up of those that are unhappy with the way the Anglican church was going with social issues (women priest, etc)---judgmental of me, I know. If they had believed in the Real Presence wouldn't they have become RC?

I also wonder how confession is done in the Ordinariate. I'm assuming that there can't be a rite from the Anglicans. Do Anglicans confess to their priests?

This goes to the issues at the heart of the Anglican outreach project. For starters, the Episcopalian 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which is available on line, has Proper Liturgies for Special Days that track fairly well with Catholic liturgies. But there are gotchas related to the uncertainties the visitor has as to what Anglicans actually believe.

There's never been an Anglican equivalent of the Baltimore Catechism, and certainly no equivalent of the current CCC, so you won't find any section on the Real Presence or anything like it. The closest equivalent is the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England. I find the Wikipedia entry overdetailed while missing certain important points, but it's convenient.

[U]pon the coronation of Elizabeth I and the re-establishment of the Church of England as separate from the Roman Catholic Church, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion were initiated by the Convocation of 1563, under the direction of Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The articles pulled back from some of the more extreme Calvinist thinking and created the peculiar English reformed doctrine.

The Thirty-nine Articles were finalised in 1571, and incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer.

The spelling makes it plain that this is a Church of England perspective. The 1979 TEC Book of Common Prayer removed the Articles from the main body of the book and placed them (with the Athanasian Creed) into a new section called "Historical Documents of the Church". This is probably a realistic reflection of historical developments. Several of the Articles that cover the sacraments are in fact radically anti-Catholic. For instance:

XXV. Of the Sacraments.

. . . The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them. . . .

XXVIII. Of the Lord's Supper.

. . . Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. . . .

However, these views were never more than loosely enforced, primarily via the Test Acts, which denied public office to non-Anglicans until they were repealed in 1828. On one hand, for the US BCP to place them among "historical documents of the Church" indicates that they are doctrinally now a dead letter -- except for low-church Anglicans, who frequently cite the Articles as continuing to define the divide between low-church and high-church.

But this leaves open the question of whether high-church Anglicans actually endorse the Catholic view of the Real Presence. The 1979 BCP contains this rubric in the Maundy Thursday liturgy:

Where it is desired to administer Holy Communion from the reserved Sacrament on Good Friday, the Sacrament for that purpose is consecrated at this service.

Reserving the Sacrament at all would be a violation of the Articles, but it's provided for here, "where it is desired", which allows parishes that object not to do it. But even if the celebrant does it, what does that mean? Even high-church Episcopalians may simply feel this is wonderfully quaint, along with the foot washing and such, and not pay much mind to the Real Presence. In fact, they'd almost certainly regard anyone who asked them about the issue too closely as gauche.

So the preference is one of style, and that makes it a very close cousin to wearing chapel veils at Catholic mass -- a form of supererogation for Episcopalians, for whom belief in the Real Presence is purely optional, and traddy Catholics, for whom chapel veils are never actually required, notwithstanding having baskets in back for everyone to take one suggests that, at least at that parish, they're compulsory.

The difficulty with Anglicanism is this accretion of vague belief, the sense that everything is optional, and that it's primarily a matter of style. On one hand, Anglicans themselves see Catholicism is basically foreign to this view, and they've stayed away from Anglicanorum coetibus. On the other, the focus on ostentatious style over substance has apparently had its own appeal to the traddies.

Regarding confession, while Anglicanism does recognize all seven Catholic sacraments, confession is seldom practiced, and very few Episcopalian naves have confessionals. An Episcopalian priest would have no training, either in moral theology or practical advice, on how to do the sacrament. This is only one reason I would never go near an ordinariate parish.

So, What Did Bernard Law Have In Mind?

I ended yesterday's post with, "And that goes to the question I'm still wrestling with -- what on earth did Bernard Law have in mind with this whole project?" The project, it's pretty clear, was meant to be an Anglican personal prelature from the time he first began talking to then-Episcopalian Fr Jack Barker about 1976. The difficulty I see is that, as of the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus, the faithful in that prelature are stuck in the mid four figures. It's a non-geographical diocese that buys and renovates buildings, but it has no property department.

It has schools, but no school department. It ordains priests, but there's no single process of formation, and bloopers happen that are expensive in remedy and publicity. It theoretically catechizes laity, but it trains and licenses no catechists, while it tolerates a wannabe semi-official blog whose proprietors often demonstrate an embarrassing ignorance of Catholic basics. Mrs Chalmers, its former chancellor, told me in 2012 that "We're making it up as we go along," but seven years in, nothing seems to have changed.

In short, this is a half-baked effort that's showing no signs of growing out of it. It reminds me of when I was really young, and I knew a couple who'd gotten involved in one of those cult-like pyramid marketing schemes. (The guy was a Yalie, come to think of it.) I was well-informed enough even at the time to recognize a Ponzi, and I asked them about it: at some point, I told them, you run out of suckers and their money. What are you going to do when the whole thing collapses? They answered they were sure that at some point, it would sorta-kinda turn respectable in some hidden way and continue. Sure enough, it collapsed within months -- the only good part was they themselves weren't indicted.

I can't avoid a sense that there's a faction of Kool-Aid drinkers in the OCSP who are convinced that at some point, the thing will have to become respectable. I'm more and more convinced the outcome will go the other way.

I'm told that Bernard Law, by the 1990s, fully expected to become pope, and a book, Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness, was published in 2002 in premature expectation that John Paul II's failing health would result in a conclave several years sooner than it did, and it was intended to introduce Law to a world eager to learn about him. (The book now sells at a premium at Amazon, for whatever reason.) Luckily, the scandals surrounding Law emerged well before the conclave was needed.

The visitor here who knew Law when he was Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau reported that Law was extremely ambitious, the sort of person who, while he shook your hand, was always looking over your shoulder to see if there was someone else in sight who might be more important to schmooze. This, of course, was the period when Law was working through intermediaries to interest the 1976-77 first wave of dissident Episcopalians to secede into a new Catholic jurisdiction that would just sorta-kinda happen.

I would guess he got that idea from Opus Dei, which was angling to become the first personal prelature at about the same time. Law took part in early Opus Dei activities while at Harvard in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and he was always closely associated with William Stetson, an early Opus Dei numerary and powerful figure in the US movement by the 1970s. The visitor says that Stetson traveled frequently and visited Law in Springfield during this period. It's hard not to think discussions on personal prelatures took place on those visits.

Opus Dei was erected as a personal prelature in 1982 in the apostolic constitution Ut Sit. Commentary suggests this was because Opus Dei was able to impress John Paul II with the money it was able to direct to the Vatican. John Paul was never as enthusiastic about creating a second personal prelature for Anglicans, and the substitute, the Pastoral Provision, turned out to be largely a headache for the diocesan bishops who hosted its parishes -- two archbishops of Los Angeles turned down repeated applications from several parishes to join.

I think the half-baked character of the Anglican ordinariates is a product of Bernard Law's ambition to become pope, but from the start, the whole project was nothing but a Hollywood stage set, a Potemkin village. Unlike Opus Dei, it's simply not a money machine -- it seems to have some difficulty even maintaining a skeleton chancery staff.

One question I have is why, after Law left Boston for Rome, probably to avoid prosecution, with any hope of being elected pope out of the question, he continued to press for the Anglicanorum coetibus project. My impression is that Law's energy was unabated in Rome, though possibly his judgment was gradually impaired.

I would be interested in any additional insights visitors may have.

More On RCIA And Whatever Problem They're Trying To Solve

Regarding the ordinariate groups that have been catechized via parish RCIA classes, my regular correspondent adds,

The St Aelred, Athens community, including their intended priest and his wife, was part of the 2017 RCIA class at St Joseph, Athens. The priest there celebrates DW for them once a month, and is apparently mentoring Mr Tipton as he prepares for priestly ordination this summer. Our Lady and St John, Louisville had a similar experience at St Martin of Tours, Louisville, and of course Holy Rosary, Indianapolis provided Luke Reese with a job as Music Director for four years while he attended seminary, and then gave the group a daily DW mass slot.

I think it is very much up to the individual pastor. When Blessed John Henry Newman, Victoria lost its service time at Our Lady of Fatima, Fr Reid canvassed most of the parishes in Victoria without success until the pastor of the parish that also hosts the local TLM group agreed to take them in, although he could only offer an afternoon service time. St Luke, Washington shares a diocesan parish. But most OCSP groups without a building of their own use free-standing chapels which do not put them in apparent competition with a diocesan parish.

The St Alban Rochester group also meets in a diocesan parish. This still leaves open the question of how other groups-in-formation receive, or will receive, catechesis. I wondered here what's up with the Denver group, for instance -- we don't know if they're Anglicans-in-waiting or already Catholic, and in either case, whether they're somehow connected with a diocesan parish for the sacraments or RCIA. Isn't it odd that this doesn't seem important, it's just there for evensong? The same applies to the Tampa Bay group, which may or may not still be active at all -- are any Anglicans in need of reception, or, if they're all diocesan Catholics, have they simply dispersed back to existing parishes?

So we're still looking at unanswered questions, the range of which certainly includes how many attendees at ordinariate parishes are diocesan Catholics. A visitor reports,

Your comment about the Infant of Prague statue in Murrieta reminded me to ask this of you.

My friend (who had NO affiliation with the Anglican/Episcopal before the Murrieta group started) mentioned that there is a basket of veils in the back for women to wear when they attend Mass at Holy Martyrs. Is veil-wearing an Anglican tradition?

I'm sure that you are aware that Catholic women until Vatican 2 wore something on their heads for Mass. Horror of horrors if you forgot your veil. Thank goodness a kleenex would suffice (a memory from 1st grade). Of course, women a la Jackie Kennedy wore hats until the late '60's.

Episcopalians have a pretty wide range of styles and behaviors, but I never noticed chapel veils in any of the TEC parishes I visited, and certainly no baskets in back. As far as I can see, the veils in ordinariate parishes are an affectation for the Anglicans. For the diocesan Catholics, who are apparently a majority in the California communities, I assume they are ostentatious markers of pre-Conciliarism, and the basket in back would indicate an assumption that they're compulsory in this particular alternate universe.

There is, of course, no canonical requirement that either women or men cover their heads, and in our parish's reverent OF mass, only two or three women out of the hundreds I see at Sunday masses wear them. The visitor continues,

I'm a bit put off with the veil-wearing of today. There are some very strange explanations why women should don the veil.

When you speak of formation of the ordinariate members, I wonder how a small parish could make that possible. (I belong to a medium-sized parish in [redacted] diocese. Our RE program includes RCIA, RCIC(hildren), 3 different confirmation classes for youth, youth graduated from high school & adults , as well as, classes for elementary grades. Needless to say, it takes an army of volunteers to make this happen.)

With the limited number that would be versed in RC teaching, it could become a rather timely commitment if those coming into the ordinariate parishes do so all year long. I don't think a married priest with children would have the time to add this to all the other duties he might have administering a parish & possibly working a job for some hours a week to support his family.

As I say, one question to start with would be how many at ordinariate parishes are diocesan Catholics, so catechesis (as opposed to ongoing formation) would not normally be an issue -- and if, as I begin to surmise, these people verge on sedevacantism with their pre-Conciliar pose, they've got it all figured out anyhow. Why bother with formation?

The question I would put to Bp Lopes or Fr Perkins if I ever made it to an open forum would be whether the North American ordinariate would survive at all without more or less sedevacantist Catholics swelling its ranks. And that goes to the question I'm still wrestling with -- what on earth did Bernard Law have in mind with this whole project?

Catechesis, Formation, And Anglicanorum Coetibus

A comment a member of our Bible study group made this past week has stayed with me. I don't think she's registered at our parish, and she mentioned that she'd nevertheless received a major fundraising solicitation for our building fund. She weighed the surprising size of the commitment that was being asked of her against the fact that the parish does serve a central function in the area and has programs (like the formal Bible study featuring DVD presentations from Jeff Cavins) that she in fact takes advantage of, and she decided she should support the campaign.

In that context, she spoke of the responsibility Catholics have for ongoing formation. Catechesis in preparation for baptism and confirmation is just the start. Ongoing formation, using her example, is something that takes place beyond the context of a single sacrament, or two of them. This is an intelligent and devout lady. But her comment brought me to Anglicanorum coetibus.

The original idea, which has almost immediately been overtaken by events, was that existing Anglican parishes would petition for inclusion in an ordinariate, undergo an abbreviated catechesis (since they were all baptized and of course there's so little difference between Anglicanism and Catholicism, don'tcha know), and have a "chaplain" or "mentor priest" assigned for some relatively brief period pending the ordination of their existing rector as a married Catholic priest.

In practice, this almost never happened. My regular correspondent says all the Canadian communities did go through this process, but naturally, all were quite small, and only one ever became a full parish, with none likely to do this in the future, so Canada is probably an exception. Most of the full US OCSP parishes, and certainly the largest ones, were previously Catholic under the Pastoral Provision, so this circumstance never applied to them -- we must assume their laity were all fully catechized before 2012.

So this leaves the US "groups-in-formation", which, while a clear minority of OCSP laity, represent the majority of communities. The paradigm we seem to have, especially in the past several years, is that these are small groups that coalesce over an evensong held in someone's parlor or perhaps a small chapel at a host facility. The main reason for this is to ordain a married candidate for the OCSP priesthood. (Exactly how these candidates are selected and formed is a mystery, and the success rate for such candidates, given the experience with Luke Reese and Vaughn Treco, is poor.)

Under the original paradigm, these groups would have had the Evangelium program or some equivalent. However, this would not have been conducted by either the "mentor priest" or a licensed diocesan catechist. In the case of St Mary of the Angels Hollywood, it was done by the Anglican clergy who expected to be ordained for the parish once it was received, although it's worth noting that under those circumstances, none had any real qualification or specific license to do this. It was just sorta-kinda gonna happen, and Houston would be OK with it, or not. In our case, it was not, although there was never a specific policy that covered any such thing.

At some point, the 2012 paradigm was dropped. Exactly how groups of Anglican evensong-wannabes are catechized now is not clear. On one hand, my regular correspondent says some groups (I think an example was the Athens, GA group) went through RCIA at a local diocesan parish, but this poses an interesting question: why can't the diocese claim them, if they went through RCIA at a diocesan parish? I assume as well that most, as baptized Anglicans, would be received at the Easter Sunday mass at the diocesan parish where they went through RCIA. And as RCIA candidates, they would have attended weekly mass at that parish during the year-long process and been dismissed after the homily there. Wouldn't that have been a bigger deal than their little evensong? Just asking.

But then my correspondent pointed out that at the Our Lady of Grace group, in Pasadena, CA at the time, every member was already a diocesan cradle Catholic except for the OCSP candidate for the priesthood, now-Fr Bayles. Fr Bartus began celebrating mass for them within a short time of their formation, with no catechesis or reception involved. Regarding another California group, my correspondent says,

Fr Bartus complained recently on his Facebook page that a significant number of his Holy Martyrs, Murrieta congregation were lobbying for a statue of the Infant of Prague---that touchstone of Anglican Patrimony---to be purchased for the church.

(Recall that Bp Lopes promised Bp Barnes of San Bernardino that the whole purpose of the Murrieta group was to accommodate a small number of families who wanted to avoid commuting to Irvine for their weekly dose of the Anglican Patrimony.) It's hard to avoid a sense that the OCSP is either hitchhiking with diocesan parishes for RCIA programs -- and recognize that the certified catechists are often paid for their work with them -- or hitchhiking for use of facilities. In the case of the California groups that are renting facilities separately (and conducting at least one building campaign), they're competing with diocesan parishes for building funds to serve diocesan Catholics who simply prefer not to register at diocesan parishes.

So I think it's worth asking some questions that I don't think Houston will ever answer:

• Exactly how is catechesis conducted as of 2019 for Anglicans wishing to be received into the OCSP? Is there a policy? Is compliance expected or monitored?
• Does the OCSP certify catechists? (Consider that if the Anglican Patrimony is so significant, there should be OCSP catechists who have a defined body of Anglican Patrimony knowledge to transmit, separate from diocesan catechists who would not have this.)
• If Anglican candidates are catechized via a standard diocesan RCIA program, how does the OCSP justify poaching them from the dioceses that hosted their program and trained and paid their catechists?
• On the other hand, if groups are made up almost entirely of diocesan Catholics already catechized, how does Houston justify this at all, especially when they are diverting pledge and building fund contributions from diocesan parishes?
• To what extent are former Anglicans in the OCSP encouraged to take advantage of diocesan programs, especially those at parishes that serve as central resources in their areas? How many concrete examples can Houston provide?
• On the other hand, how many cradle Catholics are discouraged from using the OCSP to separate themselves from effective diocesan programs?

Someone really needs to take a look at the Infant of Prague situation.

Missing The Point With The Target Market

Regarding yesterday's post, but probably also thinking of the Complementary Norms, my regular correspondent comments,

In point of fact, of course, the necessity to have some prior connection to Anglicanism to become a member of an Ordinariate only applies to people who are already Catholics, either lifelong or previous converts. Anyone else---Baptist, Mormon, Sikh, Scientologist---who enters the Church by way of an Ordinariate group or parish is eligible to become an Ordinariate member. So the target market, at least for conversions, is not "Anglicans," but those who wish to become Catholic while worshipping in a way that some people might identify as Anglican.

But this simply skips over one of the functions a real diocese performs, which is to certify catechists. At least where I am, diocesan certified catechists undergo a three-year formation. How are these fomer Baptist, Mormon, Sikh, or Scientologist catechumens or candidates being prepared in the temporary spaces their little groups occupy? We're back to this strange question, where the original idea behind Anglicanorum coetibus was that existing "groups" (read already formed Anglican parishes) would be received with their existing clergy and undergo an abbreviated catechesis (for instance, with the Evangelium program aimed at former Anglicans).

This paradigm was exhausted within a year or two of 2012. The paradigm established since then is basically that groups of "Anglican" wannabes get together in someone's parlor for monthly evensong, primarily to justify ordaining some guy who couldn't get a career going as Lutheran or even an Episcopalian, undertaking this as a desperate last resort before he goes back to school to learn to code, which he probably should have done years earlier anyhow.

The laity, whatever their status, are a distant secondary consideration. At some point, deus volante, Fr Luther V. Cromwell is ordained a married Catholic priest after months of distance learning, and his little flock is received, having absorbed whatever Anglican patrimony they can pick up in evensong, or maybe reading the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog. Under the interpretation of the Complementary Norms that's evolved, this is all perfectly OK. Hey, sounds like they're gonna get a homeschool supplement program going! Virtus? What's that?

My correspondent continues,

As I have often mentioned, I suspect that in a decade, perhaps sooner, OCSP parishes will settle into the liturgical/devotional equivalent of Tex-Mex, Hawaiian pizza, and similar examples of "fusion" cuisine.

To clarify, Ordinariate communities will become increasingly "fusion" communities because of the large number of attendees with no actual Anglican background, and this will be enabled by the leadership of a bishop who himself has little exposure to the real thing. The Knights of Columbus are a prime example. No OCSP event is complete without the KofC with their swords and feathers, and yet even Catholics in England never went in for this kind of thing, so obviously meant as a validation of immigrant Italian culture in a hostile American environment.

The problem is that even if you go for Tex-Mex, the restaurant is certified by the health department. If you buy a frozen Hawaiian pizza at the store, you've got the supermarket standing behind it, as well as the regulators. It seems to me that you have an issue arising that if you go to St Vincent's parish, you can assume the priests have been formed via the usual process and the catechists are certified. If you go to the St John Fisher Ordinariate Evensong, you have no such assurance. So Tex-Mex and Hawaiian pizza are not an apt analogy. A better one might be Joe Schmo's Cancer Cure masquerading as an FDA approved drug.

I keep seeing a bigger and bigger issue with the fact that a normal bishop approves the use of the term "Catholic" in his diocese. But even in the examples we've seen, for instance with Mr Treco, we get someone who somehow slipped through the ordination process but turns out to be offering an unapproved product. Tex-Mex, my left foot -- it's Ma's Road Kill Grill. and let's face it, Mr Treco isn't the only one doing this stuff.

Put another way, it's the Precious Treasures of the Anglican Spiritual Patrimony.

Fr Longenecker On Religious Neverland

I first found Fr Longenecker during a Lenten conference at our parish a year ago. I found his story engaging, not because it was somehow romantic, but because it struck me, as someone who'd been wrestling with the whole Anglicanorum coetibus puzzle, as something like the opposite of what I'd seen with the North American ordinariate.

Longenecker was raised an evangelical Protestant, became a Church of England priest, decided to become Catholic when C of E ordained women, at a time when the English Catholic hierarchy in response made it easy for married Anglican priests to do so, but was thwarted due to bureaucratic inertia.

So his story involved bureaucracy and effort reminiscent of the persistent widow in the parable, not the life he envisioned for himself in this post at his blog:

I was going to be a George Herbert kind of chap, living simply in my country parsonage, writing poems, visiting the poor and wandering off to my crumbling thousand year old church to ring the bell and kneel among the hassocks and cassocks and the musty dust of ages to mutter my prayers from a dog eared prayer book.

This is the stuff of immaturity–to run off after a romantic dream, and the religious romantic dream is the most seductive of all because, of course, one sees oneself as a courageous pilgrim–an adventurer who sets out in faith to follow the star. The religious romantic dream is the most seductive because it is so elusive and because one is being otherworldly and holy for pursuing it.

He's responding to a review of a new Thomas Merton biography, and of course, he thinks Merton is an example of someone pursuing a religious romantic dream.

This is also why I’m increasingly suspicious of any kind of romantic Neverland religion. It’s not real, and because it’s not real it makes you unhappy.

It makes you unhappy because it is never good enough. The reality never fits the dream. I’ve seen this time and again as people go church shopping. Their local parish isn’t to their liking so off they go to some other kind of religion or some other denomination, but of course that church is never good enough for them either.

. . . I had one friend who had a taste for traditionalism so off he tootled to the local parish that had good altar servers, nice music and high ceremonial. But it was the Novus Ordo shock horror! So he began reading more traddy literature online and started driving an hour and a half to attend a Fraternity of St Peter parish where everything was in Latin. Then when reality hit he grumbled, “They’re just a bunch of homos and liars too.” From there it was the Lefevbrists and then full blown sedevacantism.

As I mention here from time to time, I've never quite figured out what Bernard Law had in mind when he cooked up the Anglican outreach project. Whatever the original intent may have been, the reality is that in the US -- the key target market as Law originally saw it -- pretty much the only people who've been attracted to it are religious romantics, either ex-Anglicans (dominated by "continuers") or cradle Catholic traddies, often those disillusioned in the course of some other pursuit, already having found this, that, or the other that was never good enough.

This is probably a big reason why "Anglican" has never quite been defined in the Complementary Norms. If you went even as far as the Pastoral Provision does in including Methodists but excluding the Charismatic Episcopal Church, you'd be limiting your target market, which is a small and scraggly bunch no matter how you define it.

News Updates

First, my regular correspondent tells me that Msgr Peter Wilkinson has been named Dean of St John Baptist Deanery in Canada. Msgr Wilkinson had retired five years ago at age 74 as Parochial Administrator of the Blessed John Henry Newman community in Victoria, BC. This means that Msgr Wilkinson, now 79, can only be a temporary fix to the dire personnel issue facing the Canadian deanery, since this is an acknowledgement that no current OCSP priest can be a realistic choice to replace Fr Carl Reid, designated to become ordinary in Australia. Nevertheless, my correspondent estimates that the deanship in Canada can't be an especially demanding job.

I assume any dean in Canada is anyhow told not to interfere with the ongoing process of restoring the Gilbertines in Calgary. That calls for the expertise of a real pro like Fr Perkins.

Second, several visitors have informed me that the CDF on April 9 issued updates to the Complementary Norms for Anglicanorum coetibus. The biggest change is the addition of a new Article 15 concerning the celebration of the Divine Worship mass. An explanatory note goes into more detail:

In the new Complementary Norms, an entire article has been added, number 15, dedicated to the celebration of Divine Worship. It is acknowledged that the Missal proper to the personal Ordinariates, entitled “Divine Worship”, namely the form approved by the Holy See for use by the Ordinariate, expresses and preserves for Catholic worship “the worthy Anglican liturgical patrimony, understood as that which has nourished the Catholic faith throughout the history of the Anglican tradition and prompted aspirations towards ecclesial unity”.

This is the reason for the emphasis that public liturgical worship following Divine Worship is limited to the personal Ordinariates, as established by the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, explains Gori. “Any priest incardinated in the Ordinariate is authorized to celebrate using Divine Worship. This applies outside the parishes of the Ordinariate when the priest celebrates Mass without the participation of the faithful, and also publicly with the permission of the rector or parish priest of the church or of the parish concerned. Furthermore, when pastoral needs demand it, or in the absence of a priest incardinated in an Ordinariate, if requested, any priest incardinated in the diocese or in an institute of consecrated life or of a society of apostolic life can celebrate in accordance with Divine Worship for the members of the Ordinariate. Finally, it is granted to any priest incardinated in the diocese or in an institute of consecrated life or in a society of apostolic life to concelebrate following Divine Worship”.

There is nothing particularly new here, and reviewing the Complementary Norms as updated in their new form, I continue to be impressed with how loosely and creatively they're apparently enforced. Consider Article 5 §1:

The lay faithful originally of the Anglican tradition who wish to belong to the Ordinariate, after having made their Profession of Faith and received the Sacraments of Initiation, with due regard for Canon 845, are to be entered in the apposite register of the Ordinariate. Those who have received all of the Sacraments of Initiation outside the Ordinariate are not ordinarily eligible for membership, unless they are members of a family belonging to the Ordinariate.

But as far as I'm aware, "originally of the Anglican tradition" has never been explicitly defined, and both clergy and laity with only the most remote connection with "Anglicanism" seem to have full eligibility as "members" (whatever, of course, "membership" actually denotes).

As I say here frequently, the only good thing about this is how few people are involved.

What About Diocesan Bungling Marginal Performers?

Another visitor asks,

I was wondering if you might consider the question of what a non-marginal performer might look like, as far as the Catholic Church goes. My question is based on my observation that most priests in the diocese I live in are what I consider to be "bungling marginal performers". I would venture to say that, take a random 10 priests from around the country and ask them to start a new community parish, and most of them would fail miserably. This is because it is easier to maintain a structure, rather than build something new. Most do not have the charisma, or more importantly, the drive to be that kind of leader.

That might be part and parcel to the problems we have in today's clergy, which Michael Voris has clearly shown has reached the upper levels of the hierarchy. In my days as a protestant, I saw that the church went though a big effort to hire the right guy to take over the church when the senior pastor was retiring. They knew that their success was based in large part on the man's ability to preach a good sermon and fill the plates. With the Catholic Church, replacing a pastor is a completely different process. The priest is not tasked with the same burden as a Protestant pastor is.

It seems to me that if the priest that has drive and ambition, there are often negatives that go along with that. See the documentary on Netflix about Malachi Martin, for example.

I can only start by saying my wife and I have been Catholic for only six years, and we're really familiar with only three parishes, two near our home and one where we often visit. Our first parish was in many ways stereotypically happy-clappy, flip flops and halter-tops. A major factor, it seems to me, is that it continues to be run by an elderly and in some ways defeated priest well past canonical retirement; his associate is more energetic but not terribly bright. An issue there is that it's run by a liberal order that's running out of priests, so its bench isn't just not deep, it's hardly there at all.

One day I got fed up and decided to go looking. A 15 minute drive away is a parish that's prosperous and growing, with not just a music program with a paid choir but a small orchestra with brass and strings that plays every Sunday. We were sorry to see the former music director go, but the new one has full concerts on Saturdays several times a year that attract the likes of Bp Barron. Several people in our Bible study group are familiar with other parishes in the general area, and while ours is pretty remarkable, it appears that there are several others within a convenient drive that are also worth attending.

However, my wife and I remark after mass almost every Sunday that what we see at our parish meets or exceeds in reverence of service, liturgy (keep in mind TEC has Rite Two, which is perfectly fine), music, quality of clergy, and general atmosphere any Episcopalian parish we've known. And that's with clergy making no special effort to be "Anglican". (And at some of the TEC parishes, you had to lean across two rows of pews to exchange the peace.)

So I can only speak from limited experience. Certainly we've seen no need to go looking for a Latin mass, though we could attend several within half an hour's drive if we wished. My sense of things is that the Church is far more diverse than it's portrayed in any media, including Church Militant, which does have an interest in portraying things as a small band of good guys against a huge cabal of pervs and gays intent on coverup.

The visitor does make an important point, which is that Protestant churches are congregational. Personnel decisions are made at the parish level. I agree that a parish with a dedicated and prayerful vestry can hire a succession of pastors who serve the parish's interests well, but there's no guarantee. It's just as likely that a low-church clique can hijack a high-church parish and cause all sorts of havoc, or you can have a situation like St Mary of the Angels Hollywood that went generationally off the rails.

One puzzle that I'm working through is that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is heavily criticized by Randy Engle and others as a bastion of liberalism, with gays at the Camarillo seminary coming in for particular criticism. Yet our pastor and his seminary classmate the archdiocesan vocation director are down-the-line fine, intelligent, hardworking priests. Promising young products of the Camarillio seminary cycle through our parish as associates; it seems plain that the intent is for the senior men to give them training and experience at an outstanding place to go on into other parishes and keep the Church going for new generations.

There is a bell-shaped curve in every sample. Ideally, in making good personnel selections, you skew the curve to the right. On the other hand, the wrong circumstances can cause bad performers on the left side of the curve to self-select into bad environments and perpetuate themselves. My guess is that more often than not, the personnel system in a real diocese works properly, even if you have a Wuerl or a Law at the top protecting a certain number of perverts.

The problem with Anglicanorum coetibus, as far as I can see so far, is that it creates a quasi-diocese that has almost no diocesan functions, with nobody experienced in the day-to-day issues that come up in a real diocese. But I need to qualify this by saying I've only been Catholic for six years, and I've been remarkably lucky in the experience of the Church that I've had.

A Back-Door Entry To The Catholic Priesthood?

A visitor asks,

For those who wanted to “preserve some elements of our Anglican heritage,” the Ordinariate-offered DW mass exemplifies, “be careful what you ask for.” I really can’t see how any right-thinking person could believe this would have sustainable appeal.

So I’d like to know what you think: did the founding potentates of the Ordinariate really give a tinker’s damn about “preserving Anglican heritage,” or were they more interested in gaining a back-door entry to the Catholic priesthood?

Let's go back to the earliest inception of the Anglican outreach project, the discussions between Fr Jack Barker and representatives of then-Bp Bernard Law surrounding the 1976 General Convention of The Episcopal Church. Last year I went into some detail on the events and personalities involved. Fr Barker has represented himself as something of a leader in this process, but his career as an Episcopalian priest was actually quite marginal. As I said in the link,

A thumbnail provided with one version of his history of the Pastoral Provision says he was ordained in TEC in 1970; elsewhere, information suggests he graduated from UCLA in physics and mathematics and worked in the NASA space program for several years before ordination in TEC. . . . He was hired as a curate (a fancy word for associate) [at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood] under the second rector, Fr James Jordan. Fr Jordan suddenly passed away in 1971, and the version I heard from Fr Kelley was that the vestry, deeply suspicious of the Episcopal diocese, chose not to perform a formal search for a successor and instead immediately hired Fr Barker as rector, though he'd been a priest for only a year. Just five years later, Barker became intensely involved in conservative dissent from the agenda at the 1976 TEC General Convention. I find it somewhat disturbing that Barker was by no means a senior figure in TEC at the time.

So far, I've found no information that Barker ever attended seminary before his ordination in TEC; he definitely did have to enter a full program at St Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, CA and receive an MDiv there before his eventual ordination as a Catholic priest. It's worth noting in the context of the "continuing" movement that those favoring the Roman option were a small minority among the 1976 dissidents, and Barker's efforts received short shrift among those seeking a new conservative jurisdiction. Barker, in fact, was seen as something of a hothead.

The two other priests most closely associated with Barker are St John Brown and Clark Tea. Both were older than Barker, but their careers seem to have stalled, and by early 1977, they were all busy burning their bridges. A more senior figure, Canon Albert DuBois, provided some degree of prestige to the group until poor health forced him to drop out. I have two major questions:

• Bp Law must have been fully aware of the low quality of this group, yet he appears to have given them some sort of back-channel encouragement to leave TEC (and in every case destroy their parishes). Why?
• By the same token, the TEC dissidents took their parishes out in 1977 without any jurisdiction to bring them into. In fact, it would be four years before the Pastoral Provision was erected. Meanwhile, the only outcome was expensive and destructive litigation. What on earth did they and Law have in mind?

Fast forward to Law's effort to restart Anglican outreach in 1993 with a proposal to Cardinal Ratzinger for a personal Anglican prelature that eventually became Anglicanorum coetibus in 2009. The TEC lead in this effort was Clarence Pope, who had risen to bishop in TEC and was on the verge of retirement. But he soon enough proved to be unstable and in poor health, hardly someone to provide serious leadership, and he had little credibility among the Catholic clergy who knew him. We know less of what Law's actual estimate of Jeffrey Steenson may have been, but Law did ordain him to the diaconate and presumably endorsed his designation as ordinary.

Steenson in turn, once the North American ordinariate was erected, brought with him a clique from the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth who had already in 2008 clumsily telegraphed their intention to leave and go to Rome. The question I've always had is how they were able to keep their jobs there after that -- Charles Hough III was Canon to the Ordinary, for instance. The subsequent history of the Fort Worth group in the ordinariate suggests that none was a high performer.

So my answer to the visitor is that no, the founders of the North American ordinariate actually knew next to nothing about the "Anglican heritage" (Barker didn't have an MDiv, after all), and in fact they seem to have been a group of opportunists who'd mostly exhausted their career possibilities in TEC, hoping instead to become bigger fish in a smaller new pond. Whatever we may say about Fr Phillips, he wasn't the same sort of bungling marginal performer the others were, and I think it's significant that his entry to the OCSP was delayed as long as it was.

We're left, though, with the impression that everyone from Barker and Brown through Pope and Steenson, up to Hough III, appears to have been identified and selected by Bernard Law, and insofar as Anglican outreach was one of his pet projects, he seems to have protected figures like Steenson as long as he was able.

But there are many questions left in this story to which we still don't have answers. Now and then, visitors fill me in.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds,

The "Fort Worth Six" were quite a mixed bag. Fr Chuck Hough IV became pastor of OLW, Houston at the tender age of 30, which I cannot feel reflected anybody's discernment of extraordinary gifts. But he did need a full-time job. Fr Whitfield, then 34, was in similar circumstances and he was excardinated almost immediately to diocesan ministry and has had nothing to do with the OCSP, even identifying himself as a PP ordinand in assorted on-line thumbnail bios.

Fr Cannaday, then 63, started St Gilbert's, Boerne but was associated with it for less than two years before going into apparently full retirement. It has now folded, of course. Fr Perkins, then 57 we know is now Bp Lopes' right hand man. Fr Stainbrook, then 52 was reassigned from the group he brought into the Church and put in charge of St John Vianney, Cleburne, a group started up by Fr Chuck Hough III.

The fate of this last is mysterious. He was Msgr Steenson's Vicar General and Vicar for Clergy, also sponsored by Steenson for a Distinguished Alumnus award from Nashotah House, but was ousted from his administrative positions almost immediately when Bp Lopes became Ordinary. Although he is now only 64 he has no assignment; he was removed as Priest in Residence at OLW, Houston some years ago.

Fr Longenecker On Liturgy And Baroque Fantasy

A post at Fr Longenecker's blog last week, Liturgy and Laity, has stuck with me, especially in the context of Alastair-Ian's comment that I referred to yesterday. Fr Longenecker has a great deal to say about liturgical "purity":

The other day I tweeted something which was, admittedly, somewhat snarky. I was commenting on all the self appointed laymen who are liturgical experts and wondered why, if they were so scrupulous about “proper liturgy” they didn’t become priests so they could ensure the liturgy was celebrated correctly just the way they like it.

. . . [M]ost often [the lay liturologist] is driven by an ideal in his own mind of what “proper liturgy” should look like, and this can become an ideological position cut off from reality. He argues for this position or that position based on his research, his theological reading, his historical understanding and a whole range of arguments about what is “proper” with little understanding or concern not only for the needs and spiritual growth of the people, but also for the reality of parish life.

The puzzling thing is that I came to the Novus Ordo mass from the Episcopalian 1979 Book of Common Prayer and Rite Two, which was clearly inspired by Vatican II, so I have absolutely no problem with a reverent OF mass. When I see women lectors and EMs or altar girls, it just strikes me as how things are and always have been, at least since I seriously started going to church. Fr Longenecker had to make a greater stretch, since he came from the Church of England and the 1662 BCP, but clearly the OF mass doesn't bother him.

Yet we see Alastair-Ian, who at least recognizes the crazy conundrum of an OF liturgy with phony archaisms emended into it, about as authentic as the ports on a three-hole Buick. Of the "liturologists" I've found lately, they seem to be about evenly divided between those like the one I cited last week who feel the DW mass is "very traditional and not too dissimilar from the TLM" (but the Latin is easier for them to understand, I guess) and those who, like Alastair-Ian, want an even more Baroque fantasy.

Fr Lengenecker concludes,

It seems to me therefore that a “proper liturgy” is what works. The high ideals should be balanced by practicalities, and a completely utilitarian approach should be balanced by high ideals of worship. The universal is balanced by the local and the local elevated by the universal. The unity can exist within the diversity and the diversity can be fulfilled in the unity.

Is such an approach neat and tidy and always just the way we want it?

No. It is messy.

I guess if you want a church that is neat and tidy and always just the way you want it you had better join a sect or a religious commune.

And good luck with that. . .

My regular correspondent frequently adds that those who may be enthusiasts for liturgical "purity" are overcompensating for some other shortcoming, which is often echoed by Fr Ripperger, whose experience with traditionalists leads him to believe that many are overcompensating for issues of sexual purity.

But the encouraging thing is the DW mass has almost universally failed to catch on, appealing only to a tiny minority of fantasists.

The View From The Alternate Universe

Fringe fans know that Walter Bishop's early investigations into the alternate universe involved a device a little like an old-fashioned TV screen that, if you pointed it in a particular direction, showed what was basically a low-quality view of what you'd normally see, except it was on the other side. My regular correspondent sent me a screen shot of a comment on Vaughn Treco's Facebook page that gives me the same odd sense that we're not quite in Kansas any more (click on the image for a larger view).

My correspondent tells me that Treco is not making posts on his page himself, but he's not editing comments, either. The poster here, Alastair-Ian Bell Polycarp Means, is discerning a particular truth about Anglicanorum coetibus and the Divine Worship missal, but I'd say it's analogous to what we might learn about our own society by viewing it through a crude TV screen that shows the alternate universe. Alastair-Ian concludes, of Bp Lopes, "He's not a conservative, not a trad. He's there to keep an eye on the ordinariate and try to prevent its members from embracing the orthodox tradition. He's not there to legitimately confirm their faith. That's a front."

For starters, this brings to mind the insight of the visitor here who said, after getting to know then-Bp Bernard Law, that Law was never a conservative -- and how could anyone think he was, since Jospeh Bernardin was his mentor? But given that, I think you could go back farther to the inception of Anglican Use in the late 1970s and ask what Bernard Law’s motives were in starting the whole Anglican outreach movement and then, when it stalled in the early 1990s, trying to resuscitate it via Cardinal Ratzinger, a well-intentioned but ineffectual fellow?

As best I can tell, Alastair-Ian is a traddy, and I have a sense that he's among those who think wearing lace and celebrating the Tridentine mass ad orientem is some sort of vaccine. I'm with those at Church Militant who are slowly beginning to realize it's not. But Alastair-Ian's view of our universe through his crude TV screen is nevertheless perceptive: somehow the intent of tarting up the OF English mass with some thees and thous was never "conservative", and Bp Lopes isn't in Houston to confirm our faith, notwithstanding the lace and ad orientem.

This leaves open the puzzling question of what, if neither Bernard Law nor Steven Lopes was put in place to confirm our faith, they were ever actually meant to do. I certainly don't have an answer that's better than anyone else's, but I do think there's something hinky here, and that's what's kept me on this blog.

"Just Because They're. . . Facing Ad Orientem. . ."

Church Militant takes what they acknowledge is a new tack on Opus Dei in yesterday's Download:

They don't come out against it, to be sure, but their approach is remarkably even-handed. More important, I think, is the comment from Simon Rafe at about 5:10;

Just because they're wearing lace and saying the Tridentine mass and facing ad orientem and -- the devotion and rosary stuff -- doesn't mean it's immune to the kind of corruption and filth that's in there. . .

Rafe introduces the discussion by making the point that no one at Church Militant is now, or has ever been, a member of Opus Dei. I've seen allegations to the contrary now and then, but I assume Rafe is correct here.

A comment that's made in the discussion is that while Opus Dei bases itself on a call to holiness in everyday life, this is simply what all Catholics in all stations are called to, and it's essentially no different from the call that others like St Therese of Lisieux have made.

However, the major focus is on Fr C John McCloskey, whose case isn't new and which has already been discussed here. But a passing mention is made of Bp Steven Lopes, with the assumption that he's one of the good guys due to his belated statement that "everyone knew" about McCarrick.

I've already tried to alert them on that one.