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.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,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?
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?
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.
