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.