Douglas Bess Resurfaces

Douglas Bess is the author of Divided We Stand, a history of "continuing" Anglicanism from its roots in the liberalizing Episcopal Church in the 1960s, through the 1976 General Convention and the ordination of women, the formation of the Anglican Catholic Church, and the re-schisms of the 1990s. It's by far the best book on the phenomenon, but Bess, having produced it for whatever reason, simply moved on. My most recent reflections on the book are here.

When I last sought him out, he was "Fr Bess", a priest in something called the Liberal Catholic Church and living in Los Angeles. At that time, his parish had lost its facility and appeared moribund. My regular correspondent has found a new reference:

Fr. Douglas Bess will be resuming work as a Liberal Catholic priest in the Los Angeles area (Pasadena) in 2019. The bishops of the Liberal Catholic Church will determine the nature of this work — i.e. whether the Church of St. Alban will be re-opened, whether a new group (a Center or Mission) will be established, or a combination of the two.

The LCC has Anglican roots. According to Wikipedia,

The founding bishops of the Liberal Catholic churches were J. I. Wedgwood of the Wedgwood China family and the Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater. Wedgwood was a former Anglican priest who left the Anglican church on becoming a theosophist in 1904. After serving in several high offices in the Theosophical Society, including being general secretary of the society in England and Wales from 1911 to 1913, he was ordained as a priest in the Old Catholic movement on July 22, 1913. . . . In 1915 Wedgwood visited Australia in his capacity as Grand Secretary of the Order of Universal CoMasonry (Co-Freemasonry a branch of liberal or adogmatic Freemasonry consisting of mixed-sex lodges), another of the organisations in which he was prominent. On his return to England, he learned that Frederick Samuel Willoughby, a bishop of the Old Catholic Church of Britain, had become enmeshed in a homosexuality scandal and as a result had been suspended by Archbishop Mathew. . . . Wedgwood started the organisation that would later become the Liberal Catholic Church, of which he became the first Presiding Bishop. At the same time he maintained his close connections with the Theosophical movement, and many of Wedgwood's priests and bishops were simultaneously Theosophists.

Well, this is woozy stuff, although frankly, if the CDF regards the Charismatic Episcopal Church as Anglican enough to qualify its priests for ordination as Catholics after a bit of distance learning, I don't see why it should turn away priests of the Liberal Catholic Church, and I'm not being entirely tongue in cheek here.

But as long as we're on Theosophy, this brings me to an episode in my undergraduate days, when I knew some real Theosophists. I never took them quite seriously, but the rural elite school where I was serving time was actually a pretty dull place, and they were at least more interesting than the average trust-fund preppie I ran into there.

Somewhat under their influence, I was taking courses in Eastern religion at the school's Religion department. One of them was on Hinduism, although it is to be understood that the subject was actually a sort of reified hInDUiSm as interpreted by Mircea Eliade, the mentor of the prof, which had little to do with anything in India or anywhere else.

Probably as a result of chats with the Theosophists, I started looking at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement of the late 19th century and began writing a paper on it for the Hinduism course. This, of course, had nothing to do with reified Eliade-style hInDUiSm that was the actual subject matter, and once I got into Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy and a promoter of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, the prof went into something of a rage.

I wasn't a convert, of course, but I was beginning to get an inkling that Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky were influential historical figures. The prof's reaction put the brakes on that, and in fact, not many people share this view. One of the very few serious discussions I've found is this one on YouTube by Dr David Campbell, a Catholic convert. Blavatsky is one source for the general theological nuttiness that's pervaded Western culture for a century and a half.

If I'd had a theoretical Jordan Peterson-style prof instead of the guy I had in the Hinduism course, I might have learned worthwhile stuff as an undergraduate. But, pace the Liberal Catholic Church, Hindu and other Eastern religious views are in opposition to Catholicism.