I've listened about halfway through so far. It is dawning on me that these two men apparently flew all the way to Calgary to defend themselves and the Bros against John Bruce. I'm absolutely blown away. I mean, I can't wait until 11:30 am EST rolls around every day so I can read your blog, but I did not realise you had become an influencer. Wow.This is actually not an exaggeration. Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins spent much of the hour and 15 minutes in the meeting cautioning the parish about John Bruce. My reaction wasn't that far from my correspondent's -- as Rush Limbaugh puts it, I'm living rent-free in their heads. I would say that this, in addition to the fact that both men flew to Calgary at the cost of several thousand dollars to hold this meeting, is an indication that Bp Lopes is under a great deal of pressure.
Although the visitor is still working on a full transcript, I did make my own version of certain remarks by both Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins. Bp Lopes spoke first, and he outlined the ordinariate's unavailing efforts to stop this blog, including, by his account, an effort to have me declared an online bully. However, at 7:00 in the recording, he says,
Fr Bruce, er, John Bruce, whatever his name is --- I attempted to work through the Archdiocese of Los Angeles –- I know that he received a letter from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles –- I know this, because he put the letter right up on his blog – he said ‘Look, I’m getting under their skin finally’.Now, I hate to have to put it this way, but this statement is an untruth, the thing which is not. The only correspondence I've ever received from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has been periodic fundraising appeals and corresponding thanks and receipts for our contributions. I have never received any correspondence, e-mail, letter, or anything else from anyone in the archdiocese about this blog, and of course, since I never received such a thing, I never posted it on this blog.
That Bp Lopes would slip and unintentionally call me "Fr Bruce" is an indication of how agitated he must have been to be making these statements. One thing I've learned in a lifetime of dealing with untruths is that people who tell these things never just fabricate out of whole cloth -- they don't just say out of the blue, "Joe Blow is a registered sex offender," when he is not. They'll use some grain of truth -- Joe Blow told a tasteless joke that put a sex offender in a positive light one day, for instance -- and they'll build on that to sort of fudge things into making Joe into a registered sex offender himself.
The grain-of-truth episode that did appear on my blog was this. In March of last year, I posted that Fr Longenecker had conducted a Lenten mission at our parish. I had a feeling that someone still seething over the St Mary of the Angels debacle would use this bit of information to track down our parish, and this in fact happened. However, it was not anyone in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, it was a lay parishioner at our former parish who had been a member at St Mary of the Angels, where she was a member of the Bartus faction. She apparently maintains contact with Fr Bartus, now down in Orange County.
The Sunday after my post on Fr Longenecker appeared, an associate at our parish pulled my wife and me aside after mass and asked me if I was the John Bruce who had a blog about the ordinariate. I said I was. Fr ___ was both puzzled and amused. He said our pastor had received an e-mail that wasn't entirely coherent making a not fully understandable complaint about the blog, and that in fact he wasn't sure if it had been written by a native English speaker. Although this was enough for me to identify the close follower of Fr Bartus, Fr ___ never showed me a copy of the e-mail, so there is no way I could have posted it here. I did mention the episode in one paragraph of this post, but I don't believe I was gloating, and I said nothing about getting under anyone's skin.
I gave Fr ___ a 50,000-foot view of the situation, mentioning in passing things like instant ordinations and the priest who beat his wife before the altar. The conversation turned to other more local controversies, and it ended with a chuckle from Fr ___. No one from the parish or the archdiocese has mentioned this to me again. I would caution anyone who considers contacting our pastor, a very busy and outstanding priest, with any complaint about me that his first response will probably be to say he knows my wife and me as leaders in a large parish. Please do not waste this man's time.
What concerns me about the statement from Bp Lopes above is that it contains two clear untruths.
- I never received any letter from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles
- I never posted it on my blog, since I never received it.
It does interest me that this strange episode does seem to have been communicated to Bp Lopes, and it's reasonable to conclude he was satisfied to hear it and used it to embroider it out of recognition and try to assassinate my character with it. Either that, or he never heard it and made the whole letter from the archdiocese up himself.
It occurred to me, after reading my regular correspondent's reaction, that if I were simply a narcissistic troll seeking attention, I'd be flicked away like a mite. Instead, I've got a bishop and a vicar general who appear to be taking me very seriously, to the point that they feel the need to tell stories and attack my character.
In fact, I'll have some choice quotes from Fr Perkins tomorrow.
