Vaughn Treco Interview

A visitor sent me a link to a post summarizing an interview with Vaughn Treco yesterday at One Peter Five. A PDF of the full interview is here.

The visitor says, and commenters certainly agree, "It's still not clear which of his words or deeds rise to the level of excommunication." The only thing to add to that is Treco's own summary of his situation:

I have had the good fortune of wonderful canonical and superlative brother priestly council throughout this process. My canonical counsel has pursued all available recourse, and he has done it adroitly, promptly, and we have simply not heard anything from Bishop Lopes throughout this period. But the time frame in which a petition for hierarchical recourse gets a response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could be anywhere from a year to many years. And so, in a sense, what we have to do now is simply wait.

I've certainly been in situations myself where an organization wasn't acting in the interests of justice, and I got the short end of the deal. I remember a situation were the manager, who was pretty clearly abusing drugs on the job, was having an affair with a subordinate, caught by a senior executive in flagrante, and both were on very shaky ground. The problem for them was that, if the organization removed them, it had at least a temporary stopgap in that I could have been put in temporary charge. and things would probably have run more smoothly.

So the pair's clear remedy was to get rid of me to prevent the organization having a good contingency. They fixed on a project I was working on, which had a plan that had been approved with milestones stretching out over a period of months. They began to agitate that a certain task, which according to the approved plan was not to be completed for some weeks, had not been completed. Of course it hadn't, the schedule, approved by the same pair, didn't call for it to be completed. But they were able to use the "uncompleted" project, with a lot of fuzzing and mumbo-jumbo, to get me out. This didn't save them; they were out anyway, but so was I.

One reason I went into high tech was that new jobs were easy to find, so I simply picked up and moved on. Whatever the justice or injustice of a particular situation, I really think that's about the only healthy response. It's hard to avoid a sense that whatever Treco may or may not have said in his homily, the focus was on Bp Lopes -- my tentative theory is that Treco had been rubbing people the wrong way in the Archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis by doing things like celebrating mass ad orientem in the hospital chapel, and the homily, whatever particular words were or weren't in it, was but part of a package, and that package in turn was part of a bigger one. Quite possibly Abp Hebda spoke to Bp Lopes via the CDF, and the outcome was foreordained.

There's another issue here that I think again is beyond Treco's control. A Catholic priest who's formed via seminary does field work and gets practical training before ordination as a deacon. After that, he's usually assigned to a parish as an associate and works under supervision. But the theory behind Anglicanorum coetibus seems to be that all "Anglican" pastoral experience is, first, interchangeable, and second, fully equivalent to Catholic formation, with only a bit of distance-learning touchup here and there.

But the best I can tell from the full text of the interview linked above, Treco had about two years experience as a priest in the Charismatic Episcopal Church between 1997 and when he became Catholic in 1999. His seminary formation was sporadic and desultory in various denominations over decades, never resulting in a divinity degree. Yet somehow, Houston thought it could send him out to Minnesota without, as far as I can see, any type of on-the-job mentoring, and without any sort of supervision. I suspect we simply don't know the full story here, and I suspect that "schism" and "heresy" are convenient ways for Bp Lopes to avoid other questions about how the whole situation could have potentially risen to the attention of someone like Abp Hebda.

I just don't think the homily was the real issue. Reading the full text of the interview, I do have questions about focus, discipline, and stability in Treco's case -- he seems throughout his life to go on reading jags, pursuing a certain direction, when something suddenly inspires him to go in another direction, and he pursues that intently until something else comes up. As best I can tell, he starts out as Plymouth Brethren until he becomes a Presbyterian until he discovers liturgy, which makes him an Episcopal seminarian until he finds out TEC has gone to the dogs and drops out of that, and then goes into the Charismatic Episcopal Church for all of two years, when he decides he has to resign and become Catholic.

Until, of course, after a few years as a priest he's discovered the Church has got it wrong. How would a diocesan vocation director or seminary rector have responded to this? What did Houston miss here, because just reading the text of the interview, it's hard to avoid thinking there was a lot for them to miss. I'm convinced the homily was, for Bp Lopes, the most convenient way to address a problem that was probably quite a bit bigger, and if the real problem came to light, the focus would be on someone other than poor Treco.

Who really needs to be looking at how to pick up and move on.

Attrition And The Real Numbers Of Ordinariate Clergy

Not long ago, I had an e-mail from a visitor who forwarded a question from someone who seems to have had the impression, based on the context of the question, that hundreds of Anglicans were ordained Catholic priests at the start of the North American ordinariate. I replied that as best I knew, the total number ordained since 2012 had been in the range of 70-75. I would attribute the big overestimate to the impression people seem to have that if the media covers anything, it must be big and important.

My regular correspondent has sent me information that indicates the actual number of clergy engaged in any sort of active ministry to former Anglicans in the ordinariate is even smaller.

At least seven men ordained for the OCSP have never had any involvement with an Ordinariate congregation (excluding the half dozen or so active military chaplains presumably slated for future Ordinariate deployment). Another seventeen have retired and are no longer active in an OCSP community (most are still active elsewhere) or have been excardinated to a local diocese, or just thrown in the towel, like Frs Chalmers and Duncan.

nd then we have Luke Reese and Vaughn Treco. And transitional Deacon David Hodil, washed out of seminary. Two other Ordinariate seminarians, in pre-Theology, have withdrawn, although attrition in this category is to be expected. The other defections seem statistically high.

So if something like 70-75 have been ordained in total, about 30 are no longer involved with the North American ordinariate, although some are in diocesan clergy roles. This leaves about 40-45 in some clerical function with ordinariate communities, which roughly matches the known number of actual communities, however small many may be.

But of the 40-45, only about a dozen are in full time roles with ordinariate communities, with the others serving diocesan parishes part time, or in other diocesan make-work jobs like property manager.

More On Small Gathered Groups

The history of Fr Chalmers, either the first or second former Anglican priest ordained in the North American ordinariate, and the need to create a group of faithful ex nihilo for him to shepherd, indicates that within six months of the ordinariate's erection, the Anglicanorum coetibus model was failing. On one hand, even "continuing" jurisdictions were going to fight the departure of parishes to the Catholic ordinariate. On the other, established Episcopalian clergy were not going to jeopardize their comfortable positions by flirting with apostasy.

The intake of Episcopalian clergy would be marginal men without careers, with almost nothing to lose and even a minimal gain by the move, while laity would almost always be in a position of leaving property behind and having to start from scratch with limited resources. Thus, by mid-2012, the idea of full parishes coming in as existing bodies with their clergy had mostly to be dropped in favor of a Potemkin fantasy. The situation has not changed in the seven years since.

Of the gathered groups still in existence, my regular correspondent comments,

I would estimate that about half the current OCSP communities have an ASA of thirty or fewer. In some cases they are led by retired clergy who have pension income. Although these men would welcome growth, in theory at least, the existing situation is working for them.

Some are communities which an aspiring Ordinariate priest had to gather in order to be ordained; some are communities which have been taken over by a new priest after the founding priest retired. Four of the OCSP communities which have folded are in this last category. Also St Augustine, San Diego, which has dwindled since Fr Baaten took over from Fr Ortiz-Guzman; Our Lady of Grace, Covina, getting by with supply clergy since Fr Bayles was deployed to Aviano; Oour Lady of Hope, Kansas City, whose new Parish Administrator has not bothered to update the new location/ Sunday mass time on either the OCSP website or the parish's; St Thomas Becket, Ft Worth, which finally has its own Parish Administrator again almost three years after Fr Stainbrook was reassigned to St John Vianney, Cleburne, and of course St James, Jacksonville, now led by Fr Mayer.

I would consider all of them vulnerable to a decision by the new Parish Administrator that other opportunities opening up in the local diocese are more attractive than maintaining a DW mass for a handful of worshippers.

This is another way of saying that the gathered groups are highly unstable and hardly good environments for nurturing new Catholics in the faith. The problem I see is that the whole body of clergy in the ordinariate, from the lowliest deacon to the bishop, are focused on their own shaky chances for career advancement by maintaining a fantasy that something worthwhile is being done, rather than bringing the laity into a fuller life in the Church.

The record we see here is that priests who have any chance of doing so will run to the Pastoral Provision model, using their Anglican background simply as a way to qualify for the Catholic diocesan priesthood, and drop their little groups of Anglican stragglers at the earliest opportunity.

Not a good look.

The St Anselm Group Greenville, SC

As we saw yesterday, the St Anselm group in Greenville, SC was an early instance of the recognition that the Anglicanorum coetibus model, existing Anglican parishes coming into a Catholic personal prelature as groups with their clergy, would not prove viable. Instead, new "gathered" groups of interested parties, whether unreceived Anglicans, cradle Catholics, or anyone else, would gather during off hours at a diocesan parish for an Anglican-rite liturgy.

A July 2013 Facebook letter to the group from Fr Chalmers outlines the difficulties this model presented:

The bottom line, it seems to me, was that there wasn't enough focus among the group as it developed to form a coherent community, and it turned into a coffee hour-with-morning prayer between OF masses on Sunday mornings.

Another interpretation would be that the group as it existed wasn't justifying a dedicated priest -- I note that Fr Chalmers also celebrated the 9:00 Sunday OF mass. Yet another inference would be that Anglicanorum coetibus had, within a short time of its promulgation, become primarily a justification for giving marginal Anglican clergy jobs in Catholic dioceses, laity of any flavor a distant secondary factor.

A story on the Ordinariate's own site on Fr Evan Simington's journey to seminary during this period gives additional insight into this situation:

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter had a thriving Catholic community [in Greenville]. And it was simply where he felt called to be.

“It was a critical step in faith,” the 29-year-old said of his move, which opened the way for his reception into the Catholic Church. Simington was received into the Ordinariate at St. Anselm’s, the Ordinariate’s community in Greenville, in October 2014.

He found work as a pastoral associate at Prince of Peace — a Catholic parish in the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina — until this summer, when he packed up his truck once again to start a new leg of his journey.

The strong implication is that Simington came to Greenville looking for clergy work, and he found it via the ordinariate, though throughout the history of the St Anselm group, it lacked the size and focus to justify any full-time effort by anyone. As we saw yesterday, Fr Chalmers left Greenville in 2015 for Birmingham, where any involvement by him with ordinariate laity to date has been minimal. Fr Jonathan Duncan took over the St Anselm group at that time.

According to my regular correspondent,

After Fr Duncan took over, there was a DW mass every Wednesday evening at St Mary's, and a Sunday evensong. In November 2016 Fr Duncan began celebrating a DW Sunday morning mass at the chapel of St Joseph's School, where he was the chaplain. Apparently 45 adults and children attended the first one. Fr Duncan is now an Assisting Priest at St Mary, Greenville in addition to his job as school,chaplain.

My regular correspondent sums up the lack of focus and scheduling problems at St Anselm's as follows:

Fr Chalmers alludes to [the mission to develop the Anglican patrimony] in his third paragraph but how this will be fulfilled by Coffee Hour and Adult Sunday School is unclear. He does include something he calls "the Morning Office so vital to the Anglican tradition" by which I presume he means Morning Prayer. With only 55 minutes at their disposal, this program seems over-ambitious.

Fr Duncan added a Wednesday evening DW mass and Sunday Evensong, but for families with children probably neither of these were very convenient. So back to the idea of a Sunday mass. But once it was moved out of St Mary's to the basement chapel at the school it ceased to be a draw, even to former Anglicans. The whole thing illustrates some fundamental problems with AC.

I posted on the group's eventual closure on January 30, 2018. My regular correspondent summarized the situation at the time:

Its members have apparently drifted away to parishes with children's programs and the other sorts of parish activity which a small group with no weekday meeting space could never offer. In these groups the priest is active in the local dioceses; it is lay demand which has disappeared.

Question: In this and other cases, the North American ordinariate has provided married former Anglican priests primarily for diocesan work. How does it differ from the Pastoral Provision? What actual function does it serve, outside of probably fewer than a dozen viable parishes? Could those parishes be folded into dioceses and the function of forming former Anglican priests be taken over fully by the Pastoral Provision?

For Good Or Ill, My Episcopalian Confirmation Class Spent A Lot Of Time On Clerical Careers

Whereas our RCIA class spent none at all. For what that's worth, but it does give me some context to Fr Chalmers's career before he went into the North American ordinariate. The basics are available on his Linkedin profile. He appears to be a native of Birmingham, AL, and he went to the University of Alabama, receiving a BA in Labor Studies in 1994. (It's worth noting that candidates for the Catholic priesthood major in Philosophy as undergraduates, and if they don't, they must normally do remedial work at the undergraduate level.)

He worked for the University of Alabama health system in its Program for Rural Services and Research after graduation, and apparently as an outcome of this work, he went to Harvard for a Master's in Education from 1997-98. (This may have been largely distance learning, and he continued in his university job during this time.) I would say that in the academic world, Education degrees are looked down on, even those from the Ivy League. However, by 2004, in his early 30s, Chalmers was apparently looking for a completely different career, and he decided to become an Episcopal priest and go to Yale Divinity.

An observation I've often seen is that the Episcopsl priesthood is, for many, a second or third attempt at a career. What in the Catholic Church is called a "delayed vocation" is much more unusual there. The opinions I see suggest that the university system we have produces people without much direction, and they tend not to work out at one career or another, so they keep trying new ones, especially ones that are prestigious and undemanding, like the Episcopal priesthood. That's just a piece I'm bringing to the puzzle here.

But here's another piece. While you can simply decide to go to education school, to go to an Episcopalian seminary, you also need a letter of recommendation from your bishop. Here's where I think other pieces of the puzzle may fit. As my regular correspondent puts it,

Msgr Steenson seemed to get it into his head that certain people would be a "catch" for the OCSP and then get them ordained whether or not he had any actual role for them. As I'm sure I've mentioned I saw Fr Chalmers given as a reference on the website of the company that set up the OCSP website, so clearly he was entrusted with this task in the early days, and no doubt other aspects of the organisational set-up. Just as Fr Sellers was made Director of Communications, and Msgr Gipson CFO and Fr Wolfe Director of Child and Youth Protection. All completely incompetent, at least in these roles.

My impression is that Fr Gipson, who was Dean of the Birmingham TEC cathedral from 1982-94, must have been a patron of young Mr Chalmers, and he probably had some role in eventually getting him a letter from the Bishop of Alabama, not just to any seminary, but to Yale Divinity. This would certainly have helped him in reinventing his career.

However, what we see on his graduation from seminary is that his first job was Chaplain and Interim Rector at the University of Alabama Episcopalian chapel from 2007-8. An Episcopalian priest is normally ordained only after he's been hired by his first parish -- given the job market, it's by no means unusual for seminary graduates not to get calls, or job offers, and thus not to be ordained as young associates. But sometimes a bishop will ordain a few who don't have jobs in parishes and give them temporary jobs that are meant to last about a year, like "bishop's chaplain" (a fancy word for driver) or, in Chalmers's case, an "interim".

An "interim" is a priest-in-charge at a parish, assigned by the bishop, who serves the parish following a rector's resignation. This job is expected to last only until a new rector is hired by the vestry, and there is a contractual understanding that an interim is not eligible to become the parish's rector -- it's a purely temporary assignment, often with responsibilities limited to saying mass, all other matters handled by the wardens and vestry. Not necessarily the first assignment you'd expect for a Yale Divinity alum, but the ones I saw who passed through TEC parishes when I was an Episcopalian tended to be attractive but without much substance anyhow.

Certainly he didn't seem to have much future in the Diocese of Alabama, since his next job was as an associate at Christ Episcopal in Greenville, SC from 2009-12. It sounds as though by that time, Fr Gipson's influence was on the wane -- apparently he could get him nothing in TEC in Houston.

His move from Episcopalian to Catholic in Greenville, however, was sudden. As of January 7 2012, he was still an Episcopalian associate at Christ Church Greenville presiding at a funeral. By June 3, he was ordained a Catholic priest, either the first or second to be ordained in the OCSP. At the same time, press releases described him as a "hospital executive", although various references indicate he was some type of coordinator for chaplain services at St. Francis Hospital in Greenville, SC.

At the same time, Fr Chalmers started a "gathered group" called St Anselm's in Greenville. This was almost certainly the first instance of what became the actual ordinariate pattern, rather than the one anticipated in Anglicanorum coetibus: the new ordinariate priest gets a make-work diocesan day job to support his family while struggling to attract members to a small group that will celebrate DW liturgy.

The best we can tell is that Fr Chalmers lasted three years in Greenville, when he was apparently able, either through his wife or some other contacts in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Birmingham, to return there with a job as President of Holy Family Cristo Rey Catholic High School, apparently falling back on his education degree from Harvard. In 2017, he also became Pastor of the Holy Rosary Church in Birmingham.

Despite his prestigious education, we're seeing a pretty standard pattern that's developed with ordinariate priests: marginal performers in Anglican denominations seeking last-ditch opportunities in the Catholic Church. They're unable to build ordinriate communities, which typically don't survive long after they leave them, and within a fairly short time, they must rely on diocesan jobs to support themselves and their families.

We'll take a look at the St Anselm Greenville group's history tomorrow.

A Closer Look At The Short-Lived Holy Rosary DW Mass

My regular correspondent reports,

I see here that the additional DW mass was added February 10, 2019. Lent began March 6. February 10 not even a pre-Lent purple Sunday in the Ordinariate calendar. So it seems a bit harsh to accuse Fr Chalmers of intending DW as a penance for anyone, especially as his usual parishioners could always attend the OF at the usual time if they so chose.

But it still leaves us with the mystery of why Fr Chalmers felt any need to celebrate DW for anyone, four years after leaving his OCSP community and two years after taking over Holy Rosary. And why such a short trial? Ms Welborn's post implies that the congregation on the third Sunday DW was offered was small, but not single digits small. Why quit after a dozen attempts? Of course, as I suggested he may simply have wanted to be able to say "I tried." Or was there diocesan push-back?

As you have often pointed out, a bishop would need a superabundance of Christian charity to sit happily by while another jurisdiction siphoned off longtime Catholics. No suggestion in the Holy Rosary bulletins that anyone was being prepared for baptism at Easter, or reception of First Communion/Confirmation at Pentecost. Just another option for current Birmingham Catholics, as Ms Welborn points out on her Instagram page.

Here's Holy Rosary's home page. It says of its community,

Gate City is among the poorest neighborhoods in Birmingham and thus brings us ample opportunities to minister with our neighbors and promote the common good. Throughout its history, Holy Rosary has been at the forefront of contemporary Catholic Social Teaching.

Anglicanorum coetibus was aimed at pulling in upscale Episcopalians disaffected with a liberal-leaning TEC, not Catholics at the forefront of contemporary social teaching. So I'm not sure if the parish, while it has a very traditional interior, is necessarily a good fit for Divine Worship congregants. My correspondent noted earlier,

Perhaps someone said to him one day ""You know, Jon, you've been in Birmingham for years and yet you've never even tried to get an Ordinariate group together. Why not?" and he felt put on the spot. Perhaps that person was Bp Lopes. As the blogger noted, the inaugural (?) mass was on the Solemnity of the Feast of the Chair of St Peter, which was appropriate. He doesn't seem to have given it much of a trial, which suggests that it wasn't his idea in the first place. Now he can say he made the effort.

As for who would come, I agree it's a mystery, but Fr Bartus seems to have tapped into a market. Whether such people can be the foundation of a healthy long-term parish community is another matter. The comments on Ms Welborn's post are revealing.

The comments are mostly from ordinariate members, who I suppose are welcome to appreciate the faux Anglican language with the schismatic artifacts -- though they're appreciating it from places like Mobile and Houston and presumably didn't travel to get it in Birmingham. One commenter made what from my perspective is an entirely reasonable observation:

As a former Anglican, I have been happier as a plain old Latin Rite/Ordinary Form Catholic than I ever thought would be possible — at least partly because we have a good parish with good liturgy. I have honestly not missed being Anglican.

But a better question would be why it took years for Fr Chalmers to try a DW mass at the Holy Rosary parish, and why the trial ended so quickly. And Fr Chalmers was the second Anglican priest ever to be ordained in the North American ordinariate, to considerable fanfare, and with a Birmingham connection from the start:

The Rev. Larry Gipson was dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham from 1982-94 and rector at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, where his parishioners included former President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, from 1994 to 2008.

. . . Gipson will be among 69 candidates for Catholic priesthood attending a formation retreat this weekend in Houston at the ordinariate's headquarters.

Among those leading seminars at the Formation Retreat in Houston will be Fr. Jon Chalmers, who was ordained a Catholic priest in June, the second former Episcopal cleric to be accepted as a priest under the ordinariate.

His wife, Margaret Chalmers, former canon lawyer for the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham and now chancellor of the ordinariate, will also be a presenter at the weekend retreat that runs Friday night through Sunday.

He and his wife were ordinariate aristocracy in 2012, a cover couple, but we've heard less and less from them as the years have passed (although Fr Chalmers has been on the governing council from the start), until the brief and unheralded effort at holding a DW mass in Birmingham earlier this year. I think it may be worth looking more closely at Fr Chalmers's career tomorrow.

This Blog Brings You The Ordinariate News The Observer Doesn't!

My regular correspondent reports,

In the process of determining whether Fr Chalmers brought a congregation with him (He didn't. St Anselm, Greenville was a gathered group, passed on to Fr Duncan when Fr Chalmers left in 2015 to take a job in Birmingham, AL; now closed.) I came across this account of a Divine Worship mass apparently being offered as of this Lent at Holy Rosary, Birmingham, of which Fr Chalmers has been Pastor since 2017, while continuing with his school job . Looking at recent bulletins on the parish website, and at the homepage, however, it seems this was a brief and unsuccessful experiment.

The idea of a Divine Worship mass -- Latin for traddies who don't speak Latin -- at a diocesan parish is intriguing. And during Lent it's intriguing indeed.

• Our diocesan parish sings the Latin Gloria, Sanctus, memorial acclamation, and Agnus Dei at mass during Advent, Lent, Easter, Christmas, and other solemnities. But that's Latin, which all Latin rite Catholics have in common whatever their linguistic background. To turn around and celebrate a liturgical season mass with schismatic artifacts from a single country that not every Latin rite Catholic has in common is problematic.
• Diocesan parishes often have ethnic groups with particular traditions, which are especially celebrated in seasons like Advent, Christmas, Easter, and Lent. But these are typically adopted because there are lots of people from those backgrounds in the parish. (And hey, gimme that Filipino food!) But a parish with lots of Italians isn't necessarily going to have Filipino novenas. What on earth was the rationale for suddenly adding a DW mass to that Birmingham parish?
• And why Lent? My understanding is that as a season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, Lenten devotions should somehow make you feel the bite. You don't decide you're going to give up washing the dishes for Lent, after all, you decide to do something that's going to be hard. So hey, let's celebrate a mass we don't like! How about this long one with extra prayers, thee-thous, and a Last Gospel! That should be plenty more tedious for Lent!

So I've got to assume Fr Chalmers has a tin ear, at least where the Divine Worship missal is concerned. He seems to think it's something to impose on people who aren't familiar with it, and this is good, because it's something to rap their knuckles with during Lent. And I'm still reflecting on a homily from a visiting priest who commended Francis's apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium to us, for instance

6. There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter. I realize of course that joy is not expressed the same way at all times in life, especially at moments of great difficulty. Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light. . .

Yet Fr Chalmers sees the Divine Worship Missal as something to be imposed on Catholics of all traditions, especially during Lent, apparently because it's unpleasant. Well, he has degrees from both Harvard and Yale. Says a lot about Harvard and Yale.

Groups That Have Closed

My regular correspondent has provided a list of the startup groups, or parishes-in-formation, or whatever the preferred term is, that have been closed to date in the North American ordinariate. I'm surprised at how many there have been:

St Edmund, Kitchener, ON
St Bede, St Louis Park, MN
St Anselm, Corpus Christi, TX
Our Lady of Mt Carmel, Savannah/Augusta, GA
St Anselm, Greenville. SC
San Agustin, Pinecrest, FL
St John Fisher, Potomac Falls, VA
St Gilbert, Boerne. TX

In addition, St Joseph of Arimathea, Indianapolis is no longer listed on the OCSP "Parish Finder," although an "Anglican Use" mass is still celebrated on Sunday at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis. St Bede Halifax, NS has a monthly Sunday mass, celebrated by the Parish Administrator of Our Lady of the Sign, Fredericton. St Gregory the Great, formerly Stoneham, MA, maintains a web presence although its remaining members now worship with St Athanasius, Chestnut Hill.

Others appear to be as weak, but will continue as long as they have a priest to justify their existence. However, it's plain in these cases that retirement, relocation, or removal of the priest will result in the closure of more such groups. (The only exception I'm aware of is the St Alban, Rochester, NY group, which managed to maintain its existence through a long interregnum until a new priest could be assigned.)

As far as I can see, no particular provision is made for the pastoral care of members once these groups are closed. They may be told to merge with another existing group if one is credibly nearby, or they may simply be told to receive the sacraments at a diocesan parish, which as far as I can see would have been good advice months or years earlier.

Since we had Sunday readings connected with discipleship a few weeks ago, I've got to wonder what sort of model Houston is giving us in this area. Is it prudent to offer the faithful -- especially those newly converted -- a highly unstable, very iffy option for worship and fellowship when much more stable opportunities can be found a few blocks away, or indeed just upstairs in the main nave?

What problem, yet once more, is Houston trying to solve?

TEC Bishop Love's Dilemma And TEC Bishop Steenson

A visitor passed on to me a comment from another reader about yesterday's post:

The enigma of conservative Anglicanism: Bishop Love of Albany can support and practice the pretended ordination of women, while David Virtue, IIRC, opposes it (at least so far as the presbyterate is concerned; last I heard, he was in favor of woman deacons), and yet he can describe Bishop Love as the last orthodox bishop in the Episcopal Church.

And further,

I don’t understand the Cold Case File writer’s point of view. The Ordinariate is there; if they want to be Catholic with Anglican style liturgy they can. But they will have to accept the Catechism, and an authority. If they are fundamentally Protestants after all, there is ACNA, where they also have to accept a degree of doctrinal and liturgical authority over them. If they want to continue doing their own thing and getting a nice pension at the end, the cost of that is same sex marriage and priestesses. Most will decide they can, after all, live with those things.

This in turn brought to mind a remark by the late Msgr William Stetson in his History of the Pastoral Provision:

When asked the difference between being an Episcopalian priest and a Catholic priest, one former Episcopalian priest answered, “about twenty thousand dollars.” The financial arrangements for Catholic clergy are not suited to the needs of married men. This is a topic that needs further study and on which bishops sponsoring candidates need guidance.

I think the way to reconcile all this is to say that poor Bp Love is facing the Steenson Dilemma. Steenson was ordained in TEC after "continuing" Anglicanism had become a thing, so we must assume he was reconciled with women's ordination and the 1979 BCP. Nevertheless, his delicacy was such that as a bishop, he would have a suffragan ordain women priests, but he was OK with concelebrating with them once they were ordained.

He was sufficiently with the TEC program that in the wake of Eugene Robinson's election as Bishop of New Hampshire, he wrote an essay, "The New Donatists", accusing those who objected of heresy. Yet not long afterward, he succumbed to Bernard Law's blandishments, resigned his episcopal see, and traveled to Rome with what must certainly have been assurances that he would become ordinary of a new Anglican personal prelature. Whatever the difference was between an Episcopalian bishop and a Catholic ordinary, we must assume something was added to sweeten the deal. I believe he continued to own a private plane.

By the same token, I think the visitor who commented on the incentives for Bp Love wasn't too far from the mark. I would guess that even Cardinal Law's charisma could command only so many resources to recruit additional TEC bishops to the cause, but he is no longer available for the project. An apologia for his conversion by Steenson published in 2008 is full of equivocation and sheepish confessions:

So why did you become a Catholic? What was it that induced you to cast aside the reasonably comfortable life of a bishop in the Episcopal Church and commit professional suicide in your midfifties? And why the Catholic Church instead of one of the alternative Anglican options? I noticed that my answers have not always been the same, and this has bothered me.

, , , I still have a sense of guilt about the whole ordeal of becoming a bishop in the Episcopal Church, because I was so conflicted about its direction. It was perfectly evident in 2004 where things were heading. My only defense is that I still hoped Anglicanism, at the eleventh hour, might yet reorder its life so as not to lose its original Catholic identity.

. . . the tumult reached a crescendo at the House of Bishops meeting on March 20, 2007. That was the day the bishops overwhelmingly rejected the valiant work that had been done to propose more effective instruments for the Anglican Communion, and they insisted that the polity of the Episcopal Church is independent, democratic, and connected to the rest of Anglicanism by voluntary association. By sunset I knew that I could not remain in the Episcopal Church under these circumstances.

So he was copacetic with the 1979 liturgy, women's ordination, women bishops, Jack Spong, and Gene Robinson, but March 28, 2007 -- that was the last straw!! And as of 2008, his designation as North American ordinary was still four years away, but we must assume it was in train and well assured, and his living arrangements in Rome were provided for. This man made no sacrifice. I think the commenter above isn't wrong in suspecting an equivalent package for Bp Love would bring an equivalent move.

But let's take Msgr Stetson's recognition of the economic factor in Episcopalian clergy choosing to become Catholic or not a step farther. A bishop will make the move if it suits him financially. What about priests who need, as Stetson estimates, another 20K? Or maybe to put it differently, what about priests who'll make such a move without the extra 20K? Well, in the first wave of ordinations in 2012-13, we did get a few rectors from established parishes, but not many -- and certainly most of those came in with their parishes (Fr Catania was an exception). CORRECTION: : Fr Catania did bring his parish---Mt Calvary---with him into the OCSP, but was replaced by Fr Scharbach in 2014.

But since then, we've had just another set of illustrations that economic forces work as predicted. The men who've been recruited are't coming in for an extra 20K, and at that, they're no bargains. And they weren't formed as celibate seminarians, brought up on the recognition that the real treasures are in heaven, and they can live well enough as single men on what they're paid in the Church. Instead, we've got exactly what you'd expect from paying at the bottom in any job market, men who are desperate for any job, for any number of reasons -- and predictably, we're seeing those reasons as they gradually emerge.

Episcopalian clergy expect to ride first class. It's no surprise that the ones who consider the ordinariate are often not even the genuine article, they're just generic Anglicans -- or even worse. As my high school economics teacher pointed out, you can save money by buying the dented cans or the day-old bread. But you do then have to be a smarter consumer.

David Virtue On TEC Bishop Love's Options

David Virtue has been covering the controversy over Episcopalian Bishop of Albany William Love, who has refused to accept same-sex marriage in his diocese, although the TEC General Convention has approved it. He discusses Love's options:

1. He can retire and leave the mess for someone else. That seems unlikely. He is not a quitter and he is fighting now and will continue to do so until he retires. It is highly unlikely that he would abandon his mostly Anglo-Catholic priests.

2. He could ask the diocese if it would consider resigning en masse and align with the ACNA. But this is fraught with legal land mines, resulting in his immediate inhibition, presentment and expulsion, and the real possibility that all the parishes would lose their buildings. The diocese doesn't have the money for a protracted legal battle and probably not the stomach for it either.

3. If he loses the ecclesiastical battle in a trial, and that could happen, that is, General Convention resolutions override diocesan canon laws, then he could face presentment and be tossed out of the church, thus paving the way for a new bishop.

. . .

5. This could result in wholesale resignations by priests in the diocese who may feel they have no future with a bishop who does not share their Catholic faith. Furthermore, with some 16 parishes unable now to pay their diocesan dues, it is likely that a wholesale revolt by the remaining parishes would virtually bankrupt the diocese.

6. Anglo Catholicism is in trouble in general and more so in towns still heavily dominated by a sterile Roman Catholicism.

Virtue's overall analysis of Love's position vis-a-vis The Episcopal Church is realistic, I think, but it's significant that he doesn't see Anglicanorum coetibus anywhere in the range of options, which is also a realistic point of view. A potential option for the diocese is to go with the ACNA, although the legal consequences would be self-defeating. The same would apply to a hypothetical move into the North American ordinariate, which let's recall was originally conceived in the late 1970s as a version of "continuing" Anglicanism, a corporate refuge for conservative parishes and conceivably dioceses disaffected with the TEC controversy-of-the-year.

Virtue thinks there could be wholesale resignations by priests, but of course, the dog that isn't barking is the essentially non-existent option for them to become priests in the ordinariate -- TEC priests who have been rectors of successful parishes and then become Catholic ordinariate priests for purely doctrinal reasons have been quite rare after the first wave. The intake has been primarily from fringe Anglican or non-Anglican denominations and men who haven't had established careers.

While Virtue's use of the term "Anglo Catholicism" is imprecise here, I think he's correct in seeing it as having only boutique appeal even in the North American ordinariate. There are "affirming" Episcopalian Anglo-Catholic parishes that are successful in upscale urban communities like midtown Manhattan and Hollywood. But that form of Anglo-Catholicism isn't even all that prevalent in the ordinariate. And it's worth pointing out that the most punctilious liturgical observance in the TEC Anglo-Catholic parishes goes with wholehearted acceptance of TEC's positions on sexuality. Liturgy by itself accomplishes nothing.

While I certainly disagree with Virtue theologically, I think he's an accurate observer of the dilemma facing high-church Protestantism. The outcome is not conversion to Catholicism, it's a general falling away from Christianity.

Cloning "continuing" Anglicanism hasn't been an effective strategy. Liturgy by itself isn't a solution, and it hasn't been uniformly applied even within the ordinariate.

"A New Kind Of Catholic Church Is Coming To Jacksonville"

My regular correspondent found this post on the Facebook page of the Anglican Ordinariate Forum, referring to the St James St Augustine, FL group now moving to Jacksonville.

It's accompanied by the photo at left. Just lookinig at the photo, I'm not sure what's "new" about it. Looking closely at the enlarged original on the Facebook page, it's possible to see that the celebration is ad orientem, and we may assume that the sacrament is received kneeling at the communion rail, but neither is especially prominent, and the statues of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart are just plain ol' Catholic.

In fact, as we've seen, the suburban Baltimore communities celebrate versus populum and incorporate charismatic and pentecostal features in their worship -- but apparently this particular "new" won't be part of the Jacksonville project. My regular correspondent observes,

Unfortunately, those attracted by the prospect of "old traditions" "solemnity" and "formality" in the reasonably attractive church depicted---St Benedict the Moor, St Augustine---may be somewhat dismayed when they discover that the St James, Jacksonville worship space is not exactly as pictured. On the other hand, those who have read a more recent posting on the site, regarding the detestable enormity of the "orans" posture during the Our Father, and the even more objectionable practice of holding hands, " both...touchy-feely borrowings from non-Catholic practices, used in western neo-churches so recently born that no element of their worship merits application of the word 'tradition', " may be alarmed to see the attendees of St James indulging in both these practices in the photos supplied.

As a reminder, at right is their new worship space. What is the objective here? Although there's a reference to "old traditions" in the Facebook post, a school cafetorium isn't especially traditional. And how many tradition-minded Anglicans will they recruit in Jacksonville from the ordinariate Facebook page? The style of worship in the Bible Belt generally isn't like that. My regular correspondent points out that Fr Mayer's background in The Episcopal Church was not Anglo-Catholic; he was running a startup meeting at the Marriott in The Colony, TX, but at this point, he's been Catholic longer than he was ever Anglican.

I think we're looking at a half-baked effort to follow the California model of going after disaffected diocesan traddies. This has been more successful in some cases than trying to clone "continuing" Anglicanism in the Catholic Church, but it has two disadvantages that won't work to its long-term success. The first problem is that diocesan bishops will get wise to what's happening -- their own parishes are being poached -- but in addition, the ordinariate model is to put poorly formed men into unpredictable situations without supervision.

The bishops won't like that much, either.

Report On The 2018 Bishop's Appeal

A little-noticed feature in the current Ordinariate Observer (p 34) is a list of the communities that met or exceeded their goals for the 2018 Bishop's Appeal.

To recap, each community's goal for the ordinariate's bishop's appeal is assessed based on a proportion of the tithe each parish sends to Houston. The tithe is sent directly from parish funds that come from pledges and other income. The bishop's appeal is raised via individual contributions from parishioners and represents a separate fundraising challenge that's the responsibility of the priest. Although it's expected that the contributions from individual parishioners will meet the goal, any shortfall is assessed directly from parish funds in the following year.

It's something of a blot on a parish record not to meet the goal, while it's a matter of pride for a new priest in a parish to establish a record of meeting the goal where it had previously not been met.

A special twist that applies to the North American ordinariate is that, as we've seen, the proceeds from the bishop's appeal go almost entirely to the chancery's operating budget for expenses like the bishop's travel and communications, rather than to mission-oriented or charitable projects, which is the case in territorial dioceses.

Taken from the Observer story, here's the list, in alphabetical order:

Blessed John Henry Newman Irvine
Blessed John Henry Newman Victoria
Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham Houston
Christ the King Towson
Corpus Christi Charleston, SC
Holy Martyrs Temecula
Holy Nativity Payson
Our Lady and St John Louisville
Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio
St Alban Rochester
St Barnabas Omaha
St Bede St Paul Park MN (now closed)
St Benedict Mundare AB
St George Republic MO
St James St Augustine FL
St John the Baptist Bridgeport PA
St John Vianney Cleburne TX
St Timothy Catonsville MD

My regular correspondent remarked,

This means that half the OCSP communities did not meet their assessed goal, including six (half) the full parishes. St John the Evangelist, Calgary was one of the parishes which failed to meet its goal, which as we learned previously was $6,055---not a vast sum. UPDATE: This is the 2019 goal. Prior years' goals, as I understand it, were higher, and this year's goal was reduced. We don't know if the parish will meet this year's goal.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. And vice-versa.

In addition, St Mary the Virgin, Arlington TX; St Luke, Washington, DC; St Thomas More, Scranton; Incarnation, Orlando; and Mt Calvary, Baltimore were full parishes that did not meet their goals. A territorial diocese might consider reassigning more capable priests to parishes like these, but the ordinariate is severely limited in its ability to relocate priests with their families, not to mention the limited supply of competent personnel at its diesposal. The impression I have is that St Thomas More and St Luke are very marginal operations that could, under equivalent Anglican canons, lose their parish status and be placed directly under the bishop's budgetary and administrative control.

In addition, Mt Calvary Baltimore, which as far as we can determine has a generous endowment that funds a catered brunch following Sunday mass, was unable to meet its goal. We may assume that this is no matter to the parish or its priest, since the subsequent assessment for the shortfall will also be paid from endowment income. What a commentary on this group and its priest.

But overall, this record is an indication of how marginal the whole ordinariate operation is.

What About The Uighurs?

One area where I've grown increasingly skeptical of Francis-bashing is the criticism we've seen, for example in yesterday's post, of the deal he made with the Chinese government that seeks to unify the official and underground Church there. My wife has mentioned several times the radical difference between how Catholics and Muslim Uighurs are treated in China. For example, I found this piece in Bloomberg Opinion:

The evidence is mounting that China is expanding its campaign against the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, Muslim minority. Testimonials of survivors describe torture and near-starvation at the province’s so-called “re-education centers.” Investigative reports detail the state’s separation of Uighur children from their families and forced attendance at high-walled kindergartens. Academic research has unearthed state documents showing this campaign is deliberate and escalating.

. . . Last summer, United Nations investigators estimated that 1 million Uighurs were in the camps. In May, Randall Schriver, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security, estimated that at least 3 million Uighurs are being detained. (Other U.S. officials tell me this larger estimate includes people who are compelled to visit a re-education facility but still live in their homes.)

My impression is that, in contrast, Catholics have been forced to remove crosses and crucifixes from the outside of church buildings, there are restrictions on steeple height, and in some cases, overzealous officials have forced church demolitions -- but so far, there are no re-education camps. I assume the Vatican is fully aware of conditions in China, for Catholics and other Christians, as well as for groups like the Uighurs. None of this is cause for celebration.

But I mentioned Pius XII yesterday. I read and speak German, and I've been interested in the country's modern history, Catholics under the National Socialist regime were in a precarious situation. Accounts from ordinary officers in the armed forces indicate that even regular attendance at mass could bring unwelcome attention from the Gestapo, as Catholics were felt to have better informal networks that could, and did, lead to assassination conspiracies, however feckless they all proved to be.

Pius XII was fully aware of the measures the National Socialists took against the Jews, and as a diplomat who'd spent years in Germany earlier in his career, he fully understood they were capable of further measures against Catholics -- which Bismark had undertaken in the Kulturkampf. The issues on which Pacelli compromised with Hitler in 1934 were of long standing in that context.

Pacelli himself, as a diplomat, went on to strike a much-criticized deal with Hitler’s Third Reich in 1934, after six months of talks. Again, the removal of Catholics from political life, including the decimation of the Center Party, formed part of a deal that offered concessions on Catholic education and law. But just as the Italian Catholics turned to the fascists when their political outlet was shut down, so too the Germans lurched towards Hitler’s Nazi Party. Long before he was Pope, Pacelli was accused of giving Vatican sign-off to German control of coveted regions, in return for other political favours.

I think Pius was acutely aware of the atmosphere in Berlin, and the potential for anti-Catholic measures much more severe than those in place must have been in his mind. I think he also had to be aware of the unrealistic nature of Catholic plots to decapitate the Third Reich and the potential for widespread retribution against Catholics that could potentially ensue. The link above gives some insight into Francis's thinking:

Pope Francis says the church is confident that the papacy would withstand the findings by historians’ studying the archives, saying Pius was “criticized, one can say, with some prejudice and exaggeration.”

“The church isn’t afraid of history, on the contrary, it loves it, and would like to love it even more, like it loves God,” Francis said. “Thus, with the same trust of my predecessors, I open, and entrust to researchers, this patrimony of documentation.”

He said the Pius papacy included “moments of grave difficulties, tormented decisions of human and Christian prudence, that to some could appear as reticence.” Instead, he said they could be seen as attempts “to keep lit, in the darkest and cruelest periods, the flame of humanitarian initiatives, of hidden but active diplomacy” aimed at possibly “opening hearts.”

I have a sense that Francis has more than a little sympathy for the dilemmas Pius faced, because it's fairly clear that he faces similar dilemmas in China.

Ms Littlejohn is a puzzling case. Certainly she didn't discover the Chinese one child policy or the existence of forced abortion; that's been known for decades, while she didn't even take the name Reggie Littlejohn until about 2009. US presidents of both parties have spoken out against the one child policy and forced abortion. The question is what anyone has been able to do about it, and this is no different from the dilemmas Pius XII faced with the Holocaust.

Things could be much worse for Catholics in China, as they could have been for Catholics in Germany under Hitler. Francis is clearly aware of the issues.

Not A Good Look

Two weeks after Bp Lopes ordained her husband a Catholic priest, Fr Kirk's wife, Ms Littlejohn, turns up on Lifesite News with the headline, "Communist Party uses Vatican deal to bludgeon the Catholic Church in China, activist says".

The Vatican’s secret deal with the Chinese communist government is being used to crush the Catholic Church in that country, making things worse for faithful Catholics in China, according to a women’s rights activist.

Reggie Littljohn, president of Women's Rights Without Frontiers, explained to EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo how the secretive nature of the Vatican’s agreement with the Communist Party-ruled government is being exploited by Chinese officials in a destructive manner. , explained to EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo how the secretive nature of the Vatican’s agreement with the Communist Party-ruled government is being exploited by Chinese officials in a destructive manner.

An hour's due diligence should have alerted both Raymond Arroyo and Litesite News that Women's Rights Without Frontiers is a non-profit with no specific program, with income and expenditures too small to rate by the normal charity watchdog sites. More work would have brought out that Ms Littlejohn reinvented herself as a "women's rights activist" about 2009, with extensive plastic surgery and a new name, and her non-profit, of which she is the only staff member, exists primarily as a vehicle for her own self-promotion.

In addition to self-promotion, Ms Littlejohn barely skirts Francis-bashing, but she's less indulgent with the local bishops:

“I have no doubt that Pope Francis and that that deal does not authorize the things that are going on,” said Littlejohn. “But the fact that it’s secret leaves the people in China helpless.”

Littlejohn scoffed when asked about San Francisco Auxiliary Bishop Ignatius C. Wang’s recent declaration that the Vatican’s China deal is very good and “I just hope it doesn't happen that they send bad (proposed bishops) on purpose for approval in Rome.”

The first question I have is one Fr Longenecker raised several weeks ago in a different context: What are you going to do about it? Her non-profit is feckless as a policy advocate in either the US or China. Ms Littlejohn herself has little credibility as a serious spokesperson for Chinese Catholics -- I've instinctively got to give more credence to a San Francisco auxiliary bishop named Ignatius Wang.

Ignatius Chung Wang (pronounced Wong) was born in Beijing, China in 1934, the fifth of eight children in a family that had been Christian for twelve generations. . . . After his ordination, Fr. Wang was unable to serve in China because of the Communist government. He was sent to Rome where he completed a doctorate in Canon Law in 1962. . . . Bishop Wang began his service in the Archdiocese of San Francisco 1974. He was a Parochial Vicar in several parishes and in 1981 was named the first archdiocesan Director of the Office of Chinese Catholic Ministry. . . . Pope John Paul II named him a Prelate of Honor of His Holiness with the title of Monsignor in 1989. He also has served in the archdiocesan Tribunal and as Coordinator of the Chinese Apostolate.

On Dec. 13, 2002, Pope John Paul II appointed Monsignor Wang to the post of Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Bishop Wang is the first Catholic Bishop of Chinese ancestry and of Asian background to be appointed in the United States.

I'm just not sure why some lady with a fake name and phony face should be believed over someone who's lived much of recent Chinese history. Just sayin'. In addition, the little I know about Pius XII (the last real pope, according to some traddies) during World War II is that he had to take seriously the potential for massive anti-Catholic retaliation by the Nazis in Germany and occupied territories -- he had an obligation to support anti-Nazi resistance, but he had to balance it against the general welfare of Catholics. It's hard to imagine that Francis doesn't see a similar precarious situation in China and is doing the best he can with it.

But Ms Littlejohn is now married to a priest of the North American ordinariate, though she seems to see little reason to restrain her public positions, which are clearly at variance with the hierarchy. This is not a good look for Bp Lopes, though it's only one recent episode among many.

"Churchness" And The North American Ordinariate

B C Butler (1902-1986) was a Church of England priest who converted to Catholicism and became a Benedictine. As president of the English Benedictine congregation, "he attended all four sessions of the second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, during which he emerged as perhaps the leading English-speaking participant." In his published writing he frequently addressed the issue of Anglican-Roman Catholic schism.

His 1977 extended essay The Church and Unity takes the position that the Church is a visible and historical entity, which from gospel times has been regarded as a single unity. The essay is in large part a response to the Anglican scholar S L Greenslade, whom he places among "objectors" who ask, "Is it not totally unreasonable to pretend that the Church is undivided, when most manifestly it is not?" (p 3).

Butler's argument is that from the Church Fathers until Vatican II, the Church has recognized that "real sacraments, , , can exist outside its boundaries. At the same time, it maintains that these sacraments . . . are among a group of "elements or endowments" which together "build up and give life to" the Church herself" ((p 147).

One must surely agree with Greenslade that sacraments, and the other things that he enumerates, are 'things of the Church'. They are of course at a deeper level, one that Greenslade and I would both wish to emphasize, 'things of God'. But they are things of God given in and to and through the Church. He is also correct, I think, in holding that they are constitutive of the Church. The Church is not something that happens to be responsible for the sacraments; the Church is the Church because the sacraments — and the other holy things — make it such. I think we can go further with many modern theologians and say that the Church is sacramental through and through; and even that she herself is (after Christ, the 'sacrament of God') the sacrament of Christ.

Since sacraments are constitutive of the Church there is good reason to say that where valid sacraments are given and received there is `churchness' — Greenslade's word, and a very useful one. This, incidentally, is the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, though it uses its own language to express it and nowhere, I think, avails itself of the word `churchness'. (p 146)

It seems to me that Butler is arguing against a "branches of a tree" view of the Church that's frequently found among Anglicans, who will often say that Anglicans are just another respectable branch of Christianity equivalent to Orthodoxy or even Lutheranism. Butler is saying that the Church recognizes some elements of schismatic bodies outside itself, but they are worthwhile primarily insofar as they lead the faithful to the true Church.

But what strikes me is the view among the amateur apologists for Anglicanorum coetibus that there is some special value to Anglican "churchness", as in the commonly cited "precious spiritual treasures of the Anglican patrimony". The use of the term "Anglican" would refer to the dominant form of Protestant Christianity found in England and the British Empire, not pre-Reformation English Catholicism, and this implies that those who come into the Church via Anglicanorum coetibus are in a special class of some sort -- clearly entitled to schismatic artifacts eo be preserved in their own liturgy, their own parishes, and their own bishop.

I don't see this in the writing of prior generations of Anglican converts like Butler, Knox, or Newman. And looking most recently at the suburban Baltimore ordinariate communities, what I'm seeing is that small groups of converts seem to have gotten the idea that if a separate specifically Anglican "cburchness" is a good thing to bring into the Church, then a charismatic or pentecostal "churchness" can tailgate in under the same dispensation. Thus Fr Worgul can dwell on his Baptist formation, and Houston seems to rely on a legalistic interpretation that if a candidate for ordination has been arguably "Anglican" for a minimal period, he's eligible, notwithstanding decades as some other flavor of Protestant.

Under Anglicanorum coetibus, the Church in fact seems to validate the idea that some schismatics can retain a sense of separateness from the Church and cling to what is in fact an incomplete "churchness". What I find in a diocesan parish with conscientious clergy is that we're constantly being challenged to understand the teachings of Vatican II, and indeed to recognize the authority of the Holy Father and our bishop. Yet as a practical matter, it's not hard to find instances where ordinariate parishioners are being told it's OK to wink at both, if not to reject them.

As Butler points out, "churchness" is there, but it's not enough, and it shouldn't be made a fetish.

Yet More On The Suburban Baltimore Communities

My regular correspondent notes,

As you point out, Christ the King has much in common with any diocesan parish(es) Fr Kirk has been attending during his brief stint as a Catholic. It began as a Charismatic Episcopal Church congregation and was then Anglican Church in America for perhaps two years, but seems to have taken its "brand" from Fr Meeks. But Fr Kirk has never been any kind of Anglican, even for five minutes.

We're back to the question of "what's Anglican?" The Pastoral Provision recognizes Methodists as Anglican, which is arguable, and Fr Kirk was a Methodist -- but Methodists aren't very Catholic, since they recognize only two sacraments, and they have a strong tradition against alcoholic beverages, so that most parishes serve grape juice for communion instead of wine. Anglicans do have the leeway to believe in the Real Presence, while Methodists don't. And if Methodists are Anglican, what about Quakers, who derive from Anglicans as well?

The problem is even bigger with St Timothy's Catonsville. Its priest, Fr Worgul, says of his formation,

I was raise [sic] in a pious Baptist family, and growing up was deeply moved by the great preaching of our pastor who always emphasized the greatness of God and how He can accomplish the supernatural through little people. I loved the Gospel tradition and it has followed me throughout my life. I remained a Baptist even as I attended a Presbyterian Seminary and studied Hebrew Bible in Graduate School. I taught Old Testament and Hebrew in a Baptist Seminary for 15 years. It was during this time that I studied the Church Fathers and the Catholic mystics, and this, along with my studies of Hebrew Bible, opened for me the sacramental world view of the ancient Church. Finally, my wife Kathy with our two young children, became members of an Anglican religious community where I first became a priest, and then on to the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate where I became a Catholic priest in September, 2013.

St Timothy's came from The Episcopal Church, where it occupied property owned by the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. It was unable to obtain a deal equivalent to St Luke's Bladensburg, though the St Luke's parish was unable to continue in that property, either. It had brave intentions of finding new property, but it has continued to use the Catholic parish at St Mark's.

My regular correspondent points out,

As at Christ the King, mass is celebrated versus populum. Music is accompanied by guitar and electric keyboard. A video of the (small) congregation singing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" can be viewed on-line. They have female servers. Fr Worgul has a (week)day job as Pastoral Associate for Evangelization and Adult Formation at a diocesan parish and celebrates at St Timothy most Sundays. The guitar player provides the operational leadership. Mt Calvary is of course more in the traditional Anglo-Catholic mode. Supposedly Fr Kirk will divide his time among these three Maryland locations, which should provide a challenge for him.

The St Timothy's parish says of itself,

We're committed to worship in Spirit and Truth and Joy through:

• Preaching the Bible
• Reading from the Bible
• Praying the Spirit of the Bible
• Singing Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs
• Participating in the sacraments of Baptism & Communion

Although the Sacraments page recognizes Reconciliation, the home page gives no times for when one might avail oneself of it at the St Timothy's community. St Timothy's certainly has a Baptist feel to it.

There's something very roundabout going on in suburban Maryland. A visitor kindly sent me a copy of B C Butler's The Church and Unity, which has put me to thinking about the teachings of the Church on evangelization in Vatican II. What we see in the North American ordinariate seems at best a confusing and overcomplicated application of those principles, which I want to talk about tomorrow.

Update On Christ The King Towson

With attention focused on Fr Kirk, my regular correspondent fills in some information on Christ the King, Towson, MD, where he will be spending some of his time:

As I have noted before, Christ the King is very much about the Meeks family, three of whom are on the "Staff" page, along with Deacon Reick, who appears to be a near contemporary of Fr Meeks and has been at Christ the King since at least 2003. As the interior of the church suggests, the parish is not after "Traddies;" the website mentions its "Charismatic roots" and its use of "traditional hymnody and contemporary praise songs" and mass is celebrated versus populum.

The only thing that makes it onto the Facebook page is a weekly video of Fr Meeks' Sunday homily. Fr Meeks is 70, the retirement age for local diocesan priests; apparently in good health, but obviously he will not be around forever. Appointing a 63 year old Parochial Vicar seems short-sighted. [Fr Kirk does not yet show up on the Staff page, though -- jb] But maybe he's hard to work with.

Fr John Worgul is described on-line, though not on the website, as a Parochial Vicar at Christ the King, but he confines his ministry to St Timothy, Catonsville and a diocesan parish. Perhaps Fr Meeks is not interested in an energetic younger colleague.

It's hard to see what the appeal is of a separate parish that repeats "low church" features that you can easily find in nearby diocesan parishes -- unless it's the personal ministry of Fr Meeks. To that end, this may be an explanation for why parochial vicars (now two of them) seem to be assigned to the parish but aren't shown on the web site.

And in addition, while statistics have yet to be published after seven years, we must assume membership at Christ the King is somewhere in the low three figures, with total membership in the Baltimore area ordinariate parishes somewhere in the mid three figures -- but these communities now have two buildings, four priests, a deacon, and a pastoral associate among them. And the largest, Christ the King, isn't all that big on the fuss and feathers that's supposed to justify Anglicanorum coetibus.

What problem are we trying to solve?

Did Mother Teresa Need All That Plastic Surgery?

I bring this up only because both Fr Kirk and his wife, Ms Littlejohn, mention Mother Teresa so frequently as part of their own branding. Fr Kirk uses her name in his profile in the latest Ordinariate Observer, for example, but in various on line accounts, both refer to three weeks, or maybe six, in one, or maybe two, visits -- and this, or these, were apparently made while they were on break from Yale, as part of what can only come across as trust-fund dilettantery. Yeah, they had a stopover in Calcutta, but they flew back to Yale precisely when it suited them.

Priests from India regularly pass through our parish, and several of them knew her in life. They uniformly speak of how utterly unprepossessing she was in appearance, yet how powerfully strong she was as a personality. Nothing could be less phony. A problem I see is what, in contrast, Fr Kirk has brought with him into the North American ordinariate.

Ms Littlejohn's non-profit is called Women's Rights Without frontiers International. Searches on charity rating sites consistently come back with ratings equivalent to "not rated". Here's the entry on Charity Navigator. here's the rating on Guidestar. Charity Watch, which says they are “the most stringent in the sector”, returns no result. The most recent reports from the charity are annual revenues and expenditures of about $176,000. It recently moved its contact location from a post office box in San Jose, CA to 722 Dulaney Valley Road, Towson, MD, which is a UPS Store mail drop. This suggests that one of Fr Kirk's jobs is to pick up the mail and deposit any checks, but Ms Littlejohn, at lest on her Facebook profile, still lives in San Jose.

The charity rating sites make it clear that a rating of "not rated" simply means the annual budgets of these operations are less than $1 million, and there is no implication of either merit or scam. But for Women's rights Without Frontiers International to have an annual budget of about $176,000 raises the question of whether it has any programs at all. That sounds, to tell the truth, as if it's just Ms Littlejohn's salary. I'll welcome any comment or clarification from any knowledgeable individual.

My regular correspondent suggests, and I agree, that Ms Littlejohn, with experience as a litigation attorney, found herself in about 2003 with life-threatening complications following botched surgery, and she may well have obtained a legal settlement that provided her with very substantial funding for her subsequent lifestyle and highly public eleemosynary activities. The 2013 audience with the Holy Father would certainly reflect this -- but, other than generate publicity for herself, with other photos posed with figures from Glenn Beck to Raymond Arroyo, what has she accomplished -- I mean, for actual Chinese women forced to have abortions?

Women's Rights Without Frontiers International has no specific programs and no budget for them. I'll keep on supporting my local bishop's appeal, thank you very much. I would say, though, that Bp Lopes has added yet another risk factor to the North American ordinariate by bringing these potential associations in.

UPDATE: The IRS Form 990 for Women's Rights Without Frontiers International is available on its website. As explained on the form, its program consists entirely of ad hoc grants or handouts to a small number of individuals in the US and "stipends" to about 50 widows in China. No further detail is provided. The main activity as outlined on the form is Ms Littlejohn's public appearances to raise awareness of the problems. Expenses for "Travel and Meetings" for the most recent year were $16,231; "Other expenses" were $16,300.

Whether Ms Littlejohn is paid by the charity, and whether these amounts cover all, or only some, of her travel expenses is unclear.

Rev. Robert Chapman Kirk Is Actually Mr Reggie Littlejohn

Slightly more material on Rev. Mr. Robert Chapman Kirk is in the current Ordinariate Observer (p 14), which is in the mail. It's been quite a challenge to find information on the man, partly because up to his ordination, he went by "Rob Kirk". Searches on that name with Methodist are somewhat more productive. It appears that as a United Methodist pastor, he went by Rob pretty much exclusively, and "Robert Kirk" seems to be his new name as a Catholic priest. But far, far more productive are web searches for his wife, who currently goes by Reggie Littlejohn.

There are several observations to make here. Numerous online bios of Ms Littlejohn say that she and her husband, now-Fr Kirk, were "college sweethearts", which would make them roughly equal in age. The current issue of Ordinariate Observer (p 14) says Kirk is 63. But the recent photo of Ms Littlejohn at left shows an apparently much younger woman, although Kirk's account there places them both in graduate school together as well. The explanation, of course, is the miracle of modern cosmetic surgery, which, considering the appearance of Ms Littlejohn's neck, chin, eyes, and likely much else, is one giant leap for mankind.

The San Jose Mercury News story I linked yesterday says, "Kirk is married to Gina Giannini and has a son who will graduate from Harvard this spring." This had several of us stumped for some hours until a visitor commented,

It just occurred to me that Giannini could be translated roughly as "Little John," and Gina might be short for Regina, hence Reggie. It seems odd that she has an alias, but I guess that is par for the course!

Actually, it seems like Ms Littlejohn has reinvented herself several times, and her current persona, a jet-setting do-gooder, has been carefully groomed -- but there's no historical evidence for anyone named Reggie Littlejohn prior to about 2009. Via Ancestry.com, I find a Gina Giannini in a yearbook for Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, CA for 1978, which would place her age in the general range for Fr Kirk's 63. But other online accounts of her, here and here, as Reggie say she was either a "litigation associate" or a "supervising attorney" in a major San Francisco law firm up to about 2003.

I can reasonably assume that a litigator with a major San Francisco law firm would be a member of the California bar. The California Bar Association has a page where you can look up anyone's status there just with a name search -- this includes active, inactive, and deceased members. Just to double-check, I found my wife there, who, now retired, is listed as "inactive". So I did searches on various combinations of the name Giannini, Littlejohn, Kirk, Reggie, and Gina, and found nothing -- even if she were "inactive", her name would appear with that status. UPDATE: Regina Maria Giannini is listed as an active member of the California bar.

The online bios refer, without too much specificity (for instance here), to a period of illness beginning about 2003,

. . . she contracted an MRSA staph infection, which is often deadly. She left the practice of law on a medical leave of absence and was disabled for five years. During that 5-year period, Littlejohn had to undergo several surgeries and developed chronic fatigue syndrome as well.

She says basically, though again without much specificity, that she emerged from this five-year period with a new sense of purpose, and it would seem as well as with the new Reggie Littlejohn persona and a whole new face. Almost immediately, she became a major player in Catholic NGO and non-profit circles. The photo of her with the Holy Father dates from 2013, and the press release that accompanies it says,

Littlejohn was also the featured speaker at the Rome premiere of the “It’s a Girl” film about gendercide and forced abortion in India and China. She had previously spoken — together with filmmakers Evan Grae Davis and Andrew Brown — at the premieres of the film at the European and British Parliaments, as well as at the United States Capitol.

Her activities in subsequent years involve an equivalent whirl of global travel, media appearances, and massive self-promotion. Several questions come up for me. The biggest is that Fr Rob is quite clearly a tiny asteroid in distant orbit around a very bright and powerful star. He appears almost never in Ms Littlejohn's social media posts, and even at his ordination, she doesn't mention his surname -- just "Robert". Must be Mr, er, Fr Littlejohn, right?

Not only that, but her social media profiles place her residence in San Jose, CA, where her NGO is headquartered, while Fr Littlejohn Kirk is now permanently in Balmer, on the other coast. No matter, Reggie is on first class glights to world capitals most of the time anyhow. Let's get real, these people live separate lives.

A comment that was sometimes perceptively made on sites after the Luke Reese affair was how little attention the ordinariate seems to pay to the marital circumstances of the men it ordains. Bp Lopes, Fr Kramer, and Fr Perkins are boldly going where no prudent Catholic cleric has ever gone before. I was briefly puzzled yesterday when I said Fr Kirk's mannerisms were remarkably like those of Mr Aldrich, my fifth grade music teacher, but Mr Aldrich didn't have a family, while Fr Kirk does.

Well, I guess he has a family of sorts.

A New Video Of Rev. Mr. Robert Chapman Kirk

This now appears, dated July 9, on the YouTube channel of Fr Edward Meeks, which confirms my regular correspondent's impression that Fr Kirk is some type of longtime crony of Fr Meeks. But what does this new ordinariate priest bring to the party? We know nothiing about him, other than he appears to be in late middle age. What was his previous career? Where? What was his Anglican formation? The homily he gives with pursed-lips nods and pompous pauses seems to be a cut and paste from any web search on why bad things happen to good Catholics.

Does he have a family? He reminds me of my fifth grade music teacher, who did not.

UPDATE: Fr Kirk does have a family. Here is a Twitter post, I think dated 2013, from his current wife, a Reggie Littlejohn:

Thanks to the visitor who also sent me a link to a 2011 story in the San Jose Mercury News covering Fr Kirk's prior ministry in the United Methodist Church.

The Rev. Rob Kirk, who became pastor of Cambrian Park United Methodist Church last July, took a trip around the world while he was attending divinity school, and it was during the six weeks he and his wife spent working with the poor in Calcutta, India, alongside Mother Teresa that helped him focus on what he wanted to do with his life.

. . . The trip around the world was a kind of time out for the Kirks. He took time off from studying, and she took time out of law school to visit places all over the world, including Tibet and Africa.

Kirk is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middleton, Conn., with a degree in religion. Between that and his entrance to Yale Divinity School, he and his wife traveled; he worked in a psychiatric hospital and he drove a bus.

I guess the pompous part comes from Yale Divinity, huh? Here's a guy who's been Catholic for how long, a year? And in between portentous water sips, significant pauses, and meaningful glances over the top of his half-glasses, he explains what all Catholics need to think about.

The visitor notes that the story in the Mercury News from 2011 lists a wife named Gina Giannini, who is not Reggie Littlejohn (but further web research indicates that at least for a time, Ms Littlejohn did go by that name, or Ms Giannini went by Reggie Littlejohn.)

In the context of YouTube, perhaps Fr Kirk will wish to reconsider the homiletic style he seems to have brought with him from the Ivy League -- this may be of assistance.

If ordinariate members find his current style appealing, they are a special breed indeed.

How Do They Expect A Different Result?

Via the usual unquestioning hype at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog and the usual YouTube, we learn of the Ordination to the Sacred Priesthood of Rev. Mr. Robert Chapman Kirk and Rev. Mr. Gregory Blake Tipton this past June 29. My regular correspondent's reaction:

Who is coming forward for ordination in the OCSP? The two men ordained this June seem typical. One was a marginal TEC clergyman, recently ordained in that denomination, who couldn't find a real TEC job. There is a short description of his path to ordination here. The other is, I believe, a former APA clergyman who was ordained to the diaconate October 30, 2018 at Christ the King, Towson. [This was erroneously reported as an ordination to the priesthood in the St Luke's newsletter at the time, par for the ordinariate course.] There is some vague idea that he will serve the three MD parishes/communities but there is nothing else about him on the net. I assume he is some old pal of Fr Meeks.

Besides the routine misreporting in ordinariate publications, it's more disturbing that Robert Kirk may as well be an Albanian sleeper agent for all anyone can find of him on the web. OCSP ordinands usually have some sort of paper trail: they appear in seminary class news, presiding over weddings and funerals as Anglicans, in parish newsletters welcoming them as new curates. We simply have no record of Mr Robert Chapman Kirk anywhere -- there isn't even a Robert Chapman Kirk on Google who is a Ford dealer in Boise. Just nothing besides a deceased one on Ancestry.com.

So this raises an entirely reasonable question: does now-Fr Kirk have an MDiv? Records of seminary graduation and subsequent Anglican ordinations do normally turn up. Not in his case. Aren't we entitled to know more about Fr Kirk? And let's get real, it's the stealth candidates with no MDiv who go bad within a few years of their ordination in the OCSP.

Now-Fr Gregory Blake Tipton's background has in fact been discussed on this blog here. Although he was ordained in his local diocese of The Episcopal Church with several others in a cohort that year, unlike most TEC ordinands, who typically aren't ordained unless they already have a parish assignment, he drifted in a series of token jobs like cleaning out a campus Episcopal center before he focused on putting one of those tiny OCSP Potemkin groups together as a Plan B.

What we've found already is that men without clear direction and without good personal skill sets have a good chance of flame-out several years down the road in the OCSP. A visitor commented:

Though the Ordinariate is “like” a diocese, it is a guest of the diocese. Ordinariate priests are allowed to function as a “favor” to the Ordinariate. A bishop can withdraw faculties of Ordinariate priests in his diocese just as easily as he can religious order priests or priests from other diocese.

I think Houston is beginning to build a track record of sending men out into dioceses who haven't been adequately formed or even vetted and then letting the local bishop take the heat for the inevitable result. A visitor draws an analogy by suggesting Houston may not know what's in the package:

I liken this to a person who needs a couch badly but has very little money. The person goes to a thrift store and buys a decent little used couch. Unfortunately, before the couch was donated to the thrift store, it was stored in a garage, where unbeknownst to anyone, a group of spiders crawled into the frame and laid about a billion eggs. When the guy brings the couch home from the thrift store, he is satisfied it looks good and is comfortable. Then, about a month later, he is watching TV and is attacked by all these fresh hatched spiders.

Should Bishop Lopes et. al. be punished for not knowing there were spiders in the sofa? Probably not. But how much sympathy will he get if he goes to a thrift store and buys an upholstered chair and doesn’t spray it/check it for spiders this time? Bishop Lopes is in danger of forfeiting his very few remaining sympathy points.

The analogy here isn't fully apt. It speaks of someone buying a couch to watch his own TV shows -- but actually, a better parallel might be a guy who runs a business selling furniture to motels. He cuts corners by going to a thrift store. The baby spiders aren't coming out while he watches Live PD at home, they come out at motels in Indianapolis, St Paul, and Calgary, and angry guests are storming the motel office.

The question I have is whether Bp Lopes is spraying his thrift store chairs and checking them for spiders, when he already knows the couches and chairs from that particular thrift store are coming back with spider eggs. Archbishops in St Paul and Indianapolis have already learned about the spider eggs. My regular correspondent comments,

Fr Kramer may be boasting about three or four queries a week but in fact the ordinations in the OCSP are failing to keep pace with deaths, retirements, and of course, laicisations. At the moment there is still considerable redundancy---OCSP priests who have never had an Ordinariate assignment---but with the exception of military chaplains Bp Lopes seems not to be continuing Msgr Steenson's practice in this regard. So I think the ranks are thinning, although I cannot feel confident that there is any corresponding improvement in quality.

A Visitor Takes A Closer Look At The Treco Case

From a visitor this morning:

I read your blog and decided to listen to Fr. Treco’s sermon (which was not appropriate to be given during a Mass- he should have given a homily instead) [available on YouTube here -- jb.]. I was curious if I could pick out the problematic parts. I made a list as I listened. I then read the “Timeline: A Case for Fr. Treco” blog. Funny thing, my list matched up exactly with what Bishop Lopes pointed out to Fr. Treco.

Fr. Treco disingenuously claims Bishop Lopes has not pointed out exactly which words in his sermon were the problem. In Bishop Lopes defense, Fr. Treco’s sermon was so incredibly verbose that if you were to quote exactly the phrases that were blantantly wrong, the document would almost be a novelette. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess Fr. Treco has not actually read all the documents that were produced by the Second Vatican Council. I’m also going to go a little further out the limb and guess Fr. Treco’s theological formation and foundation is way more Protestant than Catholic as he either misunderstands or is willfully misrepresenting papal actions and words, Councils and Synods, as well as Catholic doctrine. Here are a few examples:

Fr. Treco claims that the conciliar popes in three iconic actions (as ) Peter, set aside the mandate given to him by Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Fr. Treco says Pope Paul VI refused to rule the Church of Christ, Pope Paul VI would not defend the Bride of Christ, Pope John Paul II would not honor the Gospel of Jesus Christ alone. None of the iconic actions by these popes cited by Fr. Treco were Ex Cathedra (meaning they had to be believed by the faithful under penalty of mortal sin) nor were the actions at the time or afterwards purported to be new dogma or doctrine. In essence, Fr. Treco either misunderstands the doctrine of papal infallibility or has purposely slandered those popes to make it seem like Catholics should not follow their other teachings (that ARE magisterial).

Fr. Treco rants about Vatican II not being an infallible Council. Yes, Vatican II was a PASTORAL Council, meaning there were no extraordinary proclamations (meaning infallible because they said so), however, there were ordinary proclamations and clarifications that were outlined, and, as a valid Council of the Church, the proclamations must be considered magisterial, meaning they should be promulgated to the faithful. Here Fr. Treco pulls what in Logic class would be called a false syllogism because first two propositions are not both true. Fr. Treco claims,

• By their fruit you will know them
• The Fruit of Vatican II was rotten
• Therefore, Vatican II was rotten and to be ignored.

Seems true, but wait, was the fruit of Vatican II rotten? Imagine there were three apple trees planted in a triangle. Tree A was Vatican II, tree B was the Sexual Revolution and tree C was Relativism. Fr. Treco goes to gather the apples that fell from these three trees. They are all on the ground in the middle of the triangle. Selecting only the rotten apples, Fr. Treco announces that all the rotten apples came from the Vatican II tree so it must be cut down.

But did all the rotten apples only come from the Vatican II tree? How many came from the other trees? Were there no good apples from Vatican II? This is why I surmise Fr. Treco has not actually read the documents of Vatican II which did not so much promote new teachings as it offered clarification of and new encouragement to follow Church doctrine with a renewed zeal.

Because Fr. Treco refuses to recognize or recant his obviously erroneous statements, and is in willful disobedience to his Bishop, I am not surprised they gave him the boot. Sadly, it is obvious by the Timeline blog and the host of comments in support of this nonsense that there are a whole lot of Catholics who are as poorly catechized as Fr. Treco.

I tip my hat to Bishop Lopes for dealing with this mess quickly and decisively. Good on him.

I agree fully with the visitor, but I'm still concerned with the circumstances that led up to, and surround, the heresies Treco expressed. The first is how this situation came to be -- I think there must be some consensus here, from Bp Lopes to outside lay observers like the visitor, that Treco was poorly formed as a priest. There must have been a general understanding of this at Msgr Steenson's level, and at the level of the authorities who proposed Treco's ordination to him at the time. Yet he was ordained.

Second, Treco was sent to Minnesota without any real supervision, although there must have been some understanding that the man wasn't fully capable. It appears, from the bits and pieces that have reached me, for instance, that he would celebrate daily mass as at the hospital chapel ad orientem. Especially to congregants who weren't used to the practice, this might have seemed unusual, disturbing, or even disrespectful, and prudent advice to Treco might have been that sometimes, with some audiences, versus populum is a better pastoral choice.

I assume he never received this sort of advice -- quite possibly the problem never got to Fr Perkins for him to offer it. Reasons for this might be the simple circumstance of inexperienced staff in Houston trying to supervise clergy a thousand miles distant, or some combination of complacency and obtuseness in Fr Perkins that might lead him to ignore the potential problems with that situation. Again, the remarks Fr Perkins made in Calgary suggest he sees reasons someone like me might attribute such qualities to him.

I agree with the visitor that it was commendable for Bp Lopes to have moved quickly and decisively in Treco's case, but I'm still convinced that the case was brought to his attention, when the circumstances of the ordinariate might have suggested to him earlier that better communication and closer supervision of his clergy were urgently needed. The Calgary problem is simply another symptom of the same poor formation and poor supervision that seem prevalent in the ordinariate. I still think the deficiencies of the North American ordinariate are recognized by the US bishops, and it was probably their action that forced Lopes's hand.

The question is how many other problems are festering out there among a collection of men who are almost as poorly formed, with judgment almost as poor, and with the same lack of supervision.