Cahenslyite Holiday Picnic!

As we've been seeing, the point of the 19th-century error promoted by Peter Paul Cahensly was that European nationalities who emigrated to the US would each require separate ethnic Catholic parishes, with separate hierarchies of priests and bishops, in order to retain the precious treasures of each country's spiritual patrimony. I'm having a harder and harder time understanding how Anglicanorum coetibus isn't just a reboot of this bad idea.

My regular correspondent has sent me a link to this post at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog:

Almost every year since I joined Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ottawa, our parish has celebrated a picnic, usually in August. This year we held it after Mass on Aug. 25. It is one of our traditions such as our Thanksgiving and Epiphany Dinners, our Mothering Sunday high tea after Mass and our joint Eucharistic Procession on Corpus Christi. That’s to say nothing of our weekly lunch after Mass.

My regular correspondent motes,

Just some pictures of a pleasant parish picnic, but I couldn’t help noticing that a couple in the first and fourth pictures is described as “[s]etting the style in true patrimonial fashion.” I’m not sure what the “style” in question is—-possibly they were channelling Lady Chatterley and the gamekeeper—-but the implication that a fancy get-up is a) English and consequently b) patrimonial sums up everything that is wrong with AC.

So we're conflating incredibly superficial -- and indeed, pretty phony -- manifestations of nostalgic English culture (as remembered wistfully from Ottawa) with an Anglican spiritual patrimony. The Church has set up a separate system of parishes and a separate hierarchy to accommodate this. Sounds like a Cahenslyite dream to me.

The only good part, as I've said here many times, is how few people buy into this. Mrs Gyapong needs to get a life.

Back To Cahenslyism

I've been intrigued by Cahenslyism ever since I ran into the term for the first time in Frederick Kinsman's Catholicism and Americanism. Merriam-Webster defines it as

a movement to divide the foreign-born Roman Catholic population of the U.S. for ecclesiastical purposes according to European nationalities and to appoint bishops and priests of the same national origin and language as the majority of the members of a diocese or parish

The assumption would be that Irish Catholics (who had dominated the 19th century US Church) would not be entitled to have Irish bishops who supervise Italian-, German-, or Polish-majority parishes. Instead, each ethnic group that made up a particular parish would be entitled to have priests and a bishop of the same ethnic group. This idea has certainly resurfaced in 21st century secular discourse -- in contemporary companies sensitive to ethnic agitation, there are African promotional silos, Hispanic silos, women silos, LGBT silos, and on and on.

Another way the idea has resurfaced is the practical result of Anglicanorum coetibus. It has created a separate path for ordination and promotion of Anglo priests over arguably Anglo parishes. (In fact, the actual qualifications for "Anglo" mirror those in contemporary discourse: you're Anglo pretty much if you say you are, just as Sen Warren can claim to have Native ancestry.) It's probably good that the original Cahenslyism didn't proceed to the point where a priest named O'Hara could qualify for a better promotional opportunity by changing his name to Schmidt.

What I think is emerging as a major objection to 21st century Anglo Cahenslyism is that the Anglo ordination and promotional silo in the Church is clearly producing problem priests who haven't been screened by the normal vocation and seminary process.

In addition, there's now a situation where a parish with masses in several languages that also hosts an ordinariate group is likely to have not one, but two different English-language masses, one presumably for Hispanic, Filipino, and other immigrants who speak English, as well as the descendants of German, Italian, Polish, or Irish immigrants -- and a second version of English mass for certifiably blueblooded Anglo English speakers. My regular correspondent comments,

As we have discussed, the appeal of Divine Worship is hard to credit, except to a few pretentious Anglophiles. Little of the so-called “Anglican Patrimony” is exclusively Anglican, and in any event no two Ordinariate members agree on what it is. So what draws a lifelong Catholic to the Ordinariate when he could find architecture, vestments, music, and liturgy as good or better in his own diocese? Some motives are suspect, I am sure.

We have discussed the idea that people are looking for a congregation that reflects their own ethnicity and social class. They may have a problem with a pastor who is Hispanic, Vietnamese, or Nigerian. They may like to run things, and are looking for a small community where they can have outsize influence.

The Lapsed, Loopholes, And Anchor Babies

My regular correspondent notes,

Decades ago, a Catholic who had grown up in the pre-Vatican II Church and wandered away for whatever reason might have found the liturgy of the typical Catholic parish a barrier to his later return. An old-style Anglo-Catholic parish might have seemed more familiar and welcoming. But no one under 80 is in that situation now. So why would the DW liturgy be a means for “evangelising” the lapsed?

Those eligible to join an Ordinariate—-those who while baptised in a Catholic church did not proceed to First Communion and/or Confirmation—-probably stopped attending mass as children. Liturgical issues played no part in their departure, and it is hard to imagine that they are crucial to their return. Certainly no aspect of DW language or a celebration per Ritual Notes is nostalgic for them—-presumably the source of the supposed draw for former Anglicans.

As you have often mentioned, reverent OF liturgy and good music can be found in every local diocese with a little effort. Or one can seek out a TLM. No need to gather in a school cafetorium or a former fitness club to participate in a Catholic pastiche of a BCP Holy Communion service if you are looking for worthy liturgy.

In fact the implication that this is your best option is probably one of the reasons many diocesan bishops are hostile to or dismissive of the OCSP. In the UK, of course, most Ordinariate groups use the OF so the OOLW tends to keep quiet about the evangelising power of DW.

My correspondent's reference to the former fitness club brought to mind the only North American group that claims to be growing, Holy Martyrs Murrieta, CA. But in the context of those remarks, I think that group may be exploiting loopholes. The groujp received several dozen confirmands this last Pentecost. I don't want to copy photos from the Holy Martyrs website, since they mostly show minor children, but you can go here to get an idea.

It seems to me that the confirmands in Murrieta are the children of Catholic families who are being confirmed at precisely the age for confirmation of children who haven't lapsed, about 12. And if their parents were lapsed, why didn't we see an equivalent large-scale reception for them? So what's up?

Article 5 §2 of the Complementry Norms for Anglicanorum coetibus reads,

§2. A person who has been baptized in the Catholic Church but who has not completed the Sacraments of Initiation, and subsequently returns to the faith and practice of the Church as a result of the mission of the Ordinariate, may be admitted to membership in the Ordinariate and receive the Sacrament of Confirmation or the Sacrament of the Eucharist or both.

Fr Lewis in last week's letter to the Atonement parish refers implicitly to this provision:

All of this is to say that we in the Ordinariates around the world have a specific mandate: to evangelize our separated brethren and lapsed Catholics, and bring them home to Holy Mother Church.

I think what’s happening in Murrieta is millennial parents from diocesan parishes who don't like their bishop or don't like their pewmates are bringing their children, who aren’t confirmed yet, and getting them confirmed at the ordinariate group. Thus they become anchor babies for the whole family, which presumably doesn’t like a diocese with lots of Hispanics and Filipinos -- or at least, that's a possible explanation. I wonder if they've taken those kids out of diocesan schools and are putting them in the Murrieta co-op, for that matter.

If those folks are lapsed, they've beern lapsed for a natter of days or weeks. And it's worth noting that Houston has no schools department, nor any program to form and lincense catechists. I would guess that Bp Barnes for the time beinng has better things to do than try to rescue those sheep who don't want him as shepherd anyhow, but this does raise the issue that those sheep are being lured away, by the same johnny-come-lately outfit that's brought us the "Gilbertgines".

Someone, almost certainly not Bp Lopes, will eventually want to look into this.

Heavy Furniture

I quote from Fr Lewis's letter to the Our Lady of the Atonement parish:

All of this is to say that we in the Ordinariates around the world have a specific mandate: to evangelize our separated brethren and lapsed Catholics, and bring them home to Holy Mother Church. And the primary tool at our disposal to fulfill this mandate is our Anglican Patrimony as it has been distilled in the Divine Worship Missal.

Seriously? We're going to evangelize with the heavy furniture of the Divine Worship Missal? Let's consider that, as a TEC priest correctly remarked to an adult forum I attended back in the day, the issues that led to "continuing" Anglicanism, the 1979 BCP and women's ordination, are no longer controversial among Episcopalians. That likely includes the ACNA. Regarding gay priests and bishops, the Church has not put its own house in order, and that goes for Bp Lopes -- nothing to evangelize there, I'm afraid. "Continuing" Anglicanism itself is a dwindling and aging movement, hardly a fertile field.

I believe Bp Barron is the point man now for evangelization in the USCCB. As far as I can see, he has nothing to say about liturgy -- for that matter, Ven Fulton Sheen, certainly the most effective evangelist in at least the last century, has little to say about it. It seems to me that the heavy furniture liturgy, whether Anglican or Latin, is not a productive direction, and in fact, as Fr Phillips suggested in the blog post I linked yesterday, potentially unhealthy.

A better course would be for Bp Lopes to start to clean up his own act. Then he might consider giving Bp Barron a call.

More On Latin Mass At Our Lady Of The Atonement

A visitor sent me a link to a 2007 blog post by Fr Phillips on the occasion of Summorum Pontificum that offers an insight into how the Latin mass was integrated, or not, into the parish life at OLA :

For a time we did offer the Mass according to the 1962 Missal. It was requested by our (now) Archbishop Emeritus Patrick F. Flores as his response to a petition from a group of Catholics who said they desired the celebration of the Tridentine Rite on a regular basis in the archdiocese. I agreed to provide this rite of the Mass on a weekly basis and on days of obligation. Our parish was an obvious place to offer this. The sanctuary was already arranged for an eastward-facing celebration. Our parish musicians were more than capable of providing the proper music. There was an exisiting dedication to celebrating all aspects of the Church’s liturgy with care and in accordance with the rubrics.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a happy experience for us. We made every effort to incorporate this into our Mass schedule so it would be seen as an integral part of the parish, but those who had requested the rite wished for it to be very much separate. While we provided bulletins for the Mass, including parish announcements, the Tridentine “organizers” made it a point to throw ours away and provide their own. There were attempts to engage other celebrants for the Mass without even mentioning it to me as the pastor of the parish. There were complaints to me if I used any Sacred Hosts from the tabernacle, and people would refuse Holy Communion if I did, because the Hosts “might be from the English Mass.” In following the rubrics of the Mass, I would receive complaints from some because “that’s not the way I remember it being done.” All I could do was assure them that the rubrics were being followed to the letter. The result was that fewer of those who had requested it continued to attend, and the congregation became more and more comprised of those who didn’t necessarily have an attachment to the tradition Latin Mass, but attended because the time happened to be convenient for them.

At some point -- Fr Phillips doesn't say exactly when -- the parish went from the 1962 Missal to the OF Latin rite, which he reported turned out to be a much better fit.

I hope our experience might be cautionary for those parishes which will be implementing the provisions of the motu proprio. There will be a temptation for some people to erect an “us and them” attitude. There may be a creeping sense of exclusivity (“We attend the real Mass.”). There may be the danger that some will see their life in the parish as consisting only of taking part in the traditional Latin Mass with little or no need to be integrated into the totality of the parish.

My regular correspondent added,

In my review of the interweb on the subject of OLA and the Latin mass I saw a number of references to families who divided their attendance between the local TLM parish (I believe it is St Pius X, San Antonio) and OLA. I think this is a pattern in other dioceses that have both an Ordinariate community and a regular TLM mass. Perhaps the TLM is distant and not always convenient to get to. Perhaps the TLM host parish is otherwise uncongenial. Perhaps “dual citizenship” is a marital compromise. In any event, many seem to have a foot in both camps, which means that for them the Ordinariate is nothing to do with Anglican Patrimony and everything to do with liturgical, musical, and (probably) other forms of conservatism.

Well, especially in contemporary political affairs, "conservatism" is hard to define with any precision, since many of the former Buckley-Reagan-Bush "fusion" faction have become bitter never-Trumpers. Our parish has many first- and second-generation Filipinos who are enthusiastic novus ordo but seem to support Trump's populist policies in favor of legal immigration. (They seem very pro-Duterte as well.)

In addition, there may be some reason for skepticism about Fr Phillips's position in the post that adopting the OF Latin mass was a simple solution with a happy ending. Clearly Houston eventually determined that a further adjustment had to be made. I'm of the view that focus on a certain out-of-the-mainstream style of liturgy creates an "us vs them" mentality, no matter it's Latin, English, or Polish. In looking at the problem of Cahenslyism, I find that the issue periodically resurfaces. According to Wikipedia,

[Cahensly] claimed that many [German immigrants to the US] were ending their relationship with Roman Catholicism, part of the problem being the domination of Roman Catholicism in America by English-speaking Irish clerics who were typically unsympathetic with the idea of preserving German culture among German immigrants, some of whom began attending German-speaking Lutheran congregations.

. . . When, during the 1920s, the Vatican administration urged the creation of an African-American seminary, the American hierarchy reacted strongly to what one bishop termed "African Cahenslyism".

Cahenslyism seems to be, broadly, an attempt to divide Catholics along artificial lines using liturgy as one excuse. I can't rule it out in this particular case, but with the odd twist that Houston has determined that Anglican Cahenslyites can't mix profitably with Latin Cahenslyites, and the parties must go their separate ways. But this doesn't solve the basic problem of what smacks of Cahenslyism here.

I have more problems with Fr Lewis's letter to the parish, which I'll discuss tomorrow.

Our Lady Of The Atonement Ends Latin Mass

A visitor sent me a copy of an e-mail from Fr Mark Lewis dated August 19 saying, once the two pages of flowery bloviation have been boiled down, that effective September 8, Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio will be ending the Ordinary Form Latin mass it had celebrated Sunday evenings pretty much since its founding. The visitor says

I am hearing that people are upset about this, Facebook exchanges, etc. With reduced enrollment and low church attendance, I struggle to see how this is a wise move.

I'll quote more from the letter, which is a waste of space to print in full, below. Actually, I don't really disagree with the motives behind the move, but I do agree that it poses a dilemma for the parsh and by extension the ordinariate. My regular correspondent comments,

I understand that the original reason for celebrating this mass was to satisfy the archbishop’s request that at least one OF mass be celebrated at OLA on Sundays. No doubt it has built up a constituency, but not one that is integral to the Ordinariate mission, as Fr Lewis explains pretty clearly.

I assume, by the way, that the archbishop was probably Flores here, not Garcia-Siller. But let's start by recognizing that OLA at the start of the Pastoral Provision intended to emulate Episcopalian parishes, which from the implementation of the 1979 BCP had themselves typically offered both Rite One and Rite Two masses on Sundays. The equivalent of Rite Two in the Catholic Anglican-style liturgy has always been the OF English mass, which inspired Rite Two in the first place.

So the motive for having a Latin OF mass at OLA always seems to have been to be not only more Catholic than the pope, but more Anglican than the Episcopalians, or something. So it seems to me there was always a certain level of confusion, and a certain passive-aggressive attitude toward whomever was archbishop. This no doubt attracted traddies, and passages from Fr Lewis's letter suggest Houston has now decided to cast off the traddies as their target market and focus on Anglicans. (But isn't this a little like Gillette deciding to cast off men as its target market and instead aim at intersectional feminists?)

Well, be that as it may, why now? Fr Lewis's letter cites the updated Complementary Norms for Anglcianorum coetibus dated last April, with quotes from Bp Lopes in a blog post at the Registar dated April 9 as well. The decision to end the Latin mass comes four months later, and nearly four years into Bp Lopes's tenure, when it could have been taken any time after OLA left the archdiocese. Why now?

Fr Lewis's letter says,

All of this is to say that we in the Ordinariates around the world have a specific mandate: to evangelize our separated brethren and lapsed Catholics, and bring them home to Holy Mother Church. And the primary tool at our disposal to fulfill this mandate is our Anglican Patrimony as it has been distilled in the Divine Worship Missal. In light of this missionary mandate from Rome and because of the gift of the Divine Worship Missal that we’ve been given, we must reconsider our celebration of the Latin Mass on Sundays.

My impression of Bp Lopes is that he doesn't display a whole lot of initiative. Every photo I've seen of him has a smile of self-satisfaction that he's made bishop, but he didn't make bishop by making bold moves. I would guess that the decision to end the Latin mass comes in the context of more general pressure from the CDF to drop the complacency that characterizes the North American ordinariate and go out and evangelize. This also means not catering to traddies. Certainly one question for me is how much the Latin mass fans contributed to the OLA parish in pledges -- I'll bet, not much.

But this goes to how much the traddies who fill the pews at other ordinariate parishes pledge. I get the impression these are the same people who've taken their kids out of diocesan schools to put them in home school co-ops connected with ordinariate groups, and this is another way of saying these folks are cheap. This is not a recipe for success.

So OK, Houston drops the traddies as a target market, fine. How well is it doing attracting the separated brethren? It doesn't help that Houston continues not to publish any sort of statistics. If it's serious about fine-tuning its mission, it needs to take a much more serious look at who's coming to mass at ordinariate communities, who isn't, and why -- and it needs to continue to look at the zero option, or perhaps the option of sending Bp Lopes to where the Navy finally sent Captain Queeg, a naval station in Iowa.

Pell Loses Australian Appeal

The Supreme Court of the Australian state of Victoria has issued its decision on Cardinal Pell's appeal of his conviction for forcible sodomy and molestation of two choirboys. According to the New York Times,

The cardinal, 78, who was once an adviser to Pope Francis, had been sentenced to six years in prison in March.

“He will continue to serve his sentence,” said Chief Justice Anne Ferguson of the Supreme Court of the state of Victoria in Melbourne, who presided over the appeals case with two other top judges.

Cardinal Pell was found guilty in December of molesting two 13-year-old choirboys after a Sunday Mass in 1996 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne, and groping one of them again months later. A gag order meant the verdict was not unsealed until February, after a second trial involving Cardinal Pell was canceled.

The story continues,

The primary argument made by Cardinal Pell’s legal team was that it was impossible for the jury to be satisfied of the cardinal’s guilt “beyond reasonable doubt.” The lawyers pointed to what they said was evidence that contradicted the account of the former choirboy — testimony that the case hinged on.

“Nobody apart from the alleged victims and the alleged perpetrator were present in the room,” said Bret Walker, the lawyer representing Cardinal Pell at the appeal. Activities after the Sunday Mass, Mr. Walker added, would have made it either “impossible” or “so unlikely” as to leave no realistic possibility for Cardinal Pell to molest them.

But two of the three judges said Wednesday that the standard had been met for the jury to determine the cardinal’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

“We did not experience a doubt,” Justice Ferguson said. “The complainant was a very compelling witness, was clearly not a liar, was not a fantasist and was a witness of truth,” she added.

I've served as a juror in two criminal trials. During the voir dire process in which jurors are chosen by the opposing sides, counsel and the judge place continuing stress on the need for, and ability of, jurors to evaluate testimony based on their life experience and ordinary common sense. An interesting part of the experience was to see the unspoken criteria for automatic deselection from the candidate pool: anyone who gave their occupation as "_____ at UCLA" pretty much got a "dismissed -- thank you".

But a result of my experience as a juror was a great respect for the jury process. When I first heard of the verdict against Pell, this was the first thing that came to mind. On the other hand, I can take no exception to the Vatican's public announcement following the decision:

The Vatican, in a statement, said that “as the proceedings continue to develop, the Holy See recalls that the cardinal has always maintained his innocence throughout the judicial process and that it is his right to appeal to the High Court.”

The CDF is conducting its own investigation of the case. There are still issues here that concern me -- the events in the case occurred in 1996. Why did it take so long for the matter to come to trial? And what is the Church continuing to do to screen candidates for holy orders? There are men in the North American ordimariate who, as far as I can see from the evidence that's come to light, should not have been ordained in the first place; two have already been removed from active ministry, but there are clearly others.

I still have a concern that there isn't full seriousness about this issue in the Church.

Frederick Kinsman On Leo XIII And "Americanism"

Frederick Kinsman's Americanism and Catholicism, of which a visitor very kindly sent me a copy, is an intriguing read (on line text is available here).Kinsman fully endorses the "melting pot" theory of American culture, particularly with reference to the mass Catholic immigration of the 19th century (and which I believe the descendants of those Catholic immigrants would still fully endorse).

This issue, though, is now hotly contested in the political realm, and Kinsman expresses views that would not now be regarded as politically correct, though I would guess President Trump would probably agree with most of them, and Kinsman quotes Theodore Roosevelt in similar positions. It's intriguing and productive to revisit what are pretty clearly similar historical conflicts.

I had been hoping for an explanation from Kinsman of Leo XIII's designation of "Americanism" as a heresy, and I wasn't disappointed:

Amer1can1sm is a national spirit and temper, a patriotism, quite right in its proper place. It is, however, taken out of its place by any who would try to make of it a peculiar brand of Catholicism, or use patriotism as a substance for religion. Any who would foist it into the spiritual sphere go counter to the American principle of separation of Church and State, and are thus showing themselves poor Americans. Unwarranted intrusions of the national spirit into the ecclesiastical domain the Church repels: national spirit in its native element she blesses.

"Americanism," as ecclesiastical hyphenism, a local mutilation of the Catholic Faith, has been officially condemned. Leo XIII declared that the name represents an error, if used to signify a policy, "that it would be opportune, in order to gain those who differ from us, to omit certain points of the Church's teaching, which are of lesser importance; and so to tone down the meaning the Church has always attached to them" as to seem to imply that "the Church in America is to be different from what it is in the rest of the world." This form of error has frequently appeared, being due to a common tendency to cramp religion into racial grooves. St. Paul denounced it in his attacks on Judaizers. There have been attempts to Gallicize, Anglicize, Teutonize and Hibernize Catholicity, all disastrous; and to Americanize it would be equally bad. Fortunately Cardinal Gibbons was able to assure the Holy Father that "the false conceptions of Americanism emanating from Europe have no existence among the prelates, priests and Catholic laity of our country." What certain Catholic leaders had urged as important for America was approved by the Pope, when he declared: "The rule of life laid down for Catholics is not of such a nature that it can not accommodate itself to the exigencies of time and place," pointing how in fact the Church had never neglected to adapt herself to the genius of nations. Of Americanism in its proper sense the Pope expressly approved: "If by this name are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to other nations; and, if moreover, by it is designated your political conditions and laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name." (pp 224-5)

Kinsman deals with a related issue, the Cahensly controversy.

The Cahensly agitation sought to promote the use of the German language and encouragement of Teutonic culture in the churches and schools of German-American Catholics. There are those who believe that back, of this was the German propaganda which, prior to the Great War, sought to Teutonize portions of the United States. Few German-Americans understood this at the time; there are probably none who would defend it now. The agitation by Germans was assisted by French, Poles, and Italians, all of whom sought for similar use of their respective tongues; and coupled with this was a plan for the composition of the Catholic hierarchy, whereby its prelates should represent proportionately the chief European nations from which the bulk of American Catholics were drawn. It thus brought the racial question before the Church, although probably few of those identified with it in this country understood all that was involved. At any rate, the Church was confronted with the same difficulty which, on a larger scale, has for fifty years confronted the nation.

Cahenslyism was strongly opposed, on the grounds, not only that it disrupted the Church, digging chasms under lines on a foreign map and introducing unnecessary rivalries, but also that it contravened the American spirit and would make trouble for the country. (pp 131-2)

I keep coming back to the issues of the "Americanist" error and Cahenslyism in trying to evaluate the practical result of Anglicanorum coetibus. To what extent do the ordinariates inevitably establish a separate hierarchy for Cahtolics of a particular ethnic background? To what extent does a made-up liturgy in a phony version of early modern English emphasize this? My regular correspondent wonders, for instance, if the otherwise inexplicable appeal of a new "Catholic" parish in the territory of the Diocese of San Bernardino -- including the half-baked attempts to establish a "school" -- are related to the fact that Spanish is not spoken there.

Just wondering.

Cardinal Pell's Legal Situation

The story of Cardinal George Pell and his criminal conviction in Australia for child sexual abuse has been hard to follow, and partly due to that, I've reserved judgment. According to Wikipedia,

Pell's first trial and conviction had initially been subject to a suppression order issued by Judge Peter Kidd, suppressing coverage of the conviction by Australian media companies, and lifted on 26 February 2019 after pending charges in a second trial were dropped. International media reported on the conviction immediately, commenting on the difficulty confirming details of the trial and conviction due to the suppression order. Pell lodged an appeal against his conviction on three grounds, including a claim that the jury verdict was unreasonable. The appeal was heard on 5–6 June 2019 and judgement has been reserved until 21 August; meanwhile, Pell remains in prison.

As a true crime fan, I stumbled on a video recording of a police interrogation of Pell, by Melbourne police possibly in Rome, on a YouTube channel that specializes in such recordings. The Pell interrogation starts at about 18:00 and continues with Judge Kidd's sentencing statement. The police interview relates to allegations of abuse against two choirboys in 1996, for which Pell was subsequently convicted. According to Wikipedia,

On 11 December 2018, Pell was convicted on five counts of child sexual abuse of two boys in the 1990s, after a jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Evidence against Pell described wilful exposure, fondling, masturbation and oral rape. International news sources reported the conviction at the time, but the suppression order was generally respected by the Australian media.

The interrogation in the YouTube video appears to cover the specific allegations that were covered in the trial, and on which Pell was convicted by a jury. While the interrogation is not a trial, and the police are employing techniques, including deception, that are intended to further their own objectives, the specific allegations raised in the interview appear to have credibility, and it appears that the Australian jury found them credible as well.

The suppression order, which has apparently prevented the release of detailed information about the trial, seems to have limited informed discussion about Pell's case and may also have contributed to a feeling in the US that Pell was martyred.

Pell has appealed the conviction, and the Supreme Court for the Australian state of Victoria will issue its decision on the appeal this coming Wednesday, August 21. A detailed update on his appeal from an Australian perspective is here.

Jeffrey Steenson On Levi Silliman Ives, With A Detour Into William James

I continue to admire the brothers William and Henry James as engaging figures in US intellectual history, though neither was remotely Catholic. William's religion was probably just Harvard, while it's fairly easy to derive from Henry's writing that their father, Henry Sr, was a Swedenborgian apologist. I bring this up here because I've always been drawn to William's description of the "sick soul" in The Varieties of Religious Experience , which is a necessary precondition for genuine religious conversion, as opposed to "healthy mindedness", which essentially avoids religious impulse.

My regular correspondent brought to my attention a strange letter from Jeffrey Steenson at Christmas 2014, published on the old Ordinariate News blog. It begins,

In Rome on Christmas Day, 1852, Pope Pius IX received into the Catholic Church Dr. Levi Silliman Ives, the second Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina. It is a fascinating, little-known story about a courageous soul involved in the Oxford Movement that re-introduced Catholic teaching to Anglican life.

Immediately below it, he publishes a representation of Ives, still an Episcopalian bishop, surrounded by young beauties of Raleigh, NC in prayerfully kneeling positions, although even the 1840s-50s were not exempt from double entendre, here hopefully not intentional. I simply have no idea what Msgr Steenson had in mind in reproducing this. But there's more in the letter that's puzzling. He outlines Ives's struggles with his diocese, presumably unrelated to any activities in the illustration, and his consequent suffering:

His episcopal career was a difficult one. The diocese did not welcome his high church ways. . . . Bishop Ives was forced to backtrack and assure the diocese that he was unreservedly Anglican.

But it didn't work. . . . Perhaps we in the Ordinariate have some sense of his struggles and the relief that came when the decision was finally made.

. . . To leave the Episcopal Church back then was regarded as an act of apostasy. Such converts (turning around) were then called perverts (turning in a bad way). He was said to be suffering from a form of mental illness: “the bishop had been in a state of mental illness that impaired his judgment.” Thankfully today we are in a (mostly) different place!

This reminds me of the accounts I've noted here from Fr Phillips and Fr Bartus of their suffering as they asserted their own apostasy -- which in the cases of Phillips and Steenson (and for that matter Ives) it most assuredly was, a violation of canons covering abandonment of communion. Msgr Steenson's successor as TEC Bishop of the Rio Grande, Michael Vono, made the entirely valid points that in resigning as bishop to become Catholic, Steenson had violated his consecration vows, and Vono rightly questioned Steenson's sincerity, insofar as he would concelebrate with women priests as bishop.

In fact, an issue I would raise as well (and Vono in 2007 was unaware of Steenson's plans to be ordained a Catholic priest), holy orders in Catholicism are viewed as equivalent to matrimony, and remarriage in this view is problematic. The Church acknowledges the need at times for divorce, but remarriage is a more intricate issue. I've got to wonder whether this underlay Frederick Kinsman's decision not to pursue ordination as a Catholic priest, although Ives's marriage would have precluded this in any case.

The problem I see in the context of William James here is that conversion is the cure for the "sick soul". I've begun a reading of Ives's apologia, The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism, and the title, as well as what I find in it, reflect a sincere account of a "sick soul":

In the outset, let me recall the fact, that for years a mysterious influence,, which I could neither fully comprehend nor entirely throw off, visited my mind, unsettling its peace, and filling it with yearnings for something in religion more real than I had hitherto experienced. (p 13)

Well, if nothing else, I would have felt deeply uncomfortable being portrayed the way Ives was in the illustration that went with Steenson's letter. The problem I see is that Phillips, Bartus, Steenson, and others see the resolution of their mental trials as leading to suffering -- I made my decision, but then that awful bishop fired me! I made my decision, but when I told those vestries about it, they didn't want to hire me! And for Steenson, it seems as though he made his decision, but then people like Bp Vono questioned his sincerity! Ah, the humanity!

Isn't this at vairance with Philippians 3:8?

More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ

Msgr Steenson seems like an unhappy guy, even years after his conversion. It's a shame.

What Does Bp Ives Add To The Picture?

The visitor who referred me to the case of Levi Silliman Ives also sent me a copy of another book by Frederick Kinsman, Americanism and Catholicism (1924). I haven't had much chance to get into this book yet, but it seems to me that Kinsman must have been fully aware of Leo XIII's use of "Americanism" to denote a particular type of heresy, which he discussed in an 1899 letter to Cardinal Gibbons, Bishop of Baltimore, and it was Gibbons who received Kinsman into the Church in 1919.

But it seems to me, reflecting on the case of Bp Ives, that there were two major events that drove, if not large-scale, at least prominent, conversions to Catholicism among Anglicans in modern history. The first was the industrial revolution. On one hand, this drove changes in British society that resulted in the Reform Act of 1832, which in turn emancipated non-Anglicans and forced churchmen like Newman to reconsider the idea of a natinal confession. However, other destabilizing influences like the movement of rural populations to the cities and the advent of railways also increased levels of social anxiety.

This brings me yet again to the highly underrated presentation on YouTube by Dr David Cambell, Christian Kenosis. One of Campbell's points is that "New Age" beliefs tend to die out during periods of national crisis, such as the US Civil War and the Great War of 1914-18. I think it's significant that the Civil War historian Allen Guelzo in his history of the Reformed Episcopal Church relates the popularity of Anglo-Catholicism in part to the national stresses that led up to the US Civil War.

But I would go somewhat farther and refer to commentators who in turn relate the Civil War to the industrial revolution and the rise of a market industrial economy. Certainly one interpretation of Reconstruction was to incorporate an agricultural, in many ways pre-industrial economy into the Yankee industrial base. One needs only point to the re-gauging of Southern railroads to be compatible with those of the North following the war as evidence for this interpretation -- but a cultural reflection of market capital's influence is also the proliferation and prestige of Anglo-Catholic liturgy housed in ostentatious Gothic churches during this period as well, often sponsored by the families of industrial robber barons.

Bp Ives is a reflection of this trend and a confirmation of Guelzo's view, but in Ives's case, his conversion wasn't just stylistic. It suggests that there was a seriousness about the Oxford movement that crossed the Atlantic.

But there was a second wave of conversions among Anglicans after the Great War, this one I think culturally even more important. In Surprised by Joy, C S Lewis, who remained Anglican, nevertheless stressed the importance of his war experience in forming his mature Christianity. Other converts, like Chesterton, Knox, Butler, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, had no direct Great War experience, but Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory points out the profound cultural effect the war experience, both at home and on the front, exerted on the language and popular imagination. T S Eliot in "The Waste Land" describes London as a city "undone by death" following the war.

The influenza epidemic of 1918, now often forgotten, though often as well compared to pre-industrial plagues in its effect, was a similar stressor. Kinsman says in Salve Mater that he delayed his resignation as Episcopalian Bishop of Delaware due to he effect of the war, as well, we may be sure, of the even more local effect of the epidemic, and it would be difficult not to consider the effect of the war on his later health and disposition.

But this brings me to a puzzle. Anglo-Catholicism, with a lesser tendency to actual conversion to Roman Catholicism, was an important cultural response to two modern social stress points, the industrial revolution and the Great War. Dr Campbell's view would be that this wort of thing was inevitable, serious crises bring people to serious religion. So what is the reason for the disappointment in Anglicanorum coetibus? Why don't the examples of Newman, Manning, Ives, Kinsman, Knox, Butler, Chesterton, Waugh, and Greene make it easier for the idea of becoming Catholic to enter mainstream popular culture in the 21st century?

I'm only starting to think about this, but one factor, it seems to me, is that there must be a different set of social stresses at work. The industrial revolution has occurred, there's no going back to arcadia. The problem of industrialized killing in total war, or by totalitarian societies, seems at least for the moment to be in abeyance. The stresses that we're dealing with now seem less clear, but if there's a problem to be solved, we can be pretty confident that Anglicanorum coetibus hasn't addressed it.

Jeffrey Steenson In Context

I asked a knowledgeable visitor if he knew of any Episcopalian bishops other than Jeffrey Steenson and Frederick Kinsman who'd resigned their sees well before retirement age in order to become Catholic. He was able to add one other to the list, Levi Silliman Ives (1797-1867). In this discussion, I'm excluding "continuing" bishops who may have resigned their positions to become Catholic, as I think they're fringe cases whose careers are simply not comparable.

According to the Wikipedia link,

Ives was rector of Trinity Church, Southwark, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1823 to 1827; later he served as assistant minister at Trinity Church, New York, and as rector at St. James Church, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, until 1831.

After the unexpected death of the Right Reverend John Stark Ravenscroft in 1830, Ives was elected bishop of North Carolina on May 21, 1831. He was the 25th bishop of the ECUSA, and was consecrated by bishops William White, Henry Ustick Onderdonk, and Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk. As a bishop Ives took great interest in the education and religious training of the black community.

Ives was deeply attracted to the Oxford Movement, which as we've previously seen was a highly controversial issue for the Episcopal Church during this period. His Catholic leanings resulted in a canonical trial in 1848, at which he was acquitted after signing a pledge in effect not to go too far with his Anglo-Catholicism. Wikipedia continues,

Despite these concessions, Ives's theological convictions continued to evolve until he was no longer able to accept that his denomination was a branch of the true Catholic church. In 1852, after obtaining a six-month leave of absence, the 55-year-old cleric left for Europe with his wife. They went to Rome, where, on December 22, 1852, he sent a letter to the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in North Carolina resigning his office of Bishop of North Carolina in view of his decision to join the Catholic Church. Ives was the first Protestant bishop since John Clement Gordon, Anglican Bishop of Galloway, to convert to Catholicism. Signalling his prominence, it was Pope Pius IX who received him into the Church on December 26, 1852.

. . . In the spring of 1854 Ives published his apologia, The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism.

This apologia, as well as a contemporary review, is available on line. I hope to investigate Ives further.

I've discussed Frederick Kinsman (1868-1944) several times here already. Kinsman resigned as Bishop of Delaware after 11 years in 1919, at age 51. Neither Ives nor Kinsman sought ordination as Catholic priests, although they did both get teaching appointments at Catholic universities. Kinsman in particular seems to have been of independent means, and he appears to have lived in semi-retirement after his resignation and conversion, although he continued to publish and lecture.

Both Ives and Kinsman published serious apologias following their conversion. Steenson so far has not -- the closest we have is a 13-page 2008 talk, On The Causes Of My Becoming Catholic, which is disingenuous -- it makes no mention of his presumptive appointment as North American ordinary under the forthcoming Anglicanorum coetibus -- self-absorbed, and often sheepish.

Although Steenson resigned as Bishop of the Rio Grande in 2007 at age 52, comparable to Ives and Kinsman, we now know that he'd been pursuing discussions with Bernard Law and intermediaries since the late 1980s about taking some type of ecclesiastical position in a proposed Anglican personal prelature. His intent, unlike either Ives or Kinsman, was to continue a career under the patronage of a major player in the Catholic hierarchy. This, with the absence of a serious apologia, suggests a lack of any real introspection.

In addition, Ives was heavily influenced by Newman and the Oxford Movement, Kinsman by Leo XIII and Apostolicae Curae, and some of Kinsman's writings suggest he was influenced by other of Leo's encyclicals. I tend to take Bp Barron seriously when he suggests Leo XIII is underrated as a Catholic thinker, and I hope I'll have the time to look into him more fully. But there is no serious equivalent influence with Steenson.

Benedict, as far as I can see, operated only under the influence of Bernard Law in issuing Anglicanorum coetibus, and Law in turn was promoting a pet idea, an Anglican personal prelature, which derived from "continuing" Anglicanism, hardly a powerful intellectual movement.

This goes to the basic disappointment that I think underlies Anglicanorum coetibus.

More On Converts, Cradle Catholics, And Traddies

The visitor who raised the original question in yesterday's post, a member of Our Lady of the Atonement, replied,

Being a parishioner for some time, I’ll tell you that the majority of OLOTA membership is not from Anglo-Catholic backgrounds. I don’t know anyone who identifies as Anglo-Catholic or former Anglican. To those who disagree, please chime in. The survey the parish took in 2012 reported 67% were Anglican converts And/Or fallen away Catholics who have returned. But that statistic was not broken down into its two parts. I think it was purposely misleading. If there was a strong Anglo number, the stat would not have been written that way. Remember, the survey was taken and presented to the Bishop for the purpose of persuading him to allow the parish to enter the Ordinariate.

My regular correspondent comments,

There were 60 confirmed at Holy Martyrs Murrieta at Pentecost. Looking at Facebook pix, at least half seem to be children of usual Confirmation age. Fr Bergman mentions here in the article entitled "Adult Confirmation on Pentecost" that the St Thomas More Adult Confirmation classes "for years now have been far more populated [with lapsed Catholics] than they have with Protestants seeking full communion with the Catholic church." None of the four adults confirmed at STM this year was a former Anglican, and this is at a full parish which entered the Church in 2005. I think the reception of former Anglicans in the Ordinariate is down to a trickle, representing a small fraction of those received every year in local dioceses.

Roughly 30 children of the usual confirmation age at Holy Martyrs suggests that a significant number of cradle Catholic families in the Diocese of San Bernardino picked up and left diocesan parishes to join Holy Martyrs -- if we consider that actively Catholic families in diocesan parishes often do send their children to Catholic schools, this raises the question of whether they pulled these children out of diocesan schools to join the "home school co-op" or whatever it's called at Holy Martyrs as well. It would be fascinating to hear more from knowledgeable parties on what's going on here.

The question in my mind is what the appeal is for lapsed Catholics in ordinariate parishes. As my wife and I travel and become more familiar with diocesan parishes here and there around the country, we find that successful parishes are part of their communities, reflect the communities' interests, and have ongoing programs involving fellowship, service, Bible study, and other ministries. Certainly it's possible, though a little hard to believe, that there are no good options for lapsed Catholics wanting to rejoin the Church in Scranton, PA other than St Thomas More.

In fact, given that parish's size and financial constraints, I've got to question whether it offers a much smaller range of options, with a priest not formed as a Catholic and preoccupied with a family, for Catholics who seriously want to rediscover what they'd overlooked when they were younger. So what's the appeal?

I'll be interested to hear anyone's opinion.

Anglicans, Cradle Catholics, and Traddies In The North American Ordinariate

A visitor asked,

I would like to see at some point an analysis from you of the breakdown of former Anglicans versus lifelong Catholics in the pews of Ordinariate parishes. I have shared with you my view of this, but perhaps others can provide information to create a better picture.

My preliminary response was,

The big problem with posting on ex Anglicans vs cradle Catholics is that Houston continues not to issue any kind of statistics. Nobody so far has reported on this to me from individual parishes, and an issue there is that most are too small to be significant – one or two families would flip the overall picture in such cases.

But I also ran this by my regular correspondent. I still offer the caveat that the numbers are so small overall, especially in any but the handful of large parishes, that evidence can be little more than anecdotal. But with that said, my correspondent replied,

There is also a third category: former Anglicans who became Catholic before, often long before, Anglicanorum coetibus came along. They may enjoy the opportunity to hear old familiar prayers and hymns, but they in no way represent any success of AC as an evangelising tool. Former Anglicans are encouraged to register as Ordinariate members even if there is no Ordinariate mass near enough for them to attend. That group contributes the single largest amount to the Bishop's Appeal, I note.

Beyond the first intake, numbers usually ascertainable from contemporary accounts of the community's reception (I think around 140 at Christ the King, Towson; a similar number at Incarnation, Orlando; then sharply down to between fifty and ten in most instances), one can then look at website/Facebook pictures of candidates being received at Easter (previously unbaptised) and Pentecost (everyone else, including Catholics who had not been confirmed) to get an idea of how many people are being brought into the Church via the Ordinariate. I recall that Holy Martyrs, Murrieta had a large (30?) number of receptions this Pentecost but that is not typical.

I also noted that Mrs Gyapong was taking a line similar to your own. I think that there is a looming split between that point of view and those who expected the OCSP to be a Traditionalist bastion. These people were mostly already Catholics.

I've had few reports from visitors on the balance in individual communities, though my understanding is that in some, like St John the Evangelist Calgary and Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, there is a certain amount of division between Anglican converts and cradle Catholics, especially given OLA's history as a diocesan Pastoral Provision parish.

One factor that may contribute to the obscurity of this whole issue is the lack of high-profile leadership of the laity from either Msgr Steenson or Bp Lopes. Thus as far as I know, we haven't seen either at any well-publicized Anglican-specific liturgical events like an advent festival of lessons and carols. Certainly the Houston communications staff should be able to place stories about this sort of thing in the mainstream Catholic press, prominently featuring the ordinary with his comments on the precious treasures.

Some traditions common to both Catholics and Anglicans, like blessings of the animals near the feast of St Francis of Assisi, would also be opportunities for celebrating joint backgrounds and would be occasions for the ordinary to participate visibly, again perhaps by stressing the tradition both hold in common. But so far, neither ordinary seems to have shown much interest in shaping the laity's attitudes through personal example. Much more could probably be done to unify the laity this way -- and the ordinary can certainly shape the approach of the priests as well.

I've got to think this is a symptom of an overall complacent, inward-looking attitude among ordinariate clergy, who from bottom to top seem focused primarily on their careers, rather than on the laity and their own concerns. So the divisions fester.

Credit Where It Belongs

I don't normally visit the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, but in working on yesterday's post, I went over there to see if there was reaction to a cause for G K Chesterton's sainthood not being forwarded. I was happy to see that there were no weepy posts decrying this development.

But even better, I found two posts from Mrs Gyapong, On Fr Treco, I Stand With Bishop Lopes and Exactly What We Signed Up for. .., which take a remarkably adult approach to what she calls in the first link "the train wreck of Fr. Vaughan Treco’s priesthood ". This is in contrast to what seems to be the great majority of traddie Catholic blogs that take Treco's side. As I said yesterday, it sounds like some people are starting to serious up.

But although the bishop's move is to be respected with the Church's authority, I still question the process by which Treco was ordained in the first place. This occurred under Msgr Steenson, but it's hard to imagine that, with other recent ordinations under Bp Lopes, anything has really changed. Priests in just about any Protestant denomination, if they've spent minimal time as "Anglicans", clearly continue to pass through the ordinariate vocation process with little vetting and few questions.

With Treco, we basically saw a reprise of the Rod Dreher story, a longtime Protestant who apparently sees a bright shiny object in Catholicism and goes whole hog without fully understanding what's involved. Inevitably something comes up where he's disillusioned. At least Dreher could hop off the carousel again with little impact except on his own credibility. Treco was a more expensive mistake, one that I suspect will be repeated. It does sound as if the celibate seminarians in the ordinariate receive the more usual rigorous evaluations from seminary faculty, which former Anglican clergy pretty clearly do not undergo.

One lesson here is that in fact, the Catholic Church has worked out effective policies over centuries. Bypassing those policies is a bad idea. I'm happy to see the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society moving farther toward recognizing what the Church is about.

Rod Dreher Is Weepy For Chesterton

A visitor sent me a link: Rod Dreher of all people is posting on the local bishop's decision not to forward G K Chesterton's cause for sainthood to Rome:

The bishop said in his letter that there is no local cult of Chesterton veneration, which is the usual thing for a new saint, and therefore a problem for GKC. Second, the bishop found no sustained evidence for heroic sanctity what the bishop called “a pattern of personal spirituality” in Chesterton’s character. And third, the bishop was concerned about allegations that GKC was anti-Semitic.

So Dreher was Catholic for a while on the same denominational carousel we've seen recently, even among men ordained to the Catholic priesthood by Houston. According to Wikipedia,

Raised a Methodist, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993. He wrote widely in the Catholic press, but covering the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, starting in 2002, led him to question his Catholicism, and on October 12, 2006, he announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.

But of course, he still thinks Chesterton should be a Catholic saint. After all, Dreher is an important guy, huh? Indeed, it sounds as if this is a project of the American G.K. Chesterton Society, which doesn't sound like it's a Catholic organization. So this is probably just a bright idea by a bunch of people who think this should be something the Catholic Church oughta do, whether they're Catholic or not. If I were the bishop, maybe I'd ask Dreher if he'd come back to the Church if the bishop changed his mind. Somehow I doubt it.

So far, the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society hasn't weighed in on this important issue, which may be reason to see a glimmer of hope. There's clearly a strain of thought in the ordinariates that takes Chesterton as a standard bearer for a clubby, cigars-and-whiskey, Wind in the Willows sort of Anglican Catholicism, the same sort of people who think Anglicanorum coetibus means the Church is finally seeing the light and becoming more Anglican (or as a waggish commenter put it on a blog, more gay).

Maybe some folks are starting to serious up.

I'm Still Looking For That Joke That Starts, "So This Catholic Convert Walks Into A Bar. . ."

because I'm convinced many of us are part of the punch line. Here are some factors that feed into my summertime thinking:

• The Roger Mahony conundrum. Mahony is one of the villains in Randy Engel's The Rite of Sodomy. He was certainly the patron for a number of unfortunate West Coast bishops, especially Bishop of Santa Rosa George Patrick Ziemann -- but Ziemann was eventually removed, and the current Bishop of Santa Rosa, Robert F. Vasa, is a conservative and an inspiring leadership figure. My wife and I were at a mass where he personally thanked first-responders during the 2017 Santa Rosa fires. The Church has a way of healing itself, it would seem. Beyond that, from the start, my position on this blog has been that Mahony was correct in denying the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood application to become a Pastoral Provision parish in the 1980s. And the biggest puzzle of all for me has been that capable men were ordained to the priesthood and promoted throughout his tenure as Archbishop of Los Angeles. Our parish would not have remained the successful one it is without that circumstance.
• A visitor very kindly sent me copies of B.C.Butler's The Church and Unity and The Idea of the Church, which I've been working my way through. Butler, himself an Anglican convert, works out in meticulous detail the nature of the Church and argues from that the nature of schism. He concludes that Anglicanism is a separate case from the Orthodox divide, and it is problematic in denying the authority of the pope. I think several things follow. One is that it's very sloppy, and in fact simply incorrect, somehow to think Anglicanism retained some sort of liturgical or doctrinal purity, from which modern Catholicism deviated. On that basis, the ordinariates are not another flavor of SSPX or a refuge from modernist heterodoxy, although some ordinariate priests seem to have built a following with that suggestion. What's the difference between Fr Hunwicke and Vaughn Treco, especially if people are insisting nothing objectively heretical can be found in Treco's infamous homily? Aren't we playing some dangerous games here?
• We have scriptural authority in the person of St Peter that popes are fallible men, sometimes impulsive, who are capable of putting their feet in their mouths. We have scriptural authority in the Council of Jerusalem that matters of doctrine have been controversial from the earliest days of the Church, and resolving those issues can be messy. We have scriptural authority in St Paul's circumcision of Timothy that apostles will act in seemingly inconsistent ways over doctrine. Clearly the Holy Spirit doesn't work in exactly the way any of us would like to fantasize.

I'll be taking a few days off from posting and will resume next week.