More Of The St Mary Of The Angels Story Trickles Out

I had an e-mail exchange with a former vestryman at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood who is familiar with the third, and now the fourth, rounds of litigation, 2012 to date. It appears that more issues were connected to the Citibank tenancy in the commercial property 1984-2014 than people had originally understood. The vestryman says,

The alley and parking lot are now inextricably tied to the commercial property, 24/7/365! Totally landlocked for church services! One of the businesses is open year-round, daily, except Easter! No other Sunday parking! The City of LA demanded this property arrangement in order to give its OK for there to be any businesses at all in the commercial building. As it was, with 29 parking spots, not counting the alley, that was too few for the bureaucrats downtown, so they demanded bike parking at both ends of the building.

Even when the commercial building was first erected, there were parking "issues" with the City. I met the man who offered the solution at the time, making some special "concordat" or "Covenant" with the City, not to get overanxious about the parking lot not being large enough for the expected traffic of the bank's clientele. But as the bank was closed on ALL Sundays, there was never an issue for church parking then.

So there had always been a problem that the parking lot was never quite large enough to accommodate both traffic to the commercial building and the church. But this was in the background as long as the commercial tenant was a bank, which kept bankers' hours. But one of the tenants the Kelley group acquired when they regained the property in 2016 was a physical therapy practice, which was open 24/7/365, The city at this point required that all the parking spaces be available to the business at all times.

On one hand, this was more or less tolerable as long as not many people came to church. But it was clearly looming in the future. It's now coming out that a follow-on problem is that the parish's creditors are suing to acquire the commercial building, which had been security for loans taken out to pay attorneys and handle emergency maintenance on the facility. If the creditors are successful, the entire parking lot will be under their ownership, not the parish, and the parking issue will be even worse.

Fr Jordan, who was rector of St Mary of the Angels from 1956 to 1971 and curate before then, had undertaken a project of acquiring neighboring property for use as a parking lot. This resulted in 29 spaces by the 1970s. However, Fr Barker, who became rector in 1971, built the commercial building, which placed additional strain on parking, but with the parish preoccupied with litigation after 1977, that money went to lawyers and not to expanding the parking lot.

With the bank as a steady tenant for the next 30 years, nobody planned ahead. Thus another two rounds of litigation, one in the 1990s and one after 2012, absorbed millions that could otherwise have gone to acquiring more property to expand parking. What fascinates me is that when then-Bp Moyer made his episcopal visit in early 2011, he mentioned the need to expand parking in his homily. It wasn't lost on him == Moyer, for health reasons alone, would not have been the best choice for ordinary, but he clearly had an understanding of how to run a church his successors haven't.

From 2012 to 2016 alone, millions were spent by both parties on litigation that should instead have gone to expanding the parking lot and maintaining the facility. This is just one slowly emerging example of the misdirected effort, unrealistic expectations, and AWOL leadership that have plagued the Anglican project from the start.

Clearly Jeffrey Steenson was not the person to bring a parish facing such issues into the ordinariate. That can't have been his only shortcoming.

More On Bp Lopes, The Holy Spirit, And What They Do All Day In Houston

My regular correspondent speculated on the possible reasons for Bp Lopes to issue his glitzy pamphlet on the sacraments:

Varying disciplines on the Sacraments of Initiation, their order and the recipients’ age, have been an issue in the OCSP, before we get to the fact that those members who are former Anglicans would be familiar with only a bishop as the Minister of Confirmation. As you may recall there was some unpleasantness at Atonement Academy over different disciplines for Ordinariate and diocesan students. So I can understand Bp Lopes’ wanting to get everyone on the same page. Throwing St JHN into:the mix struck me as gratuitous, and the pictures were quite narcissistic, although his hands are not that photogenic IMHO

I replied that if there are disagreements or questions about confirmation, the appropriate thing would be a to-the-point communication of one or two pages on letterhead explaining how things are to be done. However, my correspondent apparently did some networking and came back with the following:

Apparently the plan is not to have a uniform protocol for the OCSP. Pastors and PAs are being asked to submit their plan for preparing candidates in their community, which will then be approved individually by the Chancery. Glossy pamphlet is supposed to “start the discussion.”

Well, if the idea is to bring the Separated Brethren on board with the Church, I suppose the thing to do is have them all get their heads together and decide what to do and run it by the Church, huh? The pastors and parish admins were, of course, formed in a wide variety of Protestant seminaries, some very shaky, and their parishioners are just as diverse. So they'll be making the rules now, and probably not even Fr Perkins, more likely Bp Lopes's assistant, will decide which procedures to approve.

Speaking of the bishop's assistant, another visitor asked,

What exactly does Lopes do from day to day? Do we have any idea?

I have an idea of what a local ordinary typically does, often for many dozen large parishes. I also have an idea of what a local auxiliary does, often dealing with human resources and the priests. Lopes has a very small Diocese, very few parishes and most are small. He doesn't manage much property, or have many priests to oversee.

And how did he break his foot? Very unusual. I once knew an old lady who would drink too much malmsey and break herself - then brittle bones are more common in older ladies than in (relatively) young Portuguese Prelates.

My regular correspondent commented earlier,

Msgr Steenson was assisted by a woman who seemed far from competent; when Bp Lopes arrived she was shortly thereafter transferred to a token position in the administration and replaced by Laurie Miller, who had previously worked as a diocesan bishop’s assistant and brought a new level of professionalism to the OCSP Chancery. Now she assists Fr Perkins, and the somewhat less impressive Mr Vásquez-Weber has been judged fit to carry out whatever duties the bishop’s assistant is responsible for. Restaurant reservations. Plane tickets.

Er, if someone had to carry something upstairs, why did the bishop have to do it himself? Isn't that what Mr vaswuez-Weber is for?

However, now it appears that the staff will at some point in the possibly near, possibly less near, future be tasked with reviewing the plans of individual communities for preparing their kids for confirmation.

New Document From Bp Lopes

My regular correspondent found a new document, a Pastoral Letter on the Holy Spirit, written by Bp Lopes himself, on the ordinariate web site. So far, there's no other explanation, except that it's "To to [sic] the Clergy and Faithful of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter". To to indeed. It's to to something, huh?

Whatever he's paying to whomever sets this stuff up for him, it's too much. And whatever thanks he gives people like me for doing his proofreading for him, it's too little.

This is a glossy and glitzy pamphlet with lots of B-roll shots of the Vatican and footnoted (!) bromides.

The recent canonization of Saint John Henry Newman provides a most welcome opportunity to explore the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church and in our lives. In acquainting ourselves with the Cardinal’s writings, which in so many ways resonate with and anticipate the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, we will learn how he was taught to pray by the Holy Spirit.2 In the first two sections of this pastoral letter I would like to consider some of his insights on this topic.3 From there, we proceed to a focused reflection on the theology of Confirmation, the Sacrament of the Spirit, and on the necessary preparation for receiving the Sacraments of Initiation.

This takes me back to the question of audience. A scholarly theologian, like B C Butler, uses footnotes because he's primarily addressing an audience of colleagues whose level of interest and expertise will make them ask precisely what the source or authority of particular assertions is, especially if some may be controversial. Other writers in different contexts use footnotes to affect a phony erudition. The craziest examples i've seen are people who write for ordinary model train hobbyists and footnote their articles. It's hard to imagine something more incongruous, but footnoting the bromides in a glitzy pamphlet, frankly, comes close.

A visitor asked the other day,

Do you think that Bp Lopes is under pressure to make the experiment of the Ordinariate work?

I would imagine so, and I would imagine that this glitzy pamphlet, complete with scholarly footnotes, is part of his response. Let's make a comparison, though, of two bishops, one of whom is Bp Lopes, and the other is doing things much, much better. Here is Bp Lopes:

Here is Bp Barron:

So, Who's In Charge In Houston? Does It Matter?

Serious enterprises have in place a succession plan to say, for instance, that if the CEO is suddenly unable to function because, for instance, he had a major fracture doing something or other at home and must spend weeks under medical care, then J Bradford Schmidlap, the Sr Vice President -- Finance is designated to carry out his duties until a new plan can be developed. Often the organization's auditors or its board of directors will insist on this.

This was one thing that came to mind when I heard of Bp Lopes's unfortunate accident. What's puzzling is that as far as I'm aware, the only official notice of the bishop's indisposition has come from his personal assistant, with no word from the vicar general. One would normally expect the vicar general to be the number two, and one would normally expect the person in authority under the exigent circumstance to make the requisite public announcement.

As far as I can tell, there's been no word from Fr Perkins, the vicar general, and nothing on the ordinariate website. A web search as I write this brings up no mention of this development elsewhere. Instead, I'm told that the bishop's personal assistant has privately asked that all inquiries be directed to him, which intentionally or not says something about the real chain of command in Houston.

My regular correspondent comments,

In charge of what, exactly? Apart from the travelling involved I don’t think being Ordinary of the OCSP is a very taxing job. There’s a finance person, and Sr Amata manages membership records and the Bishop’s Appeal. Fr Kramer handles the avalanche of ordination inquiries. The former assistant to Bp Lopes is now Fr Perkins’s assistant. Presumably Bp Lopes picks up the phone when a fellow bishop must be contacted re some request for the use of his diocesan facilities, and he chairs the monthly Governing Council meetings, but otherwise...?

Bp Lopes was supposed to officiate at Confirmation at Holy Martyrs, Murrieta last Sunday, then preside at Evensong at SJHN, Irvine on March 15.

So let me see. The vicar general, who seems to be in the process of being edged aside by the bishop's personal assistant, nevertheless now has a personal assistant himself, apparently due to an increasing press of responsibility.

Late in my career I was tasked with developing a change control program for a government agency's IT department. It had close to 100 people in that department. To do my job, I had to figure out what its whole IT operation looked like and then set up procedures to record and provide notice of any changes to that environment, which could potentially take place daily, and which could have a serious impact if the wrong people weren't notified in advance.

After some weeks work, I discovered that the whole function of this agency was to receive a single monthly payment from the government and forward wire transfer payments from that single payment to a limited number of other government agencies and contractors. The amount of work the agency did was trivial, and any changes to the IT environment were de minimis. The biggest threat to the organization was that the private contractors were angling, quite reasonably, to have the agency that forwarded the check (after deducting its cut) taken out of the loop and receive payments directly.

I was taken off that project. I did notice several years later that the agency, still in existence, had moved to larger, more prestigious, and more expensive offices.

Somehow the North American ordinariate takes me back to that experience.

The bishop is out of action for most of Lent at minimum, and it doesn't seem to make much difference. Maybe their IT operation needs a change control program.

Bp Lopes Has Broken His Leg

I'm told, and have had other confirmation, that it was announced at some Sunday masses that Bp Lopes broke his leg in a fall at his residence late last week. My understanding is that this was a severe fracture, and he will be out of action for the rest of February and all of March. Everyone wishes him well and prays for his recovery.

But there's an incongruity here that's the sort of thing that keeps me at this blog. Persons of high privilege, such as Roman Catholic bishops, do not ordinarily break their legs. A remote exception would be on the ski slopes.

I've got to wonder if the bishop has been under additional stress that could be a factor in an accident like that.

St John Henry Newman Bath, PA Loses Its Venue

My regular correspondent reports,

This mission of STM, Scranton has been celebrating a biweekly Mass at Sacred Heart, Bath since 2014. It appears to have been an anchor group for Fr Richard Rojas, a former Army chaplain who was ordained for the OCSP and lived with his family on the STM property for about a year before being incardinated in the local diocese, as you reported on August 11, 2018. Fr Bergman has been celebrating Mass for them since Fr Rojas’ departure. Sacred Heart has a new pastor and SJHN, Bath has become homeless. Mass will be held at members’ homes for the foreseeable future, as we read here. Another instance where dependance on the kindness of (diocesan) strangers continues to be necessary for the OCSP.

The Sacred Heart parish that had hosted the group is in the Diocese of Allentown. My understanding is that in general, the authorization to use a parish facility by an outside group is the pastor's call, although I've got to assume that in a matter that would affect another bishop, the Bishop of Allentown would be aware of it. It appears that either Bp Lopes felt this wasn't a hill worth dying on, or he appealed it and wasn't successful.

This reinforces the problem that more than half of ordinariate communities neither own nor control their venues, and this is a major factor, though not the only one, in their instability. We see them losing diocesan venues at a rate recently of about one a year. The previous one was the Newman group in Victoria, BC, which had its time slot replaced with a Portuguese mass.

Clearly a pastor who sees a better use for a Sunday afternoon or evening time slot would be one clear factor in a group losing its venue, and naturally, if a pastor sees only a dozen showing up for an ordinariate mass, he's going to view alternatives very favorably. I get the impression there are other factors as well, with Bp Barnes of San Bernardino apparently uncomfortable with the idea of using diocesan facilities for ordinariate groups.

The same, I've got to conclude, must be the case in the Archdiocese of Boston, because however one may quibble with exactly when Bp Uglietto first redirected the Stoneham group's request to use a diocesan facility, its renewed request from Christmas 2019 hasn't been answered, and the prior de facto disapproval remains. Again, either attempted interventions by Houston have been unsuccessful, or Houston has thought them not worthwhile.

Reasons for possible diocesan discomfort with hosting ordinariate activities might also include a bishop's unwillingness to accommodate married priests and their families in rectories, or simple opposition to married priests. One example appears to be the Diocese of Rochester, which was willing to accommodate a celibate ordinariate priest formed in a Catholic seminary but somehow couldn't find an appropriate opportunity for any other flavor.

But if you give it some thought, the slipshod evaluation process for candidates in Houston would mean that as a practical matter, any conscientious bishop would have to spend major time and effort redoing a job he couldn't be confident Houston had done, tasking his own vocation director and vicar for clergy with work Houston never did.

The records of ordinariate clergy haven't been exemplary, and situations like Fr Kenyon, whose time in the Diocese of Shrewsbury, UK created more work than it relieved, probably haven't gone unnoticed.

Another issue, it seems to be, is that ordinariate laity appear to be squirrely, disgruntled, and narcissistic. Peter Smith, a highly visible ordinariate layman, seems to rate a sense that he's "empowered" in the ordinariate more than in a diocesan parish as important. A visitor suggested:

I have to think that the reason one might feel empowered is because the groups are so small. Suppose for instance, the Sarum Use is your hotbutton topic, and you think that will solve all the problems in reuniting the Church of England to the Catholic Church. When the Bishop comes to visit, there is a 1 in 20 chance that you might actually have a word with him that lasts longer than a handshake when leaving Mass.

Other factors, like the posts at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, could give a bishop or pastor the impression that ordinariate laity are poorly formed, focused on being "Anglican", and unwilling to mix with a diocesan parish.

It would be interesting to pose a question about this to Bp Lopes in a hypothetical town hall. Would he simply respond with his usual happy talk about how this isn't a problem, and he has a Sunday attendance of 20,000?

It might help the case of Bp Lopes worked to gt his flock to drop the narcissistic disgruntlement, accept that they're Catholic, and explain that the assurance we have is that many, many people are in the procession of the saints. Heaven isn't an exclusive club.

Update On St Gregory Stoneham, MA

A visitor has sent me a screen shot of a post on the Anglican Ordinariate Informal Conversation Facebook group that clarifies the situation in Stoneham, MA (Click on the image for a larger copy):

In my last post, of course, I was completely clear in saying that I didn't know how recent Bp Uglietto's decision was, and whatever Mr Covert tries to say, if the decision was made by Uglietto in 2015, there has nevertheless been no change in the situation, and it's plain that if Mr Covert has received no reply to his letter from last Christmas, there will be no change in the foreseeable future.

In fact, Mr Covert in his post also takes the long way around in saying that whatever the appeal of the DW mass and the cachet of exclusive membership in the ordinariate, it ain't worth the drive, and it would seem that this message hasn't been lost on either the archdiocese or Houston. He reveals in his explanation that the situation might have changed had the group tripled its attendance, but his implication is that this hasn't occurred. He'a also taking the long way around to say the ordinariate needs no outside detractors if this is the case.

My regular correspondent comments,

The Ordinariate model was supposed to offer the “Anglican Use” greater stability by protecting it from the whims of local diocesans, but as we can see, while this is true for self-sustaining full parishes, most smaller groups remain dependent on the goodwill of a local bishop. This story also underlines the scarcity of the OCSP’s resources; had Fr Simington been welcome in the Archdiocese of Boston, he would not have gone to Rochester and St Alban’s would have remained without a priest until who knows when.

Jeffrey Steenson And Women's Ordination

Tuesday's post covered a story at Virtue Online from 2006 on Jeffrey Steenson's address to the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande's annual convocation. It turns out that following that story, a priest of that diocese sent an e-mail to Virtue responding to the story. Virtue, although he didn't publish the e-mail, which didn't quite claim full confidentiality, did forward it to an unknown number of people, who forwarded it again. I received a copy from an individual who'd had it from one of the first group to whom Virtue forwarded it, who has since passed away.

Here's the meat:

In your report on Convocation, you wrote "Steenson, a traditionalist bishop who does not believe in the ordination of women. . ." That was his position.

In our wide-ranging discussion [at lunch], he told me that after coming to this diocese he had come to believe that women can be priests as he had seen priesthood in several of the women in this diocese. Maybe [Pennsylvania] didn't have many good examples for him? . . . So, +Jeffrey has personally received WO by faith while understanding that a reception process is still underway within the [Anglican Communion].

Please don't use that quoted statement anymore. +Jeffrey is as Orthodox as any of the other GS bishops that believe in WO and more patrisic than any of them by education and inclination. Do not expect him to abandon this stance for the AMiA or any other traditionalist group.

The context of the e-mail seems to have been that Steenson invited the priest to lunch, posing as the priest's friend and supporter, and in the course of a "wide-ranging discussion" unburdened himself more or less confidentially of his evolving position on women's ordination. This, of course, less than a year before he resigned as bishop to become a Catholic priest in a denomination that isn't even discerning women's ordination.

I'm not aware of any public reaction by this priest to Steenson's departure for Rome, though the impression I have from the e-mail is that the priest felt that he and Steenson were in agreement that whatever the battles that needed fighting within TEC, they were nevertheless post-2000 TEC to the core.

Even by 2012, four years after Steenson's departure, the sense of betrayal in the Diocese of the Rio Grande remained, as carried in this Virtue Online story:

The Rev. Jeffrey Steenson's announcement three years ago to step down as the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande to become a Catholic priest shocked and saddened many New Mexican Episcopalians.

Now many of those same people feel "betrayed" by Pope Benedict XVI's recent appointment of Steenson to head a special Roman Catholic diocese for disaffected Episcopalians.

Church leaders say the announcement reopened old wounds and created new ones among Episcopalians here.

"When he left (in 2007), it was painful, but we respected his decision," said the Rev. Daniel Gutierrez, canon to the ordinary for the 18,000-member Diocese of the Rio Grande. "But then for him to turn around and take this position and try to lure other priests is a betrayal."

The Rev. Michael Vono, Steenson's successor as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, said that sense of betrayal is particularly strong among gay and female priests in the diocese.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which bars women from the clergy, women can be ordained as Episcopal priests. Women comprise a "sizable" minority of the 180-member clergy in the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, he said.

Steenson "seemed to have no trouble working with women priests" during his three years as bishop, Vono said. "He was celebrating with women at the altars."

Steenson did not respond to messages left at his office at Our Lady of Walsingham Catholic Church Monday in Houston.

It's hard to avoid thinking that Cardinal Law and Jeffrey Steenson had at least one thing in common, an ability to project different things to different people. If Steenson could convince David Virtue that he opposed women's ordination, it's nevertheless worth pointing out that The Episcopal Church had approved this in 1976, before Steenson even went to seminary. This ought to have been a factor in his vocational discernment, or at least in his willingness to accept clerical jobs in TEC.

Yet on one hand, he posed as a center-right bishop who'd fight the good fight, while on the other assuring others privately that he was actually squishy on said fight, if that's what they wanted to hear. And then, when it suited him, he decamped for Rome.

I've got to wonder, once again, what the real reason was for that move.

"Empowered"?

At least one visitor took note of the appearance of "empowered" in the Facebook exchange I covered in yesterday's post. It's so 80s. The visitor said, "Curious someone would think that Ordinariate laity are somehow more empowered." I don't think the word ever meant much. Various feminists would use it to insist that random this and that "empowered" them. Corporatespeak of the time insisted that their employees were "empowered". I remember a Dilbert comic strip from maybe 25 years ago, in which one of Dilbert's officemates, reflecting on his empowerment, said, "Yippee! It's green ink day!"

The problem of course, is that the ordinariate members in the Boston area aren't "empowered" at all. My regular correspondent noted,

As you mention, the Pastoral Provision congregation remained no more than a few dozen strong during its twenty-five year existence, and St Gregory’s was not large enough for Bp Lopes to appoint a replacement when Fr Liias took early retirement. Nor has the combined community experienced notable growth. I think Mr Covert correctly fears being abandoned by both jurisdictions.

There's a fair amount of historical record of ordinariate groups, if they're small and no clear replacement is available, to be dissolved when the priest relocates or retires. I simply don't know what other efforts Mr Covert may have made behind the scenes to continue the group after Fr Bradford's retirement, but the letter to Bp Uglietto that he made public seems completely counterproductive. After all, the group had had the use of an archdiocesan facility, with a priest of the archdiocese, on the basis that at least some of its members were part of an archdiocesan Pastoral Provision parish, although some others were in the ordinariate.

Now Mr Covert proposes that this group become entirely an ordinariate group under Bp Lopes but continue to use an archdiocesan facility. Not only that, of course, but the implication in his letter is that Bp Lopes will be able to come up with an ordinariate priest to say mass for the ordinariate group. We don't know, of course, if any such discussion has taken place with Houston, but it would almost certainly require the archdiocese to provide living quarters and some type of job to supplement the minimal compensation the ordinariate priest would get from the small group. This would depend entirely on the good will of the archdiocese.

However, the somewhat cryptic remark in the Facebook discussion, "BpU didn't want their people to get involved with ours," suggests that necessary good will may not have been available. Could one factor have been the attitude among ordinariate laity, certainly not curbed in any public way by Houston, that their liturgy and "reverence" make them superior to diocesan Catholics?

My regular correspondent notes that a small number of ordinariate groups have managed to continue after relocation or retirement of their founding priests made their future uncertain.

I think that St Alban, Rochester owes its continued existence, after Fr Cornelius’ very abrupt departure, a year or so in hiatus until Fr Catania’s arrival, another hiatus when Fr Catania failed to obtain a supplementary job or even a place to live from the Diocese of Rochester and had to move on, to the efforts of Andrew Jordan, who kept the group together with outings and Evensong until Fr Simington was finally appointed. The Lord helps those who help themselves in the OCSP, so Mr Covert is probably wise to start the local conversation.

And

Matthew Venuti was one of the first TEC clergymen ordained for the Ordinariate, in 2012. His group was very small. Thirty-one years old, with a wife and baby, he became the first OCSP priest to be appointed pastor of a diocesan parish, St Joan of Arc, Mobile. The St Gregory the Great community (note: a dedication which appears ill-fated) held Sunday mass in the rectory chapel, which in pictures appeared to hold about twenty at most. Fr Venuti had a serious heart attack in 2014, and in 2016 another heart attack forced his permanent retirement.

There continued to be a monthly and then weekly DW mass at St Joan of Arc (in the main church) celebrated by Msgr Larry Gipson, later with a local diocesan priest, but last year the community moved to a chapel on the property of another church in Mobile. The parish campus is undergoing major redevelopment so I am not sure how long-term this arrangement is, but in any event the community has continued to this point with little or no help from Houston.

Although I've got to think that anyone with the drive and capability actually to bring something like this off in the Boston area would not use the word "empowered".

Steenson As Bishop

A visitor sent me links to a series of pasts post at Virtue Online carrying reports of Jeffrey Steenson's actions as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande. They indicate a generally center-right alignment, in which, as he said of himself below, he walked a tightrope. The biggest thing that jumps out to me is his repeated statements that he wants The Episcopal Church, in a potential state of crisis in its relationship with other Anglican Communion churches, to remain within the Communion.

A summary of his address to the October 2006 general convention of his diocese is an example:

The Bishop of the Diocese of the Rio Grande, the Rt. Rev. Jeffrey Steenson told delegates to the 54th Annual Convocation of the diocese that he will not be attending the investiture of Presiding Bishop elect Katharine Jefferts Schori on Nov. 4 at Washington National Cathedral.

Citing what he called "sound Biblical reasons," Steenson said a significant portion of his diocese was deeply concerned about her apparent views on some crucial points of doctrine, especially about the uniqueness and universality of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

"For the sake of these consciences, it seems to me the wiser course to be prayerfully absent," he said.

Steenson, a traditionalist bishop who does not believe in the ordination of women, and is opposed to the church's homosexual agenda, said there were serious questions as to her ability as Presiding Bishop to serve as an instrument of unity in the wider Anglican Communion.

The bishop also had his eye on what the Primates Meeting in February 2007 in Tanzania will do to The Episcopal Church and their promise of a new structure to take care of eight dioceses that are seeking alternative primatial oversight.

, , , Recognizing that he is walking a tightrope, Steenson told delegates, "I am not repudiating the Episcopal Church which I have served almost all of my ordained life in it, and I hold my ordination vows with the utmost seriousness. But my vow is to a church which is constitutionally pledged to be a constituent part of the Anglican Communion, in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury as our focus of unity. In this sense, I am an Anglican first and an Episcopalian second, not in the sense of either/or, nor of both/and, but of one because of the other."

In "The Causes For My Becoming Catholic", Steenson wrote,

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.

His actions as bishop indicate a willingness to work toward the end of maintaining communion. But oddly. the last-straw event that, by his account, pushed him into becoming Catholic had little to do with communion:

It is not necessary to rehearse all that was going on in the Episcopal Church at that time, except to say that 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. I still hoped that the Archbishop of Canterbury might exercise his discretion by whom he would invite to the Lambeth Conference (one of the few primatial prerogatives available to him), but two months later that hope was dashed.

What puzzles me here is that he looks to the Archbishop of Canterbury as the ecclesial authority that will ultimately determine communion, and the specific instrument by which he can do this is whether or not he invites a church to the Lambeth Conference. OK, fine, if that's how you see it. But then the Archbishop did in fact invite TEC to the Lambeth Conference. At that point, wasn't Steenson substituting his judgment for that of the Archbishop on who's a good Anglican?

For that matter, he was earlier warning the Presiding Bihop of TEC that she wasn't much of an Anglican herself. One question I'd have, if I were simply interviewing Steenson as a job applicant for human resources, would be why he wants to join a denomination that's based much more heavily on authority than Anglicanism when he's so determined to go against authority even as an Anglican.

At least, even if he's not formally a "continuer", he's in touch with his inner "continuer".

Full Version Of Jeffrey Steenson's "The New Donatists"

A visitor discovered a hard copy of Jeffrey Steenson's essay "The New Donatists" in a desk drawer and kindly forwarded a copy to me. I've scanned it as both a PDF and a text file. While it's too long to place in a single post here, if anyone wants a copy of either or both, please e-mail me and I'll send them along. For that matter, if anyone has ideas on where the text might be placed in a more permanent record, I'll be happy to assist with that effort, too.

I do think it's worth discussing as indicative of Steenson's state of mind in the years just before he resigned as Episcopalian Bishop of the Rio Grande. The vacillation is apparent, but it's worth noting that, first, he did allow himself to be elected a bishop, and second, resigned only when he'd reached the age where he'd be fully eligible for an early retirement pension, the amount of which would presumably be calculated based in part on the salary he'd received as a bishop. His scruple, we may infer, extended only so far.

Here;s what he said at the start of the essay:

Let me begin with a personal reflection. A year ago I was elected to be the bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of the Rio Grande, the 1000th bishop in the Episcopal Church's history. God being my witness, I can honestly say this was not an appointment I sought or expected; I had a somewhat negative assessment about whether North American Anglicanism could legitimately claim to be part of Catholic Christianity. I suppose that I was identifying with Jonah, who was encamped in the desert outside Ninevah in anticipation that God's judgment was about to fall upon the city. But it seems that I too was called to go in to the city, and so I went forth with a trembling heart.

But of course, with a trembling heart, he allowed those episcopal paychecks to keep coming into his account, notwithstanding the secret 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger. But he then moved on to discuss, in somewhat pedantic detail, the history of Donatists and Augustine's arguments against them.

Augustine emphasized that the Church on earth remains a work in progress, a necessarily imperfect reflection of the perfect Church in heaven. It is in the process of coming to be, and it will only realize perfection at the Second Coming of Christ. I like the way the saintly Fr. Robert Crouse puts it: "the present and future church, not as two churches, but as two moments in one and the same church."' The Donatist church by contrast was marked by an urgency to get things sorted out and by an anxiety that the true Christians would be contaminated, defiled, if within the Church they were to be in contact with the wicked.

But then he moves to the major contradiction in his position, to which he proposes a Burkean solution:

The Catholicism of Augustine's day is not the Catholicism of our own. We are living in a divided Christian world where the divisions have become an accepted feature. Roman Catholic apologists see us Anglicans as Donatist-like, and so they would say that our situation today is about Donatists contending with Donatists. The horse is already out of the barn, so to speak, and further divisions are to be expected. Augustine's Catholic Church by contrast, even accounting for its idealization by later generations, was clearer about its unifying principles, including the conviction that the primacy of St. Peter continued to find its expression in his successors as Bishop of Rome. Is the imperative of maintaining the Anglican Communion's unity of the same magnitude as maintaining Catholic unity in Augustine's day? Would separation today represent a similar sin against charity? Or should we see this as a realignment with the Christian mainstream whose ultimate purpose is greater Christian unity?

In effect, he's saying that we're in a different world with lots of schismatic denominations, but a good Burkean would say that's now the tradition, and we should sorta-kinda stick with just the ones we have as of now and not make new \ones, because that would be icky or something. And he then moves to argue from the Book of Common Prayer, "a liturgical space to gather and hold a doctrinally diverse community". And as well,

. . . the discipline of living in a "national" church, where the determination about who is in and who is out is not a matter for individuals or special interest groups to decide. Related to this is the responsibility delegated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, both in English law and in the nascent polity of the Anglican Communion, to determine the boundaries of communion, chiefly through the composition of the Lambeth Conferences.

But of course, he's addressing a US and Canadian audience, where the Church of England is not established as a "national" church, so this argument veers into incoherence. I much prefer Episcopal Bishop Bruno's much simpler and more succinct defense of Robinson's consecration: it was licit under canon law and conducted with full transparency.

Steenson also argues from the XXXIX Articles, in particular Article XXVI, "Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacraments". The biggest problem, of which he must surely have been aware, was that the 1979 BCP placed them in the "Historical Documents of the Church", which distanced the modern TEC from them, so on one hand, they are no longer strictly binding, but on the other, they are specifically Protestant-Reformed, so that Steenson is back in the dilemma of using a Catholic argument against schism with a Protestant audience made up of schismatics themselves. Indeed, without irony, he quotes a Catholic on this subject:

In the famous words of Ronald Knox, "Almost always schism begets schism; once the instinct of discipline is lost, the movement breeds rival prophets and rival coteries, at the peril of its internal unity."

Steenson's somewhat muddled and vacillating positions in this essay are reflected in many other public and private statements in the years he continued to rise in The Episcopal Church. This official history of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande reflects the overall sense of betrayal felt there concerning his stewardship:

There was great hope that his “kinder and gentler” conservative style would usher in an era in which differing perspectives would be respected, while at the same time honoring the generally traditional character of the Diocese. For all of these reasons, Bishop Steenson’s decision to resign as Bishop, renounce his orders in The Episcopal Church, and seek priestly ordination in the Roman Catholic Church, was greeted with a mixture of sympathy, consternation, and anger.

Both prior to and following his departure on December 1, 2007, people struggled to deal with this unanticipated and unwelcome turn of events. For some, his action, though understandable given Steenson’s concerns about the direction of the national church, was viewed as a repudiation of their own beliefs. Others were angry that he had allowed his name to be placed in nomination for Bishop, given his own ecclesial uncertainty. Still others wondered whether the direction in which he had begun to take the Diocese would continue.

There are other indications of his uncertainty -- indeed, muddleheadedness -- over his beliefs throughout his later Episcopalian career, which i'll cover here over the next several days. While Steenson is retired as ordinary after a tenure not much longer than his time as a TEC bishop, I think these examples raise serious questions about the planning and preparation that took place in Rome in the runup to Anglicanorum coetibus.

I'm Not Sure If This Is The Look Bp Lopes Wants

My regular correspondent mentioned a discussion thread on the Facebook Anglican Ordinariates Informal Conversation Forum about a recent statement by Taylor Marshall that ordinariate parishes were competing for traditionalist Catholics who in his estimation should be attending a Latin mass. I'm not a member of that Facebook group and presumably would not be approved if I asked to join, but I did some web searching and haven't come up with any specific statement by Marshall about that. If anyone can send me a link, I'd appreciate it.

Nevertheless, in my searches, I've found a great deal of evidence that the traditionalist wing of the Church sees a common cause with the ordinariates. For instance, Church Militant puffs the orfdinariates along with the FSSP and ICKSP here:

Likewise, ten years after Pope Benedict XVI issued his historic decree Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Anglican ordinariates continue to strengthen, in spite of various challenges, both in the U.S. and abroad.

In North America, the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter now serves 45 parishes across the U.S. and Canada. In the United Kingdom, the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham today serves 35 parishes. The Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, meanwhile, covers 11 communities in Australia, and is expanding throughout the Pacific Rim, with two congregations in Japan, one in the Torres Strait Islands, and with pre-ordinariate communities forming in the Philippines.

My regular correspondent also pointed to the 102 comments at this story on Lifesite News, which covered

In an unscripted outburst, the president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference has expressed his frustration at mounting criticism of Pope Francis among Catholics, suggesting that those who do not appreciate his style of teaching and government should embrace Protestantism.

My own views track pretty closely with Fr Longenecker, who thinks Pope Francis could use a better editor and maybe a more savvy media staff, but there's a serious agenda there. On the other hand, without consulting Fr Longenecker, I'll go ahead and say Benedict's abdication creates a serious credibility issue for those who look back to him with nostalgia. My regular correspondent notes,

Of course there have been many periods of internal debate in the Church, of which that of the First Vatican Council over Papal Infallibility is a recent example. But I suspect that this made little impression on those in the pews. Today things seem quite different.

I sense that a lot of Catholics do not see the contemporary Church as much of a draw for people who are looking for a place to escape division and uncertainty. The irony is how much they do to create the impression that the One True Faith is being kept alive by a beleaguered minority within the Church. The idea that only the EF is really a valid Mass is the extreme position on liturgy, but I think that the “Reverent Mass” website is on that spectrum.

“Continuers” and denomination-hopping clergy formed the initial intake of the OCSP. In the UK, most of those in the OOLW were formerly Anglo-Papalists on the fringe of the CofE. For both groups, becoming a “real” Catholic in communion with the Pope offered stability and legitimacy that was an attractive contrast to life on the margin. Those markets for Ordinariate membership are now exhausted, and instead, at least in North America, the focus has shifted to lifelong Catholics looking for the Church of their youth, or someone’s youth, where one was surrounded by comforting certainties and changeless rituals. But wait, aren’t there two Popes? Never mind, never mind, just look at that altar rail, or “alter rail” as they say on the Reverent Mass site.

Even so, the North American ordinariate seems more and more like a solution in search of a problem. Several visitors have sent me links to this conference announcement, which Bishop Stephen J Lopes will keynote. He may well have pertinent remarks to make on the alter rail and its role in the liturgy, if the scholarly standards established in the announcement are followed. My regular correspondent comments,

But it is interesting that some, at least, see DW as a bridge between, or perhaps I mean among, warring liturgical factions in the Church. This would certainly provide a justification for establishing groups made up almost entirely of currently practising Catholics and abandoning the pretence that the OCSP is about Anglicanism in any fundamental way.

Well, consider that the Oxford Movement was about adopting Roman form in liturgy, vestments, and architecture, while moving away from enforceable standards of doctrine. In fact, the movement toward Roman form went a great distance toward undermining ecclesiastical authority as the Church of England moved away from official Protestant forms.

i wonder if what we're seeing among this wing of the Church is the adoption of forms -- indeed, forms imported from Protestantism -- and empty traditions of the sort Our Lord Himself disparaged in Matthew 15:2, like chapel veils or abjuring altar girls.

Not a good look.

My Inner Detective Has Another Question

Why did Jeffrey Steenson really resign is Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande?

I say this because the more I look at the origins of Anglicanorum coetibus, the bigger the air of unreality that seems to surround it. Consider a major principle that governs the (largely theoretical) admission of existing Anglican parishes into the ordinariate. Such a parish must have no litigation associated with it. But we know from more than four decades of experience that The Episcopal Church does not allow existing parishes to leave the denomination with their property or endowment without litigation.

In an e-mail exchange I had in 2012 with Mrs Chalmers, the canon lawyer who was over her head in a situation that would result in litigation, she said, "We don't have the money for litigation". Well, doesn't that say something? The CDF had written an apostoilic constitution that allowed Episcopalian parishes to become Catholic, that is, if they could do it without being sued. Hey, I'd like to drive a Maserati, that is, if I can do it without that pesky car payment.

As I said yesterday, the big thing Steenson and Clarence Pope didn't bring with them to their meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger was at least $100 million in pledges. Otherwise, this whole idea was just blowin' smoke, and smoke to a particular kind.

Fast forward to 2007. Nothing had changed, except that apparently Cardinal Law had phoned up Steenson to say, OK, His Holiness has greenlighted the big project, c'mon over! In 2007, Steenson was 55, the minimum age for early retirement. But he had a private plane to support, and any subsequent benefits he got as a Roman Catholic priest would not cover his wife. I've got to think he was taking a financial hit to do this, but the story up to 2007 was that Steenson traveled first class.

A visitor reports that sometime prior to 2007, Bishop Steenson remakred at a private meeting that he had "changed his mind" on women's ordination and now tentatively in favor of it. The visitor remarked that for much of the 1990s he was Rector of St. Andrew's Fort Worth, a church which in its earlier days had been quite "high church" but in the 1940s and 50s had become much more middle-of-the-road, and is now consciously low church. It was long one of the "high society" churches of Fort Worth.

As rector, Steenson wrote articles on his "renewed appreciation" of the value of the XXXIX Articles, and I'm told that, still characterizing himself as an Anglo-Catholic, he advocated that Anglo-Catholics should eschew practices which, although good and laudable in themselves, would alienate their Evangelical Anglican brethren and get in the way of their collaborating effectively against "liberalism" in the Anglican Communion. The example he gave was the practice of "Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament" - which he insisted that Protestant Anglicans could not understand and would never accept.

So in many ways, he was theologically all over the map, and he often did what was convenient. The reason he gave in The Causes Of My Becoming Catholic was a last-straw obscure procedural move in the TEC House of Bishops -- he'd already called those who objected to Gene Robinson's consecration schismatics.

So my inner detective wants to know: Why did Steenson really resign as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande when he must have fully understood the project as approved could never succeed as a practical matter?

My Inner Detective Has A Question

I'v been thinking more about the agenda behind repeated proposals, pretty much all with Cardinal Law behind them, for an Anglican personal prelature. The first has been outlined by Fr Jack Barker, covering the 1976-7 discussions in the context of the 1976 Episcopalian general convention. The second was the 1993 meeting between TEC Bishop of Fort Worth Clarence Pope, Jeffrey Steenson, then a rector in that diocese, and Cardinal Ratzinger, which I covered here.. The third, a series of meetings between Pope's successor in Fort Worth, Jack Iker, and other Fort Worth clergy, took place in 2006-9, covered here.

Here's what my inner Philip Marlowe wants to know: why Episcopalians? Here's a YouTube by a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastor who outlines why he thinks Lutherans are closer to Catholics than Anglicans. It's at a 101 level, and he misses some key points, but I think he's basically correct:

The first thing he misses, though it doesn't really damage his basic point, is that he relies on the XXXIX Articles as a credal statement. He speaks with specific reference to the ACNA here, but the ACNA uses the 1979 BCP with TEC, and the 1979 BCP places the Articles in a section called Historical Documents of the Church. A liberal TEC priest explained in an adult forum I attended that this meant these were sorta-kinda interesting but no longer strictly binding. This would presumably apply to the ACNA as well as TEC.

The pastor's point in the YouTube, which is echoed in other sources I've seen, is that Article XVIII

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.

is in opposition to the doctrine of Real Presence, to which Lutherans ascribe. However, it's also recognized that Anglicanism has not been able to enforce doctrine effectively one way or another for some centuries, if ever, so this question is actually up to individual Anglicans. But the pastor's basic point stands -- we simply don't know exactly what any individual Anglican actually believes with regard to the Lord's Supper or just about anything else.

So, why did Cardinal Law take Episcopalians as his target, when their doctrinal statements, insofar as they can be taken seriously, are farther from Catholicism than Lutherans? One place to speculate would be that high-church Anglo-Catholics fetishize liturgy over doctrine. As long as you're facing the right direction, wear the right vestments, light the correct number of candles, swing the thurible just the right way, who needs a catechism?

The Michael Voris wing of the Church was exercised a few years ago when Pope Francis made friendly gestures toward Lutherans and Bp Barron called Luther a "mystic of grace". But when my ELCA pastor friend calls himself a "high church Lutheran", I think he actually means something more specific than anyone who calls himself a "high church Anglican", which more accurately refers to preference in vestments, liturgical observance, and church architecture than doctrine.

Indeed, this is what the New Model ordinariate startups have been stressing: "reverent" liturgy over the Church as unity. Sell a fantasy of building a gothic monument in the piney woods one day over the need to support an existing messy parish with all the human issues it entails.

But this goes to why Cardinal Law seems to have had such interest in rubbing the sores of Anglican dissent over three decades, and it also gives some insight into why the 1993 and 2006-8 proposals were so half baked. If the 1993 proposal had been at all serious, Pope and Steenson would have gone in, not with just a draft of Anglicanorum coetibus, but with pledges of at least $100 million for purchasing real estate, establishing a pension fund and other benefits, and litigation. ($100 million would probably have been inadequate by at least one order of magnitude, but it would at least be an initial indication of how serious the move would be.)

What eventually emerged in 2009 generated a certain amount of hype but little else, and only the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society and several dozen highly marginal Protestant clergy ever took it seriously. I think this is because the 1970s and 1993 proposals were made primarily to advance Law's personal agenda. Had John Paul II passed away in the mid 1990s, it's possible that Law, with good contacts in Opus Dei, support from the Spanish speaking Church, backing from the Bernardin wing of AmChurch, and the achievement of publishing the Catechism, could have had good prospects in a conclave. If he'd brought over 250,000 Episcopalians as well, it could well have sealed the deal.

But the Anglican proposals were never realistic. A more productive evangelical direction could well be with Lutherans. The more I see of Francis, the more I think there's substance there.

Visitors Respond To The "Reverent Mass Directory"

I've had several responses from visitors to yesterday's post on the Reverent Catholic Mass site. Here's the reaction of a visitor whom I've found generally level-headed:

Being very curious about the Reverent Mass Directory, I perused the site. I was interested in how they determined which churches made the list and here are their criteria. It says the Indicators found on church websites or in the bulletins were used to include or exclude Masses. How you can know if a Mass is celebrated reverently without actually witnessing it, I’m not sure, however, the part I found most elucidating was the column of Disqualifiers. Some listed were pretty vague: controversial ministries, controversial Parish Teaching Programs and the one I liked best, Other. Other what? Don’t know, just Other. OK.

By looking over this directory, I am reminded of 1 Corinthians where Paul chastises the “smart” people in Corinth that their “wisdom” was causing disunity in the Body of Christ and creating scandal for the “not as smart” as it caused them to sin or fall away. Is this directory a tool to unite and nurture the Body of Christ in our Church or is it causing division and a sense of “better than thous”? Other than the fact that the methodology seems very subjective and a little sketchy, I don’t’ understand why this tool isn’t being promulgated by more Bishops who surely know what constitutes a reverent Catholic Mass.

Another "disqualifier" was "Altar Girls". People may not like female servers -- heck, they may not like the style of stained glass in the nave -- but female servers are fully licit in the Catholic Church. According to Catholic Answers:

Jesus Christ gave his Catholic Church the power to bind and loose (Matt. 16:18-19; 18:15-18), which includes liturgical disciplinary matters such as permitting or not permitting female altar servers. Consequently, because the Church has lawfully permitted female altar servers, we can conclude that girls or women who choose to be altar servers are not acting in disobedience toward Jesus.

So it seems to me that in this particular regard, the people who are maintaining this list are causing division among people who are following the teachings of the Church in full good faith. But I have other questions. Leaving aside the ordinariate masses that are novus ordo with guitar accompaniment. What about the ones that are held in dilapidated buildings with serious maintenance issues? How is this "reverent"? What about the Our Lady of the Atonement facility, some part of which has been an incomplete empty shell for some years? How is such a fire and safety hazard "reverent"?

My regular correspondent nots,

The use of the word “reverent” to mean something objective when it more accurately describes a subjective state is part of the problem. Something entirely specious could meet my personal expectations of what “reverent” looks like, or make me feel “reverent.” Something coming from deep reverence may not evoke similar feelings in me because of class or cultural differences.

Yesterday's post also mentioned a "Mystery Worshipper" account of a mass on a different website that doesn't use the criteria on the Reverent Mass site. A visitor who is a parishioner at Our Lady of the Atonement remarked,

I just had a look at the reverent Mass directory. Around San Antonio, Our Lady of the Atonement is the only parish listed. I read the account of the Mystery Worshipper. If there was one half as good as the one that visitor described around here I would have attended. There just isn't.

But one former OLA massgoer indicated that in the 1980s and 1990s, the lack of good masses elsewhere in the archdiocese did in fact chase people to OLA. But that visitor said that the combination of disillusionment with Fr Phillips and the increased reverence of other masses due to the leadership of Abp Gómez had allowed that visitor and others to return to their former parishes. So again, we're back to individual preference, and it's hard to avoid thinking the Reverent Mass Directory is promoting a certain level of snobbery that's in fact divisive.

But it's also plain that the Directory confirms the theory I've been forming that among certain Catholics there's an abstract "ordinariate" that does things right and can do no wrong -- confirmation is the criterion that simply suggests that the word ordinariate in a parish bulletin is enough to get them on the list -- indeed, even if they don't have a bulletin, a possibly out of date reference on the ordinariate parish finder will put that possibly empty facility on the list anyhow.

But there's nothing on the criteria that would disqualify St Thomas the Apostle Phoenix from the list, at least as described on the Mystery Worshipper site. I suppose I could e-mail them and ask why that one isn't on the list, but I have things I'd rather do with my time. Today, for instance, I have to go to the dentist.

The Elephant In The Sanctuary

We were at our parish winter dinner-dance this past Saturday chatting with friends, and the subject turned to how and when we discovered our parish. In our case, we started attending mass five years ago when, as I scouted nearby parishes during the liturgical Christmas season, I came across this elephant in the Nativity display in the sanctuary at one parish. Clearly it had helped bring the Magi to Bethlehem.

My wife told our friends, "That was it. This was going to be our new parish." Our friends explained that the elephant was in fact quite recent, although it predated our arrival. That came as a surprise to me. Somehow I supposed that this must have been some traditional artifact handed down over generations from the pre-Conciliar era of natural piety.

Our friends, who are in fact fairly well-connected members of the parish (they could control which table we were seated at for the dinner, for instance) also revealed that they were fairly new as well. The woman, based on what I could gather from her account, had become fully active as a Catholic only in the process of seeking out a catechism program for her son, and she'd settled on this parish as the "least namby-pamby". But as she became more involved, she'd found the need to climb the Catholic learning curve herself. We all toasted to no namby-pamby.

What this exchange taught me was that, although our parish has always been successful, it's had a history, and it's renewed itself throughout its history, as have its members. I was stuck in an old mythology of pre-Conciliarism in spite of myself, assuming that what was good about the parish, like the communion rail, had only survived the Council, not that it had grown and renewed itself since then. Important lesson.

Over the weekend a visitor sent me a link to a Mystery Worshipper entry on the Ship of Fools website, this one for St Thomas the Apostle, Phoenix, AZ. This appears to be a parish roughly the same size, with the same reverent OF mass as our parish, the only difference is that one Sunday mass there is ad orientem, while we're always versus populum. Oddly, the mystery worshipper isn't quite sure what to do with it.

What musical instruments were played?

Organ, an electronic instrument up in the choir loft. There was also a mixed choir – I couldn’t see up in the loft from my vantage point and so couldn’t count how many singers there were.

It sounds as though the visitor isn't familiar with contemporary organ technology. There are electronic keyboards, which are the sort of thing you bring into a cafetorium for an ordinariate mass, and then there are modern digital organs, which carry digital recordings of actual organ pipes, played by consoles with multiple manuals and foot pedals just like a regular pipe organ. These digitally generated sounds can be further tweaked both digitally and acoustically, and often mixed with actual organ pipes, to produce a significant instrument. The hybrid one in our parish dates from 2007 and is currently used in a concert series.

Given the size of the parish at St Thomas the Apostle Phoenix and the location of the organ, I've got to think the visitor is talking about something similar, and to describe it as "electronic" is misleading. The account of the mass also suggests the visitor doesn't quite know what to make of it:

Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?

It was the most extraordinary celebration I have ever seen. Everything was done with dignity and style. As mentioned, the priest wore traditional Roman vestments, and celebrated ad orientem. Almost everything was chanted. Incense billowed in abundance, and bells jingled at all the right places, including the Hanc igitur, which you hardly ever see anymore. The eucharistic prayer was the Roman Canon. The music was, for the most part, modern Catholic, but miles above the usual Singing Nun stuff you hear nowadays. The priest and choir chanted as much of the mass as they could. The Kyrie was chanted in Greek; the Agnus Dei in Latin. The exchange of peace was rather tame; no one offered me the peace. Given everything else, I was surprised to see that the altar party did not indulge in liturgical embraces – rather, they shook hands. The bulletin tersely warned, ‘Only Catholics who are not conscious of grave sin and have fasted for one hour may be admitted to Holy Communion.’ I did not receive; those who did received under the species of bread only.

This sounds slightly higher-church than our parish (we normally use Eucharistic Prayer 3, but at certain times sing the Kyrie in Greek and the Agnus Dei in Latin). But this is an OF mass like ours, and the visitor found it "extraordinary". And it comfortably filled a nave with 1100 capacity on Super Sunday.

But a day or two after the visitor sent the link to the St Thomas Pnoenix mass, another visitor sent a link to a Reverent Mass Directory. Curious, I did a spot check, and neither our parish nor St Thomas the Apostle Phoenix appeared -- but oddly, every ordinariate parish is listed. Now, we might allow that perhaps a dozen ordinariate parishes might fully qualify with a significant organ, a music program, and more than low double digits at mass. But every last one is on this list, and as my rgular correspondent put it, "including Our Lady of Good Counsel, Jacksonville, NC, meeting in a suite in a strip mall for the OF with guitar accompaniment. At least we could say that this indicates that the Ordinariate has a good rep, however unevenly merited."

But this leads me to think many Catholics have a knee-jerk expectation that most parishes do not have reverent masses, while Eastern rite or Latin mass parishes automatically do -- which is reflected in that rather silly directory the visitor sent me. Even for myself, I find I need to rethink this sort of expectation. You can find real parishes with reverent Catholics far more frequently than you'd think.

The visitor who sent me the directory said,

I love Anglican English but it's not as big in the larger culture anymore so there's a lack of interest in keeping it going. Born Catholics usually don't care about the English in the services (at Mass, for most people). They only care about the English they have a tradition of using, the prayers of the rosary. That's why the missal and even the most liberal parish drop back to Tudor English for the Our Father. But some who do discover Anglican English,and a traditionalism that's not in Latin love them. We'll disagree on whether that's a good thing.

Opus Dei doesn't work. It's a good idea on paper - recruit whiz kids and spiritually form them so they can apply Christianity when they rule - but it flopped, maybe because it's the world's way, not God's. That doesn't mean Escriva was bad. Just mistaken. Saints can make mistakes.

. . . I'm happy for conservative OF, the traditional Latin Mass (a big part of my formation), the ordinariate (same, in a way: born Episcopal), and the Eastern rites, one of which, Byzantine, has become my home. If something/someone follows all our teachings and respects my customs, I won't trash his part of Team Catholic.

Reconstructing "The New Donatists" -- II

As far as I've been able to find so far, three excerpts of Jeffrey Steenson's "The New Donatists" exist on the web now. The main copy appears to have been on the website of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, and a commenter here appears to have found it in 2007 even after Steenson's resignation was announced. (I found a copy on line even after starting this blog in 2012.) The main point there was Steenson's apparent reference to the "continuing" option for Episcopalian dissenters not being viable.

This was, of course, insightful and correct. A second post quotes a brief remark,

. . . which ought to raise for us the disturbing images of continuing Anglican churches where prelates seem to outnumber people.

This carries forward Douglas Bess's observation a decade earlier in Divided We Stand that The Episcopal Church never felt the "continuing" secessions were worthy even of notice. Steenson on one hand is reflecting received TEC opinion here, but on the other hand, as a bishop, he's now taking notice of the post-Gene Robinson secessions that led to the ACNA, clearly a different matter if he's going to the trouble of comparing them to Donatists.

My regular correspondent notes that "The New Donatists" was delivered as the T. W. Smith Lecture at St John’s, Elora, Ontario, in 2005. Various references on versions of Steenson's curriculum vitae have said it was in the process of being published, so it appears to have been an important event at the time, at least for some, although it got little notice until it surfaced in the context of Steenson's 2007 resignation from his Episcopalian see.

The recognized start of the "continuing" movement was the 1977 Congress of St. Louis, which took place in the wake of the 1976 Episcopalian general convention that approved prayer book revisions and the ordination of women.

Steenson was not ordained an Anglican deacon in the UK until 1979, serving in TEC parishes as of 1980, so we must assume he had made his peace with the new order by the time he began his career. Those who knew him over this period recognized that he was extremely ambitious. Unlike Episcopal priests who'd been ordained before 1976, such as James Mote or Jack Barker, the developments did not come as any surprise or disappointment for Steenson.

Indeed, at least for him in his position as bishop, they were orthodoxy, or in parallel with Burkeans of 2008, since Roe v Wade was settled law, Barack Obama was the supporter of tradition, and any Republican who opposed it was the insurgent.

This comment carries the quote

Donatism did not represent a significant departure from creedal orthodoxy. But ... this is exactly what is happening in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in the USA.... [These are] the creedal questions: for instance, same-sex blessing held out as marriage is a doctrinal not a disciplinary matter. When a local church acts unilaterally against the counsel, indeed the pleas, of the rest of the Christian world, who is the schismatic?

Apparently the post-Robinson secessionists are acting "unilaterally against the counsel, indeed the pleas, of the rest of the Christian world"! Edmund Burke rests peacefully in his grave with a slight smile!

Several visitors have sent me links to another excerpt, which appears to be the conclusion of the paper:

. . . May I conclude by taking up a point made earlier about the Donatists’ failure of confidence. They feared the intrusion of worldly influences into their community; the future was an ominous place; they wanted to close up the Ark because the rain clouds were on the horizon, and they feared further contagion from the wicked. These are the fears that traditional, orthodox Anglicans experience also. Can they sustain themselves and preserve their identity in a hostile church? Will they be overcome by ordination policies and deployment practices designed to deny them of leaders? Will they gradually change to be more like those whose values they despise and abhor?

It is such fears that induce faithful people to try schism, and certainly to them encouragement must be given. There is a positive value of living under the authority of this church even in those places where it seems hopelessly compromised. It is not compromise to live faithfully under the laws of such a church. And if we are in fact on the horizon of a newly aligned ecclesial world, it is crucial that we prepare spiritually for this future: by overcoming anger, by subduing passions, with charity to all. The Church that we experience now will not be the Church that will be gathered in heaven. Are not these words of the blessed Augustine wonderfully ã propos? -- “But let the separation be waited for until the end of time, faithfully, patiently, bravely.”

It's hard to avoid a conclusion that Then-Bp Steenson was basically out for Jeffrey N Steenson. As of the time he delivered the T W Smith Lecture in Elora, ON in 2005, all he knew was that John Paul II had put the Anglicanorum coetibus proposal of 1993 on indefinite hold. So his course ahead would have been to make the best of spending the rest of his career as an Episcopalian bishop. But once Ratzinger became pontiff and the prelature idea was resuscitated, things changed. We can be sure that Steenson made no move until his designation as the prelate in question was fully assured, at which time he moved.

One question that still remains is what he anticipated for the North American ordinariate -- as things have shaken out, of course, it has become nothing but a clone of a dozen or more "continuing" denominations. As my regular correspondent pointed out,

He had neither a record of experience in starting something from scratch or being on the margin, nor the desire of a younger man on the make to throw himself into a new task of that kind. He had no competent support staff. For every Yale Divinity/Nashotah House alumnus coming forward for ordination, he had ten men with degrees from Bethel Reformed Seminary, or no recognised Divinity degree at all. He had a part-time teaching job to support himself, thanks to his patrons, the Davises. One could feel sorry for him.

Reconstructing "The New Donatists" -- I

My regular correspondent sent me a link to another blog post from 2007 with commentary on Msgr Steenson's previous essay, now apparently purged from the web, "The New Donatists", which contains an excerpt. Depending on what else may come in today, I'll discuss this more tomorrow with whatever excerpts and commentary that may become available. I think this essay is important in the intellectual history of Anglicanorum coetibus due to the insights it provides into the thought processes of Jeffrey Steenson, a key player in its inception.

But it's worth reviewing what Donatism was in the history of the Church. I found this essay by Patrick Madrid at Catholic Answers:

The schism had gotten under way before Donatus came to power, but it became identified with him thereafter. His predecessor, Majorinus, was elected as a rival bishop in Carthage because the bishops who had elected Caecilianus had dealt leniently with the traditores, men and women whose faith was compromised during Diocletian’s brief but bloody persecution, initiated in February, 303.

. . . The traditores were those who renounced Christ to avoid martyrdom or who, when their churches and houses were searched by the Roman authorities, handed over sacred artifacts rather than face death. In light of the many who endured martyrdom rather than renounce Christ, those who survived the persecution (which ended in 305) were outraged that priests and deacons who were traditores were allowed to resume their ministry after being reconciled to the Church through confession. This perceived injustice provoked a popular backlash with grave theological implications.

Majorinus and other leaders of this faction asserted that the sacraments were invalid, even wicked in the eyes of God, if dispensed by a traditor bishop, priest, or deacon. This view expanded to include clergy who were in a state of mortal sin of whatever sort.

By denying the intrinsic efficacy of the sacraments the Donatists claimed the sacraments could be celebrated validly only by those in the state of grace. They required the re-baptism of any Catholic who came over to their sect.

Donatists had the outward forms of Catholicism, including bishops, priests, and deacons, Mass, and the veneration of the relics of martyrs. The heresy of Donatism lay not primarily in the denial of particular Catholic doctrines but in the assertion that only “sinless” men could administer the sacraments validly. The schism was effected by the rejection of the lawful authority of validly-elected Catholic bishops and culminated in illicit but valid ordinations of schismatic bishops, priests, and deacons.

Steenson in his essay drew a parallel between those Episcopalians who, in his view, were insisting that gay priests and bishops be "sinless" in administering the sacraments and the Donatists, who were heretics and schismatics. His implication was that dissident Episcopalians, at the time of his writing in the process of seceding from TEC to form the ACNA, were forming an equivalent schismatic sect.

One problem for Steenson's argument, leaving aside other arguments we've already cited from "continuers", is that probably the most erudite discussion of Donatism in recent decades is Catholic theologian B C Butler's in The Church and Unity (1979). Butler's particular argument, against the Anglican scholar S L Greenslade, is that a detailed reading of the Church Fathers on schismatics, especially including the Donatists, suggests that Anglicans are also schismatic.

Thus an argument from one schismatic that others in the same group are also schismatic is ridiculous. Oddly enough, my regular correspondent makes the point that Steenson's bent was theological and scholarly, not administrative, but certainly in his later role as a professor of patristics in Catholic seminaries, he might have been expected to be familiar with Butler. One might also have expected a man of integrity to disavow the contradictions implicit in "The New Donatists", but instead, he seems to have gone to some effort simply to scrub the whole record.

Of the text itself, my regular correspondent notes

I note it was originally delivered in Elora, ON, a small town about an hour and a half from Toronto. Maybe there is a copy on file in a Divinity school library here.

I hope anyone who has located the original text, or other references on line, can forward them to me. I've now and then been puzzled here about Steenson's somewhat careless and imprecise expression -- his reference to Anglicans coming into the Church via Anglicanorum coetibus as "catechumens" in another public statement was incorrect; these people are clearly already baptized and are "candidates". But in the whole context of Anglicanorum coetibus, none of this should be a surprise.

How Things Looked In 2007

A visitor sent me links to two threads at the Anglican Continuum blog that are contemporary with Jeffrey Steenson's 2007 resignation as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande. The first asks why he didn't become a "continuer" instead of going to Rome, and the comments reflect widely varying assumptions about Steenson's motives. If you think about it, if certain churchmen see Anglicanism as "true", then the response of an Anglican bishop, who must certainly endorse the "truth" of Anglicanism more than most others, must be to seek out a version of Anglicanism that must be more faithful to its "truth".

(On the other hand, if you're a Burkean Anglican, which Roger Scruton pretty clearly is, then you endorse Anglicanism because it's traditional and a repository of good ideas, not because there's any central "truth" there, just a certain soundness, and your response to gay bishops, gay marriage, the ordination of women, or the revision of prayer books is basically to fulminate. I'm not endorsing this, either, and I don't believe this was necessarily Steenson's position, nor the position of the commenters at the Anglican Continuum blog, just an observation on a particular approach to the problem.)

A commenter at the blog says,

Jeffrey Steenson has been an Anglo-Papalist for many years, probably even since before his ordinations in ECUSA in 1979 and 1980. . . . In several conversations that I have had with him over the past three years he has more than once stated that "the answer is B16."

I would guess that this was a Delphic way of telegraphing that Big Things were in fact under way in Rome even then, though nobody would be able to put the pieces together until knowledge of the 1993 meeting with Ratzinger and continued contacts with Cardinal Law over the course of Steenson's career became more generally available. But the author of the original post concludes,

Both ["continuing"] Parishes and clergy appear to come and go and it is difficult to countenance a stable future ministry within something that appears so ‘fragile’ and ‘unpredictable’.

For those who have families / dependants and who seek a refuge from the instability of modern Anglicanism I can see why Rome appears the most straightforward option.

But this is again something of a modified Burkean option, a least-bad solution to circumstances that would make adhering to fully sound, whether or not "true", doctrine impractical.

The second post expands on this dilemma.

If anyone truly believes in the claims of the Papacy, he should go to Rome because of his conscience. If someone does not believe those claims, as I do not believe them (as defined in our time), he should not go to Rome. Furthermore, it is risky to enter our Continuing Anglican world unless one is sure of his financial health should the ministry fail to provide a living, which is often the case. Nonetheless, the only reason for a clergyman to join us is because he actually believes that the Anglican Way is right and good, and worth saving from the wreckage of the Cantuarian apostates. If Bp. Steenson believes, as it seems he does, in the claims of the Roman Magisterium, then I can only be happy for him to find a place among that branch of God's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The author then proceeds to examine the claims of Steenson's now-lost essay "The New Donatists" which currently seems to exist, like the writings of pre-Socratic philosophers, only in commentary. (The visitor who sent me the links says he may be able to locate a paper copy, which I will at least excerpt here if it becomes available.)

Second, he assumes that traditionalists question the sacramental validity of ECUSA and its allies on the ground of the personal unworthiness of ECUSA's leaders. This would be true Donatism but it is in fact a false depiction of the reasons for that question. Instead, those of us who doubt that ECUSA today either possesses or can confer valid Orders, and therefore doubt that it can validly confect and administer those Sacraments that depend upon an Apostolic ministry, do so not because of the manifest unworthinesss of ECUSA representatives such as Vickie Gene Robinson but on quite another ground.

I think the author and the commenters are all struggling to find noble motives for Steenson's move, but they're understandably based on incomplete information, which Steenson, Bp Clarence Pope, and indeed Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Law had been at pains to keep strengstens geheim since 1993. "The New Donatists" was written a year or two before Ratzinger rose to the papacy, and Steenson would have had no clear path forward beyond remaining a good Burkean Anglican, so as a good Burkean, he endorsed the "traditional" path as more recent Burkeans endorsed Barack Obama as the most traditionalist candidate over two Republicans.

But knowing Ratzinger's agenda -- as he not too clearly implied in the B16 remark quoted above -- he simply saw a new path after 2005. A few of the commenters in the first thread linked above recognized that Steenson was a man on the make from the start, probably even before his Episcopalian ordinations, as indeed observers noted throughout his subsequent TEC career.

I've wondered, in fact, exactly where the Anglican personal prelature stood in Cardinal Law's own agenda, assuming the remarks from people who to some extent knew him, like Philip Lawler, are true, that Law expected to become pope after John Paul II. It's possible that had John Paul greenlighted the prelature idea in 1993 instead of placing it on indefinite hold, Law might have been able to use it as an achievement comparable to the Catechism in the runup to a conclave.

John Paul, for that matter, may have understood this about Law better than anyone else. Whatever the actual circumstance, it wasn't such a bad idea to put it on hold, and it would have been a better idea to keep it there.

How Things Looked In 2011

A visitor found a link to the USCCB's page, still up on their site, covering the report of Cardinal Wuerl to the November 2011 General Assembly on the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus. In hindsight, several things stand out. Perhaps the biggest is what a psychologist might call "flat affect".

What is Anglicanorum coetibus?

This is an apostolic constitution issued by Pope Benedict XVI in November 2009 that authorized the creation of "ordinariates," geographic regions similar to dioceses but typically national in scope. Parishes in these ordinariates are to be Catholic yet retain elements of the Anglican heritage and liturgical practices. They are to be led by an "ordinary," who will have a role similar to a bishop, but who may be either a bishop or a priest.

Note: Anglicanorum coetibus is pronounced Anglican-orum chay-tee-boose.

While the weepy grandiosity we often now see from spokespeople for the ordinariate is happily not to be found here, the lack of any particular enthusiasm for the project is also apparent.

• In September 2010, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, was asked by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to be its delegate for the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus in the United States.
• The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops created an ad hoc committee that includes Cardinal Wuerl, Bishop Kevin Vann of Fort Worth and Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester to assist the CDF with implementation of the document and to assess interest in an ordinariate for the United States. Fr. Scott Hurd, a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, was named as a staff liaison to the committee.

(Note the reference to "in the United States". Even by November 2011, there was an expectation that there would be a separate Canadian ordinariate, something that appears to have been disapproved by Cardinal Collins at the last minute, but which was never discussed publicly.)

Another item that stands out for two big reasons is this:

Has an ordinary been named yet?

No. The canonical establishment of the ordinariate will take place on January 1, 2012, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. An ordinary for the United States will be named at that time.

The first issue is that the identity of the presumptive ordinary had to have been known to all in the loop since his resignation as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande in 2007, moving to Rome under the auspices of Cardinal Law, whose pet project had always been the Anglican personal prelature. Jeffrey Steenson, who had attended the 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger that effectively presented a draft of Anglicanorum coetibus, was the clear choice for the job once TEC Bp Clarence Pope's failing health rendered him unsuitable.

So why the big secret? I would guess that ecumenical issues were in play, and Rome didn't want to present a picture of poaching an Episcopalian bishop directly to become a Catholic ordinary. But if Steenson left TEC in 2007, and the North American ordinariate wasn't erected until 2012, couldn't someone have decided there'd been a decent enough interval and announced his designation in, say, mid 2011?

I ask this because, in hindsight, the process of setting up the North American ordinariate was in fact ongoing, with an ad hoc committee and a staff liaison at work from 2010. The fact was that a Yale-Nashotah House clique that included Scott Hurd, Jon Chalmers, and his wife, as well as the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clergy who'd previously surrounded Steenson, all had an inside track, and it's not unreasonable to assume that the parishes to be formed and the clergy who'd be appointed to them were all known well before January 2012.

So the process was anything but transparent. Oddly, though, nearly all those who were on the inside track. from Hurd to Steenson, flamed out within a few years of the ordinariate's erection. Might the project have benefited from better personnel procedures? Not only that, but I think the implementation suffered from the assumption that everything would start up just fine on January 1, 2012. Before that magic date, nobody was in charge, there was no clear line of authority, and people were looking, for instance, to David Moyer for guidance on how TAC parishes should prepare, when Moyer, preoccupied by that time with his own legal problems, could be of no help.

The second question was simply Steenson's suitability for the job. While he was a member of an Anglo-Catholic clique within TEC, he wasn't an inspiring leadership figure, and his public utterances were few and in fact highly politic. His essay "The New Donatists", which has apparently gone down the memory hole (does anyone have a copy?) implied that those who objected to gay TEC bishops were schismatic. (Why call them Donatists otherwise?) Yet he himself made what from an Episcopalian point of view was a schismatic move only a few years later, when his career prospects improved in Rome.

His later essay "The Causes For My Becoming Catholic" is obscure and disingenuous, since it makes no mention of his still-secret position as ordinary-in-waiting, while he also sees the need to dance away from his prior accusation that those who disagree with TEC's current course are schismatics.

I continue to think the assumptions at the basis of Anglicanorum coetibus are flawed, but it's hard to avoid thinking that the project could have been implemented better if more capable people had been identified and the process had been more transparent, with clear lines of authority, from the start.

“You Can’t Find A Directory Of Reverent OF Masses.”

A visitor quoted this remark from yesterday's post and added,

And therein lies the rub. You will also get a pretty varied response if you call the Chancery of most mainline dioceses. The response to that question will vary between an unending shuffling/on hold/ someone will call you back and no one ever does, to that sort of thing doesn’t exist/isn’t tracked or all our Masses are reverent, what do you mean?

Knowing what I know about Bp. Barron (which is only what I have gleaned from news reports, some of his own written essays and from taped presentations/online, Youtube type videos he has produced) I would guess he would say the truth will win out. He seems to be the type who will put out his message and respond if engaged but he is not out actively searching for folks to judge or pick a fight with, just to share Christ’s message.

The Michael Vorises of the world seem to have a different, more confrontational mission. Scaring or shaming folks into the Church can be an imperfect solution until they can grow into a more perfect understanding of the Church. Each has a path to round up lost sheep but I think Bp. Barron prompts people to make up their own minds to follow the Lord or they are not really exercising free will.

The people who are fixated on single file, cookie-cutter paths to Heaven and prayer are not getting the benefit of the wonderful, sometimes beautiful, sometimes obscured, mostly unfathomable complexity with which God works in the world and draws all men to Himself.

Besides, I would also guess Bp. Barron and Abp Gómez have too many fires to put out and much larger fish to fry just trying to get the USCCB on the same page, much less random bloggers, media-ites and otherwise Faithful, practicing Catholics with different opinions and a microphone.

I wasn't completely serious in referencing a non-existent directory of reverent OF masses yesterday, simply because parish resources (and legitimate interests) differ widely. We're actually fairly familiar with another parish in northern California as well as our own, and this serves a highly diverse community ranging from wealthy Hollywood types to gentleman vintners to farm workers. The atmosphere is completely different there, but the mass is reverent, although in a different way. So I don't know if it would even be possible to list a single "directory" of reverent masses, and I don't actually blame a chancery that finds creative ways not to answer such questions.

But this does suggest to me that there ought to be reason for people to go exploring if they don't feel the mass at a nearby parish is satisfactory. The thing not to do would be suppose there's an abstract thing called an "ordinariate" that does things right, and until they can find or start an "ordinariate" evensong group or some such thing, they aren't going to look for a better parish in the diocese.

My regular correspondent adds,

The existence of a few OCSP communities with music more towards the “praise band” end of things, one of them the large (by Ordinariate standards) full parish of Christ the King, Towson, suggests that a directory of “capable music programs” in a diocese would be not as straightforward as a directory of EF liturgies. Of course Christ the King’s “Anglican” credentials were never robust to begin with, but that’s another issue. The point is that if one were searching for a Mass with liturgy and music of high quality and traditional style, one could not assume that it could be found at a local Ordinariate community, not just because it might be worshipping in a cafetorium or other space with no organ, or because it might not have enough competent singers to form a choir, or anyone to lead them, or some other logistical reason. They might just prefer something else. The composer of “Shine, Jesus, Shine” is CofE, after all.

UPDATE: A visitor points out that the Anglo-Catholic English Church Union published Travellers' Directories and Church Guides for Tourists, listing good masses with acceptable music and so forth, for many years, for example here.

UPDATE; My regular correspondent reports,

The Church Travellers’ Directory and its antecedents directed Catholic-minded Anglicans to parishes with Daily/Sunday Mass, scheduled Confessions, etc. It made no claims for the quality of the liturgy or the music. Indeed, it pointed out that “[a] change in the manner of the presentation of the Holy Mysteries may be no bad thing for any of us, when away from our accustomed altars...” “The information is intended to be factual, and must not be taken to imply any particular churchmanship. . .”

So this would be very similar to what we have in masstimes.org.