The Kool-Aid Drinkers

Since the Our Lady of the Atonement parish began to show up on this blog in a big way, I've heard from about half a dozen former communicants at the parish, who tell a consistent story. Most, by their account, were cradle Catholics and never actually registered there, but they attended mass and got involved for reasons like sending children to the school or a preference for the Latin mass that was offered. Thus they were able to maintain detachment while closely observing what went on -- and when the kids left the school or the Latin mass was discontinued, they left, too.

One impression they've all given me, consistently and independently, is of a core group of families, committed Phillips acolytes, who developed an intricate set of mutual favors and obligations within the parish. Not only were they members, but they, and often their children, were also employees. They were major donors, but of course, the donations effectively became kickbacks from their salaries, and at least some of those went not to the parish but to the Our Lady's Dowry off-the-books charity, where the expenditures were completely under Fr Phillips's control.

Another influential family had a building contractor business, and construction work for the parish and school went to them. Their big donations thus amounted to kickbacks as well. At some point before 2016, this family became fed up and left, but other families in this core group have remained up to now. The San Antonio visitors here say that although Fr Phillips has been prohibited from having a pastoral relation with the parish, and even from coming on the property, he continues to influence the donations of the core group, and they suggest that this group withholds donations without Phillips's OK. This has Fr Lewis, as one visitor puts it, "over a barrel".

The visitors who've told me about this situation pretty consistently refer to these families as "Kool-Aid drinkers". One visitor said recently,

[Redacted] was a member of the administration for many, many years. She had two boys who were there at the same time my kids were there. They were also untouchable. She was a gatekeeper and gatherer of info for Fr. Phillips and was in a position to protect him if and when issues raised by children and parents from the school arose as she held the titles of School Administrator, Lower School Administrator, etc. If parents had issues with teachers or other students, they had to go through her. And of course, if you complained incorrectly, you might just get “disappeared”. Don’t know that was because of [redacted], but she was certainly a conduit to Fr. Phillips of the pulse of the school and who were drinking the Kool-Aid and who weren’t.

I am not surprised by the big money donors. There were quite a few more I could rattle off, some of whom gave big, really big, until they got crosswise with the powers that be and disappeared never to be heard from again. The level of giving of the average parishioner at OLA blew the doors off the average amount giving by a run of the mill diocesan parishioner, not including the mega donors. Getting money out of people was Fr. Phillips's specialty, he could smell a mark from a mile away. I don’t know if Fr. Phillips is still pulling strings. I would guess he has Fr. Lewis over a barrel. Fr. Lewis needs the money and the street cred, Fr. Phillips has the power with the true believers in the project. How it is playing out is still shrouded in ambiguity.

It's not hard to extrapolate that if complaints about the school and faculty went through such screening, these core members were also covering for Dcn Orr.

Another former member said recently,

Fr Phillips and Dcn Orr were very creative. We know of the flimflammery and sleight-of-hand tactics used by the both of them. Let's assume for a minute that Fr Phillips wants to take on a very expensive project. He still has to go the traditional route of applying to the diocese for what he has in mind. Remember, no pastor can do anything to a parish without the Bishop's approval because the diocese owns the parish/property. Now let's play a little game here. Fr Phillips wants to build something. He has to raise half the money and the parishioners rebel.

Fr. Phillips does not want to wait to raise half of the money so he goes to his wealthy parishioners and gets them to cosign a loan to raise half of the required money. The Bishop has no knowledge of this arrangement, but says to himself, "Wow, Fr Phillips has raised the required half of the money in record time. There must be a good need for this project. I will get behind it and apply for the additional commercial funding." But, all along, the Bishop has no knowledge of the additional indebtedness that the parish has taken on with the cosigned loans. Now, you talk about a good con game, here it is. I am not saying this happened, but this is morphing into a really good book or movie!

As I've suggested, I'm increasingly convinced that some sort of deception like the one the visitor outlines here came to light during 2016, and in addition to the allegations of covering up for Dcn Orr, this became a reason for Abp Gustavo to remove Fr Phillips in early 2017. But it sounds as though Fr Phillips is still pulling strings. According to the first visitor above, the funding of the $4 million project still can't be separated from Fr Phillips's involvement:

[P]eople funding a direct need and then getting recognized for it was in place with Fr. Phillips. This would include people who donated $10,000 could sponsor a classroom that would have their names on a plaque outside the room as recognition. There were $5,000 sponsorships for something I don’t recall and various other things that they used to raise funds, all of which was great except all the checks for these fundraising efforts were to be made payable to Our Lady’s Dowry not Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church. That was the shell game Fr. Lewis and the faithful parishioners inherited.

It's hard to avoid thinking that in key ways, Fr Phillips is still running the show at Our Lady of the Atonement and indeed still getting kickbacks. It sounds as if he may have personal control of money in Our Lady's Dowry that had been intended for the $4 million construction project as well. I wouldn't pledge a penny to that thing in the first place, but donors ought to be able to assure themselves that no money previously intended for that project is still held by Our Lady's Dowry.

OK, It's Going To Be Medieval Times Without The Horses

A San Antonio visitor told me yesterday, regarding the unfinished school expansion at Our Lady of the Atonement,

The "new project" on the school is change it to an event venue... Weddings, Quiecesneras, banquets. . . you get the theme.

The explanation was the only way now to ever make a profit off this big hallow school is...EVENT VENUE TA-DA! The $4 million is to do that.. can't have an event venue with nothing but classrooms. . . well empty, unfinished classrooms. . .

This has been done, I think part of the implication from the visitor is, without any sort of announcement, parish meeting, prospectus, or anything else. However, private fundraising appeals have been made to major parish donors. Exactly how this relates to the $100,000 already registered on the fundraising thermometer at the parish billboard isn't clear. However, as far as anyone can determine, this billboard is the only public notice of the campaign.

As far as I can see, it's also disingenuous, since although the project features listed include a "multi-purpose auditorium and event venue" and "dining area with catering kitchen", the project as outlined on the billboard also includes "religious formation rooms", "additional classrooms, science labs, and computer labs". My regular correspondent thought the catering kitchen was a tipoff from the start. It sounds as though the academic facilities will be low on the list of priorities.

One question is whether this was on Fr Phillips's mind during the planning phases in 2010-14. The "meeting rooms" on the plan may always have been intended as hotel-style breakout or private function facilities. The hokey battlements on the school facade always suggested to me that somebody had Medieval Times on his mind when he dreamed the whole thing up.

Another San Antonio visitor comments,

They have pushed out fuzzy numbers about the school enrollment for so long it is hard to get a bead on what is happening. The 570 number is touted but if you look around, the real number is below 400, just how far below 400 I don’t know but I suspect it too, is dropping steadily.

They have eliminated same sex classrooms and have dropped down to only about one class per grade level. The high school population is abysmal, less than 100 for sure, maybe only 20 kids per grade. A tragedy of enormous proportions. And a very ungodlike racket it is…

So this raises entirely reasonable questions on whether the school was ever as successful as Fr Phillips and his supporters claimed, and how much the 2010-14 plans were developed to address precisely the same situation as that in which the parish finds itself in 2020, a school that's unsustainable that needs an infusion of "profit" for it and the parish to survive. Since the project as approved in 2016 was precisely an unfinished shell, it's hard to avoid thinking a follow-on project in the $3-4 million range was always in the plan to finish it out. But finish it out as what?

Let's get real for a moment. My wife and i travel to what amount to event facilities in resort areas once or twice a year (and will yet this year, if they ever let us out). These places have full time managers, salespeople, and catering staffs. You don't just have the school principal's secretary or whoever take the reservations down on her scheduler.

The first question is whether anyone, staff or volunteer, at Our Lady of the Atonement has the skills to undertake this wort of thing, and a problem I see is that given the parish history of nepotism, cronyism, kickback deals, and so forth, the parish could ever hire and retain capable people to run such an operation, especially if they have to report to or work with relatives or cronies of the ruling clique. I don't want to think about what would happen if it's run entirely by the Phillips children or those of his inner circle.

The second question is how long it will take to raise the necessary money to get started on the project, and how soon the project could realistically begin paying off, even assuming capable people are involved in the startup. Every indication is that the parish financial situation is dire, something Fr Phillips probably understood ten years ago. How much time does it have left? How much of the event venue plan is just a get-rich-quick fantasy?

The impression visitors have is that this continues to be Fr Phillips's original plan, and Fr Phillips is continuing to call the shots, notwithstanding he isn't allowed on the property and can't function as a priest there.

What Problem Was Fr Phillips Trying To Solve?

Using the information that's gradually coming to light (and I'm hearing more as I continue to post on this subject), let's return to the question I like to ask: what problem are we trying to solve? What we know about the concrete events in the Our Lady of the Atonement parish over the past decade is beginning to suggest an intriguing pattern.

Anglicnaorum coetibus was promulgated in 2009, with Fr Phillips a key cheerleader in the runup to the erection of the North American ordinariate. I'm told that he expected to be named ordinary, although other figures like David Moyer were also mentioned. As questions have gradually come to light, indicating that he was enabling and covering up for Dcn Orr, as well as running a financially squirrely operation with the parish and Our Lady's Dowry, I suspect he knew he could not have continued in the role he had as pastor, much less an Anglican papalist leadership figure, if he hadn't been made ordinary, so there was one big problem for him at the start.

As of January 2012, it was immediately clear that he wouldn't be named ordinary. Beyond that, as my regular correspondent puts it,

I remain amazed that Fr Phillips got away with as much as he did for as long as he did. We have agreed, I think, that Fr Phillips changed his mind about joining the Ordinariate in the first round because he had reliable information that Msgr Steenson intended to replace him. Why was that? On paper, he was by far the most successful priest in the Pastoral Provision and a leading force in the run-up to the erection of the OCSP. Presumably, however, Steenson had information that led him to believe, correctly, that the parish and the school were rife with personnel and financial problems rooted in Fr Phillips’ management.

I agree that Fr Phillips elected to remain with the Archdiocese of San Antonio once he realized in early 2012 that he would have no future in the North American ordinariate. From the posts on his blog that we've linked here, though, we know that he'd been planning to expand the school since 2010. The post from 2014, after he'd decided to keep the parish in the archdiocese, indicates that the finalized plan, at least as it existed in his own mind, would be to expand the school as an empty shell, with no finished classrooms.

The basic question here is why anyone would do this, incurring something like $11 million in new debt with no revenue earning classrooms available to pay it off. A subordinate question is why the archbishop would sign off on the project, which we know from Fr Phillips's blog he did in January 2016, if he understood this. My tentative conclusion, based on what we've come to know about Fr Phillips, is that he somehow misrepresented the project to the archdiocese.

New information is becoming available that may shed more light on this issue. I would say, based on that, that multiple factors brought the shaky nature of the project to the archbishop's attention over the course of 2016, and what must have been concealed from him probably built an unavoidable case for Phillips's removal, although the archbishop also know it would be controversial.

But given what we've been learning over the course of several years, it seems plain that Fr Phillips knew he wouldn't be able to keep all the balls he was juggling in the air much after 2012 if he weren't named ordinary. (The Church, of course, dodged a major bullet there, for which we must be grateful). So what problem was he trying to solve by building the school addition that, as specifically planned, could never pay for itself, especially when the blog post for 2014 indicates there was an apparent refocus from a plan for a smaller expansion that would have revenue-making classrooms to a bigger one that would not?

New information suggests Phillips may have thought he could continue to rely on donors who would let him keep kiting that check, so to speak, so that's one potential explanation. I'll talk about this in subsequent posts.

However, the overall recklessness of Fr Phillips's behavior -- and that goes to his strange relationship with Dcn Orr as well -- makes me wonder if Fr Phillips's judgment was somehow seriously impaired throughout the period he was pastor at Our Lady of the Atonement. In fact, I would go so far as to ask if this had an influence on his leaving the TEC diocese in Rhode Island.

Anglican papalists are men with secrets.

More Puzzles In San Antonio

My regular correspondent found this post at fr Phillips's blog from January 2016. There are two significant bits of information. One is the message, "The archbishop has signed the contract, the financing is in place, and the contractor is ready to begin this $11.4 million expansion of The Atonement Academy!" The other is this remarkably ugly architectural drawing of the project:

You know what? Texans aren't that tacky. The phony McMedieval crenellations are a cheapo imitation of Victorian prisons. This says maybe more than it intends about what goes on inside the parish, and indeed more than it intends about the whole Anglican project.

The remark about the archbishop signing the contract on the $11.4 million pretty clearly implies that this had been undertaken under the structure the visitor in yesterday's post explained, with the parish funding half the amount and the archdiocese securing a mortgage for the other half. But within almost exactly a year, the archbishop removed Fr Philips. Personnel issues are confidential, and most speculation about the removal has involved Fr Phillips's failure to report the credible allegations of abuse against Dcn Orr.

But I've got to wonder if something went seriously awry with the school project as well. The blog post from 2014 quoted yesterday isn't completely clear. ". . . we have continued to revise our plans and have elected to build the entire complex, including the auditorium shell, though it will not be finished-out when construction is completed." Does this refer to the whole project not being finished out, including the classrooms and so forth, or just the auditorium? Was something sufficiently unclear that it prompted the archbishop to remove Fr Phillips? Who knows? But I lean toward the idea there was a con of some sort in operation there, and Abp Gustavo was forced to act.

My regular correspondent omments,

I would bet that $4 million dollars is what OLA believes will complete the roughed-in building expansion. I agree that the process is far less transparent than it would be in a denomination with more congregational accountability, and no one has come forward with evidence that they have a professional quality fundraising program in place (indeed, as the most recent bulletin suggested, regular giving is off “drastically” this month). But I assume they got some kind of professional opinion on what it would cost to finish the job in accordance with the original plan.

The OLA bulletin for this past Sunday contains this message:

With Masses being suspended it is going to take a special effort on your part to assure the parish remains financial sound. Our current giving for the month is drastically less than usual. Please keep current with your giving.

All I can say is that I've been around the block enough times not to be surprised at how incompetence manifests. People who can't function do it in ways you don't expect -- which is to say, you expect people to exhibit normal ability, but when they don't, it's a surprise. I would not be surprised at anything that's been overlooked, forgotten, left out, sneaked in, stolen, covered up, or whatever else in this project. Look at the whole context of the parish's history.

Another visitor commented on my view that the unfinished building is both a fire and safety hazard:

It’s not a fire hazard. Think of a a strip mall you have seen built. They are built with an unfinished inside because tenants are going to fill the lease spaces. But you’re right about there not being much specifics about the project.

Except that any unsupervised space in this day and age is an invitation to homeless and squatters. Our own diocesan parish, with two schools, discovered that homeless managed to sneak into one of the buildings during ordinary entry and exit traffic and stay there over a weekend, which resulted in major revision of security precautions. You do not want homeless squatting in a school building, believe me. The risks of such an unsupervised space at the Atonement Academy boggle the mind.

And if homeless can sneak in, they'll start fires. Sorry. I would also check out what sort of insurance coverage the parish's policies actually provide for the unoccupied space.

Incompetence by its nature ought to be a surprise, although if it isn't, it's just a bigger form of incompetence.

The San Antonio Fundraiser: More Questions Than Answers

A couple of visitors have been digging into what can be learned about the $4 million project Our Lady of the Atonement has advertised on a sign at its site. My initial curiosity was piqued by the apparent lack of specificity in the proposal, but the visitors have raised questions beyond that. My regular correspondent, for instance, went through years of posts at Fr Phillips's blog and has found references to what seems pretty clearly to be this same proposal. From a post on November 14, 2014:

Our recognition has put a strain on our existing classrooms. At 570 students this academic year, (almost identical to our enrollment in the last three years), The Atonement Academy is at capacity in the current building, so the need to expand our classrooms is a necessary one, which we are doing! After years of planning, we are excited that construction has begun on our 117,000 sq. ft. expansion. This time last year, we were making earnest preparations for “Phase 1 and 2” of the expansion plan, which involved the construction of 19 new classrooms and four science labs, plus a dining hall, two practice gymnasiums, more offices and site preparations which include additional parking.

But this appears to be a 2014 update to an earlier plan from 2010:

We’ve revised our site plan and goal since the short 2010 Capital Campaign, making the design more cost-effective without sacrificing the needed classroom space. Because of your generosity, we have continued to revise our plans and have elected to build the entire complex, including the auditorium shell, though it will not be finished-out when construction is completed.

I'm not sure if the school publishes current enrollment numbers, but not long ago, a visitor familiar with the school went over past issues of its house organ and via photos and references determined that the program is operating at a much lower level than that described by Fr Phillips in 2014, for instance, dropping separate classes for boys and girls. So a worthwhile first question for Fr Lewis would be why he appears to be simply continuing a plan developed in the Phillips-Orr period, when enrollment and projected facility use were quite a bit higher.

Another visitor raises another very good set of questions:

It has been my experience in the past that when a parish wants to expand, make improvements or renovate, they first make application to the diocese. If the project meets with the Bishop's approval usually the parish has to come up with half of the money. Then the Bishop or the diocese will apply to a commercial bank for the additional funding for the project. So my question here is whether OLOTA is trying to raise four million dollars in this fundraiser or are they trying to raise eight million dollars? I do agree with your assessment that for a project this large four million seems unrealistically low.

Continuing along this thread, the next question is whether Bishop Lopes and company have the ability to secure the additional funding to complete the project. Next, most are aware of the murky waters surrounding the present mortgage on OLOTA. When the parish left the diocese and joined the ordinariate there was a very considerable balance left on the mortgage that the diocese was holding on the parish in the many millions of dollars. We are told in the OLOTA financial statement that the monthly payment on this mortgage is in the neighborhood of $58,000.00 a month.

If the present undertaking is to be realized, how much more would the total mortgage payment be? How could financing be arranged with the San Antonio diocese holding the mortgage on the parish and the ordinariate being responsible for the parish to pay this [additional] mortgage? The real question here is could any parish anywhere the size of OLOTA even afford to do this? How much money would the church and school have to generate to stay afloat?

These are the sorts of question that a functioning Episcopalian vestry made up of professional people like lawyers, bankers, and accountants would have hashed out -- and indeed, between them and the rector, they would have had a good idea of who could be hit for the money. It doesn't appear that in the case of OLA, there's a parish council or finance council of the same caliber, and this ought to be troubling.

Theoretically, if the parish council doesn't ask enough of these questions, they should at least be put to Fr Lewis in a general parish meeting. I have no indication any such thing has taken place -- can someone bring me up to date if it has? And if it took place, what were Fr Lewis's answers?

We're called to be good stewards. That means making effective use of our donations. I would not pledge a penny to this campaign without serious answers to these questions:

• Is this campaign just a renewal of ten-year-old plans that are out of date, given current enrollment and parish membership? Is the expansion projected in 2010-14 justified now?
• What part of this project does $4 million cover? Is this just the parish's portion of a larger amount that will be financed via Houston? If so, how does Houston intend to finance this?
• An additional mortgage payment will be beyond the parish's current income. What serious plan does Fr Lewis have to grow parish membership and school enrollment to the extent needed to cover the increased payment?
• If the $4 million to be raised by the parish is the full cost of the project, a much more detailed breakdown of project features and costs will be needed, as the projection seems unrealistic as shown.

It's hard to avoid thinking this project is at best premature, and the parish should expect to see results from Fr Lewis's leadership that give credibility to this proposal. Every account, though, is that Fr Phillips grew the parish to the extent it grew as part of a con job with smoke and mirrors. Fr Lewis doesn't appear to be even at Fr Phillips's level here.

The San Antonio Fundraiser

Although I hear regularly from several San Antonio visitors, mostly former parishioners at Our Lady of the Atonement who keep up with events there, I've heard remarkably few specifics about a $4 million fundraising campaign that's at least ostensibly intended to finish out the school addition, which is largely an empty shell, and which I've suggested all along is a fire and safety hazard in that state. A visitor sent me a photo of a billboard that now stands near the site. It gives as much as I've heard about the scope of the project (click on the image for a larger view):

Several questions come to mind. The first is that scope. What I originally heard from visitors was that the project was intended to finish out the school interior, but the details now include a new auditorium and events center, a second gymnasium, a catering kitchen, meeting rooms, and so forth. I've now got to ask if $4 million is going to cover all this. If some part of this is just a fancy way of saying "cafetorium", that might wash. But I simply don't know exactly what facilities currently exist in the school and how they fit in.

From our diocesan parish's experience, just normal facility renovations each summer are a major expense simply to keep the schools competitive, let alone expand them. It seems as though our parish parking lot is partly taken up with construction equipment every year just to maintain existing infratructure, and even projects like a new fence or new surface for the playground are separately funded. I'm just a moderately informed outsider here, but I'm wondering if this project has been adequately thought through, especially in the likely economic conditions over the next year or so.

Another question I have is exactly what's being projected here. Our diocesan parish hit my wife and me up for a fundraising project that was serious enough that we had to go back and redirect some income. To raise funds at that level with people serious enough to have the income to redirect, the proposal had to have credible detail. (The detail included, in at least some cases, whether people wanted to have a particular facility named after them, which at least shows a level of granularity that I'm not seeing so far at OLA.)

Are there project proposals or brochures that nobody's sent me? If there are, I'd like to see them. But so far, the impression I have is that the OLA parish is on a shaky foundation, even leaving aside a new fundraising project. Long-term problems, like churning in the school staff and administration, do not seem to have been solved. I'm told that school enrollment has been declining for some years as well. The visitor who sent the photo said, "This certainly is an ambitious project on the part of OLOTA considering all that is going on right now."

I would be interested to hear any other information visitors may have.

Another Signal From Kenneth's Frequency

As life continues to imitate Fringe, another incoherent signal has come over the Kenneth frequency, which I've been monitoring for something to do during the lockdown. I may need to call Walter Bishop and Agent Broyles. Here's the signal I got yesterday afternoon:

We have good statistical evidence that a large proportion of weekly-Mass attending Catholics think "Rome has got it wrong"

• 65% in favor of contraception
• 46% in favor of allowing cohabiting couples to receive Communion
• 45% in favor of women priests
• 37% in favor of the Church recognizing same-sex marriages

And as I pointed out to you last year, 37% of weekly mass attendees don't believe in the Real Presence.

Well, let's stop there. The statistics are from the Pew surveys, and Pew, like all foundations funded by the descendants of the robber barons (Pew is Sun Oil), it has a liberal, corporate-state bias. Among the questions I have, but don't see answered in the links, is the sample size, how Pew determined someone is Catholic, how they screen for sincerity when they say they go to mass "weekly", what kind of push questions are included in the poll, and how and where the poll was conducted.

UPDATE: Various visitors have pointed to methodology links on the Pew site, for instance here.

If they're pulling people aside as they leave mass, how rushed are the respondents? How likely are the respondents just to agree with the perceived views of the pollsters? How many of the respondents politely refused to be bothered? Or was this a phone poll? "If you're Catholic, press 1"? Pew doesn't tell us any of this. I simply have a hard time taking any such poll seriously, as polls have shown themselves less and less reliable.

Replying to yesterday's post on the Anglican Papalists complaining about "ghost" vs "spirit", a visitor commented,

I'm trying to raise a family, educate and form them in the saving faith of Christ; and they are worrying about whether to use ghost or spirit in a baptism formula when everyone, including God I presume, knows what is being asked.

The tail has wagged the dog on this deal for way too long.

Clearly anticipating this sort of reaction, the first visitor above, who'd come in on Kenneth's frequency, said,

Not that I'm endorsing the sentiments expressed on that Facebook group. People say all sorts of dumb stuff on the internet. But it's one thing to quibble about "Holy Ghost" vs "Holy Spirit" (I am indifferent), quite another to disagree with the Church about her non-negotiable teachings.

But if this visitor takes the Pew numbers seriously, as he must if he's presenting them to me as something that ought to change my mind about something, what does he propose to do about it? Dr Brand, in the paper I linked, feels the apostolate of the ordinariate laity will set a powerful example to other Catholics and renew the Church. Well, is it? Are schools an important part of this project? Then why is the only school in the ordinariate, which it inherited from the Pastoral Provision, on shaky ground?

Why have no new schools been started? If the communities haven't reached critical mass to do this, why not? One part of the Church's ongoing story is figures like St Francis of Assisi, St Catherine of Siena, or St Ignatius Loyola, who brought about renewal through their example and influence. How are these guys coming in on Kenneth's frequency -- "Please do not use my name" -- doing anything like this?

And this leaves aside the whole question of the sanctimonious types who know exactly how to answer all the Pew questions. Indeed, they and their families are first to the communion rail each Sunday to take the Sacrament kneeling, on the tongue, in both kinds, but they have secrets anyhow. Lots of secrets. Our Lord had their number in the gospels.

Yet Another Transmission From The Frequency, Kenneth

My regular correspondent sent me a screen shot from the Anglican Ordinariate Forum. The background is:

This is part of a conversation about the Baptismal Rite in Divine Worship: Occasional Services. Original poster inquired about finding a pdf of same, and somehow the Book of Divine Worship rite got into the conversation, and Leading Expert John Covert jumped in to point out that the BDW rite was suppressed, and this led into a discussion about the formula “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” which was used in BDW but explicitly forbidden the DW Baptismal Rite, although “Holy Ghost” is used elsewhere in DW. This as you can see then led to carping.

Click on the image below for a larger copy.

So the issue boils down to "Holy Ghost" is patrimonial and part of the Anglican heritage we are bringing into the Church. Except that the Church has gone all post-Conciliar NO, which means that the Church is imposing all kinds of non-patrimonial stuff on us Anglicans, who have it right to start with.

And anyhow, "an Anglican considering crossing the Tiber should have no obstacles put in his way other than the basic necessities of the Faith. . ." And I assume that the "basic necessities of the faith" are those that the Anglicans determine to be "patrimonial". My correspondent says the thread drifts into the usual wails and moans about OF Lectionary and other aspects of contemporary Catholic liturgical practice parachuted into DW despite lack of any connection to “Patrimony.”

So if these Anglicans are being treated unjustly by Rome, why not go back to Canterbury, where things are clearly patrimonial, and they keep all the basic necessities of the faith? Again, the subtext of this whole discussion is that Rome has got it wrong. There are multitudes of Christian options for those who feel Rome has got it wrong. Heck, if none of them suits this bunch, why don't they start a new one?

And it's hard to avoid the impression that these folks are angry.

A Clarification From Msgr Burnham, And Win-Win

A visitor forwarded this e-mail from Msgr Andrew Burnham:

I have just been given sight of your blog. The Inter-dicasterial commission, of which you write, has not been convened since Divine Worship: the Missal. I did produce the Customary, as you say, and I have tried a couple of times, without authorisation to update it and publish the results. I have not been part of the group producing an Ordinariate Office Book. I am now 72 and was retired from my position as liturgist when I was 70. I hope that helps.

It does appear that Msgr Burnham is distancing himself from the project.

Another visitor comments,

Perhaps some of the delay in producing an agreed upon formula for Anglican based daily offices is that the Roman Bishops have been working on their revised Liturgy of the Hours and the Anglicans are simply going to piggy-back on their work product in the way they piggy-backed the revision of the Gospels and readings into the three year cycle after Vatican II.

The revision of the Roman Breviary (or Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours, whichever you prefer) has been underway for many years. The final product is very near completion. Here is a link to their progress to date. As you can see, it takes quite a bit of time to accurately translate, then agree on text, get approval from the Vatican and finally, obtain all relevant copyrights before something so large can be revised and published.

The informed speculation is that the final copyrights and approvals will come soon and the first printed editions may be available by 2022. Why duplicate such an enormous and expensive undertaking when all parties involved are doing this for English speakers? I speculate that the Anglican version of the new daily offices will be strikingly similar to the opus faithfully translated by the monks in Missouri and will be in print fairly soon (in Church time) after the Roman Church produces theirs.

The Anglophiles can take the translations and texts from Rome and then quite easily add some thees and thous, replace the New American Bible readings with KJV [I assume this is tongue in cheek!], and call it their own. Then they can look down on their Latin brothers as having lost their way after Vatican II, all the while using the very building blocks of the apostolic Church they sneer at. See, win-win for everyone.

Maybe I’m too jaded.

Well, let's keep in mind that the Divine Worship missal was cribbed pretty faithfully from the early 20th century English missals by a group meeting three times per year. I do get the sense that not all the participants in that process were fully on board with the program. For all I know, that may be the case in the North American ordinariate. I pray for those to whom this may apply.

Well, How's It Been Going?

What I've learned in the past couple of weeks, thanks especially to the angries who've tuned me in to Kenneth's frequency, as well as the work of Dr Brand, is that Anglicanroum coetibus had a separate agenda that wasn't clearly expressed in either the constitution itself or the complementary norms. Its full fruition would depend on the products of Anglicanae Traditiones, the interdicasterial commission that was going to define the Anglican patrimony.

Except that on one hand, only half of this work has been completed, while Msgr Andrew Burnham five years on has shown no perceptible progress in completing the daily offices. And here's a puzzle: the commission seems to have decided pretty quickly that the Anglican missal dating from the early 20th century constituted the full Anglican patrimony, even though as the erudite Dr Brand acknowledges, it was never authorized by any Anglican jurisdiction, and neither its style nor especially its implicit theology has ever been compatible with large factions of real Anglicans.

But if the commission was able to declare the Divine Worship missal authentically Anglican notwithstanding, why couldn't it settle on a single text for the daily offices in the same way? The argument for supplanting the Book of Divine Worship was primarily that it was accepted by just one national group as reflecting the US 1979 BCP, while the other ordinariate countries used other versions. So in order to be neutral, a whole new model would be imposed on all the ordinariates so as not to favor any single one.

OK, fair enough. But my understanding is that the obstacle to developing a single text for the daily offices is that the different ordinariates can't agree. So why not just re-convene the commission and shove a text for the daily offices down their collective throats? That's what was done with the DW missal, wasn't it? What's the difference?

But that's just a problem of detail. I'm interested in the scholarly Dr Brand's assertion that "the good seed, which having in the past fallen among the stones or in shallow soil", will finally land on productive ground (as apparently it hasn't heretofore under 266 bishops of Rome). How's that been working out?

The first thing that stands out is that the strongest ordinariate communities all date back to the Pastoral Provision, including the only one with an actual school. Wasn't Anglicanorum coetibus supposed to be "an audacious venture in realized ecumenism"? Where are the new ordinariate parishes that outdo those from the old regime? A few make noise about home school co-ops or something similar, but none appears to have developed support for anything like an accredited program in a full facility, even though a couple of parishes seem to have taken over buildings that were schools in their former dioceses.

The next thing is that nearly all the communities are in a precarious financial state. We don't know how long the current lockdown will last, but so far, none of the "phases" for restarting society envisions resuming church services at all. The most that's been mooted is that some jurisdictions have been forced to allow drive-in get-togethers in parking lots, but there's not even unanimity on when even this sort of thing might be accepted generally. At this point, I suspect that each successive Sunday without an offering will place all Christian communities at greater and greater risk.

The North American ordinariate, not financially strong before the lockdown, must certainly be among these. I feel confident Houston will never make public any figures on how many members are maintaining weekly payments to their parishes via mail or direct deposit, and we must assume that some members, subject to layoff, will be unable to do this in any case.

But even before the lockdown, my overall impression has been that these people have been too cheap to maintain their buildings. acquire or maintain an organ. Contra Dr Brand, a thee-thou liturgy hasn't inspired these folks to do much more than fund some portable altar rails. If the culture was pusillanimous before its faith was put to more serious test, what will the outcome be now?

Beyond that, even if we grant Dr Brand's metaphor of the seed not falling among stones or thorns, the ordinariate hasn't grown. Bp Lopes cites single-digit numbers of celibate vocations, but even this won't replace current projected retirements in coming years, not to mention unplanned vacancies. Existing groups aren't growing, while those at the margin continue to be unstable and will probably expire in the current circumstances. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

Uriah Heep Is Not A Good Model

As I reflected on Dr Brand and my angry pre-Conciliarist visitors, the figure of Dickens's Uriah Heep suddenly came to mind. To recap, from Wikipedia,

Uriah Heep is a fictional character created by Charles Dickens in his novel David Copperfield. Heep is one of the main antagonists of the novel. His character is notable for his cloying humility, obsequiousness, and insincerity, making frequent references to his own "'umbleness". His name has become synonymous with sycophancy.

. . . Uriah is a law clerk working for Mr Wickfield. He realises that his widowed employer has developed a severe drinking problem, and turns it to his advantage. Uriah encourages Wickfield's drinking, tricks him into thinking he has committed financial wrongdoing while drunk, and blackmails him into making Uriah a partner in his law office. He admits to David (whom he hates) that he intends to manipulate Agnes into marrying him.

Uriah miscalculates when he hires Mr Micawber as a clerk, as he assumes that Micawber will never risk his own financial security by exposing Uriah's machinations and frauds. Yet Micawber is honest, and he, David, and Tommy Traddles confront Uriah with proof of his frauds. They only let Uriah go free after he has (reluctantly) agreed to resign his position and return the money that he has stolen.

Later in the novel, David encounters Uriah for the last time. Now in prison for bank fraud, and awaiting transportation, Uriah acts like a repentant model prisoner. However, in conversation with David he reveals himself to remain full of malice.

Unctuousness and weepy grandiosity are a hallmark of Dr Brand's style, for instance.

Anglicanorum Coetibus is an audacious venture in realized ecumenism, a daring pledge in the new evangelization, and its success will require more than a collection of liturgical texts. It will demand and hopefully call forth the right kind of catechesis and explanation; it will depend upon effective preaching, dedicated pastoral care, and a particular way of modeling parish life and the apostolate of the laity, all of which are equally valuable components of Anglican patrimony; and it will require singular confidence, charity, and courtesy in living out a special liturgical charism, bravely yet humbly, as a natural, normal way of being Catholic in these challenging times. The clergy and faithful of the Ordinariates have the special responsibility of using their formative heritage in a new key — now indeed with the power of the keys — to form others for the future, that the good seed, which having in the past fallen among the stones or in shallow soil. . . [blah blah blah] (op cit, p 164)

In the cases of Dr Brand, Mrs Gyapong, Mr Jesserer Smith, and others like my angry pre-Conciliarist visitors, the apostolate of the laity has been unimpressive. One of these latter is especially oleaginous:

Mr Bruce, I give you my solemn and heartfelt assurance that I'm not angry. I'm trying to engage you on a question of consistency, and this doesn't require a great deal of emotional labor on my part.

In line with CCC 2478, I am asking you in all charity to explain an apparent double standard in your polemics. Double standards are offenses against justice and charity, and should be taken seriously. For my own part, I would welcome any such correction, as would anyone who seeks to align himself with the truth.

. . . Thanks for mentioning me in today's entry, Mr Bruce, though I assure you I'm not angry in the least. (My wife tells me that I often come across as angry in writing because I tend to be forthright.) However, arguments stand or fall on their merits alone, rather than on the real or perceived subjective emotional states of the parties.

This fellow won't identify himself by name, though he accuses me of great sin, but his e-mail handle is "phytoplankton", which are defined as microscopic organisms that live in watery environments. Was ever such a humble man?

There's a certain underlying phoniness in all of this discourse, which in an ecclesiastical context is deeply troubling. These people seem intent on creating a holier-than-thou appearance, and indeed, the strong implication of remarks like Dr Brand's above is they're going to show the pope how it's done, since hitherto the seeds have been falling among the stones.

Let's Look At Another Member Of The Anglicanae Traditiones Commission

On behalf of English majors all over the world, I want to apologize for Dr. Clinton Brand, associate professor and chair of the English Department at St Thomas University Houston. He's just one of the many tenured underachievers who've caused productive society to think our humanities degrees are worthless -- if it were up to people like him, they would be. Dr Brand, apparently via proximity to the Walsingham parish and the Davis Foundation, had a place on the commission that brought us the Divine Worship missal. [UPDATE: My regular correspondent says, "I believe the Catalina Brand in charge of the home school 'academy' at OLW, Houston is his wife. Presumably BMOC at OLW."] That he could bring nothing worthwhile to the discussion was apparently a point in his favor.

Since he received his PhD in 1995, we must assume he's had a 25-year academic career, but his list of publications contains only a 24-page article from 2004 on a George Herbert poem and a fawning 16-page reflection on the Pastoral Provision, both the original publication and a reprint. There's an article on the Divine Worship missal, but it isn't listed in his faculty profile for whatever reason. Twenty five years, two publications. If others besides that one are available, they're hard to find, and I have no idea why he hasn't included that one in his profile -- is he ashamed?

Well, actually, I would be. Let's look at it, courtesy of the link my regular correspondent sent me, "Very Members Incorporate: Reflections on the Sacral Language of Divine Worship", which appeared in Antiphon in 2015. The first thing I noticed was this man, who theoretically should be teaching undergraduates to write capably, himself has a style that can charitably be characterized as sappily viscous. For instance,

Among the first fruits of the liturgical provision according to the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the recently promulgated Missal for Ordinariate usage, under the title Divine Worship, represents a momentous development in the history of Catholic worship: for the first time, the Catholic Church has officially recognized, blessed, approved, and made her own in a sustained and permanent fashion a collection of liturgical texts that found voice and developed outside the bounds of her visible communion. (p 132)

The sentences below could well have been written in peanut butter, but try to parse out the content, too:

As Msgr. Andrew Burnham has pointed out, in the Anglophone context, the norms of Liturgiam Authenticam had the effect of complicating the ecumenical sharing of common texts reflective of modern Anglican liturgical revision in contemporary English. At the same time, however, these norms auspiciously prepared the ground for another kind of ecumenical convergence, one that has now borne fruit through Anglicanorum Coetibus: in the sacral language of the traditional Books of Common Prayer, we find a ready-made, time-tested, carefully honed dialect of worship that, mutatis mutandis, with only a few adjustments, admirably answers to the promise of Sacrosanctum Concilium and the requirements of Liturgiam Authenticam. (p 135)

He's saying basically that adding some thees and thous to the liturgy makes it special. Which even he acknowledges is subject to challenge and a matter of taste, although he wades through several pages of rhetorical crankcase oil to get there:

But quite aside from the context of ecclesial sanction and the attendant evangelizing responsibility, it may also be important to recognize that not everyone will immediately like or appreciate the language of Divine Worship, and some (including members of the Ordinariates coming from different liturgical backgrounds and accustomed to more contemporary language) may at first feel uneasy with the Ordinariate Missal’s consistent, uncompromising preference for a style of traditional, liturgical English derived from the classic Prayer Books. Some might question the pastoral effectiveness of such a hieratic liturgical dialect in the twenty-first century, and certain skeptics might dismiss Divine Worship as a “Tudorbethan fantasy,” “an exercise in mock-Tudor nostalgia,” or “a Cranmerian pastiche with limited appeal.” (p 138)

Well, yes, they might. But that's OK:

Liturgy, of its very nature, as the public worship of God and the recollected enactment of divine mysteries, requires a language set apart from everyday communication, description, and commerce. Historically liturgical language, even when it aims at intelligibility and engaged participation in the vernacular, is inevitably, to one degree or another, a specialized idiom (a Sondersprache), a register of language purposefully situated and one that takes its place as an integral component in the overall Gestalt of enacted praise, thanksgiving, penitence, supplication, and sacramental participation. Liturgical language in the Catholic tradition is the verbal cognate of the stylized gestures, ritual actions, vestments, candlesticks, and architectural ordering of the sanctuary, themselves hearkening back to the historical character of ancient cultural forms and all of which work together with the dialect of proclaimed prayer to take the worshiping congregation out of the profane world into a sacred precinct for a dedicated and communal encounter with God. (pp 139-140)

This reminds me of the Episcopal associate who lectured us at All Saints Beverly Hills that if we complained about the length of his homilies, we didn't get the point. At mass, we're in mythic time (yes, he said this), just as we are when we attend a performance of Hamlet. We don't complain that Hamlet lasts three hours, because we're in mythic time. Still less should we complain that Fr Fortescue's homilies take 40 minutes.

I sent Fr Fortescue a note saying that Shakespearean directors routinely perform a task in putting a play together for performance called "blocking", in which they specifically edit out passages in the interest of keeping the performance within a reasonable time frame. Fr Fortescue never acknowledged the note. Luckily for the parish, he moved on.

I pointed out to one of my angry pre-Conciliarist visitors that there's such a thing as elevated diction, for instance

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

As opposed to precious archaism:

Ask not what thy country can do for thee; ask what thou canst do for thy country.

The visitor asked me what made me the arbiter of such things. I guess I'm not, actually. What will make the difference will be whether this project succeeds even until the end of the current year. But ask as well how someone who writes as badly as Dr Brand can see the language of the DWM as being good.

Already Have Germans Englischspeakingers Anglican Liturgie With Helped

One of my recent angry pre-Conciliarist visitors brought an important detail to my attention: a member of the interdicasterial commission Anglicanae Traditiones created to discover the Anglican patrimony in response to Anglicanorum coetibus was Uwe Lang, a German acholar whose books examine questions like ad orientem worship. Although pre-Conciliarists cite him in support of their positions, I've read Turning Towards the Lord, and my impression is that Lang, a rigorous scholar, finds the evidence for exclusive ad orientem worship in the early Church not fully conclusive. There appear to be archaeological examples of altars facing either way.

But the key point as I see it is that, although another member of the commission, Herr Doktor Professor Feulner, writes in less than idiomatic Englisch, Lang's work is published in translation. Two native German speakers were on the commission meant to determine Anglican liturgy. I can't imagine that, had Germans 80 years ago had the chance they sought to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer, even they would have been so clumsy.

This reinforces the question another visitor raised last week: what was the agenda behind the Divine Worship Missal? He asked this due to his experience on the ground in the ordinariate, which he outlined in an e-mail yesterday;

We belonged to a Cadillac Episcopal parish and were frustrated that while the vehicle was really nice, we didn’t seem to be going anywhere, especially toward heaven. We joined an ordinariate community in the early years and found it a really good experience. We traded the Cadillac for a Buick, but at least it was going somewhere good.

Then along comes a change in the Mass from the BDW (low to the ground, easy transition for our kids) to DW. And one day we looked in the garage and instead of the Buick there was an MG roadster. Interesting until you try to start it and keep it running.

I’m thinking about a line from the movie, IQ, where the mechanic looks under the hood/bonnet of a sputtering roadster: "You see, you have a Lucas type four generator on a 12-volt system, and you know the British. They'd rather spend time gluing wood on a dashboard than getting the electrical system right."

And the message we were being told was that the MG was better than the Buick, much better. And we’re wondering, where do we put the kids? Where’s the trunk? Is it going to start when we want it to? Can we drive it in the rain? Yes, its got a load of character, but character is overrated as your primary driver. We were not looking for a hobby vehicle. Even the people I know who have MGs don’t use them as their daily commuter.

So now we’re in a parish that's more like a comfortable old Chevy. There’s no wood on the dash but it gets the job done. The Buick got us into the church, and we're grateful.

Over the past few years, I've heard from at least a few people who've left ordinariate parishes out of dissatisfaction after becoming familiar with them. This seems to be yet another. The bone of contention here is that a liturgy that looked like the 1979 BCP was familiar and got the job done. It was replaced with something exotic, a hobby item. What interests me is that one of my angry pre-Conciliar hobbyists seems to be saying that's not a bug, it's a feature:

Fr Lang is well regarded not as an expert in Anglican liturgy but as a proponent of reforming the Novus Ordo to make it more consistent with the traditional Mass - his most popular book is on restoring ad orientem worship. Ask yourself why he was put on the commission?

. . . My point is Lang represents a certain tendency in the Roman Rite to try to restore pre-conciliar ceremonial. Someone like yourself who has this theory that the Ordinariate is trying to smuggle in as much of pre-conciliar liturgy as possible might ask why Lang was put on the commission. It might be that the people in Rome who staffed the commission were sympathetic to his views[.]

Elsewhere, the same visitor has angrily denounced my perspective as "middlebrow" and favoring a "Howard Johnson's" demographic, so I suppose he'd also sneer at the visitor above who prefers Buicks and Chevies for family transportation. But this is the same guy who, by his own account, attended the St Clement's openly gay Anglo-Catholic parish in Philadelphia for some number of years, giving the impression that he was a communicant there, while, by his account, nevertheless fulfilling his weekly obligation in a Catholic mass.

Well, there are classic car buffs who carry their MGs between meets on a trailer, huh?

But this yet again raises the question of what the Vatican had in mind with Anglicanorum coetibus. My regular correspondent has frequently pointed out that Houston has increasingly been airbrushing the Anglicanorum out of coetibus. The ordinariate is now just a diocese for Catholics who have their faith deepened, or something like that, and a couple of native German speakers are showing the way. My regular correspondent comments,

Young women who don’t remember having a Kleenex attached to their hair with a bobbie-pin by an aggrieved nun because they had forgotten to bring a hat on a day that the class was going into the church think that chapel veils are a cool idea. The fact remains that in, say, the Archdiocese of Toronto there are 226 parishes and quasi-parishes of which four offer at least a weekly TLM. It’s a niche market.

All I can say to those who seem to have settled on Anglican patrimony as a way to sneak pre-Conciliarism into the Church is hey, knock yourselves out. We'll see the fruits, won't we?

Deconstructing The Process

The visitor whom I quoted yesterday has prompted me to try to figure out a more basic set of questions: what problem, among other things, was the Vatican trying to solve when it published Divine Worship: The Missal? Two papers have emerged from principals involved, Bp Lopes's 2017 address and one from 2013 that my regular correspondent has tracked down, '“Anglican Use of the Roman Rite”? The Unity of the Liturgy in the Diversity of Its Rites and Forms', by Hans-Jürgen Feulner. This piece is ponderous, it copiously footnotes matters not in question, its English is infelicitous, and it's opaque over any issues of remote interest.

With so little insight from those close to the project, I'm inclined to want to approach the overall question the way a strategist, an engineer, or a corporate manager might. So let's start with a given: someone decided that Anglicans need to be brought into the Catholic Church with a unique liturgy that expresses their diversity in the unity of the Catholic Church, or something like that. I won't question this for now, I'll just proceed from the given.

What Problem Were They Trying To Solve?

It seems to me that there were three problems that stemmed from the existing Book of Divine Worship (a given) that needed to be addressed:

1. The Rite Two modern language version of the Holy Eucharist in the Book of Divine Worship was suppressed in 2011 with the issuance of the revised Novus Ordo translation of the mass. Thus the BDW needed revision in any case.
2. The Book of Dvine Worship, which reflected the 1979 US Book of Common Prayer, was seen as US-centric.
3. A standardized Anglican rite for use in all Anglicanorum coetibus ordinariates was thought desirable.

What were possible solutions?

It seems to me that the simplest solution would have been simply to rewrite the Rite Two section of the BDW to conform to the 2011 Novus Ordo. For that matter, mutatis mutandis, other aspects of Rite Two could be rewritten to reflect a modernized ordinariate liturgy. As someone who's undertaken similar corporate writing projects, I would estimate that a capable writer, under the supervision of liturgical specialists, could accomplish this in a matter of weeks, and approval could proceed as approvals proceed, with political pressure applied at higher levels as needed to stop any dithering or resolve concerns in a timely way.

What were the disadvantages of this approach? I think the biggest was that the 1979 BCP was problematic not so much because it was US-centric, but because its use of contemporary language and optional eucharistic prayers was Vatican II-centric. Cardinals Law, whose pet project the Anglican business had been, and Levada, prefect of the CDF, were part of a strange "conservative" wing of the US Church that had nevertheless been mentored by the liberal Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and also actively enabled the tolerationist status quo over clerical abuse.

A continued "modernizing" of the Anglican liturgy was apparently not in the cards, notwithstanding a traditional-language rite would still have been included. An alternative that was clearly under consideration, given the record of what emerged, was the uniate masses that originated from Anglican papalist sources in the UK in the early 20th century. Unlike the 1928 or 1979 BCP, these had never been authorized by any Anglican denomination and were highly controversial among Anglicans generally, since they incorporated specifically Catholic doctrinal references. The Anglican papalist wing was also seen as heavily homosexual, with the published texts reflecting a highly romantic style in art and typography.

It is not known what other options may have been under consideration. The decision that emerged appears to have been against a pragmatic, "modernist" choice and in favor of an archaizing, "romantic" style that specifically rejected contemporary language or choice in eucharistic prayers in favor of a made-up simulacrum of Tudor prose.

What were the resources?

Time: Bp Lopes made it clear in his 2017 address that the project took place over a five-year period, from 2010 to 2015. From a real-world perspective, this is an absurdly long time. Corporations rise, merge, and go bankrupt in that time. National leaders undergo re-election in that time. Wars are fought, lost, or won in that time. We're talking about a specialized liturgy that will apply, so far, to something like 10,000 people worldwide, in a Church that has billions of members.

Personnel: According to Bp Lopes, there was an interdicasterial committee. The full membership is published here. We know that Bp Lopes was a representative from the CDF, and that Prof Feulner of Vienna was apparently also on it as a liturgist. (His command of written English is not encouraging.) My regular correspondent suggests a Clinton Allen Brand was on the committee (a published article here), and

Probably Msgr Andrew Burnham, an experienced liturgist, produced a first draft for comments. He is credited as the co-author of the Walsingham Customary, closest thing to a Daily Office Book so far produced in the Ordinariate, and he is on the committee which has been attempting for about five years to produce a version acceptable to all three Ordinariates.

I would be interested in any further information or insight visitors may have on the makeup of the committee. My overall impression is that these are people who met, by Bp Lopes's account, about three times a year on this project. This is not hard work by any estimation. Msgr Burnham, after more than five years, seems to have struggled to produce a finished product of any sort in his own assigned area.

But the actual result, the Divine Worship missal, it seems to me is recognizably derivative of a single source, the Anglican papalist uniate mass from the early 20th century. A committee of experts spent five years to bring it to birth. A follow-on is indefinitely delayed. The altar missal version is out of print. The project it supports is stalled.

I'll have more to say about this boondoggle tomorrow.

Good Questions!

A visitor sent an e-mail with questions that, while they might initially seem to have simple answers, started me on a train of thought.

What do you think the effect was on ordinariate communities when they switched from a 1979 BCP based liturgy in the Book of Divine Worship to whatever DW: The Missal is? Might the instability and low numbers reflect what seems like a bait and switch -- shifting from an approachable liturgy known and loved by Episcopalians who sought union with the Church to this expression of a patrimony that was foreign to most?

My initial answer was that Bp Lopes says basically nothing about the reason for the change, or even what the substance of the change was,. in his 2017 address in Vienna. But the drop in expectations for the ordinariate was plain by late 2012, even by March of that year, well before the DW missal came into use. The two parishes about which so much optimism had been expressed, St Mary of the Angels Hollywood and Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, were going to stay out, while David Moyer, a key figure in the runup, was denied a votum for ordination. The visitor replied,

I won't argue that there was a profound drop in expectation by the end of 2012....an ordinary who considered leadership to be his side job against teaching patristics is at the core of that....aided by a vicar general who also considered his role to be a side job against writing books. [The vicar general, then-Fr R Scott Hurd, left the priesthood to remarry after his divorce, which of course says something as well.]

I was interested in this project when it appeared to be the object of Ratzinger's thought in his paper on ecumenism in the compilation, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith. I thought that's what the story was on the ordinariates. Now, despite a lifetime of being in TEC, I'm pretty confused by what the 'Anglican patrimony' is - and that's kinda funny.

Poor leadership can be developed or replaced. In this case, the entire project changed frequency, at least once, maybe more.

I think Anglicanorum coetibus was a bad idea horribly implemented. Just yesterday I asked who thought it would be a good idea to invite Protestants into the Church via a little group, where they could spend their time explaining to each other how Rome had gotten everything wrong, and they were going to fix things.

But the visitor raises new questions about the implementation, and he raises the issue as well of what the heck the Anglican patrimony is supposed to be. Let's just start with the question of Jeffrey Steenson as a patristic scholar. According to Wikipedia,

Steenson earned a B.A. from Trinity International University in 1974, a M.A. in church history from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1976, and a M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School in 1978.

He went on to earn a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1983 with a dissertation entitled "Basil of Ancyra and the Course of Nicene Orthodoxy".

An Oxford PhD with a dissertation on patristics is about as Anglican as you can get. One problem I see is with the context: keep in mind that Protestants adhere to some variation on the theme that the Church was clearly doing things right in the apostolic age, but at some point after that, Rome became corrupt and added unnecessary "accretions". A basic question for any variety of Protestant would be where things went wrong. Most Protestants, as far as I can tell, would agree that by the time Aquinas came along, the situation was past rescue.

However, it seems to have taken several centuries more until Wycliffe, Hus, Luther, Knox, and Calvin saw the light and cast off the Roman darkness. Anglicans, who in latter centuries have cast themselves as moderates, seem to take the position that, although the Protestant Reformation was justified, the Church Fathers were authentic guides, which places the point of Roman deviation some time after the death of St Isidore of Seville in 636.

That Steenson would specialize in this field basically makes him a respectable Anglican, which he certainly was, although I'm not sure if he ever held any academic position, even part time, during his Anglican career. (This indicates he had some adjunct positions in the 1980s.) As far as I can see, his PhD qualified him to hold academic posts once he was designated ordinary, but this was fairly clearly a supplemental income source, and I'm not sure how good a teacher or scholar he ever would have been.

Nor, of course, did he turn out to be an effective administrator in The Episcopal Church, since the Diocese of the Rio Grande seems to have found him a disappointment overall, failing to develop any clear path for conservative parishes and clergy in a liberal denomination.

What, if you get right down to it, did Pope Benedict, Cardinal Law, or Cardinal Levada expect him actually to do? Did they even ask that question? Or did they just figure they needed a guy who'd been an Episcopalian bishop to occupy a position pro forma?

As far as I can see, once Steenson was activated as North American ordinary in January 2012, he froze. His first job would have been to facilitate the entry of the two most prestigious potential parishes. Apparently there were questions about the pastors of each (in my view, justified in the case of Fr Phillips, but not in the case of Fr Kelley). But the clear path forward would have been to move quickly to bring both in and address questions about their fitness once they were under his authority.

Instead, he dithered, so that months after he should have brought St Mary of the Angels in, the ACA sued to keep it out. Again, early in the game, it appears that he gave Fr Philips plenty of warning what bad things would happen and time to react. He should have brought the parish in and temporized with Fr Phillips down the road.

It's hard to avoid thinking Fr Hurd was probably not qualified to serve as a vicar general at all, but he was apparently distracted by personal issues in any case.

But this is before we even get to the subject of liturgy and the new missal, which I think is a symptom of pre-existing dysfunction and not a cause. I'll work on this tomorrow.

Who Is Allowing This?

Over the past week or so, I've heard from two visitors who strongly imply that the Ordinary Form mass stems from errors in the Second Vatican Council and that it's somehow unpleasing to the Almighty in a way that the Divine Worship Missal is not. If I press them, they sorta-kinda back off this, but not quite, and in e-mails they resort to the standard gaslighting technique -- no, you didn't understand what I said, you aren't being charitable, you're being judgmental, etc etc.

A visitor who pays attention has what I think is a more level-headed view of the Ordinary Form mass:

The rewrite of the Mass promulgated licitly in 1968 still follows the rubrics of the old Mass and the old celebrations of the early Church. . . . I have included a link for you that compares the Tridentine Mass to the Novus Ordo, both in English, side by side. You can see that even though some of the texts of the prayers have changed, the structure of the Mass is the same, so the spurious claim that the OF is a total rewrite and not congruent with the Tridentine Mass is bunk.

The Council of Trent occurred from 1543-1563 making the text of that Mass only 400 years old. What did the Mass text say for 1500 years from 33AD up til that point? Wasn’t the Tridentine Mass considered a rewrite then? Hmmm. The parts of the Mass that have not changed since the Last Supper and the Early Church are still in use.

Here is a concise page of the most important parts of the Mass from the USCCB. I think the biggest mistake your correspondent is making is conflating the decline in Mass attendance since the 1960s with the introduction of the OF Mass. The relationship between the two has not been shown to be causal/effectual but, by a most generous classification, as corollary.

I find that the OF (using EP I) tracks closer to the Tridentine Mass in form and order of prayers than the DW Mass. I don’t find it a double standard to consider the DW the Johhny-Come-Lately that is more of an outlier than the OF.

What seems to be happening in the ordinariate is that the theme is shifting from the "precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony" to something like "the second Council got it all wrong, and to fix it, we need to go back (!) to the Divine Worship liturgy, kneeling, in both kinds, on the tongue". Advocates of this view claim, among other things, that the decline in mass attendance since the 1960s stems from the Second Council's errors. But if this is the case, why do so few people come to DW masses?

Isn't it in fact part of a Protestant mindset to think Rome has got things wrong, and our little group has it right?

Beyond that, who thought it was a good idea to bring Protestants into the Church by setting up a separate little compartment for them?

It's hard to avoid asking whether this mindset is being permitted, if not tacitly encouraged, by the authorities in Houston. Their lifestyles and careers depend on it.

So, What About Evangelization?

A visitor responded to yesterday's post:

Reading the letter you posted [from the bishop's secretary], I wonder if the author considers evangelization, and the growth that can result. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip. The Ordinariate chancery should be concerned that their parishes are growing.

I think we can say that Houston has recognized for several years at this point that the market for Episcopalians to come over into the North American ordinariate is played out. But recall that in 1993, TEC Bp Clarence Pope, with Jeffrey Steenson in the room, told Cardinal Ratzinger that 250,000 would join an Anglican personal prelature. I won't dwell on John Hepworth's claim that 500,000 TAC members would swell those ranks. Instead, the North American ordinariate is stuck in the mid four figures, with the addition of Our Lady of the Atonement a major disappointment.

So for the past few years, Houston has instead relied on rebranding itself as a new kind of Catholic church, seeking to attract disaffected cradle Catholics. I'm not sure if this is working out much better, since the semi-official line appears to be that it offers a serious liturgy along pre-Conciliar lines, with de facto compulsory communion kneeling, in both kinds, and on the tongue, at least in some parishes. (But as far as I can see, the interest and growth at parishes like St Timothy Catonsville, which do not do this, is not much different from those that do.)

But here's an example of the "evangelization" I get from ordinariate members who are trying to change my own mind about their liturgy:

Surely you agree that the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi implies that some forms of worship are more pleasing to God than others, and that this especially applies to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

So given a choice between three options:

A) A Mass with direct origins in the earliest practices of the Church;
B) Mass A, but in English with additional prayers from a particular local tradition;
C) A made-up Mass originating in a brief (and retrospectively embarrassing) period of cultural giddiness.

I'm not sure why anyone would choose C*, but I'd love to hear your reasons.

By "C", the visitor is referring to the Ordinary Form, with the strong implication that the Second Council was "a brief (and retrospectively embarrassing) period of cultural giddiness". "A" I assume is the Latin mass, while "B" is the DW. So basically he's saying I'm a teeny-bopper Catholic. What a way to encourage me!

But let's say I reflect on this and decide this guy really has a point. So I go looking for a place to worship in a way pleasing to God, when Fr Jim just hasn't seen the light at our diocesan parish. I'm in luck! There's a community only 25 miles away! A one-hour round trip! So I go and find a dreary rented termite-ridden pile with a couple dozen there for Sunday mass, singing raggedly to an electronic keyboard. But they're effectively forced to take the sacrament in both kinds, kneeling, and on the tongue, which is far more pleasing to God than anything Fr Jim could possibly drum up.

At least, when we all get to go back to mass.

As far as I can see, only a few ordinariate parishes offer anything like the fantasy they want us all to believe in, the clone of All Saints Margaret Street (but of course, without all the gay guys). That's a bait and switch and just plain dishonest.

But the appeal to cradle Catholics is more troubling. The evangelizer above is edging close to pre-Conciliarism or sedevacantism, since he's more or less explicit in saying the Second Council was somehow misled by cultural giddiness. (I'm sure he'll offer an angry serving of word salad to deny this, with insults in the bargain.)

Bp Lopes himself speaks enthusiastically of the CDF's origin in the Inquisition. Yet as far as anyone can tell, it takes powerful pressure from his brother bishops to do anything about people like Vaughn Treco, who created a small following for himself by preaching just that sort of thing.

I don't know what the community is of which the angry visitor I quoted above is a member. His pastor should be concerned -- but more likely, Bp Lopes should maybe be concerned about the pastor. I think there are other Vaughn Trecos in the ordinariate that haven't been addressed. I pray for the sincere and capable priests in the ordinariate who must certainly be looking at their better options.

By their fruits. The good thing is how small this movement is. Evangelization won't fix it, that's something these folks don't do.

Glimpses Into The Ordinariate's Financial State

A San Antonio observer reports,

I was looking at an Our Lady of the Atonement church bulletin (March 29) the other day and noticed on page 2 an oddly worded appeal for financial support. The odd words to me are, “we have no endowment to rely upon.” That reminded me of the ol’ Our Lady’s Dowry slush fund that Fr. Phillips and Deacon Orr set up to pay Dn. Orr a salary against diocesan policy and to avoid reporting income to the Archdiocese of San Antonio (and apparently the Ordinariate, too). I figured after Dn. Orr’s passing and the entry into the Ordinariate, the Dowry fund would have been dissolved.

Since Fr. Lewis mentions specifically an endowment, I wondered if the dowry was still going on. What a surprise, it is! Some folks funneled over ¾ of a million dollars ($874,078 to be exact) through that fund since 2014. I know some of that money was supposed to be earmarked for classrooms for the new school building because I know someone who contributed specifically for that purpose and was told to make the check out to Our Lady’s Dowry.

I wonder where that money actually went. Here is some publicly available info regarding the charitable Our Lady''s Dowry organization. Check out the financials and the Form 990s. They clearly show Dn. Orr was paid a salary for 40 hrs/wk (ranging from around $64K to $65K per yr) as Treasurer until the year of his death when he was replaced (presumably after he passed) as Treasurer by a guy who made $0 in compensation.

Some of the money went to SAWS (San Antonio Water Service to the tune of $150,074 in 2016), presumably to bring water/sewer to the new school building. Some of the money went for organ repair ($22,486 in 2015 and $124,788 in 2016). Some of the money went to produce videos for the priest ($11,500 in 2015) and advertising ($20,000 in 2016).

The information from 2017 is not available so it is difficult to say where that money went.

It is interesting to note that income from Hall Rental, which had been increasing year over year dropped to $0 in 2018. I suppose because Hall Rental was no longer controlled by an Our Ladys Dowry tool in the office and Fr. Lewis began directing money from the rental of the parish hall back to the parish and not the slush fund he was not a party to.

Was the money used for nefarious purposes? Mostly, no. Was it used to circumvent reporting to the Diocese/Ordinariate and thereby circumventing the cathedraticum tax, yes. Is that moral, no. Was it used to provide a salary for a Deacon who was assigned to a parish, yes. Was that legal? I don’t know but it doesn’t pass the smell (and morality) test. [If it was used to pay Orr a salary over and above what was paid by the parish, it was a violation of archdiocesen policy. -- jb]

What a mess, and what a con! I tip my hat to the creative shell game masterminded at Our Lady of the Atonement. I just wish they worked as hard at being authentically Catholic as they did at gaming the system.

An oddly pastoral letter from J Henry, the bishop's secretary, has indirectly reached me on the subject of tithes.

My regular correspondent comments on its oddly detached tone:

At this point I would have thought that spiritual and personal support from the bishop and the V-G would have been more urgent, but I think that the what we have is evidence that financial survival is uppermost on the mind of the Chancery.

Well, the tone here is pretty murky. As of this coming Sunday, ordinariate communities will have gone five weeks without the weekly offertory, and we may assume only some of the members are sending their checks by mail or making direct deposits. Add to that the lack of Easter donations. This is 10% and more of annual income for both the communities and the chancery. The financial situation must be dire, yet it's being expressed in terms of catechesis, and those who resist are characterized as gnostics.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

"Outliers . . . Don't Work And Play Well With Others"

My regular correspondent raised two issues over yesterday's post:

Your thesis exactly accords with my observations on the Ordinariates from the beginning, and I mean back to the days of The Anglo-Catholic. They have attracted primarily those who were outliers, and while they may have tried to frame the narrative as one of wanderers at last coming in to a safe haven, in fact many of them don’t work and play well with others in the Church any more than they did in their previous denomination. Mr [redacted], of course, is now SSPX and occasionally lobs a grenade into the Anglican Ordinariates Informal Conversation Forum, making points not unlike your own ie that the Ordinariates lack liturgical integrity and consistent discipline.

There's a double problem with how Anglicanorum coetibus has shaken out in the US. The first is that it hasn't attracted many Anglicans, either in absolute numbers or, even worse, relative numbers. The ACNA has been far more effective in providing a more "orthodox" (at least from an overall Christian perspective insofar as it shares traditional teachings on marriage and sexuality) alternative to The Episcopal Church.

But there's another problem even here, since more centrist Anglicans have always been suspicious of Anglo-Catholics since the start of the Oxford Movement, specifically on the grounds of sexuality. It's hard to avoid a concern not fully expressed out of decorum in the low-church tract I quoted yesterday, that there was an agenda behind the Anglican missal movement of the 1920s to bring toleration of Anglo-Catholic sexuality into the larger Episcopal Church.

A key complaint in the tract is that the Anglican missal advocates claim they're adding Roman theology to Anglican liturgy in the name of Church unity, when in fact the missal movement is highly divisive in parishes when it gains a foothold. This is a cousin of the 21st century secular alphabet agenda, which insists that bizarrely deviant sexual expression be accepted on the basis of tolerance, when, once it's tolerated, it becomes the basis for proselytism -- witness drag queen story hours and mandatory same-sex ed for elementary students.

The second issue, and I think it's related, is that the uniate missal is an innovation, pure and simple -- it dates from no earlier than the 20th century. But ordinariate apologists fuzz this over, for instance on the website of the St John Henry Newman group in Victoria, BC:

Our Ordinariate Form of the Roman Rite, Divine Worship, approved by the Holy See, is rooted in the liturgical and spiritual patrimony of the English and Anglican traditions as found in the Use of Sarum, the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer, and the English and Anglican Missals.

This is similar to what Bp Lopes said in his 2017 Vienna address:

The search for the authentic faith of the Church within Anglican worship allows us to situate Divine Worship firmly within the shape and context of the Roman Rite so that it might be approached in a manner which respects its own integrity and authority.

Except that all that's been done has been to take the Book of Common Prayer, pretty much snip out the part of the mass between the Creed and the Agnus Dei, and replace it with an archaized Roman Canon. Sarum Use has nothing do to do with it. It's like the lady at the counter at Taco Bell who asks you if you want Swiss or American cheese on your taco. It doesn't matter if they wear sombreros on Cinco de Mayo, this is not authentic, and there's no integrity.

The outlier part concerns me, too. It's increasingly clear that the North American ordinariate isn't even attracting many Anglicans. The angry visitor whom I'd characterized as a Catholic turned Anglican turned Catholic again corrected me: in the period he'd attended mass at the "affirming" St Clement's parish in Philadelphia, he'd remained a cradle Catholic and attended a proper Sacrament on Sunday before then betaking himself to St Clement's, where apparently for some years he gave the impression that he was a communicant, but he wasn't. Or something.

A certain contingent of members, cradle Catholics, appear to be attracted by features like de facto compulsory reception of the Sacrament kneeling, on the tongue, when in the US, for a priest to force a communicant to do this is a canonical violation, and reception in the hand is actually the "Anglican patrimony". Again, we're looking at a movement that's pushing the limits of opposing authority, and in fact at least two priests insisted they would administer only on the tongue in the face of recent health advice that this was dangerous.

Whatever the frequency, Kenneth, it's not very Anglican, and not all that Catholic, either. It isn't even prudent from a secular perspective, which ought to be troubling.

I continue to think that the combination of suspended public meetings, the financial precariousness of the ordinariate and most of its communities, and changing health awareness in the population will make these matters largely moot as we recover from the virus threat. That this strange episode should simply die out would, I think, be the most desirable outcome.

The Anglican Missals In Context

We've seen that the interdicasterial commission Anglicanae Traditiones, whose representative from the CDF was now-Bp Lopes, selected a version of the uniate missal, variously called the Anglican or English Missal, as the chief model for the Divine Worship Missal. Beyond that, we know very little, as in his 2017 address, Bp Lopes suggested there were things he would not be allowed to say about the process.

However, in the Wikipedia entries for Anglican Missal and English Missal, we can at least learn that the idea of a uniate missal that combined translations of the Roman Canon with passages from the Book of Common Prayer took root in the early 20th century. Something called The English Missal was published by W. Knott & Son Limited in 1912. I've already referred to The Anglican Missal, first produced in England in 1921 by the Society of SS. Peter and Paul.

There have been other variations on the idea. None has ever been adopted officially by any Anglican denomination. The adoption of a redacted version by Anglicanae Traditiones and its use under the auspices of Anglicanorum coetibus is certainly a belated development. However, we know nothing of which of the several versions was the point of departure, nor the nature of the deliberations that took place in making the decision or decisions. All we know is that the commission met three times per year over a five-year period, which suggests only that few details entered the debate, and it mostly ratified staff proposals on a perfunctory basis.

The belatedness of the Church's ratification of the idea is striking. The Anglican missal movement began a century before the adoption of the DWM, but among Anglicans it was highly controversial, and after the peak of Anglo-Catholicism in the 1920s and 30s, it seems to have become something of a specialized cult, similar in its way to vegetarianism, and as that sort of cult, it probably attracted devotees of other eccentric cults.

The Wikipedia entry for Anglican Missal contains a link to a low-Church Episcopalian tract on the American Missal edition that's undated but must date fairly close to its US publication in the 1920s. It contains reproductions of pages from the actual missal that look quite a bit like the pages of the DWM, another indication of its inspiration. Here's a passage from the tract:

The most candid and serious defense of the book has been put forth in The Churchman, by one of the Missal's editors, Dr. Douglas. It is worthy of the most thoughtful consideration. He claims that its purpose was to check the use of frankly Roman uses. Here is his exact language:

"Two new foreign publications found their way to American altars, The English Missal and the Anglican Missal. The latter claimed to contain the American rite, but did so only in a garbled and imperfect form. Both books were frankly Roman; rearranging the order of the Eucharist more Romano, interpolating the Canon of the Roman Mass before the Prayer of Consecration, and adopting the Roman Calendar even to such feasts as those of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin and of St. Peter's Chair at Rome. To many of us these books seemed alien in manner, inadequate in preparation, and disloyal not only to our formularies, but to our whole morale as a Church." To check this evil he agreed to co-operate with Bishop Ivins "in the preparation of an altar book not open to these grave objections." What an admission! This book that we find "so disloyal not only to our formularies but to our whole morale as a Church," to use Dr. Douglas's own language, with its propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass, its prayers to the Virgin and the Saints, its feast of the Conception of the Virgin and of the Chains, if not of the Chair of St. Peter, with its directions for signs of the Cross, holy water, incensing, genuflecting, kissing hands, with requiem masses for the dead and absolution for the dead, is, it is revealed to us, an effort on the part of the more conservative Anglo-Catholics to control their more [57/58] extreme brethren. These are the uses that have been practiced and are being recommended by the more moderate Anglo-Catholics. It is no wonder that the inauguration of an Anglo-Catholic rector is followed by the disruption of his parish and the secession from the parish of people grounded in the teachings of the Prayer Book.

How can the General Convention ignore the existence of such conditions, or the Bishops consent to visit in their Episcopal capacity parishes whose rectors are using such garbled and disloyal renditions of our Communion office? Bishop Parsons, one of our most liberal bishops, and an influential exponent of the mind of our Church at the Lausanne Conference, puts the case in a nutshell:

"Every congregation of this Church has the right to be protected from the individualism of the priest. We are not a conglomerate of. independent congregations but a church organized with a code of law."

We look to the General Convention to make those words good. If such overt lawlessness and disloyalty to the spirit of our Church escapes censure, we might as well give up legislating and abandon the pretence of having any discipline.

Those who defended the Roman style missals suggested they could be used as private supplements to the BCP liturgy, or that by adopting them, TEC could appease the Anglo-Catholic faction and prevent even worse abuse.

The low-church response had some merit, even if in an Anglican context it was unrealistic:

When an organization discards certain things by law it is sheer anarchy to permit their re-introduction without legal warrant. Mariolatry, Invocation of Saints and the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass were taken out of the devotions of the English Church at the Reformation and repudiated in the Articles. The omission is of itself sufficient to rule them out of the devotions, but the repudiation in the Articles double-locks the door. The prevalence of the Missal would mean that in an age which needs to be taught respect for law, the Church disregards its own law. The advocates of the Missal claim to be exponents of the claims of authority: their book is a manifestation of lawlessness and extreme individualism.

Frederick Kinsman's resignation as TEC Bishop of Delaware, though, was still fairly recent in the time of this debate, and he left TEC specifically because it had already proven itself unable to enforce authority.

But I keep coming back to the insights of Cardinal Mahony, faced with the petition of the Anglo-Catholic St Mary of the Angels parish to enter his archdiocese in 1986: if the parish had shown it couldn't adhere to Episcopalian authority -- which it hadn't, since it seceded from TEC -- what assurance could it give that it would conform to Roman Catholic authority? More than three decades later, we can see by that parish's subsequent record that Mahony was prescient. But the record of Fr Phillips and the Our Lady of the Atonement parish has been little different.

So I still wonder what the Church has brought in by encouraging a form of exclusive cultishness that had its origin in an anti-authoritarian movement. Keep in mind, if the people who favored a Roman Catholic liturgy in a Protestant denomination had actually been so sympathetic to Rome, they always had the door open to simple conversion. Why did they insist on remaining a faction? And why do they want in effect to continue as a faction, a special case, once they've actually made the move to Rome?

I continue to think Cardinal Mahony's had a bad rap.