Over the past week or so, I've had a series of e-mails from a visitor in India who's brought my attention to what amounts to a continuing con operation by the so-called Anglican Church of India. It's worth noting that in the runup to
Anglicanorum coetibus, the late John Hepworth, then Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, was for a time the most vocal advocate for a Roman Catholic personal prelature for disaffected Anglicans, and in support of his petition, he cited a worldwide membership in the TAC of 450,000, of which 400,000 were assumed to be in India, since verifiable membership in the other TAC components, UK, US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, was barely into the low five figures.
Nevertheless, it's hard for me not to think this number was in Pope Benedict's mind when he referred to "groups of Anglicans" who petitioned "repeatedly and insistently" to be received into the Catholic Church. But people who investigated the actual state of affairs in the Anglican Church of India came away with a very different impression. Early in the history of this blog, I posted the contents of an e-mail from a retired priest of the TAC-affiliated Anglican Church in America who moved to India and hoped to continue a ministry there in his retirement. His experience is worth reprinting here:
[E]very "number" I have ever seen published by the TAC or any member church has been greatly inflated or totally falsified from the beginning ... I have actually never seen any "church" here whatsoever - it's like a ghost.
The reason I decided to transfer my canonical residency to the TAC Church of India was because I fully expected to find an organized, thriving church here under Archbishop Samuel Prakash. A [thriving] group of TEC'ers poised and ready to enter the Ordinariate. +Hepworth was going to make a trip here (to Delhi, where +Prakash is located) in November of 2010. I was invited to go. I was told so by none-other-than +Hepworth during several Skype conversations. That meeting never took place.
When I arrived .... I found out from +Prakash that I would be living in the "Diocese of Nandyal" - - unfortunately, there is only one "parish" here... and "here" is the village of Nandyal - around 300 km. due-south of Hyderabad - and the Bishop is the Rector..."parish" is his family, meeting in his [house]...and no English is spoken - only Telugu.
Later in the post, I quoted Abp Prakash himself on the Anglican Church of India's website, who uttered the words that appear in the title of this post, "We mustbe [sic] careful from these persons who are claiming to be Anglican leaders". However, not much has been reported outside India on the subsequent history of this TAC-affiliated church and its activities. My correspondence with this visitor from India has brought things somewhat more up to date, but there's clearly been no change:
I was actually associated with Samuel Prakash, who claims to be the Metropolitan of India ACI, he has appointed many Non-Christian people as Secretary, Principal Officer, Property Officer etc. who are involved only in selling of the Anglican properties.
This is an accusation I sometimes saw about the ACI when I first looked at the whole question of the Traditional Anglican Communion. The visitor gives some historical background, which I have slightly edited to US from South Asian English:
The Anglican Church in India was formed in 1927 through the Indian Church Act, and the Church was governed by the Government itself, the Crown being the Supreme Governor of the Church. After the Independence of India in 1947, The British handed over the Church and its properties to the Anglican Church of India through a gazette notification. Since all aid stopped from the Government [i.e., the ACI as Church of England surrogate was no longer established in India] the Church started to suffer. In 1970 six Churches which included the Anglican Church of India came into a union through which Church of North India & Church of South India was formed. This is duly functioning up to now, although they are also involved into so many fraudulent activities for which I am contacting the International Anglican Communion, but have not got any positive response.
John Asa Prakash (Father of Samuel Prakash) was a priest of the Anglican Church of India during that time. It was he that resisted this union and declared himself the Bishop of the Anglican Church of India.
The visitor at this point brings Louis Falk into the story, and I'll supplement his account with what I've learned about Falk in the course of research for this blog. I gave a
thumbnail of Falk's career in this 2013 post here. A member of a prominent Wisconsin family (though a bit of a black sheep), Louis Falk (1935-) was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1963, but he was almost immediately involved in scandal, and he was defrocked or "deposed" from the Episcopal priesthood in 1965, moving as well from Wisconsin to Iowa, where he quietly went into business.
However, the dissident movement in The Episcopal Church after its 1976 general convention rekindled his interest in the quasi-priesthood, and once the movement gained momentum in the late 1970s, he quickly rose in what became the first Anglican Church in North America, which then morphed into the Anglican Catholic Church, with Falk eventually replacing James Mote as its primate.
Always a political schemer, Falk ran into opposition within the ACC, but in retaliation, in 1991 he founded a worldwide umbrella body, the Traditional Anglican Communion, of which he became the primate, and he created the Anglican Church in America as part of the TAC, a body in which he could also preside. (The ACC, which had expelled Falk, continued as a separate body unaffiliated with the TAC. All these organizations were small, poor, and shrinking.)
The exact mechanism by which Samuel Prakash and the Anglican Church in India came into the Traditional Anglican Communion remains unclear. Although the TAC was founded in 1991, according to Wikipedia, "Prakash was consecrated as a bishop of the Anglican Church of India on 6 October 1984 at the YMCA Hall in New Delhi by Louis Falk, assisted by James Orin Mote and John Asa Prakash." Falk was a defrocked priest of the US Episcopal Church and a self-designated priest and bishop of the ACC; James Mote was a dissident Episcopal priest who had left that body and become a self-designated bishop and at the time was the retired primate of the ACC. Neither had apostolic authority except in his own mind to consecrate anyone a bishop, much less in a defunct denomination halfway around the world.
(The Roman Catholic Church, which invented bishops, has held since 1896 that no Anglican of any sort has this authority.)
The visitor from India has forwarded a few documents that strongly suggest Prakash's business practices have been deceptive. For instance, here is a 2017 communication from the ACI to Indian government offices that misrepresents the ACI on its letterhead as part of the "Worldwide Anglican Communion", which it is not:
Another copy of a 2016 letter shows that the ACI letterhead as of then referred to the "Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion", which was correct as of then. Nevertheless, it shows that the primary activity of the TAC-ACI was to acquire and sell off what properties of the defunct former Anglican Church of India that it could.
It's difficult to say how much Louis Falk or James Mote knew of Samuel Prakash's activities, which as far as I can determine have always been deliberately deceptive, since he seems to claim to be primate of a denomination on the Anglican model that actually has few or no actual parishes, few or no actual members, and indeed as we see employs many non-Christians in its holy work, which consists of acquiring and selling putative properties of a defunct denomination.
While the Traditional Anglican Church, as of 2020 successor to the TAC, currently makes no claim of numbers on its Wikipedia page, the TAC was well known as of 2008 for claiming numbers "like 400,000 and 700,000 for their worldwide membership". These would have come from Falk's successor as primate after 2002, the late John Hepworth. Hepworth's history is as sketchy as Falk's; he had been ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Australia but left the priesthood in uncertain circumstances and then married twice. After 1990, he became active in the TAC-affiliated Anglican Catholic Church of Australia, rose to be its primate, and succeeded Falk as TAC primate in 2002.
In the runup to Anglicanorum coetibus, he had hoped to be restored to the Catholic priesthood under its conditions, but as this prospect became unlikely, he alleged that he had been subject to abuse as a seminarian. I came to know him slightly after 2012, and from his accounts, I got the impression that Catholic authorities treated him politely but never took him seriously as an Anglican spokesman. In this, I suspect their assessments of his credibility were correct.
It's hard for me to avoid thinking that at best, Hepworth found it advantageous to look the other way over Prakash's claims, and we know from the above account of the retired US ACA-TAC priest who went to India that these were the sorts of claims Prakash always made -- but minimal inquiry would have shown they were false. From the same account, we also saw that Hepworth himself made optimistic predictions about India that also never came true.
The comic-opera TAC College of Bishops forced Hepworth out as primate in 2012, largely but not exclusively due to the debacle Anglicanorum coetibus proved to be for both Hepworth and the TAC, but I think it's significant that the man whom the bishops voted in to replace Hepworth as "acting primate" was Samuel Prakash, whose "province" was made up entirely of smoke and mirrors. This was likely convenient, as Prakash would be unlikely to rock the boat by challenging any of the other bishops, but none of the TAC's provinces was consequential, and all were and still are shrinking by the year.
Prakash was replaced as acting primate of the TAC when Canadian Bishop Shane Janzen of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada was elected primate, but the Wikipedia entry for the ACCC says that at the time of Anglicanorum coetibus, it had 35 groups, while at the current time it says there are 14. None of these people, Prakash or his colleagues, fronts a serious enterprise.
If the TAC-based Anglican Church of India is almost entirely a fictional church, we still have the question of how successful it's been as a fraud, and for that, we simply don't have a good answer. The visitor from India who brought this issue to my attention last week has been concerned that I help in making it public, but I can only surmise that the ACI is a tiny minority within a minority. Wikipedia says there are about 27.8 million Christians of all denominations in India, making up 2.3 percent of the population. Of these, Protestants of all denominations including Anglican are 59%, but the ACI must be a near-invisible component of this group.
For the ACI to attract the attention of Indian media, it seems as though it would need to be larger, and indeed more successful as a fraudulent enterprise, than it's been. And frauds of all shapes and sizes have been part of religious sects forever, the smaller and more credulous the groups the better.
Still, it's worth pointing out that the Traditional Anglican Church, he TAC's successor, continues to list the Anglican Church of India as a province on its website. Though it makes no claim as to its membership (or the membership of any other province), that it should cite India as a province at all must be considered a matter of borrowed prestige that in fact is deceptive.
But the "continuing Anglican" movement is tiny and shrinking no matter what. The actuarial tables have been driving this process from the start. It may be too much to expect the leadership of the Traditional Anglican Church to clean house at this late stage, although it ought -- if they did, it would be a sign that they take their roles as religious leaders seriously. At least they'd give the whole project a decent burial.
