The Personal Prelature Puzzle

My regular correspondent brought to my attention an issue that's arisen in an ordinariate discussion forum that bears on a point I raised in Tuesday's post:

Someone brought to the attention of the Anglican Ordinariate Forum Fscebook group (the public forum, not the informal one) that the Our Lady of the Atonement bulletin last week mentioned that Quinceañeras were held at the church [This is a Latin celebration, both a religious and a social event, of a girl's fifteenth birthday.]

This has led to a blizzard of comments—-96 to date—-some of them making the point that San Antonio is 60% Hispanic, and that there are significant numbers of Hispanic Episcopalians, or just “what’s it to you?”, but many others saying that an Ordinariate parish should be culturally “English” and that Mexicans with their celebrations derived from Aztec fertility rites have no place there.

At one point there was a Spanish language OCSP community of former Episcopalians in Pinecrest FL, which has since folded, but I believe that their former administrator, Fr Pedro Toledo, travels periodically to Incarnation, Orlando to offer Confession in Spanish. Cahenslyite deviation indeed.

It does underline that the Ordinariate is not even a unified concept among its own adherents.

I covered Cahenlyism most fully in this post s year ago. It was a proposal in the 1890s by Peter Cahensly, a prominent German Catholic layman, to have separate hierarchies in the American Church for each group of ethnic immigrants in the US. This was apparently intended mainly to avoid situations where German immigrant Catholics would have Irish priests and bishops in charge of their parishes.

As best I understand the history, this never rose to the level of a formal proposal, and it never resulted in a formal rejection by Leo XIII, but a consensus arose both in Rome and the US that things weren't going to be done that way. However, I don't believe this ever reached the point that it was formalized in canon law -- I hope more knowledgeable visitors can chime in here.

But that a Latin tradition should cause controversy if it's celebrated in an ordinariate parish shows that there is some notion that the Anglicanorum in the coetibus refers to people of English or Episcopalian cultural roots, or more broadly, as Fr Bartus explained to an adult forum that I attended, "white people". (I know Fr Bartus well enough to know that neither irony nor humor is part of the man's makeup.)

So we're left with the question: is Quinceañera or Día de Muertos appropriate in an ordinariate parish? My answer would be derived from Wittgenstein, in which the solution to the problem emerges from the disappearance of the problem. In a novus ordo parish, this would be up to, say, the worship committee, the Fil-Am council, or whichever other parish body was involved, in consultation with the pastor.

In a novus ordo parish, the result would probably be processions, flowers, and lots of food. In an ordinariate parish, apparently a certain level of snobbery and bitter debate, no flowers, no processions, no food.

But this gets to the Cahenslyite conundrum as well. In effect, Cahensly's proposal, never quite folly defined or elaborated, would still amount to a personal prelature for certain interest groups. And this leads to the question, well above my paygrade, of why the idea of a personal prelature emerged in the late 20th century, when Leo XIII implicitly rejected it about 1900.

The first personal prelature was Opus Dei. It appears that Bernard Law was involved in some way with it, since he had been involved with, and maintained contacts with, Opus Dei since his time as a Harvard student in the early days of the American movement. At roughly the same time that John Paul was reviewing this possibility for Opus Dei, Bernard Law was advocating a personal prelature for disgruntled Episcopalians.

Law, an extremely ambitious man whom I've heard intended to succeed John Paul II as pontiff had it not been that John Paul outlived Law's expectations, was an opportunist and may have hoped that an Anglican personal prelature could in some way leverage his rise in the Church.

We're left now, with a personal prelature for Anglicans belatedly established under Benedict, trying to address the question of what problem it's meant to solve. Is it meant to cater to a particular ethnicity ("white people", perhaps?) in a way that novus ordo doesn't? I would say that Leo XIII was correct in saying this idea isn't worthy of a formal answer.

Is a personal prelature needed to cater to a particular liturgy? Why would that be necessary? Latin masses have prospered far more than Divine Worship within novus ordo dioceses. So we're left with the puzzle of why this strange personal prelature is needed, beyond that it seemed like a good idea to Bernard Law.

If any of the ordinariates had a strong leader, or perhaps even a strong advocate in Rome, who could articulate reasons for its existence, it might make a difference. In North America, Jeffrey Steenson comes off as an opportunist and an incompetent administrator. Bp Lopes -- I wonder why Bp Barron has never, to my knowledge, mentioned Anglicanorum coetibus or the North American ordinariate as any sort of bright spot in the suffering Church.

I would guess Bp Lopes is known to his brother bishops, if at all, as the guy who broke his leg falling off a ladder in his residence. Says a lot about a personal prelature.

I would guess that Cardinal Law, although he may have thought the establishment of an Anglican personal prelature could in some way further his career, he wouldn't have wanted the job, and he wouldn't have done any better in it than the others.

So if there's a reason for it, we've yet so see an effective leader who can show us what it is.

A Visitor Gives More Background On St Barnabas Omaha

A visitor familiar with that parish e-mailed me yesterday:

There’s definitely an attitude of “we’ve got it right, and the rest of the Church has got it wrong,” at St. B’s, as throughout the Ordinariate. It doesn’t surprise me that they are flouting local guidelines the way they ignore authority in general, including Houston, when they don’t like what they’ve been told.

St. Barnabas is a strange place. Most of the original Episcopalian congregation have gone - the original members who swam the Tiber in 2013 number fewer than 10 at this point. The congregation is almost entirely made up of traddy diocesan Catholics who want the trappings of the Tridentine Mass in English - people who were never Anglican at all. Lots of Pope Francis bashing, and Novus Ordo bashing. Not quite the purpose of Anglicanorum Coetibus, but I digress.

Father Catania is a contentious figure, who is largely responsible for having chased away most of the original congregation after he arrived. Anything deemed “too Anglican” was done away with (Gospel procession down the center aisle, birthday blessings, etc.) in favor of a stodgy “Traditional Latin Mass but in English” liturgy. Naturally, those who were assured nothing would change when they became Catholic, felt like they’d been duped, and left. Father Catania’s lack of pastoral skills made the transition much harder than it needed to be.

Alcohol is, and always has been, a problem at the parish. After Evensong, I’m told it’s customary for people to be at the Rectory drinking until well after Midnight. Fr Catania drinks openly and often.

About five years ago, the parish was left around four million dollars. After buying a bunch of property, including an historic three story mansion for a new rectory, completely remodeling the church, and building a large addition, the money is almost all gone. No effort has been made to grow the small congregation, so income is not nearly enough to cover expenses. The obsession with everything being fancy has left them broke. I’m told Fr. Catania left Mt. Calvary in similar straits after undertaking a renovation there, too.

It would be interesting to get a similar account from Mt Calvary, but not every parish has truth-tellers. I'm grateful for those that do, but I estimate this whole ordinariate story will be entirely historical in a fairly short time.

My regular correspondent reacted,

You titled a column in 2016 “Fr Catania Rehabilitated?” Under the Steenson regime, he was exiled to Siberia, as you noted, and then an unsuccessful attempt was made to find a diocesan assignment for him in Rochester. The arrival of Bp Lopes resulted in a big turn-around in his fortunes.

The larger picture—-that the Ordinariate is a sheltered workshop for Traddies, with campy Anglophile trappings but no real connection to Anglicanism or Anglicans—-is evident to me as I look around the web. Explains why at, say, the start-up group in Arden, NC I wrote to you about on July 6 everyone at the first mass was already a communicant. It has nothing to do with evangelism.

There was a cash crunch at St Barnabas earlier this year which supports the visitor’s contention that the endowment has pretty much been used up.

The question for me continues to be that the Church, especially the Catholic Church in the US and some other countries, is under major pressure, both from mobs and vandals who are tacitly encouraged by politicians, and from politicians using a manufactured medical crisis to impose special conditions on Christian and Jewish religious expression. This will have major repercussions on how dioceses operate for some time to come, even if the civil unrest and government persecutions abate.

The North American ordinariate is pretty much irrelevant here, and its major challenge will probably be simply staving off financial extinction.

But also, in the context of New Testament psychology, for instance in the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) there's always a secret payoff to censoriousness. It's not hard to think the people who favor the heavy-furniture liturgy use it to compensate for other failings, apparently in this case using this parish as a respectable version of the Delta house.

Anglicanorum coetibus is looking more and more like a footnote to the current series of crises that isn't going to solve any particular problem, especially as COVID lockdowns put a financial strain on the ordinariate, and money that goes to the Church can be better used elsewhere.

St Margaret's Katy, TX Ordinariate Community Closes

Based on posts on the "Catholic Ordinariates of Anglican Tradition Informal Conversation Forum" (whew!) Facebook group, my regular correspondent notes that the St Margaret's Katy, TX ordinariate group has been suppressed by Bp Lopes,

Peter Jesserer Smith is looking for answers, on the actually quite reasonable basis that information sharing helps communities learn and grow. An idea Houston vigorously rejects, in my observation. In any event, there is a picture (from a while back) on the FB page with maybe twenty-five or thirty lay members so of course by OCSP standards this was a not entirely negligible community which has now ceased to exist, despite an abundance of local Ordinariate clergy.

Well, the ordinariates are clergy-centered enterprises, one of whose key functions is to provide career paths for married Protestant refugees from that job market who haven't learned to code. My correspondent continues,

I always assumed that despite Fr Sellers’ initial efforts to recruit membership from among his former TEC parishioners in the area, the majority of those attending St Margaret were connected with the school where it assembled. As we know, Fr Sellers was originally Chaplain, later President of St John XXIII Prep.

Fr Scott Blick, another Ordinariate priest, became Chaplain when Fr Sellers was promoted, Fr Simington assisted there while a deacon, and most recently Fr Mitchican taught there before his priestly ordination and then became Chaplain.

Fr Sellers’ abrupt departure as President probably spelled the end of the school’s cosy relationship with the OCSP. If the congregation had had a significant membership not associated with the school no doubt they would have looked into another worship site.

The fact that this didn’t happen suggests that St Margaret’s was basically a Sunday extension of the school chapel and had no potential as an independent entity.

I think the question is another variation of "What problem are we trying to solve?" My regular correspondent sent me a photo from Facebook that shows how the worship space was arranged at the time the group started in 2015.

As my correspondent puts it,

No kneelers, no altar rail, altar appears to be set up in like that in St Peter’s in Rome, where the celebrant peers through the candles and the crucifix at the congregation, although not for the same reason, judging by the direction of the sunshine.

Beyond that,

Fr Sellers began the process of forming St Margaret by contacting “200 families” of former parishioners for a series of eight organisational meetings in a very long process that led to a modest beginning that stayed pretty modest.

Fr Sellers’ decision to provide congregational music on the guitar, with his wife accompanying him on keyboard, probably meant that the community was not a draw for the Trad crowd in chapel veils.

His tenure as unpaid Director of Communications for the OCSP, then as Director of Schools, of which there were none at the time, was unproductive, to put it charitably.

His initial chaplain’s job at St John XXIII clearly a handout from Cardinal DiNardo, whose brother-in-law was President of the school at the time. He is now officially retired from the OCSP, although he is not canonical retirement age [we think about 68], and continues to minister in the local diocese.

It's hard to avoid thinking that nobody thought this through beyond seeing a need to find a job for Fr Sellers, a member of the old Steenson clique. The tone deafness here is astonishing. If Mr Jesserer Smith is still interested in lessons to draw, the first one might be that you don't look to existing elites to make a success of something new. But there are others.

One is simply the pattern of failure in so many ordinariate startups. If there's a secret, it must be very well kept. However, I think one factor that probably does lead to success is having sufficient money to create something like the ordinariates' selling point, a high-church style worship space, liturgy, and music. If the organizers can't make a start that shows the promise of something like that emerging in the medium term, the effort isn't worth it.

Another issue Mr Jesserer Smith might want to bring up with himself is whether it's a responsible move to keep trying to promote such marginal, unstable efforts. If these things won't last more than five years or so, isn't it delaying the spiritual growth of the few dozen members -- including the Jesserer Smith family -- when they might be making more productive use of their time, talent, and treasure at a perfectly fine diocesan parish far closer to home?

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.

Why No Response At All On The Bishop Love Issue?

Episcopalian Bishop William Love is scheduled to face trial on April 21 for violating something called Resolution 8012, which from context I assume has something to do with same-sex marriage. It's a mark of how very poor the reporting is on all platforms that no coverage I've seen explains where Resolution 8012 came from, what it specifies, and what specific violation Bp Love is alleged to have committed, although he'll be tried for it soon. Repeated web searches on variations of "Episcopalian Bishop William Love Trial Resolution 8012" have been fruitless. Everyone involved with this should be ashamed. The dereliction is not just in the elite outlets.

UPDATE: A visitor sent me this link to a more complete story at the Episcopal News Service.

Although a best-case outcome would be a mirror of the 1990s Righter trial, where the panel found itself unable to find a specific violation of something or other, whether Love is saved by a hung jury, convicted, or acquitted is beside the point, and the knee-jerk conservative reaction, "tsk tsk, what are things coming to?" isn't really relevant.

The immediate beneficiary of the controversy will almost certainly be the ACNA, which has been by far the most successful Anglican realignment movement at attracting the disaffected. This in turn goes to the perennial question that comes up over Anglicanorum coetibus: what problem is it trying to solve? Clearly the start of the Anglican outreach project came in the wake of the Episcopalian general convention of 1976. Nobody can really escape the fact that the Pastoral Provision and the subsequent apostolic constitution were intended to reach out to conservative Episcopalians, who in fact have shown themselves willing to jump ship -- just not to the Catholic Church.

But why have we seen no appeals, either from Bp Lopes or the retired ordinary, Msgr Steenson, in the context of the current William Love controversy? Well, of course, it looks as though Bp Lopes will be laid up at least until May recovering from whatever he's recovering from, though one might expect Msgr Steenson to write something, speaking as an individual but someone who'd weathered the Episcopalian battles and found his personal solution to them,. perhaps in the Register, perhaps in First Things, perhaps somewhere else. Wouldn't platforms like these be happy to publish his considered views?

I think one explanation, even if Msgr Steenson had something new and illuminating to say, would be that the strategy outlined in Anglicanorum coetibus, for disgruntled parishes and even dioceses to come over in a body, was a pipe dream. The leaders like TEC Bp Iker who could bring this off with the ACNA never took the Vatican option seriously, even though the evidence we have is that it was presented to them in some concrete form. At this point, I think the CDF needs to rethink the project, which is past its sell-by date.

From an ecumenical point of view, I'm not sure how politic any such gesture would be in this context anyhow. The Episcopal Church is in the process of destroying itself and needs no assistance; any attempt to reach out to the dwindling ranks of the disgruntled would probably serve more to rally the bitter-clinger virtue signaling elites who remain there.

What would Bp Barron, the USCCB's point man for evangelization, do? I'd love to get half an hour of his time to ask him. I think the idea that an attempt at outreach at this point would be counterproductive would be among those he'd throw out. Others might be that the target market is too small, compared to the numbers of those who become dissatisfied with the solutions offered by atheism or New Age religion; or the potential of addressing Evangelicals from an intellectual perspective -- many of these are in fact intelligent, thoughtful people with serious insight into scripture.

But the dogs that aren't barking continue to be Bp Lopes and Msgr Steenson. Maybe they'd agree with the hypothetical points I might hear from Bp Barron. But in that case, both these men were nevertheless tasked with the specific mission of bringing Episcopalians into the Church, indeed even more specifically with bringing them in as full parishes and even dioceses -- after all, the ACNA succeeded at this task where so far they've failed. Where did they fail in this mission where the schismatics succeeded?

I think if Bp Barron were to produce a YouTube on Bp Love and the latest Episcopalian crisis (which I don't think he'd do, and which I don't think he should) he'd almost certainly have to insert brief prefatory remarks on how earlier Catholic attempts to attract Episcopalians didn't work, because. And there would be the rub. After all, Bp Barron isn't expecting to draw atheist parishes and dioceses, nor is he expecting the Rinzai Zen Buddhists to defect in a body.

The decision to become Catholic, I think he would go on to say, is always personal. A direct, largely rational and intellectual appeal is the one that's always worked, on a personal basis.

More Of The St Mary Of The Angels Story Trickles Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Steenson And Women's Ordination

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

Here's the meat:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steenson As Bishop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not necessary to rehearse all that was going on in the Episcopal Church at that time, except to say that the tumult reached a crescendo at the House of Bishops meeting on March 20, 2007. That was the day the bishops overwhelmingly rejected the valiant work that had been done to propose more effective instruments for the Anglican Communion, and they insisted that the polity of the Episcopal Church is independent, democratic, and connected to the rest of Anglicanism by voluntary association. By sunset I knew that I could not remain in the Episcopal Church under these circumstances. I still hoped that the Archbishop of Canterbury might exercise his discretion by whom he would invite to the Lambeth Conference (one of the few primatial prerogatives available to him), but two months later that hope was dashed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Inner Detective Has Another Question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstructing "The New Donatists" -- II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This comment carries the quote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstructing "The New Donatists" -- I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of the text itself, my regular correspondent notes

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

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

How Things Looked In 2007

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

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

A commenter at the blog says,

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

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

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

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

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

The second post expands on this dilemma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Things Looked In 2011

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

What is Anglicanorum coetibus?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has an ordinary been named yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Things Looked In Early 2013

A visitor sent me a copy of a 2013 essay by Aidan Nichols, OP, "Catholics of the Anglican Patrimony: The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham". It's worth pointing out that he makes clear that he's talking about the UK ordinariate exclusively, but this skirts a basic problem that Anglicanorum coetibus as it emerged began as an American initiative that had been proposed by Bernard Law in the late 1970s. His idea was of a personal prelature from the start, and the Pastoral Provision was only a partial realization of Law's original proposal.

The actual constitution was drafted as a result of a meeting between TEC bishop Clarence Pope and Fr Jeffrey Steenson and Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, and the work product resulting from that meeting appears to have formed the eventual text of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Complementary Norms. Nichols's narrative relies largely on hypostatized Trends, a Catholic element, a Protestant element, a Latitudinarian element, Catholic-minded Anglicanism, ecumenism, and so forth. The puzzling thing is how few individuals, specific events, or actual documents are referenced -- there's just Henrician Reformation and other cloud-like entities drifting over the narrative.

The one thing that strikes me is the section on Pope Benedict and His Vision. On one hand, I think it's hard to attribute a vision to Benedict when Anglicanorum coetibus appears to have been drafted primarily by the American Jeffrey Steenson at the instigation of the American Cardinal Law, with the intent of addressing a specifically American set of circumstances, to wit, the 1970s Episcopalian prayer book revisions and ordination of women, which had created a specifically American dissident movement that Law's proposals were meant to address.

It's worth pointing out that Nichols requires the Traditional Anglican Communion. which he characterizes as "a worldwide (if somewhat ramshackle) body of Continuing Anglicans" to justify his postulating a larger intrnational movement, though he doesn't identify John Hepworth as the main actor, he doesn't mention that Hepworth's initiatives were almost immediately repudiated by the TAC bishops, and he seems to be completely unaware of the 1993 meeting between Pope, Steenson, and Ratzinger.

The real puzzle is that Nichols imputes a much larger agenda to Benedict, an evangelization project that would embrace not just Anglicans, but Lutherans, Lefebvrists, and Eastern Orthodox. Well, this was written in 2012 and overtaken by events early the following year. Someone may be able to help me out here, but I'm not aware of any concrete proposal for evangelizing any of these other groups that involved any sort of personal prelature or other special structure to bring them into the Church. And as of 2013, for reasons that aren't at all clear, Benedict seems simply to have dropped the project and abdicated. Whatever his agenda. other things clearly supervened.

I've exchanged e-mails with a friendly ELCA pastor who plans to retire this summer. He describes himself as an "Anglican wannabe" and seems to be a high-church Lutheran who vests in alb and chasuble. I don't think I'll ask him about the prospects he might see in an equivalent evangelization move toward Lutherans from some future pope until he's well and truly retired, because I have a feeling that just about any observation he might make could be problematic otherwise.

My guess is that, if he's aware at all of how Anglicanorum coetibus has fared in the US, tearing parishes apart as it has, attracting only those clergy who had few career prospects as Protestants, with insignificant interest among its target market of disgruntled Episcopalians, he would simply respond that the idea as it's emerged has proven unworkable from a practical standpoint. Maybe if the CDF went back to the drawing board, something better could be developed.

So I find Nichols's essay an odd artifact of an optimism that simply hasn't proved justified.

Ten Years On, And Nothing Has Changed

My regular correspondent sent me a link to a 2016 post at the inactive Ordinariate Expats blog, Two interviews from “Our Sunday Visitor” with Monsignor Steenson and Bishop-elect Lopes give some interesting insight into the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. The interesting thing is how little of the standard line has changed, big things are on the way, we're appreciating our shared treasures, we want beauty in worship, blah, blah, blah.

From Msgr Steenson,

The thing we want to avoid above all else is the ordinariate becoming a safe harbor of refuge for people who are disgruntled with their previous church experience. That’s what we absolutely don’t want.

How's that going? The main signs of life in the North American ordinariate seem to be with groups that consist of Catholics who in fact are disgruntled with their previous church experience -- at a time when, as the visitor yesterday points out, the true fruits of Vatican II are beginning to ripen in the diocesan Church. And,

Obviously in terms of the stability of the ordinariate, we need to strengthen our congregations. Hopefully we get to the point where many of the clergy will not have to work another job in order to make ends meet, that the congregations will have their own buildings and are able to support the clergy full time.

Six years after that 2014 interview, there's been absolutely no progress toward that goal.

From Bp Lopes at the time of his designation,

We had a new community in Texas that just had its first Mass on the Third Sunday of Advent. Thirty-five people participated in that celebration, so the new community of St. Margaret of Scotland is off and running. There is continual interest in other places. I do have a certain sense that the ordinariate is a growing reality. We could build six churches tomorrow if we had the money for it.

Five years later, where are the new buildings? Where are the new groups? My regular correspondent notes, "There were 43 OCSP communities four years ago. Today there are 41, according to the OCSP website." Also, "About 25% of the men ordained for the OCSP are currently working exclusively in military chaplaincy or diocesan parish ministry. Another 10% assist at (or lead) a diocesan parish in addition to their work with an Ordinariate group."

Compare this with a recent post at Fr Z's blog, where he asks if there's a web site that gives reliable statistics on locations and mass times for Latin masses. The consensus is that there's no single completely reliable site, but this one linked in a comment gives something like 52 parishes offering Latin masses in California alone, more than the entire North American ordinariate.

And the sense is that the Latin mass movement is continuing to grow, while the appeal for Anglicans seems to have peaked, with the ordinariate now seeing disgruntled Catholics as a more productive market. But even Catholics are apparently going elsewhere if they don't like the OF mass.

Tyendinaga: What Problem Were They Trying To Solve?

An update in yesterday's post contained a link to a National Catholic Register piece on the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus that gives a much more detailed version of the Tyendinaga community:

But the ordinariate in Tyendinaga shows people that they can be fully Mohawk and fully Catholic with the Anglican traditions of their ancestors. The community sings Mohawk hymns and prays some of the Mass prayers, such as the Our Father, in Mohawk. While both the Book of Common Prayer and much of the pre-Vatican II (extraordinary form) Catholic Mass was translated into Kanienʼkehá, Maracle said the language is still being relearned and other challenges would have to be met first before translating Divine Worship: The Missal.

A paragraph above it also caught my attention:

Charles Maracle, warden for Keristos Ne Korah:Kowah (Christ the King) parish in the Tyendinaga Mohawk territory, told the Register that the community joined the ordinariate because it guaranteed they could be Catholic and keep the Anglican traditions of their ancestors.

A "warden" is a canonically and legally defined function for lay people in Anglican denominations. There is no direct Catholic equivalent. Mr Maracle seems to be serving a function equivalent to pastoral life coordinator in the position he's occupied in a Catholic context, but he calls himself a "warden", and the Register doesn't seem to have asked him anything about that.

The version of the ordinariate worship in the first quote above says it mixes translations from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the EF Latin mass into Mohawk, but any translation of the Divine Worship Missal is only a very distant possibility.

Well, OK, but this sent me searching the web for what form of worship Catholic Mohawks not in the ordinariate use. This story outlines the diocesan Catholic Mohawk liturgy in another Mohawk reserve in Ontario. My regular correspondent added more context on the Tyendinaga group:

The original ACCC group might have had issues with the ordination of women or other changes in the ACC. Certainly nothing specific to Indigenous heritage. The Anglican church has long and close ties with indigenous Canadians and is currently moving towards some kind of First Nations diocese within the ACC. The ACCC clergyman, Mr Trinque, was not indigenous, as far as I know—but I could be wrong.

Fr Whalen, who received them and celebrated mass once a month is 70 or 71 now. That is why I speculated that he might be stepping away from ministering to the Tyendinaga group.

Mr O’Coin, however, is a local Mohawk man and a convert to Catholicism from, apparently, an evangelical background. Not sure what Anglican Patrimony he brings to the table, or why he got involved with the Ordinariate group rather than a local diocesan parish. Early ads for the group under his leadership called it an “Open Catholic Church” that welcomed “absolutely anybody.” In any event, he has been very ill and his ordination to the permanent diaconate on hold since 2018.

So the question comes up, why did Msgr Steenson and then-Fr Hurd see the need for a specifically Anglican-Mohawk brand of Catholicism, when there's a thriving Catholic Mohawk tradition in North America? The appeal for Anglican Catholic Mohawks seems never to have involved more than roughly a dozen people, but it would appear that once the priest who celebrated their monthly mass retired, the group was discontinued, as has happened in several other cases in the ordinariate.

What problem were Msgr Steenson and then-Fr Hurd trying to solve? Given the limited resources available, including the limited time of a diocesan priest to celebrate mass for them, why did they go out of their way to create a project of such limited appeal -- including raising at least the possibility of translating the Divine Worship Missal into Mohawk? (Now, there would be a task for a Viennese professor.)

I think this is yet another example of the incoherence in the Anglicanorum coetibus project.

Another Atonement Insider On Fr Phillips And Anglicanorum Coetibus -- I

As we come closer to the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus, it's very useful to develop all the information we can on the leadup to its implementation and, not incidentally, the trail of destruction it's left in its wake. Some time ago, we had input from an insider at Our Lady of the Atonement who gave one perspective on Fr Phillips's stewardship there and the reasons that led him to keep the parish out of the North American ordinariate until 2017.

More recently, I've had extensive correspondence with a second insider who confirms aspects of the first account, but he adds perspective from someone who saw the parish from a different point of view, including that of the several hundred parishioners who attended the Sunday evening OF Latin mass almost exclusively. For this substantial group, of course, "Anglican Use" was of very little meaning. This visitor's account is quite detailed, and I'll present it in posts over several days, with my own observations interspersed.

I will start out by saying I was not one of the original parishioners at OLOTA, so I do not have knowledge of some of the early events that took place at that time. I will try to give an overview of the facts as I know them. I do know that when OLOTA first started, with about 17 people, a moderate sized house was purchased for Fr. Phillips and his large family. Again, this was before I arrived at the parish so I don't know all of the details, but the house was owned by the parish, not Fr. Phillips. Not long after this, a small church and a school were built.

As I understand it, some Franciscan nuns were brought in to teach at the school. This did not work out well. The nuns had their own idea about the school and Fr. Phillips had his idea. A battle ensued that brought in the Archbishop of the diocese to negotiate a settlement. Fr. Phillips won and the nuns left. The interesting thing here is that one of the nuns left the Franciscan order, joined a new order and is to this day still at OLOTA.

This whole affair created bad blood between Fr. Phillips and Archbishop Flores. To my knowledge the Archbishop never came back to OLOTA. When Fr. Phillips needed a bishop for any occasion, such as confirmations, he called on an older retired bishop to come out and officiate.

Because of his falling out with the diocese, Fr. Phillips became somewhat nervous about his precarious position at OLOTA. He once said to me that he wanted his own house, one not owned by the parish, to protect his family in case something happened. An aside here is that sometime after he bought this larger home, he installed a pool. When asked by a parishioner if this luxury was necessary, he responded that he never took a vow of poverty.

Interestingly, we see this tendency echoed in the priests at Our Lady of Walsingham, who live in million-dollar McMansions. (It would be worth investigating how Fr Perkins is housed as well.) The visitor also commented,

All of Fr. Phillips's family members and their spouses with the possible exception of his elder daughter were paid employees of OLOTA in different capacities. I think that the new regime has put an end to this. To my knowledge, none of Fr. Phillips's family members are still employed by the parish.[But see below]

This goes to the oh-by-the way opportunism and self-aggrandizement that seems to be so common among ordinariate priests. It seems as though both the ordinaries Houston has had so far would suggest this is not a bug but a feature. The visitor goes on,

Now on to the Ordinariate. As is well known, JPll and B16 were favorable to the whole Pastoral provision/Ordinariate idea. As this was progressing to become a reality, Fr. Phillips started a campaign to sign up the parishioners at OLOTA. He wanted big numbers, so he strongly asked that we all sign up. Most did. In the interim Fr. Phillips was invited to a bishops conference in, I think, Washington, DC. Many of us felt that Fr. Phillips was invited to this conference to be made head of the new ordinariate.

Fr. Phillips told me that one day when the conference was in session a cart was rolled out with a birthday cake on it. The cart was placed in front of Fr. Phillips and the whole assembly got up and sang happy birthday to him. I am sure, with this display, he must have felt that he was on the inside track. Unfortunately the ordinariate announcement did not materialize at that conference. He came home full of joy. It would only be a matter of time until the announcement was made.

One day in conversation with Fr. Phillips, I asked who he thought were possible candidates to be head of the upcoming ordinariate. He thought he was the rightful choice because of all he had done to bring it about. I mentioned Msgr Stetson because he was a Roman Priest who could be elevated to the rank of bishop. A married man cannot be a bishop. He was also the liaison between the Pastoral Provision and Cardinal Law who, as I understand it, was put in charge of overseeing the ordinariate by the Vatican. [see below]

I should not have mentioned Msgr Stetson's name as this precipitated a volley of expletives unbecoming a priest. Fr. Phillips did not like Msgr Stetson, but had to tolerate him because of Cardinal Law. Fr. Phillips went on to say that there are four ranks of Monsignor and the highest rank was equal to a bishop.

This confirms the earlier insider's account that Fr Phillips and Msgr Stetson were on very bad terms. What we do know in hindsight is that Msgr Steenson had been working with Cardinal Law since at least 1993 to draft what went to Cardinal Ratzinger as a proposal for Anglicanorum coetibus. Had this been implemented under John Paul, it appears that TEC Bp Clarence Pope would have become ordinary, with Steenson likely vicar general and heir presumptive. Given the more than 15-year delay, Bp Pope's declining health made Steenson the clear choice once Steenson became an Episcopalian bishop himself.

This was kept a deep dark secret, since Steenson would likely never have been voted a TEC bishop in 2004 had the plans with Law and Ratzinger come to light prematurely. In fact, the actual reason for Steenson's 2007 resignation as TEC Bishop of the Rio Grande and journey to Rome under Law's auspice never was made clear even after Steenson's designation as ordinary in 2012.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl was made delegate for implementing Anglicanorum coetibus when it was promulgated in late 2009. Wuerl in turn made Fr R Scott Hurd his day-to-day designate. Hurd, a married Anglican Use priest, continued as Steenson's first vicar general. In the spirit of mutual self-promotion and self-aggrandizement we see throughout this history, he seems to have favored a clique of young graduates from the elite Nashotah House Episcopal seminary in recommending ordinations for Episcopalian and Anglican candidates.

Msgr Stetson's position in the implementation is something of a puzzle. Fr Phillips saw him as a prime candidate for ordinary, and it's true that he had a strong link to Cardinal Law since they were both at Adams House in Harvard together in the late 1940s. However, Stetson was 80 and already retired from Opus Dei. He was given the task of supervising the entry of the St Mary of the Angels parish in Hollywood, CA into the ordinariate, since he had moved to Los Angeles.

But between Stetson himself, Hurd, Steenson, and Steenson's legal adviser, Margaret Chalmers, the project of bringing that parish into the ordinariate was bungled disastrously over a five-month period that culminated with parish dissidents starting a seven-year round of litigation that is still not over. We should not neglect this chapter in recognizing the trail of destruction Anglicanorum coetibus is leaving in its wake.

The money in the blogosphere as of 2011 was on either Fr Phillips or David Moyer to become ordinary. Moyer, a "continuing" bishop, in my view might have been the best choice among all the potential candidates. He had what I think was a realistic vision of what the ordinariate could actually become, a sense of the risks in what it quite possibly would not, and a sense of personnel and personalities, which I don't believe any other candidate had. But Steenson in hindsight was the only reasonable choice, while if nothing else, Moyer's hidden health issues would quickly have killed him if he'd gone to Houston.

I'll continue with the visitor's account tomorrow.

UPDATE: The first insider who contributed to earlier insights comments, regarding the employment of Fr Phillips's family at the parish:

This account is all correct with the exception of Fr. Phillips's eldest daughter, named Christian, was employed by the parish, in the very early days of the school, as a librarian/aide.

With the exception of his second eldest daughter, all five of his children have worked at the parish in the past - and her husband was a custodian for a time.

His only son, Nathan, had an extremely lucrative contractual relationship with the parish, during the construction of the most recent buildings ($millions spent but not completed), and he still receives payment for services rendered, from a facilities maintenance point of view.

It has been an extremely challenging endeavor for Fr. Lewis to extricate this family from the cash flow of the parish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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