"We Mustbe Careful From These Persons Who Are Claiming To Be Anglican Leaders"

Over the past week or so, I've had a series of e-mails from a visitor in India who's brought my attention to what amounts to a continuing con operation by the so-called Anglican Church of India. It's worth noting that in the runup to Anglicanorum coetibus, the late John Hepworth, then Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, was for a time the most vocal advocate for a Roman Catholic personal prelature for disaffected Anglicans, and in support of his petition, he cited a worldwide membership in the TAC of 450,000, of which 400,000 were assumed to be in India, since verifiable membership in the other TAC components, UK, US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, was barely into the low five figures.

Nevertheless, it's hard for me not to think this number was in Pope Benedict's mind when he referred to "groups of Anglicans" who petitioned "repeatedly and insistently" to be received into the Catholic Church. But people who investigated the actual state of affairs in the Anglican Church of India came away with a very different impression. Early in the history of this blog, I posted the contents of an e-mail from a retired priest of the TAC-affiliated Anglican Church in America who moved to India and hoped to continue a ministry there in his retirement. His experience is worth reprinting here:

[E]very "number" I have ever seen published by the TAC or any member church has been greatly inflated or totally falsified from the beginning ... I have actually never seen any "church" here whatsoever - it's like a ghost.

The reason I decided to transfer my canonical residency to the TAC Church of India was because I fully expected to find an organized, thriving church here under Archbishop Samuel Prakash. A [thriving] group of TEC'ers poised and ready to enter the Ordinariate. +Hepworth was going to make a trip here (to Delhi, where +Prakash is located) in November of 2010. I was invited to go. I was told so by none-other-than +Hepworth during several Skype conversations. That meeting never took place.

When I arrived .... I found out from +Prakash that I would be living in the "Diocese of Nandyal" - - unfortunately, there is only one "parish" here... and "here" is the village of Nandyal - around 300 km. due-south of Hyderabad - and the Bishop is the Rector..."parish" is his family, meeting in his [house]...and no English is spoken - only Telugu.

Later in the post, I quoted Abp Prakash himself on the Anglican Church of India's website, who uttered the words that appear in the title of this post, "We mustbe [sic] careful from these persons who are claiming to be Anglican leaders". However, not much has been reported outside India on the subsequent history of this TAC-affiliated church and its activities. My correspondence with this visitor from India has brought things somewhat more up to date, but there's clearly been no change:

I was actually associated with Samuel Prakash, who claims to be the Metropolitan of India ACI, he has appointed many Non-Christian people as Secretary, Principal Officer, Property Officer etc. who are involved only in selling of the Anglican properties.

This is an accusation I sometimes saw about the ACI when I first looked at the whole question of the Traditional Anglican Communion. The visitor gives some historical background, which I have slightly edited to US from South Asian English:

The Anglican Church in India was formed in 1927 through the Indian Church Act, and the Church was governed by the Government itself, the Crown being the Supreme Governor of the Church. After the Independence of India in 1947, The British handed over the Church and its properties to the Anglican Church of India through a gazette notification. Since all aid stopped from the Government [i.e., the ACI as Church of England surrogate was no longer established in India] the Church started to suffer. In 1970 six Churches which included the Anglican Church of India came into a union through which Church of North India & Church of South India was formed. This is duly functioning up to now, although they are also involved into so many fraudulent activities for which I am contacting the International Anglican Communion, but have not got any positive response.

John Asa Prakash (Father of Samuel Prakash) was a priest of the Anglican Church of India during that time. It was he that resisted this union and declared himself the Bishop of the Anglican Church of India.

The visitor at this point brings Louis Falk into the story, and I'll supplement his account with what I've learned about Falk in the course of research for this blog. I gave a thumbnail of Falk's career in this 2013 post here. A member of a prominent Wisconsin family (though a bit of a black sheep), Louis Falk (1935-) was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1963, but he was almost immediately involved in scandal, and he was defrocked or "deposed" from the Episcopal priesthood in 1965, moving as well from Wisconsin to Iowa, where he quietly went into business.

However, the dissident movement in The Episcopal Church after its 1976 general convention rekindled his interest in the quasi-priesthood, and once the movement gained momentum in the late 1970s, he quickly rose in what became the first Anglican Church in North America, which then morphed into the Anglican Catholic Church, with Falk eventually replacing James Mote as its primate.

Always a political schemer, Falk ran into opposition within the ACC, but in retaliation, in 1991 he founded a worldwide umbrella body, the Traditional Anglican Communion, of which he became the primate, and he created the Anglican Church in America as part of the TAC, a body in which he could also preside. (The ACC, which had expelled Falk, continued as a separate body unaffiliated with the TAC. All these organizations were small, poor, and shrinking.)

The exact mechanism by which Samuel Prakash and the Anglican Church in India came into the Traditional Anglican Communion remains unclear. Although the TAC was founded in 1991, according to Wikipedia, "Prakash was consecrated as a bishop of the Anglican Church of India on 6 October 1984 at the YMCA Hall in New Delhi by Louis Falk, assisted by James Orin Mote and John Asa Prakash." Falk was a defrocked priest of the US Episcopal Church and a self-designated priest and bishop of the ACC; James Mote was a dissident Episcopal priest who had left that body and become a self-designated bishop and at the time was the retired primate of the ACC. Neither had apostolic authority except in his own mind to consecrate anyone a bishop, much less in a defunct denomination halfway around the world. (The Roman Catholic Church, which invented bishops, has held since 1896 that no Anglican of any sort has this authority.)

The visitor from India has forwarded a few documents that strongly suggest Prakash's business practices have been deceptive. For instance, here is a 2017 communication from the ACI to Indian government offices that misrepresents the ACI on its letterhead as part of the "Worldwide Anglican Communion", which it is not:

Another copy of a 2016 letter shows that the ACI letterhead as of then referred to the "Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion", which was correct as of then. Nevertheless, it shows that the primary activity of the TAC-ACI was to acquire and sell off what properties of the defunct former Anglican Church of India that it could.

It's difficult to say how much Louis Falk or James Mote knew of Samuel Prakash's activities, which as far as I can determine have always been deliberately deceptive, since he seems to claim to be primate of a denomination on the Anglican model that actually has few or no actual parishes, few or no actual members, and indeed as we see employs many non-Christians in its holy work, which consists of acquiring and selling putative properties of a defunct denomination.

While the Traditional Anglican Church, as of 2020 successor to the TAC, currently makes no claim of numbers on its Wikipedia page, the TAC was well known as of 2008 for claiming numbers "like 400,000 and 700,000 for their worldwide membership". These would have come from Falk's successor as primate after 2002, the late John Hepworth. Hepworth's history is as sketchy as Falk's; he had been ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Australia but left the priesthood in uncertain circumstances and then married twice. After 1990, he became active in the TAC-affiliated Anglican Catholic Church of Australia, rose to be its primate, and succeeded Falk as TAC primate in 2002.

In the runup to Anglicanorum coetibus, he had hoped to be restored to the Catholic priesthood under its conditions, but as this prospect became unlikely, he alleged that he had been subject to abuse as a seminarian. I came to know him slightly after 2012, and from his accounts, I got the impression that Catholic authorities treated him politely but never took him seriously as an Anglican spokesman. In this, I suspect their assessments of his credibility were correct.

It's hard for me to avoid thinking that at best, Hepworth found it advantageous to look the other way over Prakash's claims, and we know from the above account of the retired US ACA-TAC priest who went to India that these were the sorts of claims Prakash always made -- but minimal inquiry would have shown they were false. From the same account, we also saw that Hepworth himself made optimistic predictions about India that also never came true.

The comic-opera TAC College of Bishops forced Hepworth out as primate in 2012, largely but not exclusively due to the debacle Anglicanorum coetibus proved to be for both Hepworth and the TAC, but I think it's significant that the man whom the bishops voted in to replace Hepworth as "acting primate" was Samuel Prakash, whose "province" was made up entirely of smoke and mirrors. This was likely convenient, as Prakash would be unlikely to rock the boat by challenging any of the other bishops, but none of the TAC's provinces was consequential, and all were and still are shrinking by the year.

Prakash was replaced as acting primate of the TAC when Canadian Bishop Shane Janzen of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada was elected primate, but the Wikipedia entry for the ACCC says that at the time of Anglicanorum coetibus, it had 35 groups, while at the current time it says there are 14. None of these people, Prakash or his colleagues, fronts a serious enterprise.

If the TAC-based Anglican Church of India is almost entirely a fictional church, we still have the question of how successful it's been as a fraud, and for that, we simply don't have a good answer. The visitor from India who brought this issue to my attention last week has been concerned that I help in making it public, but I can only surmise that the ACI is a tiny minority within a minority. Wikipedia says there are about 27.8 million Christians of all denominations in India, making up 2.3 percent of the population. Of these, Protestants of all denominations including Anglican are 59%, but the ACI must be a near-invisible component of this group.

For the ACI to attract the attention of Indian media, it seems as though it would need to be larger, and indeed more successful as a fraudulent enterprise, than it's been. And frauds of all shapes and sizes have been part of religious sects forever, the smaller and more credulous the groups the better.

Still, it's worth pointing out that the Traditional Anglican Church, he TAC's successor, continues to list the Anglican Church of India as a province on its website. Though it makes no claim as to its membership (or the membership of any other province), that it should cite India as a province at all must be considered a matter of borrowed prestige that in fact is deceptive.

But the "continuing Anglican" movement is tiny and shrinking no matter what. The actuarial tables have been driving this process from the start. It may be too much to expect the leadership of the Traditional Anglican Church to clean house at this late stage, although it ought -- if they did, it would be a sign that they take their roles as religious leaders seriously. At least they'd give the whole project a decent burial.

"Any Of Them Could Have Become Roman Catholics At Any Time"

I had two e-mails yesterday that provide worthwhile angles to approach what I think are contradictions and even obstacles to the faithful in Anglicanorum coetibus. The first:

My appreciation of the generosity extended to the now homeless SMA parishioners is tempered by the fact that any of them, Fr. Kelley included, could have become Roman Catholics at any time during these difficult years. They could have “joined” the Ordinariate as well. This business of holding out until a priest gets in or a building gets in, or “we all get in together,” still seems to me to be a misreading of the ultimate reward of reception.

This is completely correct, and in fact the parish was told essentially this, twice, by Cardinals Manning and Mahony when it sought to go in under the Pastoral Provision in the 1980s. As I've said here repeatedly, I think the cardinals made the correct call at the time.

A major question I have, to which we'll never get a complete answer, is what role Cardinal Law played, along with Msgr Stetson, in allowing this story to continue the way it did from the late 1970s up to recent weeks. Law and his representatives (probably including Stetson) we know worked closely with Fr Jack Barker, then Rector of St Mary of the Angels, not only in developing a plan for St Mary's to leave TEC, but in attempting to get other founders of the "continuing Anglican" movement to enter an inchoate personal prelature in the context of the 1977 Congress of St Louis.

By Fr Barker's account, the "continuers" never took this seriously (not that their own approach was any more productive). But I've got to think some assurance was given to Fr Barker that the parish would be received in some way under Law's aegis, notwithstanding the Pastoral Provision was years in the future, and whatever assurance Law gave Barker proved utterly worthless by the mid-1980s. But we also know that Law continued to pursue the idea of a personal prelature, continuing back-channel contacts with Jeffrey Steenson and other "conservative" (read opportunistic) TEC figures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Any of them could have become Catholic at any time, for that matter.

Anglicanorum coetibus was effectively drafted by Steenson, very likely with major input from Law, in the wake of a 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger; it stayed in Ratzinger's desk when St John Paul II proved lukewarm (quite correctly; he'd already promulgated the Pastoral Provision), and it emerged in 2009 only after Ratzinger became pontiff and could implement it himself.

Among the problems I see in it is its treatment of "groups of Anglicans" as something special -- it allows them to enter the Catholic Church on a vaguely streamlined basis, and it creates a major exception for their married clergy. What we see as a practical matter with the clergy in particular is that it's allowed the CDF to bypass effective diocesan vocations procedures and ordain whomever it chooses based on whim -- no MDiv is required; psychological review is cursory; no serious consideration is given to the numerous pitfalls connected with making married men Catholic priests.

By treating "groups of Anglicans" as something special over and above groups of Baptists or whatever else, it also feeds on existing feelings of Episcopalian class bias and exclusivity among both clergy and laity who come in, while at the same time it ghettoizes them into parishes that are outside dioceses and under their own jurisdiction -- as one US bishop put it, not just unique but separate. I agree with the commenter that this is a "misreading of the ultimate reward of reception".

On the other hand, I'm not inclined to be too hard on Fr Kelley and those of the parish who stayed out until the latest developments. The promise that was made to them in late 2011 was that they would in fact come in quickly. Once things began to go south -- a result of bungling by Stetson, Steenson, Hurd, and Mrs Chalmers -- the OCSP provided no serious guidance to the parish and effectively cut it loose, with only token communication in succeeding years. Much of the fault is on the pastoral side here, aided by the false impressions given by Anglicanorum coetibus. It's worth pointing out that the effective pastoral guidance the parish received after about 2014 was from Abp Hepworth, who stepped up to the plate when Houston did not. Fr Kelley also had a continuing pastoral obligation.

In addition, prudence is a virtue. Fr Kelley and the vestry had a fiduciary responsibility to preserve the significant asset in the parish property. I can give a man my cloak, but I can't give him another man's cloak. The property wasn't something they could simply give away. When the legal situation finally changed, their obligation in this matter changed. Given that a promise had effectively been made over decades by Law, Stetson, Steenson, Ratzinger, and many others from within the Church, I can't fault Fr Kelley and the core parishioners for giving it good-faith credence; presumably, this promise will now be carried through promptly.

I say presumably. The second e-mail I had yesterday, from an individual who went through the events of 2010-12 but is no longer connected with the parish or the OCSP, said

I never expected the degree of obfuscation, plausible deniability, and outright deception practiced in OCSP and whatever that continuing Anglican "church" is called. I am no political operator and am certainly unsuited for, and incompetent at, that bs. I pray that Fr Kelley is protected from further harm by those people.

Lucy can still pull the football away, as she has been doing here for decades, for reasons that are inscrutable. Timeo danaos et dona ferentes.

Two Movies On The Same Screen

I had an e-mail in response to the post on Fr Kelley's letter that I need to respond to here, because it's from someone who spends a great deal of time commenting on other blogs that don't approve my comments when I occasionally submit them. So I may as well get things clear here.

The letter from Fr. Kelley clearly is sad, but I think that it reflects what has been the policy of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter from the beginning, formally stated on Page 6 of the ordinariate’s Guide to Parish Development: “Recognized ordinariate communities cannot be involved in civil litigation in their ecclesial community of origin.” Soon after the canonical erection of the ordinariate, Msgr. Steenson told Fr. Kelley and the congregation of St. Mary of the Angels that the Catholic Church would provide facilities for them if they abandoned the property. They could have done what they are doing now back in 2012. Instead, they have lost six years and spent a considerable sum on legal costs that they could have put toward acquisition of another parcel of land and construction of new facilities. In the end, this case clearly shows the wisdom of the ordinariate’s policy.

My visitor says the letter "clearly is sad", when in my post I called it "really wonderful news", so I think this is a case of what humorist Scott Adams calls people seeing two entirely different movies on the same screen.

Let's back up and look at chronology. In December 2011, Houston's representative to the parish, Msgr William Stetson, who had been closely associated with Cardinal Law and his efforts to establish the Pastoral Provision throughout Law's career, told the parish in a public meeting that it would be received into the OCSP during the first weeks of January 2012. Indeed, it would be the first parish to be received. At the time, there was no litigation pending against the parish from any quarter. The parish had voted to enter the OCSP earlier in the year by the requisite supermajority.

Repeat. No litigation. Parish to be received in early 2012. Period.

However, for reasons that have never been clear, Lucy in effect pulled away the football at the last minute. Two weeks into January, the announcement was made that Houston wanted another vote, which was promptly held, and which resulted in an even larger supermajority in favor of entering the OCSP. At that point, the process simply stalled. Again, the reasons why nothing happened after that have never been entirely clear. I've speculated on them here now and then, but in the spirit of Fr Kelley's letter, there's no sense rubbing that sore again.

The Monday after Easter 2012, the Bush group and the ACA made their first effort to seize the parish physically. However, no litigation was filed, and the police removed the Bush group from the property after it was established that they had no right to be present at that time. At that point, it should have been clear to Houston that delaying their intention of receiving the parish posed greater risks than they may have thought.

It's worth stressing that when I was briefly parish treasurer in 2011, I developed a proposed 2012 parish budget that included a 10% tithe to the Ordinariate, which would have been in the range of $25,000 per year. This would have been possible due to the rental from the commercial space on the parish property. For Houston to have ignored this as a factor in its internal deliberations, which as far as I can see it did, was beyond stupid. I have no other way to characterize it.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the vestry's attorney argued to Judge Murphy that the ACA let every other parish that was headed for the OCSP, including Holy Nativity Payson, go in without trouble. The difference in the St Mary of the Angels case was the income from the commercial property. If Houston was ignoring this factor, the ACA definitely wasn't. I keep referring to Houston's strange behavior in this period as bungling, and I see no reason to change it.

(By the way, if Msgr Steenson urged the parish to abandon its property, this is the first I've heard of it. Houston would thereby be giving up a $25,000 a year tithe, which it would have preferred to have.)

No litigation was filed over the St Mary's property until May 2012. If the OCSP had followed through with its intention in January 2012, or at any time between January and May of that year, the move would have been unencumbered by any current litigation. Houston had between January and May 2012 to resolve any issues they may have had, and I can only conclude that the individuals involved, from Msgrs Stetson and Steenson, to then-Fr Hurd, to Mrs Chalmers, a canon lawyer acting as Houston's attorney, were not equal to fairly simple tasks. All are no longer in the picture.

The visitor's comments above remind me a little of the arguments from the secularists who challenge people like Bp Barron: if the laws of physics explain everything, why do we need God? Bp Barron would ask in reply why we have the laws of physics. By the same token, if Houston's policies retroactively explain what happened in 2012, how did the events of 2012 get started?

There's a very good answer here: Fr Barker and the St Mary of the Angels vestry revised the parish Articles of Incorporation in January 1977 to remove the parish from The Episcopal Church. This ensured that every subsequent event would be driven by the idea that extra-ecclesial actions could supersede any other effort to govern the parish. More than 40 years of litigation were the result. Demons are real. The question I have, which will probably never be adequately answered, is what role then-Bp Law and Msgr Stetson played in this event, because by Fr Barker's own account, they were talking to him at the time. The bungling started much earlier than 2012.

On the other hand, I think it's significant that, at least in the account we have via Fr Kelley and Abp Hepworth, Fr Perkins, and by implication Bp Lopes, are moving quickly to receive the parish even without its once-substantial tithe. This is generous and, if things follow through, good news. Nothing sad about it.

Unless, of course, Lucy pulls the football away once again.

Abp Hepworth And The Titanic

Mr Chadwick has replied to yesterday's post, and it appears that he has moderated his positions on Abp Hepworth to some degree, so I'm disinclined to argue with him. His opinion on the St Mary of the Angels parish, while realistic, doesn't seem entirely consistent.

The “correspondent” speaks of his uneasiness about being under Hepworth’s oversight on account of his no longer being the primate of an institutional ecclesial body. St Mary’s is not my problem. Even lovely ships like the Titanic had to be abandoned when they were sinking. A building, however beautiful, is not worth that amount of litigation.

My correspondent had this comment on Chadwick's view:

I concur in seeing no long-term benefit from being associated with Hepworth, someone regarded, and not just by the "RC bureaucracy", as a "toxic apostate priest." . . . What does maintaining a connection with him say about St Mary's view of its way forward?

I think the comparison with the Titanic is apt. From Fr Kelley's informal comments, I believe he is in a process of discernment, but exactly where this will lead him, we don't know. But that someone would use the example of the Titanic also has serious implications. The souls aboard the Titanic were in a desperate situation. While lives aren't threatened at Hillhurst and Finley, people are at least having to make serious decisions about their way forward, and for some, becoming Catholic may be an extended and difficult journey.

But let's keep in mind that a laicized Catholic priest is still a priest and may hear the confessions of those in danger of death, e.g., on the Titanic. Abp Hepworth has apparently not been formally laicized, and St Mary's parishioners are not in literal danger of death, but we're still in a spiritually desperate situation. Certainly several people, including my wife and me, underwent spiritual crises after the events of 2012 and saw the need to cut their losses and become Catholic outside the very dodgy OCSP process of acceptance. That would be a sign of the spiritual desperation still occurring there.

Let's consider too that a number of former Catholic priests have become Anglican bishops -- the move isn't unidirectional. This includes ACA Bishop of the Eastern US John Vaughan. It's not unusual for former Catholic priests to become TEC priests, including Alberto Cutié, "Father Oprah". None of these has presumably been properly laicized, since a laicized Catholic priest is not entitled to wear clericals or call himself a priest in any denomination, to avoid misleading the faithful. But in the case of Abp Hepworth, we're in for a penny, in for a pound.

St Mary of the Angels is currently an Anglican parish. It is probably even more correct to call it an Anglican Papalist parish, since it has aspirations, however unrealistic, of one day resolving litigation in its favor and going into the OCSP. We may exercise our own judgment on eventual outcomes, but given its current circumstances, it has a bishop, who as far as I can see is no more and no less legitimate in Roman Catholic eyes than any other "continuing Anglican" bishop. Let's keep in mind that Louis Falk was deposed as a TEC priest for apparently good reasons -- nobody's without sin here.

If, as at least some observers seem to concur, the St Mary of the Angels parish doesn't have much of a long term, I'm not sure why my correspondent questions the "long term benefit from being associated with Hepworth". My view as consistently expressed here is an Aristotelian argument from circumstance, which as R M Weaver puts it, is the most desperate argument. If the sea is on three sides, and we can’t swim for it, but the enemy is bottling us up on the fourth, we have no choice but to fight our way out. St Mary’s is a sinking Titanic, I generally agree. Even a laicized Catholic priest can hear confessions from those in danger of death. Given the much more flexible circumstances that apply among Anglicans, I'm not sure what the problems are in seeing Abp Hepworth functioning as a bishop.

Let's say, for instance, that everyone at St Mary's wakes up tomorrow and decides the best step is to close things out and turn the keys over to the ACA. How long would that take? Months? Years? Who knows? Wouldn't this small group of people be entitled to the best leadership and spiritual counsel they could find under the circumstances? Recognize that they would have a number of options -- renew an application to the OCSP as a different entity, go individually into the Church via RCIA at other parishes, return to TEC, find another "continuing" parish, or none of the above.

Wouldn't it be best for them to have someone who can give them spiritual comfort and assistance with discernment? How many others would be willing to apply for that job?

So, What's Really Going On At St Mary's?

My regular correspndent has some reasonable questions in response to my latest couple of posts:

Where does John Hepworth go on a regular Sunday? A home chapel? Does anyone join him? Not my business, really, but his relationship with St Mary's strikes me as an odd note in a situation which already has enough of them. I was re-reading Anthony Chadwick's account here. At one time he and Mrs Gyapong had a (largely amiable) on-line debate about Hepworth's role in the AC process; although she remains a fan and Chadwick is quite over him there were many points of agreement about how he oversold what was on offer and TAC's role therein. Their main disagreement was about his motivation, a subject on which Mrs G puts a charitable spin while Chadwick is ready to entertain terms like psychopath and narcissist. Or perhaps "put." At the time she was confidently predicting that he would be reconciled with the Church sooner rather than later.

The fact that he attracted, indeed mesmerised, two such highly influential people as Chadwick and Christian Campbell, only to be equally strongly repudiated, says a lot to me. They are, of course, both crazy, and Mrs G, a not uninfluential figure herself, only seems sane by contrast. Even if he were an obviously benign and uncontroversial figure I have problems with the idea of being under the episcopal oversight of a man with no other constituency whatsoever. But the fact that this person is John Hepworth really puts the icing on the cake. Of course St Mary's is in a terrible situation, with good outcomes hard to identify at this point. As you have pointed out, the seeds were sown in its protracted legal battle to leave TEC and the harvest was probably inevitable.

At one time I did a lot of online research on episcopi vagantes. There was a site which gathered a lot of links and I used to marvel at the many pictures of men in their basement cathedrals, mitres scraping the low ceilings. Pre-selfie days, but the same aesthetic. But at least their jurisdictions were pretty much confined to the basement. No one was inviting them to travel halfway round the world to preside at anything. It's a funny old world.

On the most serious question, whether Abp Hepworth is a narcissist or psychopath, I don't think so. Characteristics that would make one think someone is a psychopath would include a solid history of reckless, even criminal, behavior, lying, drug or alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, cruelty to animals, and the like. The most I can see with Abp Hepworth is sometimes seriously flawed judgment, but this is something that he often admits to. "Narcissist" is a more difficult term that I try to avoid, simply because it's imprecise but has a certain "scientific"-sounding validity. But if pressed, I would call James Pike a "narcissist", and that would be due to a clear history of hamartically abusive and manipulative behavior, to the point that he drove both his son and a mistress to suicide. This is a question of degree, and while all people are sinners, I don't see Hepworth rising to an egregious or notorious level. (Where does "sumbitch" leave off and "narcissist" begin anyhow?)

Having met with and listened to him a few times by now, I can say that he's very engaging, charming, and even gifted with blarney, although these are also Australian qualities not necessarily indicative of any sort of abnormality. If you dress someone like this in clericals and call him "his grace", it will have an effect. I would say that it's incumbent on everyone to make independent analyses of character. I don't get a sense that Abp Hepworth has any intention of misleading people, but by his own admission he himself tends to give optimistic interpretations. He's a glass-half-full sort of guy, but in his case, the glass may not necessarily be all the way half full. I think people need to factor this in, but I don't see it as pathology.

I think it's also important to put Hepworth, the St Mary of the Angels parish, the TAC, and the "continuing" movement in context. Anglo-Catholicism simply attracts eccentrics and outliers, as does "continuing" Anglicanism. This has been an issue with more than a few leaders in the movement, as well as a good many followers. Somewhere in the mix are also very sincere people like Fr Kelley, but others, sincere or not, strike me as driven by unhappy forces and not necessarily stable. This probably applies as well to the fringes of the "traditionalist" Catholic movement, people who aren't going to be happy anywhere but who will move from place to place in hopes something might change.

I actually wonder what Abp Hepworth might say if pressed on questions like this. That he so willingly describes his outlook as optimistic suggests his actual answers might be surprisingly down-to-earth. He seems sincerely motivated, not just to play archbishop, but to give real counsel to those at the St Mary of the Angels parish who seek him out on a one-on-one basis during his visits. Even ousted or retired, he's still an Anglican bishop, and he can do things like confirmations if they're needed. I can't imagine this is harmful. I like the guy -- in my book, anyone who likes trains isn't all bad anyhow -- and considering the cards he's been dealt over his lifetime, he's playing them well. He seems to have been treated with courtesy by Catholic authorities throughout this story, especially in the events surrounding the Portsmouth Letter.

I'm not really optimistic about the outcome for St Mary of the Angels, and I question how suitable any Anglo-Catholic parish is for transition to Catholicism, but in my view, he's providing sincere leadership that's certainly better than they might otherwise expect to have.

Abp Hepworth On Corporate Reunion

I attended Abp Hepworth's presentation at St Mary of the Angels last night on Anglicanorum coetibus and corporate reunion. I had been expecting something a little more specific on where he saw the current status of the OCSP and the direction of the St Mary's parish, but he had very little to say (and nothing really new) on that. What he did give was a broad-brush, and by his admission optimistic, history of the "corporate reunion" movement, with particular attention to the period after Vatican II.

Those in attendance filled the choir room, with its capacity of a dozen or so, but I recognized only one new face -- all the others were from the original core pro-ordinariate members as of 2010-11. The archbishop's history helped me to clarify my own views on "corporate reunion".

He mentioned several names, including Pierre Duprey, whom Paul VI named under-secretary (third in command) of the recently created Secretariat for Christian Unity, later becoming Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. However, Abp Hepworth pointed out that the council's mission was more abstract, and the actual task of implementing reunion went to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Another figure was Msgr Peter Wilkinson, an Anglican priest ordained in the OCSP in 2012. According to Hepworth, he corresponded with Cardinal Ratzinger on liturgical issues for 20 years. It's worth noting, though, that these figures represent two themes in the presentation, general ecumenism and liturgy, that didn't actually seem to have borne much fruit until Cardinal Law began to work toward the Pastoral Provision. Hepworth didn't mention Law at all, and he mentioned the Pastoral Provision only in passing.

Just a few days ago, I heard from another visitor who brought up another name among earlier figures in the "corporate reunion" movement, not mentioned by Hepworth:

I read Mark Vickers' Reunion Revisited: 1930s Ecumenism Exposed last week and, having awakened with insomnia about an hour ago, have begun to write my review of for Shared Treasure. The book is well worth reading, and the story it tells is fascinating. It is interesting how Fr. Vickers subtlely, in a between-the-lines sort of way, depicts the French Catholic ecumenical enthusiast, Fr. Paul Couturier, as having had, unintentionally, an unfortunate effect, in the longer run, on these conversations, as the substitution of his "Week of Prayer for Church Unity" for the Anglo-Papalist "Church Unity Octave" allowed, from the 1960s onward, the "warm feelings" of "an ageing and diminishing constituency sitting in church halls sipping tea and coffee, telling one another that they are 'all the same really'" (Vickers, p. 258) to supersede aspirations for the concrete and specific goal of "corporate reunion" based on complete doctrinal agreement - and how he portrays the Ordinariates as a reversion to, and realization of, that earlier goal.

But let's look at "corporate reunion" in a larger context. By the 1920s, we had a remarkable series of Anglicans converting individually to Catholicism, without the need for any corporate prompting. These include Frederick Kinsman, Ronald Knox, G K Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Leaving aside C S Lewis, who as an Anglican ranks well above the others, the only comparable figure who remained an observant Anglican is Dorothy Sayers. (Agatha Christie was raised an occultist; T S Eliot, an American expatriate Anglophile, belongs more in the category of Henry James and Ezra Pound.) These converts had far more influence on culture and contemporary opinion than anyone working at the margins on "corporate reunion".

Abp Hepworth sees Anglicanorum coetibus as a result of this "corporate reunion" movement, although my impression is that, as he was felt to do in the runup to the Portsmouth Petition, he tends to exaggerate the numbers, strength, and prospects for it. By his own admission, he couldn't hold the TAC bishops to their promises.

I think there are actually two threads to "corporate reunion", a US thread and a UK-Canadian thread. The UK-Canadian thread, Anglican Papalist, a late outgrowth of the Oxford Movement, seems largely to have been driven by "warm feelings" and nostalgia, and as far as any actual reunion was concerned, had no practical result. The US thread, coming more than a generation later, was driven by Cardinal Law as he observed the "continuing Anglican" movement leading up to the 1977 Congress of St Louis. This, however, was marked by false starts and only modest success in scattered instances, mostly in Texas.

Abp Hepworth did mention resistance by diocesan bishops to the Anglicanorum coetibus project. He cited the conflicts between Fr Phillips and Abp Garcia-Siller as his best example, but my view here continues to be that Abp Garcia-Siller was enforcing reasonable diocese-wide policies on matters like finance, school management, and protection of children, and Fr Phillips's retirement, simultaneous with the parish's entry to the OCSP, was a face-saving gesture.

Liturgy is just one aspect of Catholicism. If ordinariates stress liturgy as a main justification for their existence, they won't serve the full set of purposes for which the Church exists. As I continue to say here, only a handful of OCSP parishes offer anything like the range of fellowship, education, and devotional activities available at many diocesan parishes. In addition, it can only help Catholics to encounter the different cultural perspectives they can find at diocesan parishes where Asian. Latin, African, central and southern European, and Middle Eastern people can easily be found.

I still keep asking myself what problem the "corporate reunion" movement is trying to solve. Certainly, considering the overall lack of progress over what is now a century, it can't have been important.

Abp Hepworth To Visit St Mary Of The Angels February 4

I've learned through unofficial channels that Abp Hepworth will make what appears to be an episcopal visit to St Mary of the Angels on February 4. It will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the parish's founding in a Hollywood storefront by Fr Dodd. At that time, he will also, based on the version I've heard, formally assert his jurisdiction over the parish.

Now that I've had several weeks to reflect on the news that came out January 4 and the discussion in front of Judge Murphy, I think I have a general idea of the vestry's likely course of action. I'm not an attorney; I am not a member of the vestry; I haven't been a member of the parish since 2012; legal strategies are confidential, and I'm not privy to them. So far, the vestry has given me no official or unofficial statement about Abp Hepworth's visit or its forward strategy.

However, Mr Lengyel-Leahu did, in discussion in the courtroom, give a general outline of what his position will likely be. Although the superior court's appeals division in December 2017 reversed Judge Strobel's 2015 decision declaring the parsh's August 2012 vote to leave the ACA valid, this decision did not affect the state appeals court's 2014 finding that the vestry elected in February 2012 was the valid St Mary of the Angels vestry. This has an important effect on other Rector, Wardens, and Vestry cases, which were decided on the basis that the Bush group, which claimed to be the vestry, did not have standing.

Here is the ACA's problem: the appeals division has ruled on narrow technical grounds that the parish's August 2012 vote to leave the ACA was invalid. As a result, the parish is officially under the ACA. However, based on the state appeals court's decision, the elected vestry, Fr Kelley, and its wardens continue to be the vestry. But under the articles of incorporation, the vestry owns and controls the property. The vestry hires the rector. The rector has the keys to the property. (So far, St Mary of the Angels has not reappeared on the ACA Diocese of the West web site.)

As a result, the ACA is in a similar, though less advantageous, position to the TEC Diocese of Pennsylvania when David Moyer was rector of Good Shepherd Rosemont. The then-bishop hated Moyer. The bishop had inhibited and deposed Moyer. The bishop wanted to come on the property, but Moyer wouldn't let him. The Good Shepherd vestry was the entity that employed Moyer, and it kept him in its employ. This also is fairly clearly what the situation is at St Mary of the Angels.

The TEC diocese, recognizing the delicacy of the situation, was apparently reluctant to evict Moyer from the property, but legally, the TEC diocese did control the property, and eventually it saw the need, after about a dozen years, to evict Moyer. The ACA, however, does not own the St Mary of the Angels property due to the unique nature of the parish's founding documents. It cannot legally evict Fr Kelley. There is no way it can legally or canonically remove the vestry in whole or part.

As a result, the ACA is pretty much in the same situation it was in as of May 2012, when Mrs Bush and Mr Lancaster went to Judge Jones to seek a temporary restraining order barring Fr Kelley and the elected vestry from the property. Judge Jones first granted the order, then quickly reversed herself, saying this was an ecclesiastical issue, and she had no authority under the US First Amendment to interfere.

As far as I can see, while the ACA can claim ecclesiastical authority over the parish, it can't evict Fr Kelley, and it can't replace the elected vestry. There is no question that a good litigation attorney can try to pick away at the February 2012 vestry election and, depending on the mean temperature on the day the matter goes to court and what the judge had for breakfast, try to get some kind of an ex parte, but this will cost money, and the elected vestry will have the clear precedent of Judge Jones's original reversal of the first ex parte.

This means that the elected vestry will likely continue to have control of the bank accounts and the rental income from the commercial property. Meanwhile, the Bush group had run out of most of its resources in 2015, when by his filing, Mr Lancaster was last paid.

The state appeals court has already ruled that the Bush group does not have standing to litigate this matter further. As far as I can see, the ACA, not Mrs Bush, would need to file a new suit challenging the February 2012 vestry election, which would initiate a new, multimillion-dollar, multi-year process of litigation. The ACA would need to come up with many thousands of dollars to hire a new set of attorneys to do this. The vestry, though, now has the rental income from the commercial property to defend itself.

I certainly do not endorse this, but it does seem to me that both parties, the elected vestry and the ACA, are in a stalemate where they have roughly equal standing. There should be major incentive to settle this matter on terms generous to Fr Kelley and the parish employees.

Yet More On Stockport

The first visitor who provided an update here on Fr Kenyon's situation has elaborated further:

Fr Kenyon knew months in advance that he had been appointed to Our Lady's parish. Unknown to the parishioners, his parents had been coming to the weekend masses observing and no doubt reporting back to him what Our Lady's was like. Even from the outside it must have been obvious to his parents what the presbytery was like. The comment “a precipitous drop overlooking a railway marshaling yard" is incorrect. The busy railway sits across a busy road and is protected by a high wall. There is no realistic danger of falling onto the tracks.

When it was announced that our parish priest was leaving Our Lady's to make way for Fr Kenyon and his family, there was considerable anger by many parishioners. A lot of people wrote to the Bishop protesting at the appointment of Fr Kenyon before he had even arrived at Our Lady's. Of course, this was wrong and did nothing to make him feel welcome. Fr Kenyon knew that the Bishop had received unwelcoming correspondence about him and that a volatile situation existed before he even arrived in Stockport, yet almost immediately, he started making changes in Our Lady's much to the annoyance of many. Instead of attempting to calm things, he did the exact opposite. Could it be that Fr Kenyon failed to 'read' the situation correctly? An experienced priest would not have allowed the situation to deteriorate in the way it did. Things then escalated rapidly out of control. This could be attributable to a lack of experience.

It was suggested that the parishioners were cruel and unfriendly to him. Whilst some did indeed treat him unfairly, it must be said that the situation was not helped by rumors circulated that all the parishioners were hostile to him. From certain perspectives, it appeared that he was attempting to shift the blame for his problems onto the parishioners. That certainly did not help matters at all.

This unfortunate matter has done considerable damage to the reputation of Our Lady's Church. Whilst Fr Kenyon cannot be entirely to blame, he must shoulder the majority of the responsibility for whats happened. He has put his family through a traumatic experience, and he has left our parish community seriously damaged and hurt.

A common list of pastoral qualities that I see on Catholic sites includes these, among others:

• Ability to work with others
• Respect for other people
• Good social skills
• Capacity and desire to learn
• Capacity for friendship

Fr Kenyon was among the most senior priests in the OCSP, leading a full parish and the vicar forane for a deanery, yet it appears that he was lacking in many of these qualities. The visitor suggests, quite reasonablhy, that Fr Kenyon had a "lack of experience". This raises once more the question of why he left Calgary, what Bp Lopes knew, and why he thought moving Fr Kenyon was a good idea. I find it very hard to imagine that, given the reputation he's so quickly established, Fr Kenyon can find another appointment in the Diocese of Shrewsbury, or perhaps anywhere in the UK.

Another visitor noted,

RE: Fr. Kenyon, it’s very common that a new job proves to be utterly wrong almost from Day 1. Infant mortality in such positions happens all the time. It’s a shame that this case with Fr. Kenyon happened, given what apparently should have been careful pastoral oversight in his making the move. Yet I know you know such things happen in the real world, just as they do in marriages, sports coaching, etc.

I agree that I have unhappy personal experience of jobs being wrong from day one! On the other hand, looking back on those experiences, they arose pretty consistently because I was working in a new field, and in one particular case, it was a highly secure environment where I couldn't have known much about it beforehand anyhow. In those cases, expectations were unknowable or unreasonable-but-concealed. In Fr Kenyon's case, it seems as though the qualities that would be required of him were very clear, expectations were consistent throughout the Church, and in fact, given the account above, his parents had been scouting out the parish for months.

It's entirely possible, though, that Bp Lopes had no real understanding of the problems that might confront an ordinariate priest going into a UK diocesan parish, and the Bishop of Shrewsbury had little understanding of what a fuss-and-feathers OCSP priest might be like. This reflects especially on Bp Lopes, as it seems as if his job knowledge is limited and overspecialized, and he seems to have been unaware of possible issues with Fr Kenyon's personal style.

I see a subtext in the account above, that the parishioners at Our Lady's somehow sensed that the personnel move involved in Fr Kenyon's arrival was not in their primary interest, and it was somehow to be in furtherance of Fr Kenyon's circumstances, not their spiritual well-being. The clergy-centered culture in the OCSP is a major factor here. The need for repeated visits to St Luke's by Fr Phillips and the apparent short-notice visit by Bp Lopes to Calgary make me think the problem in Stockport isn't unique.

I think Abp Hepworth, Fr Kelley, and the people and vestry of St Mary's need to hold off on any decisions to join the OCSP until such matters become clearer.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent comments,

Virtually all of the OOLW clergy below retirement age are in diocesan ministry; the UK Ordinariate has no stipendiary positions. But I have read of no situations along the lines of Fr Kenyon's epic fail. Presumably they have mothballed their birettas and gotten with the local program. Of course there will be disappointment when a highly valued pastor has to be moved to make way for an unknown commodity. But the push-back must have been epic.

This suggests to me that the Bishop of Shrewsbury thought he was getting something much more like an OOLW priest, he didn't understand the difference -- and, I'm afraid, neither almost certainly did Bp Lopes.

The Psychology Of Anglo-Catholicism

A visitor comments,

Reading about all of the personalities involved with the Ordinariates, I don’t think you can dismiss the psychology of anglo-catholicism. Part and parcel of anglo-catholicism, going back to the ritualist controversy, through the Declaration of St Louis, through modern crises, is the fact that the laity (and especially the clergy) have been on a war-footing against their local bishop and the institutional church for many, many years. Authentic spirituality has been supplanted by a rear-guard fight over “issues.” When they leave Anglicanism for the Ordinariates, they bring that baggage with them. Now they are fighting a rear-guard action against the local bishop and local decadent American Catholicism which is seen as banal, heterodox and “not quite the real thing.” They are walking-wounded, and in need of healing. I wonder, are the Ordinariates conducive to that healing, or simply perpetual the problem?

One thing I began to realize when we got into the St Mary of the Angels litigation was that in our case, there was a hard core of free-floating anger among the dissidents. Mrs Bush, who hadn't been to church for 40 years, decided she had definite ideas about how things were to be done, and the rector, wardens, and vestry really didn't fit into what she had in mind. This mindset looks like it's going to continue to the bitter end.

Seeing the controversies at Our Lady of the Atonement from a distance, I can't help but think the mindset there was a close cousin to what we had at SMA. I've go to think some part of the parish's success was portraying itself as standing against "local decadent American Catholicism which is seen as banal, heterodox and 'not quite the real thing.'” Clearly this was of concern to Abp Garcia-Siller, and I would think Bp Lopes saw his role as somehow threading between the positions. I continue to think the angries at OLA got snookered -- the result of a rear-guard fight against two ordinaries was that Fr Phillips was forced into retirement by a third no matter what.

One thing I took away from my chat last week with Abp Hepworth is the insight he has into how people have been damaged throughout this process. If in fact he's working behind the scenes with individuals connected with the CDF on issues like the ordinariates and survivors of clergy abuse, it can only be to the good. On the other hand, if it's a good idea to preserve the "distinctiveness" of Anglo-Catholicism, the caution to be careful what you wish for certainly applies here.

A Hepworth Episode

My regular correspondent, who is not a Hepworth fan, sent me a link to an article in the UK Catholic Herald from May 2011, "Ordinariate talks stall in Canada".

But this morning we learned that the leader of the Traditional Anglican Communion has thrown his toys out of the pram and warned that the British structure may well be the first and last ordinariate, as negotiations in Canada have come to a standstill.

Archbishop John Hepworth – a flamboyant and outspoken former Catholic turned Anglican who leads the TAC – wrote a letter to Bishop Peter Elliot, a former Anglican who is the Vatican’s appointed delegate for the Australian ordinariate, in which he accused the Vatican’s Canadian point man for the ordinariate of derailing the process.

My evolving view is that stories about Russian election hacks are nothing compared to unpublished backstories about the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus. A matter that's had almost no mention from the start is why, in mid-2011, references were made in the Catholic press and by Cardinal Wuerl to a Canadian ordinariate-in-formation, but by roughly February 2012, this was off the table, with Canadians put under the OCSP. Hepworth himself suggested to me that this was part of more universal contentiousness and opposition to Anglicanorum coetibus among bishops' conferences. Well, this is the Vatican, and I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that there's more to this story than we know.

The particular story in this episode, at least the part we know, appears to be this:

[T]he Church has decided to adopt the process that was used for the ordinariate in Britain, namely requiring the clergy submit to its dossiers for approval and having the people begin a Eucharistic fast while receiving formation and asking them to worship alongside local Catholics. One difference between Britain and Canada (and the United States) is that many of the groups own their buildings, which understandably makes the idea of worshipping in the neighbouring Catholic parish less appealing.

Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto, who was appointed to be the Vatican’s delegate to the ordinariate[,] appointed mentor priests who were due to visit the parishes this month. Before Archbishop Hepworth’s letter was made public, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, a member of the TAC, asked for these visits to be put on hold.

Hepworth's objections, expressed in the letter to Bp Elliott, were

These priests are to announce, on behalf of Archbishop Collins, that the parishes will close forthwith, that the laity and clergy will attend a Catholic parish for from four to six months, that they will not receive the sacraments during this time, that they will be catechised adequately during this time since any catechesis from the Catechism of the Catholic Church done by the Traditional Anglican Communion is inadequate because only Catholics understand the Catechism, that the dossiers submitted by Traditional Anglican Communion clergy show an inadequate training since they have not attended Anglican Communion Theological Colleges, and therefore those selected by the Ordinary and approved by the CDF will have to attend a Catholic Seminary for an as yet unspecified time, at the end of this process, new parishes for Anglicans along the lines of the Anglican Use in the United States may be established, but not necessarily in the former Traditional Anglican Communion churches, and that during this process the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) must cede its property to the Ordinariate.

I would say that Hepworth's concerns seem completely reasonable, especially in light of Bp Lopes's recent Vienna lecture, where Lopes made the point

a new approach [viz, Anglicanorum coetibus] might involve creating a juridical structure which would allow the incardination of priests and the canonical membership of laity so that their distinctiveness was not lost to assimilation into the much larger sea of Catholic life.

The interpretation in Hepworth's letter strongly suggests an intent by Canadian bishops in effect to squash the ACCC parishes like bugs and then maybe let the few remaining members in, though quite possibly assimilated into local parishes. One may disagree with Lopes's approach -- certainly yesterday's visitor doesn't quite see the point of retaining distinctiveness -- but it's hard to disagree that Hepworth's position is more consonant with what appears to be the CDF's intent than Collins's.

My regular visitor comments,

In the event, only the ACCC parishes in Oshawa and Ottawa entered the Church with a majority of their members (and their buildings). Two clergy associated with those parishes were in the first group to be ordained, despite not having been former ACC clergy or possessing M.Divs or the equivalent. But the uptake from the ACCC was probably fewer than a hundred people.

Nevertheless, the overall numbers in Canada are too small to see a definitive trend. It does appear to me that something like the Hepworth position, whoever else may have held it, eventually prevailed vis-a-vis the OCSP, in that overall, no parish entering the OCSP was required to close and send its members to diocesan parishes for catechesis, and no former Anglican clergy in the first waves were required to spend extended periods in seminary. This would certainly be consonant with a common-sense interpretation of Anglicanorum coetibus.

I don't see a scandal on the part of Abp Hepworth here, and I don't see reason here to see him as a disreputable figure.

Ordinariates vs The Whole Nine Yards

Regarding yesterday's post, a visitor makes a worthwhile point:

St. Mary of the Angels, its pastor, and Abp. Hepworth are all participating in independent congregationalism, which is not what Roman Catholicism is about. Perhaps SMA has no other choice at this point but to try to seek entry into the OCSP. But there is nothing that prevents its parishioners, Fr. Kelley, and Abp. Hepworth from seeking reception in the Catholic church—in the case of the Abp. I think all it should require is a confession. This business of waiting to all go in together, or to come “with the building,” etc., might be a nice team-building exercise but it is wrong-minded from a Catholic point of view, if they really want to be Roman Catholics (imho, of course).

St. Mary the Virgin withdrew from the Diocese of Ft. Worth fully three years before their reception into the Catholic church, and I often wondered under whose authority Fr. Hawkins considered himself, as he celebrated mass for those three years. He did have a promise of pastoral care from his future Catholic bishop of Ft. Worth, however.

Still, states of limbo are to be avoided, and COULD be avoided, if people would abandon this white-knuckle grip on phony baloney Anglican “patrimony” and just join the one true universal church of God. I think that, like recovering alcoholics, they would then find that everything just falls into place.

I'm certainly among those who felt it would be more prudent to go in via RCIA than wait for the uncertainties of reception via Anglicanorum coetibus. One side-effect for me was to come more in contact with the full scope of Catholic tradition. As I said several years ago, Bl John Henry Newman is one thing, St Thomas Aquinas is another thing entirely.

On the other hand, the parish, Abp Hepworth, and Fr Kelley are doing nothing more than playing the hand they were dealt. From a pastoral perspective, I believe Fr Kelley felt he needed to take the parish into a better alternative than the ACA, though I believe from his account, he had been leaning toward Orthodox and only slowly began to favor Anglicanorum coetibus. As a shepherd of a flock, he was certainly obligated to think beyond what was good for his own salvation.

I don't disagree that Anglicanorum coetibus has definite syncretistic elements, including the fact that it encourages congregationalism. The idea has flaws, as did the Pastoral Provision, whose flaws Bp Lopes clearly acknowledges. I don't know if someone could get Bp Lopes into the sort of freewheeling exchange Abp Hepworth enjoys, but I suspect he would acknowledge this of ordinariates as well. My surmise is that he privately feels the CDF has also dealt him a particular hand, and he has to play it as well as he can.

At this point, I think it's important to recognize that the parish followed Abp Hepworth's leadership, as expressed in the 2007 Portsmouth letter, in expressing a desire for corporate union with Rome under the terms Rome gave it. The parish then entered the process of joining the OCSP in complete good faith. While one might find flaws in the terms given and in the process, the parish has been doing what it was told. A limbo period, long or short, was going to be inevitable given the way things were implemented.

Actually, I don't believe Abp Hepworth or Fr Kelley is doing anything at variance with a continued good-faith attempt at corporate union with Rome under the terms Rome gave it. Let's keep in mind that the Patrimony of the Primate was set up specifically as a "holding tank" for parishes wishing to proceed with Anglicanorum coetibus. As things fell out, all the other parishes in the Patrimony either entered the OCSP or withdrew, leaving SMA as the last one standing. But this doesn't change the parish's continuing canonical status that began in late 2010 and continues.

Visitors are reading various positive and negative implications here. I would say that as of mid-2012, Abp Hepworth had a series of health crises, from which he began to recover at roughly the same time, late 2015, that the parish began to dig itself out of its litigation problems. At that point, I think the best interpretation would be that he actively resumed the role in which he saw himself before 2012 -- but this role was not at variance, as far as I can see, with the role that he played in bringing a number of TAC bodies into the Church.

You can complain about the hand people have been dealt, but my view is the parish, its pastor, and Abp Hepworth are playing the hand in good faith. From a personal standpoint, I wouldn't have wanted that particular hand, but that's just how things are.

A Threat To The Conventional Narrative?

If Abp Throckmorton of the Universal Anglican Episcopal Church of the Earth, the Moon, and Mars were to pay a pastoral visit to the sole parish in his see, almost nobody would notice, and among those who did, nearly everyone would just give a sad shake of the head. But Abp Hepworth of the Patrimony of the Primate pays an episcopal visit to St Mary of the Angels, and people are ticked. I mean, some are really mad. Even regular correspondents seem to be getting worried about my own mental state.

Here's a representative e-mail, with my comments in bold:

I have to ask you, respectfully, to consider whether you are maintaining the same standards of scrutiny for SMA that you hold for other Continuing Anglican parishes and parishes of the Ordinariate. Consider:

1. Archbishop Hepworth is now acting as the parish's ordinary, despite the fact that he was dismissed from the TAC / ACA, under circumstances that you yourself describe as, um, "hinky". He is an Archbishop without an Archdiocese or even diocese. He is in communion with no other jurisdiction, Anglican or Catholic. Before he retired as Primate of the TAC, which is how he characterized his departure, he created a Patrimony of the Primate, an entity described by ACA Bp Marsh as a "holding tank" for parishes intending to enter the OCSP. Although the ACA House of Bishops announced they were dissolving the Patrimony in January 2012, they had no authority to do so, as the Patrimony is an Australian entity under Hepworth's continuing authority. The US courts have at least de facto recognized this and the parish's right to be in it. Nor did the TAC ever dissolve the Patrimony, which continues in existence under Hepworth's authority.
2. Likewise, SMA itself, having separated from ACA and not yet entered into the Ordinariate process, is in communion with no other jurisdiction, Anglican or Catholic. It, and its purported "ordinary," are both entirely vagantes. The ACA parishes that intended to enter the OCSP entered two possible jurisdictions, the Patrimony of the Primate and the Pro-Diocese of the Holy Family. There was always going to be a period of limbo, however short, for any parish that left one jurisdiction before being received into another. In the case of ACA parishes, this was sometimes many months. Canonically, there is nothing exceptional about St Mary of the Angels's status except for the time it's spent in limbo -- the circumstances have been unique and, at least in modern times, unprecedented for any parish intending to enter an ordinariate. How SMA's situation is eventually resolved remains to be seen, but in both Hepworth's and the parish's view, its status is temporary but licit, whatever jurisdiction it eventually joins. Nonetheless,
3. Mr Hepworth has now introduced the use of Divine Worship: The Missal at SMA, and did so, as you concede, "not in response to any initiative from Houston," which is to say without the blessing or permission of Bishop Lopes. Let me emphasize that a vagantes bishop has instructed a vagantes parish to use the official liturgical book of a jurisdiction to which it has not successfully applied, without the permission of its actual Ordinary. Let me see. Dozens of "continuing Anglican" denominations use the TEC 1928 BCP without anyone's permission. (Indeed, as a graduate student, I was urged to secure a copy for literary study, being told by the non-Anglican professor that "the Episcopalians will probably be happy that it's being put to a good use".) Both the ACNA and the CEC use the 1979 TEC BCP, presumably not having secured anyone's permission. Anglo-Papalist parishes in the UK used the Tridentine mass up to Vatican II, and subsequently the OF, without anyone's permission.

If the idea here is that the use of DW is a means to instantiate SMA's desire to become an Ordinariate mission I thought it was made clear that this is not its intent , it would seem, um, "hinky" for it to do that under the orders of a bishop who, far from simply being not recognized by Rome, was actually told in no uncertain terms that he could only re-enter Rome as a layman, given his history. (We will leave to one side as unsubstantiated rumor So why bring it up at all? the word that Fr. Kelley has also been advised that transfer of SMA into the Ordinariate and his own ordination as a Catholic priest are two entirely separate matters, and that the likelihood of the latter is very slim indeed.) This sounds awfully definite and authoritative for an "unsubstantiated rumor" -- where did you hear this? Surely you would admit that if one of the other Continuing parishes that you generally hold in contempt decided to use DW without any clear indication that it intended to enter the Ordinariate, you would let them have it on your blog. Actually, I wouldn't think it was important enough to note. Imagine if +Marsh did that, for instance, and justified it by saying "that the previous eucharistic liturgy had never been approved by any jurisdiction." Would you accept that at face value, and say, oh, the parishioners seem to really like it? But Marsh uses the 1928 BCP, which has been approved by TEC and would be about as likely to use DW as the Quran.

I appreciate the insights you offer even when I think you are off base in your speculation, but in this particular instance, I think you are giving your old friends an incredible amount of latitude.

What I find especially intriguing is that my visitor elects to wander off into character assassination of Fr Kelley, when Fr Kelley has nothing to do with the rest of his e-mail. While admitting he has no basis for doing so, he proceeds to cite authoritative-sounding words regarding Fr Kelley's status. Where did he get these words? Bp Lopes clearly takes the CDF's policies of confidentiality very seriously, and the CDF would have been involved in any such decision over Fr Kelley. Was any OCSP priest involved in revealing confidential information to all and sundry, which my visitor characterizes as "unsubstantiated rumor" just before repeating it?

Again, if this were Abp Throckmorton of the Universal Anglican Episcopal Church of the Earth, the Moon, and Mars, nobody would care. But this is Abp Hepworth of the Patrimony of the Primate, and people are upset. I sense a disturbance in the Force, or maybe just a threat to the conventional narrative. That someone should feel the need to dig up old character assassination, which did in fact benefit an OCSP priest to Fr Kelley's detriment, argues the more strongly for this view.

Hey, guy, you can still make it to confession this Lent. Last I checked, calumny is still a sin.

Abp Hepworth On The Portsmouth Letter And Anglicanorum coetibus

I had a number of questions for Abp Hepworth on the 2007 Portsmouth Petition and Anglicanorum coetibus. His replies were wide-ranging and compelling -- His Grace is friendly, charming, and straightforward, with a definite gift of blarney. Included in his answers was quite a bit of Vaticanology based on what appear to be extensive ongoing contacts in the CDF and elsewhere. Some of this I can't fully remember at this point, and most of it I'm not authorized to disclose in any case, but I'm certainly making note of his remarks in hopes of eventually determining how much is blarney and how much is accurate.

Regarding the Portsmouth Petition, he did authorize me to quote him thus:

Am I disappointed that some bishops went back on their vow? Yes. Am I surprised? No. I knew several of them were shaky, but I needed their signatures. I bullied them!

As I said in his presence in a different context, bishops aren't teddy bears. He did make the additional point that the petition did go to the Vatican, and whatever the subsequent behavior of individual signatories, the petition is still in effect, and the TAC never revoked or renounced it. He also made the point that he drafted the petition in consultation with Vatican contacts, and it wasn't made out of the blue. In particular, the provision that in addition to signing the letter, the bishops also sign the Catechism was a strong suggestion from the Vatican which was well received when it took place.

This goes to how much impact the Portsmouth Petition may have had on the promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus. Bp Lopes mentioned it in passing in the lecture I discussed Sunday as one of several appeals to the Vatican for corporate reunion. It's worth pointing out that a visitor responded to my Sunday post on Bp Lopes's lecture by reporting at second hand a view from the CDF:

[some other] "petitions" seemed rather insistently demanding of concessions on the part of the Holy See, and others seemed to have some overtones along the lines of "if the Holy See concedes the requests we have made, some of us might consider taking up the offer;" which seemed to mean that some of these Anglicans were more interested in haggling with Rome, rather than submitting to it.

The Portsmouth Petition was not of this sort. Abp Hepworth said he was told Pope Benedict was moved on receiving it and instructed that it be placed in the Vatican archives as a historic document.

Regarding the role of Cardinal Law in setting up the 1993 meeting between Episcopalians Pope and Steenson and Cardinal Ratzinger, Hepworth said there had always been a "Law faction" in the process leading up to Anglicanorum coetibus, but it was not the only one, and the process was contentious start to finish. In particular, although Steenson drafted a proposal for a personal prelature that had some resemblance to what was in the final constitution, this leaves out an entirely separate liturgical effort, something Bp Lopes stressed as well in his Vienna lecture.

Hepworth repeated a view that I've heard now and then elsewhere, that the implementation of the OCSP was a creature of what he called a "Law-Wuerl faction" that was not entirely consistent with the intent of the CDF, and this appears to have had some connection with Steenson's removal. But there were other sources of resistance to Anglicanorum coetibus among other bishops' conferences and elsewhere, having to do with the geographical distribution of ordinariates, including the reversal of the original position that there would be a separate ordinariate in Canada.

Abp Hepworth is clearly supportive of Bp Lopes -- he enthusiastically cited a lecture Bp Lopes delivered in Australia a few months before the Vienna lecture, and he clearly feels Lopes's designation as ordinary has been a very positive step.

Abp Hepworth At St Mary Of The Angels During Holy Week

Via Fr Kelley, I learn that Abp Hepworth will be flying in from Australia to spend Holy Week at St Mary of the Angels. He will be preaching on a theme, "Being Christians in Difficult Times", on Palm Sunday, 10:30am & 5pm; then Monday - Friday in Holy Week, at the 7pm liturgies, each day. The Paschal Vigil is set for 8:30pm, Holy Saturday. He will preside Easter Day, at 10:30, & preach; and preach lastly at Vespers & Benediction, 5pm, Easter Evening.

For Anglicans and Catholics local to the area, I can vouch that the archbishop's homiletic skills are worth the trip to hear him!

What Happened In 2012? -- II

This post will cover versions of personal conversations with Fr Phillips regarding the reasons for OLA's sudden reversal over joining the OCSP in May 2012. I believe that, in opposition to inevitably politic public statements, the reasons he gave in private reflect an exclusive preoccupation with his career and personal circumstances. I repeat what I said yesterday, I've come to recognize that both the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus are simply the syncretistic wing of the unproductive and moribund "continuing Anglican" movement.

A visitor reports,

I need to begin this by saying the Fr. Philips NEVER had a kind thing to say about Archbishop Flores, Archbishop Gomez OR Archbishop Garcia-Siller. Even though he feigns attention on wealthy Hispanic benefactors, in private he speaks very disrespectfully of "Meskins" as he calls them. He also looks down on any other parish in the city. He never attended, (nor did Orr), any Archdiocesan mandated retreats, conferences, or activities. They would laugh when parishioners bragged about going to mass at another parish earlier in the day but then coming to the Atonement for a "real mass", later in the same day. [Er, if mass is so important, why waste the time going to the "fake" one when you could go to two masses at OLA?]

It's important to remember that once Anglicanorium coetibus was published there was immediate anticipation and speculation about who the Ordinary would be. Because of its size and stature, much of this speculation centered around the Atonement. There was a conference held at the parish to answer questions about the impending ordinariate. This conference was attended by people from all over the country. The "Buzz" on the street was that Fr. Phillips was the odds on favorite to be the Ordinary. He did everything he could to present himself as the leading contender. He relayed stories to me about how people told him "they don't care what Rome says he (Fr. Phillips) was OUR Ordinary..." Deacon Orr spoke openly about his own impending role as the "Archdeacon" of the Ordinariate. He would travel the country showing the other parishes how the mass was to be said, in the light of Fr. Phillips's creation. [I've heard in e-mails that Fr Phillips has apparently told people that he wrote the BDW mass.]

Fr Phillips attended a meeting on Anglicanorum coetibus at St Mary of the Angels in December 2010, just before my time there, and pretty clearly represented himself as a major figure in the movement, if not ordinary-in-waiting. I mentioned a blog post from him made from this meeting in a previous post here, where a question arose about his report that he had just celebrated mass there. (Huh? said mass for a bunch of Anglicans?) According to Fr Kelley, whom I asked about it when the issue came up, this didn't happen. I was also somewhat irked that in the post, Fr Phillips pumped his protégé Andrew Bartus but never mentioned his host, Fr Kelley. I've always thought of Fr Phillips as something of a blowhard and grandstander.

The visitor continues,

After some time the Ordinariate was announced with Msgr Steenson as the Ordinary. I remember asking Fr. Phillips about him. Fr. Phillips told me he considered Steenson to be a nice enough fellow but rather "limp-wristed". I don't think he meant to imply that Steenson was gay, just weak and ill equipped for the position. I got the feeling Fr. Phillips figured he could manipulate the weak-minded Ordinary so the parish moved in that direction.

At this point, after a few days, Fr. Phillips made it known that the Parish was going to move to the Ordinariate. Soon, the Archdiocese got involved, inquiries were made and the parish was polled for demographic data. I remember Fr. Phillips meeting with the Archbishop and it was obvious the situation was being pondered by the Chancery. During this time the Atonement bulletin, written and published by Jim Orr himself began scurrilous attacks on the Archbishop, still relatively new to the Chair. This went on for several Sundays. I always wished I had hung on to one of those bulletins but sadly, I did not. It was the same clap-trap; "The Archdiocese is only interested in the money and property of the parish and will 'steal' the property from the parish, if given the opportunity" - It was all portrayed as a "land-grab". Orr even had printed and distributed new missalettes stating that the parish was part of the Ordinariate.

Then, out of the blue, Msgr. Steenson meets with Fr. Phillips and the very next day EVERYTHING changed. It was such an abrupt change of direction and focus, I asked Fr. Phillips what was going on. He was shaken. He said Steenson had made it clear that it was arrogant for Fr. Phillips to have purchased a home next door to the parish because he could be transferred to anther parish within the Ordinariate at any time. Joanne had previously made it clear she was NOT moving so Fr. Phillips was completely vulnerable to Msgr. Steenson. He told me, "for the good of the parish" he decided it would be best to remain within the Archdiocese. There was no other reason, the good of the parish was not involved, other than Fr. Phillips view that the parish could not exist without him. There was really no other reason - Fr. Phillips told me these things himself. All other explanations, intimations and justifications were concocted after the fact, "spin" to pacify the minions, who had been publicly fed with the hatred of the Archbishop (their now Father-In-God).

I say this because almost immediately Fr. Phillips published a blog post, explaining, in loving, glowing sentimentality how much we loved being a part of the Archdiocese as a Pastoral Provision parish and so on. He referred to Archbishop Gustavo as our "Father-In-God". It was enough to make your stomach turn, if you knew the whole story.

Some time ago I posted about another version of the dealings between Fr Phillips and Msgr Steenson:

A reliable source has provided an account of what appears to have been the real story on Our Lady of the Atonement. As it happens, during the first part of 2012 as Steenson was traveling to receive a parish into the Ordinariate, a group from that parish had picked him up at the airport and was driving him to town. Several people were in the car. Remarkably, Steenson got involved in a cell phone conversation while in the car with several witnesses in earshot and began explaining to whomever was on the other end that he intended to force the retirement of Fr. Phillips after a year and replace him with one of his younger priests, presumably a member of the Nashotah House clique with whom he surrounded himself. One of those in the car conveyed this information to Fr Phillips.

My source continues:

This came shortly after OLA's parish council had voted to enter the Ordinariate even at the price of relinquishing the title to their church and school property to the Archdiocese of San Antonio (with the Ordinariate congregation to have the indefinite use of the property), and just after they learned that this "compromise," which they thought had been a "hard bargain" originating with the San Antonio archdiocesan authorities, had actually been suggested to the archdiocese by Steenson himself. The parish council reversed itself immediately, and decided to remain within the SA archdiocese[.]

From this account, it appears that the parish did accept the conditions that Fr Phillips found objectionable in the e-mail I quoted yesterday -- but I can't rule out that any account from Fr Phillips may be embroidered to suit his own purposes.

I do find both versions of Msgr Steenson's role credible. I don't, based on this, think Steenson had any reservations about how Phillips ran the parish, Dcn Orr, or anything else that might have been a justifiable concern -- this was simply Steenson, an insecure careerist, meeting Phillips, an ego-driven opportunist. The OCSP wasn't going to be big enough for the two of them. Given the character of "continuing" Anglicanism as a pretty homogeneous movement, this isn't much different from the conflicts and intrigues surrounding the likes of Falk, Grundorf, Seeland, Hepworth, Gill, Marsh, and the rest.

But the problem of Fr Phillips's residence represents something I believe nobody thought through in drafting the Pastoral Provision or Anglicanorum coetibus. Celibate Catholic priests normally live in rectories, owned by the diocese. They may or may not own homes elsewhere, but typically not near the parish property, and often for vacation or retirement. In earlier years, celibate Catholic priests might expect stability in assignments, at least after age 50 or so, but the shortage of priests in recent decades has limited this, and the USCCB recognizes rotation of priests on 6- or 12-year cycles as a normal practice.

In this as apparently many other areas (like attending otherwise mandated meetings and retreats), Fr Phillips feels he's a special case. He owns a house right next to the property, gol dang it, and he's entitled to conduct himself as a proper Episcopal priest and stay as long as he likes. Msgr Steenson may have had his own motives for questioning Fr Phillips here, but he had a real point.

What else is the movement bringing into the Church besides alternate lifestyles for clergy? I'll have more to say on this.

Abp Hepworth At St Mary Of The Angels, January 6, 2017

Abp Hepworth celebrated Epiphany Day mass at St Mary of the Angels on the evening of January 6, 2017. Several things struck me. One was that this was a genuine pastoral visit -- he was not presenting himself as some sort of past Anglo-Catholic celebrity, or perhaps some sort of martyr. He was entirely focused on 2017 and his specific responsibilities as bishop of the parish.

Another is that he is a big man -- about the size of President-Elect Trump, maybe six feet two and hardly emaciated. Another similarity is that his mannerisms and timing command respect. I suspect that, like Trump, he's easily underrated.

I was interested in what he'd say in his homily. Again, it was a pastoral exercise, and it was about Epiphany. He focused on several parts of the gospel narrative: Herod's request of the magi that they tell him where the newborn Christ was located, the massacre of the Holy Innocents, and the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. He made the repeated point that in these times, it's also become more difficult to be Christian, and it still involves the way of the Cross.

Hepworth clearly has a deep understanding and familiarity with scripture and salvation history, which came out in his homily. He's also focused on the world as it is. Although some visitors here, and other observers elsewhere, have suggested he's something of a con artist, I got nothing like that from his visit.

I came away with the impression, like that of other correspondents here, that Hepworth is a complex man, but I would add to it that he's something of a visionary. He saw a potential in the Portsmouth Petition that simply hasn't been realized. It reminds me of the sense of potential, if not necessarily optimism, that I get whenever I visit the St Mary's parish.

Hepworth Visit

Abp Hewpworth will visit and celebrate mass at St Mary of the Angels at 7:00 PM Epiphany Day, Friday, January 6, 2017, not Epiphany Sunday as I had previously posted. (I assumed!!) Anyone for whom this is convenient is, of course, invited. I will attend and try to get a photo, though probably not outside the church.

Abp Hepworth To Visit St Mary's Epiphany Sunday 2017

I'm told that Abp John Hepworth, who is the parish's Ordinary, will visit St Mary's on Epiphany Sunday, January 8, 2017. Fr Kelley says the archbishop would like to spend some amount of time meeting with individuals, and if anyone is interested, they should call the parish to set up a time. However, the exact schedule for his visit is still up in the air, including the mass time. I'll post more information here as it becomes available.

I certainly intend to come to the mass Hepworth celebrates (taking care of my own obligation at my diocesan parish), and as I've told Fr Kelley, I would like to take a photo of him with his crook and mitre in front of the parish, which I will publish here if I get it.

This will be the first episcopal visit to the parish from a valid bishop since 2011, when David Moyer was here.

Deborah Gyapong on Abp Hepworth

I received the following e-mail from Ms Gyapong yesterday, which I am posting with her permission:

Dear Mr. Bruce,

Thank you for running that letter about Archbishop John Hepworth from a former TAC priest who traveled with him to Japan.

His description more closely matches my experience of the man: larger than life; a tremendously gifted speaker and writer; wickedly (in the Boston-sense of wicked, meaning great!) funny; an inspiring leader and serious about the need for our coming into unity with the Holy See. He was a tremendous evangelist for unity and for the Catholic Church.

Interestingly, from my position up here in Canada, the bishops who remained loyal to Hepworth to the end, who trusted him, are now Catholic priests, two of them monsignors. They, however, did not have impediments in becoming Catholic such as delict of schism or being in an irregular marriage.

Now that we are in the Ordinariates, I can see 90 per cent of what Hepworth was "selling " to us regarding what our new life in the Catholic Church would look like regarding our liturgy, our married priests, our property, our patrimony, turned out to be true. I also think if more bishops had been loyal, and "catholic" in their behavior vis a vis their archbishop, perhaps more parishes could have come in.

There were some significant things he got wrong, perhaps from wishful thinking on his part, but I do not think malice, or chicanery had anything to do with it.

Sadly, whatever flaws or blind spots or inconsistencies in his behavior can be explained by the abuse he suffered. For most of his adult life he had suppressed it and tried to move on, but, in the run up to the TAC's approach to Rome, he also began to face what had happened to him. Though he had a naive view, perhaps, of how his story would be received, and how that might mitigate the view of his leaving the Catholic priesthood,and so on, it saddens me greatly how terribly he was treated by some in the hierarchy when he first came forward. I remember encountering outright contempt towards the man in some quarters.

In a sense he was revictimized at the very same time he was trying to keep the TAC together so as to approach Rome in unity. I look at our small, but happy and holy little Ordinariate communities in Canada and am extremely grateful for what John Hepworth did for us and suffered for us.

And for those who think the sexual abuse claims were bogus, Archbishop Hepworth went through the special counsel the Melbourne diocese had set up to deal with sexual abuse claims since one of the abusive priests was from there. (This independent counsel was set up by Cardinal Pell when he was Melbourne archbishop). He was examined by experienced people who have assessed the credibility of hundreds of victims, and who knew evidence no one else would have known from any public record. They found Hepworth's accounts of abuse credible.

The ordeal of going public with the abuse claims, abuse that caused him tremendous agony and shame, eventually led to his being taken more seriously by the Catholic bishops who helped get the ordinariate off the ground. I think Hepworth played a key role in the fact there's an Ordinariate in Australia at all and that a former TAC priest, Msgr. Entwistle, heads it.

I suspect one of these days we'll hear John Hepworth has quietly reconciled with the Church he loves, but to me he is like the captain of a sinking ship, waiting until everyone's safe on the Barque of Peter. If it's only for the sake of St. Mary's in Hollywood, he'll do so. I'm delighted he has stepped forward out of his voluntary exile to help St. Mary's get justice after what looks like an unbelievably painful ordeal.

By their fruits ye will know them and I think the TAC parishes in Canada, the United States and Australia are John Hepworth's fruit in many ways---and I think most of my fellow Ordinariate members would agree.

You may publish this on your blog if you like,

Blessings

Deborah Gyapong

I find it very difficult to disagree with Ms Gyapong's argument. The circumstances of St Mary Hollywood's case bear it out: there can be no question that Abp Hepworth opened up the opportunity for TAC parishes to take advantage of Anglicanorum coetibus. There can be no question that the ACA bishops took legal and canonical actions, in particular (and most severely) against St Mary Hollywood. Hepworth set up the Patrimony to protect it and other parishes from such actions. That protection has proven ultimately effective and was a key element in the parish's legal defense. His reemergence as the parish's legal situation becomes more favorable is an indication of his continued wish for the process begun in the TAC with the Portsmouth Letter to continue.

I'm very grateful to Ms Gyapong for her support for Abp Hepworth and by implication the parish's continued intent to join the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.

More On The Patrimony Of The Primate

A visitor asks, "What will St Mary's be affiliated with, besides Hepworth? Are there any other parishes or groups in the Patrimony?" As far as I know, there are no others active, but this leads me to further examination of the Patrimony issue.

A couple of years ago, I sent an e-mail to David Moyer asking him if he could provide a list of parishes that had been in the Patrimony, and what their ultimate fates had been. Moyer never replied -- this is too bad, since he, as bishop, would have been the definitive source.

In a "To Whom It May Concern" letter dated February 3, 2014, Abp Hepworth refers to the Patrimony as a provision of the TAC that had been in existence prior to Anglicanorum coetibus, which he used in the early 2000s to resolve conflicts between Bishop Robin Connors and a Portland, OR parish. He said, "The US bishops were unhappy, but accepted the legitimacy of my actions." Hepworth went on to say that he implemented the provisions of the Patrimony once again to prevent canonical and legal action by US bishops against parishes that had determined to enter the US-Canadian Ordinariate.

In a separate move, Bishop Louis Campese of the ACA Diocese of the Eastern US resigned as an ACA bishop in early 2011 and withdrew about half the parishes in that diocese into the Pro-Diocese of the Holy Family, which was not in the Patrimony of the Primate. The reason was the same, to protect parishes from the actions of Presiding Bishop Marsh and others. Beyond that, the exact status of other ACA parishes or ACA-derived groups, like the Fellowship of St Alban, Rochester NY, isn't completely clear to me, as the circumstances of that group's formation involve opposition by Bishop Marsh and the ACA parish's ACA priest, who, however, passed away during the transition. (UPDATE: Prof Jordan has clarified that his group was not in the Patrimony.)

So there is a class of ACA or ACA-derived parishes or groups that intended to enter the Ordinariate and suffered adverse action from the ACA but may or may not have actually been under the Patrimony of the Primate, Moyer, and Hepworth. At this stage, I would invite anyone with specific knowledge of what happened in those circumstances to let me know the details, as the historical record should be preserved.

Without better confirmation, I am fairly certain that the following groups or parishes were in fact in the Patrimony during 2011-2012:

• St Mary of the Angels Hollywood
• Holy Cross Mission Honolulu
• St Columba Lancaster CA
• St Aidan Des Moines
• Holy Family Payson AZ

I will be extremely grateful for corrections and additions to this list and will update it here as I receive them. The historical record is important. It's worth pointing out that of the current list, only Holy Family Payson actually entered the Ordinariate, a symptom in part of the bungling that characterized the establishment of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter. Indeed, I've had e-mail exchanges with two clergy associated with these groups who emerged embittered from the unsuccessful process of trying to join the OCSP. However, the specific circumstances for each group's non-entry were unique.

It's important to note that the St Mary of the Angels parish voted to revise its bylaws in early 2011 to reflect its exit from the ACA and membership in the Patrimony of the Primate. Due to a technicality, counsel advised the vestry to hold a second election on that question in August 2012, which also passed. It was this election that the courts eventually recognized as legally establishing the parish's membership in the Patrimony.

The parish's bylaws have established its membership in the Patrimony, which, according to Abp Hepworth, whose personal creation the Patrimony is, continues in existence. Whether other parishes or groups are currently active in it is not really relevant. The most important thing is that the affiliation is legally and canonically valid, it has protected the parish from the most severe attacks, and it keeps the parish's options open.

Whether, as my visitor has subsequently mused, the Patrimony as a denomination currently of one parish gives anyone leverage is an interesting question. I would point out, though, that the fact that St Mary of the Angels remains outside the OCSP is a major conundrum for the whole Anglo-Catholic project, not just Anglicanorum coetibus. I'll discuss the implications of this in future posts.