Letter to the Pope

Here is the text of a letter to Pope Benedict XVI that was sent at the start of the year from members of the large pro-Ordinariate majority at St Mary of the Angels. I believe it speaks for itself:

January 2013

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI
Apostolic Palace
00120 Vatican City

Most Holy Father:

This letter is written on behalf of a small, but historic parish in Hollywood, California, USA, St. Mary of the Angels. For well over a year we have accepted your most kind offer to enter the Catholic Church as a traditional Anglo-Catholic use parish. We have had formal votes by the parish on two occasions. In both cases there was a super majority of those wishing to do so by over 80%.

During 2011, our clergy provided a number of months of instruction from the excellent, Evangelium Catechetical course. This was eagerly attended by parishioners ready for unity with Rome.

Msgr. William Stetson was our contact with Archbishop Jose Gomez. He came and spoke to us of the steps necessary for our journey.

We eagerly awaited our early reception in January of 2012, as soon as an Ordinary was named.

You may imagine our puzzlement and disbelief when everything came to a halt. There had been a small group in opposition to our entry in the Catholic Church. They had managed to mail a packet to Cardinal Wuerl in Washington D.C. falsely accusing our priest, Father Christopher Kelley, of multiple counts of serious wrong doing.

Your Holiness, Father Kelley is a priest of deepest Christian faith and practice. In the five years as our priest he has displayed the virtues that should be found in all priests, a complete and total dedication in his love of God, his parish and preserving the beauty of our Anglican traditions and liturgy.

Although we had placed our parish under the Patrimony of the Primate (organized for parishes wishing to join the Ordinariate) we found ourselves threatened with a hostile take-over by a denomination we had withdrawn from (The Anglican Church in America). We found ourselves in need of legal representation. The legal action was initiated by this same ACA who now claimed St. Mary’s parish as their own. We are a freestanding California Corporation with a legally elected governing board yet we have been barred from the property.

Our gates have been locked since mid-June of 2012. Masses were begun on December 2, 2012 but only by invitation. They have claimed to excommunicate all of the duly elected board members and most of those whose hearts were set on the Ordinariate. No homeless are being given aid and no community groups have been allowed to meet.

Many parishioners have become discouraged and left, some have joined Catholic parishes, but there is a small remnant that has continued to celebrate Mass in the park and now in a private home.

Ultimately we believe in the power of God to intervene on our behalf.

Our plea to you, Holy Father, is for your help and prayers on our behalf in order to bring us to the chair of St. Peter. Our hearts long to bring our precious, historical, beautiful church, St. Mary of the Angels into full communion with the Holy See of Rome.

We remember you in our prayers and pray for the unity of the church Jesus came to establish.

We sign below with deepest humility and gratitude for your joining your intentions with ours.

[names redacted]

Anglo-Catholicism as Camp

Ms Gyapong points to a post by Fr Andrew Bartus on the Baroque and its relation to Anglo-Catholic vestments. I know Fr Bartus and have a difficult time taking him seriously. (Ms Gyapong has complained that I don't know Abp Hepworth; to her I would reply back at you re Fr Bartus.) That post is one more among the many reasons I can't take Bartus seriously, and indeed one more reason I would not reach in his direction for Catholic worship.

Fr Bartus says,

In the Church of England (and elsewhere too), the revival of the Baroque was indeed to demonstrate liturgically the ecclesiology: that Roman Catholicism was the true form of the faith. This produced the fine heritage of Anglo-Papalists who followed the Oxford Movement in those early days in seeking corporate reunion with the Church, today fulfilled in the Ordinariates. . . . Notice that the majority of the bishops and hierarchy who composed and led the "groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately" were in fact men who wore lace, fiddlebacks, and who were Anglo-Papalists.

I would simply refer Fr Bartus, Ms Gyapong, and anyone else who might be interested to Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on Camp. The essay is lengthy but inchoate, and since it's trying to catch an ephemeral idea, difficult to summarize. But here's one of her points:

This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in his heyday.

I've referred before to the appeal of Anglo-Catholicism to gays, and of course Camp is largely a gay phenomenon. I don't mean to denounce either Camp or Anglo-Catholicism on that basis: I came to St Mary of the Angels, which must have been among the highest of high-church parishes, from an only slightly lower-church, urban Anglo-Catholic, largely gay Episcopal parish. I appreciate the Anglo-Catholic style, though Anglo-Catholics need to recognize there is such a thing as Camp, and as I become more familiar with the garden-variety Catholicism down the street, I've got to say that I appreciate Campiness in worship only up to a point. Here's another piece of the Sontag essay:

The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, satire - seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.

Anglo-Catholicism is as much Camp as it is Baroque. One hates to say this, but if the clergy were to turn up at Our Lady of ______ vested in lace, birettas, and fiddleback copes, accompanied by an altar party, with a subdeacon brandishing a paten at the distribution of the host, it would clear the room -- the hundreds who normally attend any of several Sunday masses there would probably never come back; they would most certainly be voting with their feet on Bartus's proposition that Campy Baroque somehow meant that Roman Catholicism was the true form of the faith. Bartus, who'd probably have been subdeacon, would be shaking his head about how they just didn't understand.

But I'm not completely sure at this point that they'd be wrong.

There's a Worthwhile Essay by Prof Tighe

on Ms Gyapong's blog. It confirms the conclusion I've slowly been coming to myself: the Anglican "statement of belief" is normally taken to be whatever Book of Common Prayer is accepted in a particular jurisdiction. For those who do not accept the US 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which does not include the Thirty-Nine Articles in its main body, then they simply do accept the Thirty-Nine Articles, apparently without much thought: "the Articles are perfectly useless as a Confession of Faith for contemporary Anglicans".

Prof Tighe's essay does not, and was not intended to, address the issue that's closer at hand to my own concerns, which is the increasingly obscure implications of the Portsmouth Letter and what appear to me to be the muddled motivations of those who drafted it and those who signed it. The basic problem is that Anglicans don't necessarily believe a whole lot that can be pinned down, and Prof Tighe understands that this is a feature as much as it's a bug. What we have with the Portsmouth Letter is a splinter group of putative Anglicans, representing one particularly flaky wing of the whole movement, signing on to a statement of faith derived from a very different Christian tradition. Neither the drafters nor the signers appear to have given the implications of this much thought, although the Vatican's response appears to have been shrewd at the very least.

I suspect there were several different subtexts among the various signers, and it's significant that only a minority have so far availed themselves of the opportunity the Vatican provided to them. Archbishop Hepworth, for instance, a key drafter of the Letter, has not yet re-converted to Catholicism as a layman as far as I'm aware. Shouldn't this raise some questions about his own sincerity? Others who signed were no doubt being "good Anglicans" in the sense that they were bowing to perceived political pressure, and once that pressure seemed less powerful, they promptly unbowed to it. Archbishop Falk seems to have shifted positions with every change in the breeze.

My conclusion from my own observation, supported by opinions like Prof Tighe's essay, is that "continuing Anglicans" are little different from those of the discontinuing persuasion, and on the whole the US Episcopal Church has actually behaved with greater consistency than the ACA or the TAC. I find Bishop Bruno far more appealing a figure than Bishop Strawn, and indeed, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori no more unpleasant than Presiding Bishop Marsh. Neither is an intellectual giant, though on balance I'd say Jefferts Schori behaves with marginally more integrity.

Archbishop Hepworth Isn't A 39-Articles Anglican, I Assume,

although that raises the question of what kind of an Anglican he is. Ms Gyapong correctly asks someone in the TAC to clarify where the Thirty-Nine Articles now stand in that denomination's ecclesiology, because I'm not sure where they've ever stood. In the 1979 US Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, they're listed among "Historical Documents of the Church", and as an Episcopal priest whom I respect puts it, that's what they are, they're a historical document. The TAC, which with other "continuing Anglicans" has a peculiar fetishistic relationship to the 1928 prayer book, doesn't have this escape clause, although I'd say it's a point in the 1979 prayer book's favor.

The Wikipedia entry on Anglo-Catholicism, although apparently written by informed contributors, never quite gets around to resolving the problem the Thirty-Nine Articles have always raised. Specifically, it's possible to say Archbishop Hepworth, or Fred Farplethwaite for that matter, is not a "39 Articles Anglican", but that raises the question of what kind of an Anglican he is -- and this isn't trivial. In the 2012 court cases regarding who was in charge at St Mary of the Angels, the ACA's attorneys argued that the ACA hierarchy were the experts on the "Anglo-Catholic" faith.

Because both sides in the case agreed that facts were not in dispute, no witnesses were called or cross-examined, and this may have been a mistake. I think a better step would have been to call either Canon Morello or Bishop Strawn as witnesees and ask them specifically what statement of belief they ascribed to in order to call themselves "Anglo-Catholic". In their proceedings against Fr Kelley, for instance, they referred to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Did that mean they ascribed to all of the Thirty-Nine Articles? In that case, how could they be "Anglo-Catholic"? I wouldn't put much stock in the ability of either Strawn or Morello to sort this out on the witness stand -- Hepworth either, for that matter. Fr Smuts will be wise if he ducks Ms Gyapong's invitation, too. Recalling the truism that Anglicanism is "the thinking man's religion", I certainly would except the "continuing" variety in any case.

On the other hand, for the bishops and other clergy who signed the Catholic Catechism as part of the Portsmouth Petition process, exactly which of the Thirty-Nine Articles did they abjure thereby? Did this imply a change in whatever statement of belief bound the entire TAC? Apparently not -- and by purging Hepworth and Moyer at minimum, the ACA House of Bishops and the TAC College of Bishops (many of whom signed the Portsmouth Letter) were asserting that Anglo-Catholicism apparently doesn't mean they're specifically Catholic, either, except they don't really ascribe to all the Thirty-Nine Articles, or maybe or maybe not. Or maybe they just believe that all you need is love.

I suspect that the bottom line is that the TAC believes whatever anyone can get away with saying it believes right then, subject to being purged down the road. I'd go a bit farther than Ms Gyapong -- besides asking which of the Thirty-Nine Articles the TAC does or does not ascribe to, I'd ask how the College of Bishops differs from the Politburo, or for that matter The Episcopal Church. Why do we need more than one Anglican denomination if they all work the same way? True, I may not like the TEC or TAC stance on women priests or gay bishops one day (take your choice), but wait a week or two, and someone will bully in a different version, and maybe I'll be happier with that one. TAC, TEC, what's to choose?

One More Time

Article XXVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, as it appears in the 1928 US Book of Common Prayer, says:

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.

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

One more time: Anglicans are a type of Protestant. A scrub jay is a type of bluejay. Scrub jays on the edge of their range may look a little like other kinds of bluejays, but they are definitely not sparrows. The reason Catholics take the elements of the eucharist so seriously is that they believe in the transubstantiation that Anglicans and other Protestants specifically abjure, as we see above. If the bread becomes the body of Christ in some real way, according to Catholicism, it's important that it be bread and not something else; the same applies to wine. And this is a specific litmus test as to Catholic belief, though certainly not the only one.

To a Protestant, it's not the same thing, and faith is key, so it's OK to use grape juice, and if pumpkin bread is all you've got, have at it. For Abp Hepworth to claim that departure from the elements of the mass, and departure from the maleness of the celebrant, wanders into heresy, doesn't match his Protestantism, which he acknowledges, since he has styled himself a Primate of a Protestant denomination that ascribes to Article XXVIII. The statement of belief to which he ascribes, the Articles, makes him a Protestant. The Catholic Church, which he left, considers him a Protestant. In wishing to re-enter the Catholic Church, he acknowledges that he is a Protestant.

Certainly at the highest Anglo-Catholic parishes a subdeacon brandishes a gold paten as the host is distributed, such that if the host should fall from a communicant's hands, it won't reach the floor. However, since it's nevertheless a Protestant service, to which Article XXVIII definitely applies, this is only a formality, since the host has not become the Body of Christ in a real way. If you dress as an Elizabethan during a Shakespeare festival, it doesn't make you an Elizabethan. (And patens, with subdeacons, are rare indeed at actual Catholic masses.)

So then we inevitably come to the TAC bishops who signed the Catholic Catechism during a Protestant mass in 2007 as part of the Portsmouth Letter process. To the extent that the Protestant TAC bishops did this, I now have to agree with the ACA Chancellors: this was in fact abandonment of communion (which applies to clergy, not laity). If the Thirty-Nine Articles are the TAC's statement of belief, which they are, then at best it was an indicator of fundamental confusion for the bishops and other clergy at Portsmouth to sign the Catechism, and I would have to agree with Presiding Bishop Marsh that it's hard to know exactly what anyone had in mind in signing it.

In fact, I'd go a little farther: Marsh implies that the bishops intended to teach the Catechism, but not necessarily to become Catholic. But if they teach the Catechism, they're contradicting the Thirty-Nine Articles in numerous ways, whether they're Catholic or not, and not just over transubstantiation: the Articles also abjure Purgatory, icons, and the saints. They're actually quite Protestant. The bishops, from Hepworth on down, should have resigned their Anglican orders before signing the Catechism. That would have been the act of sincerity that they claim to have made. Instead, Hepworth fostered only ambiguity and confusion, and he's responsible for the result.

There Are Other Puzzling Features

in Ms Gyapong's post of January 1. I keep thinking about her account of Abp Hepworth on heresy and doing the sacraments the wrong way, and it reminded me that this is another version of the "Anglo-Catholic" bait and switch: as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the TAC is just another Protestant denomination. It does not recognize Anglican orders any more than it recognizes Baptist orders; it's as much a sin for a Catholic to participate in a TAC eucharist as it is a Presbyterian. In fact, this was the perceived slap in the face that the TAC got from Anglicanorum coetibus.

But as I've said, the Vatican was under no obligation to give things away that normally have a cost. Luke 14:31 makes it plain that the Lord Himself sees that faith has a cost: "Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?" No matter how much Abp Hepworth or any other "Anglo-Catholic" wants to insist that using the proper elements in a sacrament makes him Catholic, from the Catholic point of view, he's deluded, and Anglicanorum coetibus simply makes that clear. If you want to be Catholic, you have to pay the dues that make you Catholic.

But Ms Gyapong makes another odd remark in her January 1 post:

Of course, today does mark the Circumcision of our Lord, but now that we are Catholics, it is a new Holy Day of Obligation for us as it is now the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God.

A commenter makes it plain that in fact, January 1 is not a Holy Day of Obligation, although it was before Vatican II reforms. Our priest at mass on Sunday in fact reminded us that January 1 is not a Holy Day of Obligation. I'm wondering if we're seeing a certain residual Anglo-Catholicism here, a need to be more Catholic than Vatican II, a need to make things more complicated than they need to be.

One of the excommunicated St Mary of the Angels parishioners, who'd returned to her previous Catholic parish, noted what several others of us have seen: the St Mary's high mass was, by 2012, close to two hours in length, with every possible accretion: asperges, lengthy homily, extended announcements, extended intentions, prayer of thanksgiving, post-communion motet, Angelus, and Last Gospel, the sort of thing that's very seldom seen or, coming from the Anglican prayer book, not seen at all in a Catholic mass. A Catholic mass, our friend noted, starts on time and ends an hour later!

The need among "Anglo-Catholics" to perform such acts of putative superergogation seems to be characterisic, and it probably speaks to a basic insecurity, a recognition that after all, one is not actually Catholic and needs to make up for it. As the Puritan John Milton put it, who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. No need to make things harder than they are!

My Post on Heresy vs Schism

from last year has excited some comment, both on the web and via e-mail. Ms Gyapong responds,

Now, I remember Archbishop John Hepworth from this documentary by Salt and Light TV in 2006 saying something about how heresy did not matter as much as maintaining the validity of sacraments, that the Church had managed with heretics before and always will, but with the introduction of women as priests, this tampered with the economy of grace in such a way as making all their sacraments uncertain.

In other words, if sacraments were done in the prescribed manner, it did not matter what kind of wonky beliefs the priest or even the bishop held personally. However, not doing the sacraments properly or using different elements (female instead of male priests, raisin cakes and milk instead of bread and wine).

This reminds me of a case that came up on Fr Z's blog: a priest, with the best of intentions, had been celebrating the eucharist with communion bread made from gluten-free flour. After all, who knew which communicants might be allergic to wheat? He'd protect them all, no matter what! But then he learned that bread made from gluten-free flour was not, strictly speaking, bread. He metaphorically rent his garment and threw out all the gluten-free "bread" on the spot! Fr Z clearly felt this was the appropriate response.

Well, maybe. But I keep thinking of Mark 7: 15-23, which says in part,

Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him; Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats? And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.

Do you suppose that some woman Episcopal priest, over the decades when I was in that denomination, may have decided to protect me from any allergies by consecrating gluten-free communion bread herself? What should I do about that? I'm simply not qualified to parse the precise sacramental value of any Episcopal eucharist, but I've been credibly told by a Catholic monsignor that there is "some" sacramental value there. Is the "some" proportionally less if the bread was gluten-free? Is the "some" proportionally less if it was consecrated by a woman priest? On the other hand, is there more of the "some" if it was real communion bread administered by a male Episcopal priest?

What of my Presbyterian childhood and adolescence? Their communion is administered with tiny cubes of bakery loaf and jiggers of grape juice. Is there still "some" sacramental value there? In 2008 I revisited my first childhood Presbyterian parish, fully aware by then of the various differences in interpretation of the Sacrament among the denominations. I nevertheless participated in the communion service and consumed a cube of bakery bread and a jigger of grape juice consecrated (if that is the proper word) by a female pastor.

As a baptized Christian, I was eligible to receive that particular form in that particular denomination, and I was not sinning as a then-Episcopalian by doing it. Will any of that be counted against me on the last day? I suspect that whoever performs that review will have Mark 7: 15-23 somewhere in mind. Naturally, I now take the Catholic view of the sacraments with utmost seriousness, and I would not become Catholic if I didn't. On the other hand, I'm not at all sure what anyone will have in mind when Apbs Hepworth and Falk come up for their own reviews, notwithstanding their correct opinions on heresy and the elements.

Actually, there was a great volume of comment on the usual blogs by the usual suspects on the whole subject of who is the real schismatic. Was it Henry VIII, or Thomas Cranmer? Was it whoever started the whole filioque dispute? Is schism from schism less schism, more schism, or just more of the same? What if it's schism over heresy and trying to repair other schism by correcting the heresy? Buzz, buzz, buzz. Not so long ago, several Episcopal parishes in the Diocese of Los Angeles chose to leave because some years before that, Eugene Robinson had been elected Bishop of New Hampshire. Another way of putting it would be that factions in those parishes, often led by clergy, went out of their way to find a scandal 3000 miles distant so that they could effectively destroy their own Christian communities with secret meeetings, disputed votes, lawsuits, and bitter contention.

Heresy worse than schism? I've been there.