OCSP 2018 Bishop's Appeal

A visitor sent me a picture of the recently-released brochure for the 2018 OCSP Bishop's Appeal, in hopes that I might be able to pass it on for more informed opinion. I've cropped it to focus on the amounts and percentages -- many visitors probably have received a copy in the mail. You can get a larger version by clicking on the image.

The visitor's view is, "The budget allocations strike me as a quite administration-heavy, and the category definitions are pretty interesting, too." I passed this on to my regular correspondent, who said,

In a typical diocese seminarians get student loans to cover their tuition, etc which their diocese assume if/when they are ordained. Presumably this is the OCSP practice. Not sure how it funds the on-line instruction and semi-annual residential seminars for former clergy or its candidates for the permanent diaconate. "Parish Development" clearly the ongoing attempt to get a handle on membership files and other record-keeping tasks like Safe Environment, which are all a mess. "Communication Outreach" has also been a weak link from Day One. Hard to believe anyone has put five cents into it up till now.

My first reaction is that $253,125 isn't much, no matter what. How much of an impact any expenditure of this size can have on the OCSP's problem areas is going to be hard to discern. A bigger question is that $30,075 is going for the bishop's travel expenses, and I'm assuming that overnight accommodations will be in Church facilities. Normally, a diocesan bishop doesn't need to fly hundreds or thousands of miles to make episcopal visits, and this is just the most visible indication that maintaining cohesiveness in such a scattered prelature will be difficult. Regarding other areas, my regular correspondent added,

"Evangelization" a bit of a stretch for the Ordinary's travel expenses, and I would put production of an annual Pastoral Letter down as an office expense. Going back to "Communication," as you have probably noticed I am constantly puzzled as to why the OOLW can produce a monthly magazine, on-line and in print, and maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date, if not particularly exciting, website, while the OCSP fails to report anything, including ordinations, unless someone outside the Chancery takes the initiative to submit a news item, manages one "infomercial" magazine a year, and cannot maintain even an up-to-date list of parishes on its website, let alone accurate service times and contact details.

And again, given the relatively small amounts allocated to these areas, regardless of intent, I'm not sure how much of an impact any measures can really have, if the current direction and level of effort has been so unavailing.

Regarding the allocation for clergy and vocations, I'm struck yet again by what continues to be a two-tier approach. An upper tier of parishes and more successful groups is apparently eligible to receive seminarians once they complete their formation. A much larger lower tier gets the Protestant retreads, whose quality has been steadily diminishing over the life of the OCSP.

I think this is important, because the lectionaries for the TEC 1979 BCP and the Roman Catholic missal are the same. I went through ten three-year cycles in 30 years as an Episcopalian, and since 2013, I've been through more than one cycle as a Catholic. I've got to say that the homilies I hear on significant readings -- let's say the raising of Lazarus, the woman at the well, if you forgive the sins of any -- are night and day between TEC and Catholic. They go to what Bp Barron calls the physics of salvation, and as far as I can see, whether this is at Nashotah House or Yale, the interpretations Anglican seminarians learn are at best pale imitations of what we hear from priests infused from the start with Augustine and Aquinas. Let's not even mention the substantial number of OCSP priests who went to Reformed seminaries.

We hear, or surmise, that some diocesan bishops are pushing back over allowing OCSP groups-in-formation in their territories. Given in particular the poor formation of the lower-tier priests and their quickie ordinations, I've got to say I have a lot of sympathy with these bishops, and I don't see that Bp Lopes's apparent direction for the OCSP will do much to solve this problem, or for that matter, any other. The overall spending levels don't strike me as enough to make any real changes.

In contrast, my wife and I have been increasing our financial support of our diocesan parish and related charities year by year. The reason for this is twofold: the effective preaching by parish clergy about the need for sacrificial giving, and the visible good use to which the parish and the archdiocese put our money. If any OCSP members find the 2018 bishop's appeal budget troubling from this perspective -- I would guess that if a visitor sent me a copy hoping to get outside input, this may be the case -- I would suggest they investigate possible alternatives if strong diocesan parishes are available nearby.

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.

Evensong At St Mary Of The Angels Yesterday

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I attended an evensong at St Mary of the Angels, which was part of its 100th anniversary celebration. Abp Hepworth presided. He is well over six feet tall, and vested, he is an imposing figure with an outstanding liturgical voice. In many ways, he is the picture of an Anglican bishop. In his homily, he mentioned what may have been a re-consecration of the parish building, which would have involved an exorcism, which in my view it definitely needs. But one exorcism isn't always enough.

One thing struck me about the whole very well-done service: it was high-church Anglican, not Catholic. Among the odd notes were prayers to Mary, who of course is the parish patron, but they referred to the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, which are specifically Catholic doctrines. If I go to mass on the Catholic holy days of obligation for those feasts, the homilies that explain them are actually matter-of-fact, as if the priest were explaining something as obvious as gravity or the weather. At St Mary's, which is not Catholic but from a denomination that more or less does not recognize them (depending on who you talk to), the prayers are oddly adventitious.

Another odd perspective came from diocesan mass that morning, where the advice in the homily, often repeated by all our priests, was pretty down-to-earth. Come to mass. In fact, come to mass on time. Set aside time in your day for prayers. And that was about all. No thees or thous, except in the Our Father. Then I began to think about advice I've gotten in my private devotions. Think about memorizing the common prayers in Latin. Latin is the language of the Church. Prayers in Latin are efficacious. One effect of becoming Catholic for me is having to dust off my high school and college Latin, and I seem to be moving farther in that direction.

The English of the 1662 BCP is a detour and something adventitious. And I'm still not sure how you get from high-church Anglican to Catholic. Not saying it can't be done, but these are different things, and I don't see it yet.

It Depends On What The Meaning Of "Corporate Reunion" Is

My regular correspondent has reacted to my two most recent posts in a way that provokes me to further thought.Regarding the "corporate reunion" question:

I think that a turning point came for many when it became clear that the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus was precisely not a "corporate reunion," but required the individual reception of every member on precisely the same basis as would have been the case had he or she sought membership in the Church through the RCIA process in a local parish. His or her former clergyman might or might not get ordained and lead the community down the road; his or her former bishop would not be exercising any episcopal role, with the exception of Keith Newton. This was a complete non-starter for most of the UK Anglo-Papalist parishes and even in the North American "continuum" turned off many groups and individuals, earlier and in some cases a fair bit later, as we read here.

I agree that the 30,000-foot version of Anglicanorum coetibus that was promoted in the media just after its promulgation was that entire parishes with their clergy would become Catholic, with little other change. This itself was a somewhat stricter version of the notion that seems to have taken hold in the TAC after the Portsmouth Letter, that the Holy Father would simply declare that Rome and the TAC were "in communion" (i.e., that each denomination recognized the episcopal actions of the other).

It's clear in hindsight that anything short of "in communion" quickly becomes impossibly complicated, but even the truncated version of "corporate reunion" we saw with Anglicanorum coetibus has a serious downside. My regular correspondent moves on:

One might point out that proximity of episcopal oversight does not in and of itself guarantee anything---otherwise there wouldn't have been a problem to start with at OLA. I know you believe that Fr Phillips had a protector in high places, but I think a bigger problem was the fact that he was starting everything from scratch with lay people who either didn't know better or were prepared to accept uncritically everything Fr Phillips did. Fr Bartus has, fortunately IMHO, not built his empire as rapidly as Fr Phillips but I am concerned that he has gathered a similarly smitten community around him, made up both of people whose idea of Catholicism has been formed by him and of people who had a negative previous experience of the Church and are looking to the Ordinariate as a fresh start. Let us remind ourselves of the many projects he has blue-skyed and the work he has put in to advance Fr Baaten and Mr Bales towards ordination. Not to mention Holy Martyrs, Temecula, which he has been trying to get together since last August, although that seems to have run into a bit of a buzz saw. But the point is that presumably his parishioners think that this is what a Catholic priest is like. So whatever he says, goes. The strength of an established parish is the knowledge that pastors come and pastors go, but St Lucy's goes on with its mission.

I keep coming back to Fr David Miller's observation in my 1981 TEC confirmation class, that Anglo-Catholics are people who want the prestige of calling themselves Catholic without paying the dues real Catholics have to pay. Rome and the OCSP need to guard against enabling this attitude, although it seems to me that Abp Garcia-Siller, in his remarks about OLA being not just unique but separate, was driving at something very similar, and it seems to me that Bp Lopes is also now trying to address the same problem there.

But this doesn't change the real problem that even my correspondent raises, that the farther you get from Houston, the more likely it's going to be that clergy are going to freelance "Catholicism", and some people -- not all that many, though -- will buy into it.

More Changes At Our Lady Of The Atonement

A visitor reports,

CCD is returning

Addition of Saturday vigil Mass

When the bishop came to visit the last few times Fr Phillips was not present at the altar when all the other clergy was.

It appears that the entire school and church is being reorganized. The Phillips family members, wife and daughter, are no longer heads of departments.

My regular correspondent confirms,

Bp Lopes made an episcopal visitation to the school last week, presumably to put the official stamp on a new regime there.

"CCD", Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, is commonly referred to by its abbreviation, or simply as "Catechism," and provides religious education to Catholic children attending secular schools. The visitor who reported this says it had been absent from OLA for at least ten years. This would be another indication that the "corporate reunion" movement, left to itself, pays only lip service to mainstream Catholicism and must be closely monitored.

The emerging picture of the changes that have been reported here is that, had the parish remained in the archdiocese, Abp Garcia-Siller would likely have made very similar moves. His removal of Fr Phillips appears to have been fully justified, and Phillips's replacement as "pastor emeritus" has been largely cosmetic, meant to assuage a pro-Phillips faction in the parish, but Bp Lopes and Fr Lewis have made it increasingly clear that Fr Phillips is no longer in charge.

This in turn suggests that if an OCSP parish is close enough to be effectively supervised from Houston, and if it's big enough to make the supervision worthwhile, Bp Lopes is able to give it his attention. However, communities thousands of miles away are not as likely to be in this position and represent real vulnerabilities for the OCSP.

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.