By Their Fruits

Per a local paper:

St. Mary of the Angels Church on Finley Avenue will reopen and resume activities in December after Father Kelley vacated his quarters on the property October 30th.

Except that the same paper reported a month ago:

“There will be an outreach to hire an interim priest for St. Mary’s and I will remain there for the present,” Morello said. “The church members are happy to get their church back and the services are scheduled to begin again this month [November]. We are working slowly and meticulously to restore the church to normalcy and doing an outreach to all parishioners. Members who had left the church are reacting favorably and returning.”

No one I've talked to has received any sort of "outreach", and no one I've talked to has "reacted favorably" or "returned" -- especially considering that the church remains locked as of now. As I've said here already, Morello and Strawn are, in my opinion, incompetent quacks. The task of reopening the parish is beyond them.

At the same time, David Virtue and other bloggers have been irresponsible in not following up with those same incompetent quacks to get a credible commitment for a schedule on reopening, as well as a credible explanation for what measures they've actually taken to "outreach" to "all parishioners".

If anyone knows of concrete developments on this front, I'd be most interested to hear of them.

The Trouble With Scandals In The Establishment,

whether the establishment is medicine, religion, or journalism, is that they create openings for quacks. Abuses in psychiatry inevitably lend credibility to the Scientologists. Carelessness or corruption in the media adds fuel for conspiracy theorists. Episcopal bishops who publicly doubt Christ's divinity make people consider the splinter-group alternatives.

The root problem is that Anglicans of all flavors have forgotten what it means to be Anglican: from the 17th century onward, the Church of England and its progeny found creative ways to finesse disagreements. Thus by the time of Barchester Towers there were high church, low church, and broad church factions that were able to coexist without schisms or purges. In the US Episcopal Church, there was an urban elite that looked the other way over unorthodox sexuality, as well as a country party that embraced low or broad church views and middle-American mores.

I recall an Episcopal adult forum discussion in the mid-2000s in which a priest made the point, valid at that immediate post-Robinson, pre-ACNA moment, that the disputes that led to the 1977 St Louis Affirmation were water under the bridge, nobody in TEC was having any second thoughts, the ordination of women and the 1979 prayer book were by then noncontroversial, and the breakaway denominations that resulted from it were small and shrinking. He felt that the election of Robinson and what it reflected about TEC's views on sexuality would, over time, be treated the same way.

As of 2012, that hasn't been the case. Four whole dioceses broke away in 2009 basically over Robinson, whose career by then was ending anyhow, and who would be replaced as Bishop of New Hampshire by an openly straight male. TEC then pushed a fifth diocese, South Carolina, out of the denomination in 2012, with an aggressive anti-conservative stance that could well affect other conservative dioceses. Somehow, TEC and the ACNA lost the point of Anglicanism along the way.

This hasn't been good policy for anyone. Insofar as TEC has had moral teachings at all -- I remember finding a tract in a narthex during the 1980s that emphasized that to be a good Episcopalian, you definitely had to feed your pets -- it has advocated only the widest possible public acceptance of sexuality other than straight monogamy, quietly abandoning pretty much everything else in the moral sphere. Since sexuality, whichever your preference but not minimizing its importance, is hardly the only segment of Christian moral thought, this is most peculiar.

We might say that the liberal elite urban-avant garde wing of Episcopalianism has triumphed, except that the J.P.Morgans are no longer endowing parishes or dioceses. For all I know, Bill Gates might be a Wiccan, and the Hollywood types who once supported St Mary of the Angels, now deceased, have been replaced by a generation of Scientologists. The Episcopal Diocese of Washington, whose see embraces a pinnacle of US wealthy society, is in financial free-fall. Whatever the effect on middle-Americans, current TEC policy has been fiscally counterproductive, in that the faction it most wishes to appease is also the faction that's stopped its pledges and bequests.

The other side of the coin, as I've suggested above, is that the scandals in the establishment have provided openings to charlatans, such as the current leadership of the ACA. But leaving aside the quacks, the reality is that the disputes among Anglicans simply mean that they're trying to divide an ever-shrinking pie into smaller and smaller pieces. As we've seen in the St Mary of the Angels case (and many, many others), not only is the pie shrinking, but more and more of it is going to unproductive use in legal fees.

The disputes among "continuing Anglicans" have themselves been highly contentious, with even the second ACNA (the first having dissolved in its own set of disputes) breaking into factions in the short time since its founding. The tiny "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion", as we've seen, split into high church-low church factions and purged the high churchmen. Its remaining prelates are bitterly anti-Catholic -- but as we've seen, they're also quacks who shouldn't have the credibility the bloggers give them. If anyone ever thought that leaving The Episcopal Church was going to solve anything, they've long since been proven utterly misguided.

I don't see a good solution for Anglicanism.

How Did We Get Here?

Breakaway denominations aren't unusual -- there have been Catholic breakaway groups as a result of both the First and Second Vatican Councils, and while The Episcopal Church managed to avoid breaking up over the US Civil War (many other Protestant denominations split into northern and southern factions), the Reformed Episcopal Church broke away in 1873 due to too much Anglo-Catholic influence in the mainstream.

The "continuing Anglican" movement as we know it dates to the 1977 Congress of St. Louis, where the issues were The Episcopal Church's decision to ordain women as priests and the upcoming adoption of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Over the next 20 years, interest in breakaway Anglicanism slowly subsided until Bishop John Spong's unorthodox theology became prominent, along with his willingness to ordain openly gay priests. This was followed by the election of openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire Eugene Robinson in 2003, which eventually prompted several Episcopal dioceses to leave The Episcopal Church and form the second Anglican Church of North America in 2009. (The first ACNA emerged from the St Louis Affirmation of 1977 but subsequently broke up.)

The ordination of women is, theologically, a bigger issue than gay priests or bishops -- no clergy is without sin, after all, and the steps that were taken to ordain openly gay and lesbian priests in the 1980s, or the election of openly gay and lesbian bishops in the 2000s is a matter more of emphasis than revolutionary change. On top of that, since at least the 19th century, The Episcopal Church has always been -- and elements of it have always more or less prided themselves as being -- part of the sexual avant-garde.

The financier J.P.Morgan was an active Episcopalian who eagerly attended the denomination's triennial conventions and closely followed the development of the 1894 Book of Common Prayer. Although he was married, he had several mistresses, with whom he traveled openly (to Episcopal conventions and elsewhere) -- in fact, he would charter railroad cars so that bishops could accompany him to the conventions, in what his biographer strongly implies was an intense party atmosphere.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead's first husband, Luther Cressman, was an Episcopal priest. Coming of Age in Samoa, written during that marriage and revered almost universally in the last century by liberal arts majors, has been accused of fabricating its field work and misrepresenting the sex lives of Samoans. During Mead's marriage to Cressman, their views on fidelity appear to have been other than conventional, despite Cressman's status as a priest -- this strikes me as entirely consistent with the elitist-avant garde strain of Episcopalianism.

1960s LSD guru Alan Watts became an Episcopal priest and served from 1944 to 1950 as Episcopal chaplain to Northwestern University. By his own account he was deposed as a priest due to his numerous sexual relationships. (Once I mentioned this to an Episcopal priest, whose answer was, "Boy, that would have had to have been a lot. A lot.")

Laud Humphreys was a sociologist best known for his book Tearoom Trade (1970), an ethnographic study of anonymous male-male sexual encounters in public toilets. He was an Episcopal priest before he became a sociologist, and served in largely gay urban Anglo-Catholic parishes (his ashes are immured at St Thomas Episcopal Church Hollywood, another such parish). He later came out as gay, despite a marriage.

Interestingly, the latter-day controversies over Bishops John Spong and Eugene Robinson have tended to de-emphasize the earlier controversies over alcoholic and sexually promiscuous Bishop James Pike, who eventually resigned as Bishop of California under the threat of a heresy trial. Yet another bishop, Paul Moore Jr, was, according to his daughter (one of nine children), a closeted gay man all his life and forced into retirement under the threat of a sexual harassment complaint from a male priest.

In brief, The Episcopal Church has long tolerated unconventional sexual behavior, sometimes openly, frequently tacitly, and sometimes combined with highly unorthodox theology. The scandals surrounding gay bishops over the past decade have often made me think of Captain Renault in Casablanca, who is shocked, shocked to learn that this is going on. It's been going on for more than a hundred years. That breakaway denominations would seize on one or another episode as some sort of last straw is puzzling to say the least.

Why St Mary's?

As we've seen, dozens of parishes have left the ACA in the past few years. The whole idea behind the ACA and other "continuing Anglican" denominations was to make it possible for parishes to leave a particular denomination without that denomination making an issue of property ownership and causing lawsuits -- the original experience of St Mary's leaving The Episcopal Church in the 1970s was a pioneering case that served as a model for "continuing Anglicans", although it was never St Mary's intent to wind up in that sort of limbo.

So what is it about St Mary's that led the ACA to sue to keep the parish, when it had let so many others go with little fuss? There are probably several reasons, none of them good, but the main one was expressed by ACA Presiding Bishop Marsh when asked just that question by a parishioner during his late-night visit to the siege: "it's about money." The ACA is collapsing, as we've been seeing here, along with the rest of the TAC. The ACA is running out of money -- it has about 25 parishes in good standing, which is to say, parishes that send tithes to their diocese. The other 40-odd are missions, which is to say, parishes that don't. That's not enough to fund junkets to the Greek islands or ecumenical trips to Florida. With the reputation the ACA has, there's little chance it will attract new parishes, either.

St Mary's occupies less than half of a parcel of prime real estate that it owns in Los Feliz, an affluent section of Hollywood. The rest of the parcel is occupied by a bank branch and a parking lot. The bank pays about $20,000 a month in rent; use of the parking lot after hours brings in another $1000 a month. Plate and pledge pale in comparison. Exactly what the property is worth is hard to say in this real estate market, but it's probably several million, with the impediment that the building is a historic landmark, so there are restrictions on what can be done with it.

Bishops Strawn and Marsh have never been completely clear on what they mean to do with their prize, assuming they win all the appeals. It's worth pointing out that they won most of the initial legal actions on the basis of their argument that the ACA's position on who controls the property is an ecclesiastical matter, and the US First Amendment prevents the courts from getting involved. Among other things, the court can't even rule on whether the ACA has followed its own canons over matters like removing vestry members -- and the ACA in fact has followed neither its own canons nor California law, but that basically doesn't matter as far as the court is concerned. By the same reasoning, of course, a church could declare someone a heretic and order him burned at the stake, and it could claim that was a First Amendment issue, too -- there's something wrong with the court's decision, in my view, but that may or may not ever be sorted out.

The ACA needs money. It needs money to fund its bishops, clearly: Bishop Marsh took retired Bishop Langberg on a couple of junkets in 2012, and I suspect this purchased Langberg's support in the House of Bishops at critical times. I also suspect that he'll need to bring money to the table in the merger talks that are ongoing with the Anglican Province of America -- I can't avoid the impression that the cruise to the Greek isles made by the head honchos of the two little splinter groups last May was basically flash. The ACA will have to be putting up more of this to seem in earnest.

That St Mary's is, or was, a parish, and indeed, a parish that had clearly expressed a wish no longer to be part of the ACA, has nothing to do with any of this. St Mary's is a source of ready money. As far as I can see, there are several paths to realizing this money: one strategy, which Bishop Strawn has already attempted at St Stephen's Athens TX, is to declare that the parish is a mission and simply take it over. At that point, the budget and the checkbook belong to him. St Stephen's was able to stop this by pointing out that this would violate the ACA canons and Texas law, suggesting that the parish's insurance would cover the costs of defending the case. Strawn backed off in Texas. The California court, on the other hand, has said it simply can't get involved, which would give Strawn, who has made it clear that he don't need no stinkin' canons, a free hand.

Another strategy would be simply to sell the parish property. Potential obstacles would include the building's status as a historic landmark and the possibility that the transaction might bring further attention from the authorities -- depending on how far Strawn, Marsh, Morello, and their stooges bend the rules, we could be getting into a criminal conspiracy. Marsh has told me in an e-mail that "we have no current plans to sell the property", but this means nothing. A potential buyer that would provide the least complication would be the Church of Scientology, which has been picking up Hollywood properties for years and which would probably maintain the building as something like a church. St Mary's would then wind up its corporate business and transfer the proceeds to a deserving non-profit like, oh, say, the Anglican Church in America, the Most Rev Brian Marsh, proprietor. The vestry having long since been packed with compliant stooges, there'd be no problem in doing this.

A thief can get off on a technicality, but that doesn't mean he isn't a thief. A theft can go undetected, but that doesn't mean it's not stealing. The clerics who seem to be mooting transactions like these are utterly corrupt. The clerics who support them in the ACA and the TAC, as well as the Standing Committees who tolerate this conduct, are complicit. This thing smells. It's not just Morello, Strawn, and Marsh who will have this to deal with in this life and in the hereafter.

It's worth pointing out, though, that from what we've already seen, Strawn and Morello are simply incompetent. Pulling off this kind of heist is almost certainly beyond them. Brian Marsh is basically a high school drama teacher, and I don't think he's equipped for the kind of mission they have in mind, either. We'll see what develops, but I strongly suspect that in the end, the ACA will get very little for its efforts, although the future for St Mary's as a parish has already been destroyed.

I'll be out of town on family business for the rest of the week; I won't be posting until I get back.

Incongruities

Fr Anthony Chadwick makes an interesting point in his post from yesterday, that it's hard to find news on the collapse of the "Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion". Some of his commenters agree that collapse is what's taking place. (I appreciate his kind remarks about this blog, but visitors should keep in mind the clarification I make there; I'm an amateur blogger and occasional semi-pro writer, but no more a "journalist" than it would seem Stephen Smuts is a "priest", at least outside his tiny denomination.)

But you can't hold any blogger to "professional" standards, and those standards aren't what we're getting in any case. Consider just how bloggers like David Virtue have missed the actual size of the "Worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion": with a few hours work, I came up with an estimate of the ACA's current size at about 2,300. An Australian estimate for the ACCA is 400. I haven't seen a figure for the Southern African franchise, but a tour of parish web sites at the ACSA page (all 14 of them) suggests 400 might be a comparable number there as well. The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada lists 20 parishes and missions scattered across that vast country. The web site of the Anglican Church in India is so poorly done (in a country that normally does high-tech very well) that it's hard to give that branch much credibility at all. It seems to me that the size of the "Worldwide TAC", or the lack of it, is a story even the bloggers have missed.

The second story that everyone's missed is its corruption. Bishop Michael Gill is notable almost entirely for his bad faith in signing the Portsmouth Letter and then disavowing his signature. Bishop Stephen Strawn is noted for his utter disregard of his own canons and his appointment of a Canon to the Ordinary who left The Episcopal Church following a scandal. The former Primate ordained a politician to the priesthood, apparently in hopes of gaining political favor, but the move backfired into its own scandal. Yet the remaining bishops expelled the Primate in a kangaroo proceeding that, if anything, served to damage the reputation of the denomination further.

Instead, the bloggers have focused on three TAC figures, ex-Primate John Hepworth, former Bishop David Moyer, and Fr Christopher Kelley, as stereotypical buffoons -- the sort of thing new media types have denounced the old media for doing. Hepworth, Moyer, and Kelley are very different people. Hepworth, it seems to me, is deeply flawed, although figures from Noah to Jacob to David to St Augustine to Martin Luther King Jr were deeply flawed as well. To his credit, he appears to have made a realistic assessment of the "Worldwide TAC"'s future and set up a path for its most respectable elements to leave it -- and in the process was a prime mover behind Anglicanorum coetibus. It's hard to avoid concluding that the bitter opposition to this move that arose within the TAC is a response among the corrupt, complacent, and self-deluded to a dose of plain reality -- the TAC is collapsing. Best face facts and make a plan.

Moyer strikes me as both complex and deeply flawed as well, but he also seems to have come down on the side opposed to corruption and complacency at several important moments in his career. His opponent in The Episcopal Church, Bishop of Pennsylvania Charles Bennison Jr, is probably as representative of the current complacency and corruption in that denomination as Alexander Borja was among the Renaissance Popes. He may have lost his particular legal battle against Bennison, but I'm not sure if the Diocese of Pennsylvania could finally have forced Bennison's exit without the work Moyer did to expose him. Moyer then acted on Hepworth's behalf in protecting ACA parishes from reprisals when they simply took the denomination's leaders at their earlier word and wished to enter the US Ordinariate. This was good work, too.

Kelley is the hardest one to figure. His parish, St Mary of the Angels, was interested in Anglicanorum coetibus from the start, and naturally it became the immediate target of reprisals from Bishop Daren Williams (who showed the same bad faith as Bishop Gill in signing the Portsmouth Letter and then reversing himself). This almost certainly then served to encourage the small anti-Ordinariate faction within the parish. But unlike Hepworth, he's made no reckless allegations of decades-old clerical abuse; unlike Moyer, there's been no out-of-control litigation. He focused instead on the complicated job of taking his parish through a political minefield, and while he's not perfect either, and has made no claims of perfection, he's probably as good an example as any of the old saw that no good deed goes unpunished.

More recently, Kelley has been the target of uncanonical kangaroo proceedings similar to those against Hepworth, brought by a bishop whose seminary was unaccredited and has since closed because it couldn't get accreditation, and whose reputation for intrigue and uncanonical actions had previously driven other parishes out of the ACA. The Canon to the Ordinary whom he appointed to drive Kelley out claims academic credentials, from bachelor's to MDiv to PhD, that nobody has been able to verify, runs questionable businesses on the side, and left The Episcopal Church following a scandal. Yet Kelley is portrayed as the buffoon, and the likes of David Virtue are simply incurious.

The bloggers are doing us no favors.

You Know Who Else I Think Is Hinky?

Fr Stephen Smuts, the TAC blogger-priest in South Africa. Here's why: In both Anglicanism and Catholicism, there are three orders of ordained clergy, deacons, priests, and bishops. There are then two kinds of deacons, vocational and transitional. Vocational deacons are permanently ordained to the diaconate as their vocation -- deacons perform a limited role in the mass and have traditionally cared for the sick. Transitional deacons are ordained to the diaconate as a kind of final probationary period before they are ordained to the priesthood. This probationary period lasts around six months (at least in The Episcopal Church) and is then followed by an ordination to the priesthood.

But the process of ordination is long and complex. In The Episcopal Church and the more respectable continuing Anglican denominations, a candidate for the priesthood becomes a postulant for holy orders and has many interactions with the bishop and various committees. Then the postulant goes off to an accredited seminary, typically a three-year residential program equivalent to any other post-graduate study like law or medicine. (Even Episcopal programs for commuting students are rigorous.) Only then, following further background checks, exams, and review, does the candidate for the full priesthood reach ordination as a transitional deacon.

A major benefit of this extended process is it ensures that enough different pairs of eyes fall on a candidate to weed out the marginal people. One cause of the Catholic child sexual abuse scandal was insufficient supervision of priestly formation and an unwillngness to weed out marginal candidates, and this must certainly have been a factor in the discussion with Archbishop Daniel that Bishop Gill found so unsatisfactory in yesterday's post -- the Catholic Church must take every precaution in evaluating any candidate for the priesthood. Why should Gill find this disturbing?

On the other hand, we already know the Traditional Anglican Communion has ordained priests on the fly, so to speak -- look at the controversy over Peter Slipper, the alcoholic gay sexual harasser whom John Hepworth ordained to the priesthood apparently because it seemed like a good idea at the time. (Why, by the way, if Bishop Gill is anti-Hepworth, should he nevertheless think it's OK for the TAC to ordain priests willy-nilly?)

But via the blog of the same Fr Smuts, we get a picture, however faint, of the way ordinations go in the TAC Diocese of Pretoria and Southern Africa:

After a considerable time of waiting, sustained teaching and visitations back and forth by Fr Francis Ward, our Director of Studies, it gives me great pleasure to announce that the Ordinations of Deacons and Priests will take place at two venues this year. . . . Those being Ordained in Kimberley will be Philip Simelane (St James Botshabelo), Denzil Philander (St Marks, Koffiefontein), Angelo Eriksen (Christ the King, Kimberley), Lennox Busani (St Francis, East London) and Siyabonga Thambo (Kirkwood, Eastern Cape) The service will begin at 09h30. All are engaged in sudies [sic] that will need to be completed before they progress any further. Zwelidumile Kama (St Mary the Virgin, Port Elizabeth) has asked that his Ordination be delayed as he feels he needs more time to prepare himself – an admirable decision.

Let me see -- for starters, it doesn't seem as though these candidates have been to any recognized seminary; they just get sustained teaching and visitations from a "Director of Studies". If my assumption here (or anywhere else in this matter) is incorrect, I see that Fr Smuts has resumed blogging, and he's free to offer evidence that will correct me. And in mainstream Anglican denominations, you're ordained a deacon after you've finished seminary and passed additional checks and exams. But we see that of this group (and it's not clear if they're all deacons, priests, or what) these need to complete additional "sudies" before they progress any further, whatever that means. No wonder Archbishop Daniel seemed a little nervous!

On the matter of Fr Smuts himself, though, while I don't even find an equivalent announcement of his own ordination as a priest, I do find the following for his ordination as a deacon in 2004:

ON SUNDAY 15th February, lay readers Stephen Smuts and Peter Wood were made Deacons in the parish of Christ the King, Brackenfell, Cape Town. The ordination service was held in the school hall of the Bastian Primary School, Brackenfell, and was conducted by the Rt Revd Trevor Rhodes.

Again, it wouldn't happen in The Episcopal Church, and likely not in the ACNA, that anyone would be ordained as a transitional deacon (which Smuts clearly was, since he's now "Fr" Smuts) straight out of lay reader -- there'd be three years of residential seminary in between (more for a commuting student), and it likely would not be at his home parish -- he'd have been called to another parish out of seminary, another instance of how worthwhile it is to have multiple pairs of eyes on a candidate.

On top of that, we find on the parish site of The Curch of the Holy Cross -- Pretoria that "Fr Stephen Smuts of Cape Town spent three months with the parish". Was this part of the additional studies that priests apparently need to complete after ordination, at least as this goes in the Diocese of Pretoria and Southern Africa? We don't know. All I can surmise is that this bothers Archbishop Daniel, too, and that in turn bothers Bishop Gill, to the point of apparently turning him anti-Catholic.

All I can say is that in the US, if someone calls himself a doctor and practices medicine, I assume he's completed medical school and a residency, and he has a license. By the same token, if someone calls himself an Episcopal or Catholic priest, I can assume he's completed at least three years of seminary, has passed all relevant reviews, background checks, and exams, has served a probationary period as a transitional deacon, and has been properly ordained. The question arises whether this happens all the time in the TAC. The Catholic Church, as part of Anglicanorum coetibus reserved the right to double-check this, and frankly, it makes me feel real, real comfortable. For Bishop Gill, not so much.

Some of Fr Smuts's on line conduct has, frankly, made me wonder from time to time how much of a priest he really is, notwithstanding what he claims to be. When I've called him on it in the comments on his blog, it's clearly been a sore point. All I can say is that the Catholic Church has said there are no plans for an Ordinariate in Southern Africa, so there's little chance that it will ever need to review Fr Smuts's qualifications. Has he had three years of seminary training?

A Master of Divinity program, required for ordination as an Episcopal priest in the US, consists of 60-63 units of work in the basic subject areas of theological education. (Naturally, this would follow a four-year bachelor's program at an accredited college or university.) Semester-long courses are 3 units each. Full-time study at most residential seminaries represents a load of 12 units (four courses) per semester. How has Fr Smuts's priestly formation corresponded with that requirement?

I have some concern -- which Archbishop Daniel apparently shares -- that people ordained as "priests" in some parts of the TAC may feel entitled to call themselves "priests", when people elsewhere in the world may be assuming their qualifications are more than what they actually are. Since people anywhere in the world want to see a consistent product when they see a Catholic priest, it's clear that the Catholic Church is entitled to review carefully the qualificaitons of any priest from an Anglican denomination who wants to go into an Ordinariate (notwithstanding Bishop Gill's objections). Following review, the US Ordinariate has certainly ordained Episcopal priests who've had the priestly formation outlined here, as well as TAC/ACA priests with the equivalent.

Fr Smuts will almost certainly never have to face such a review, although from his public remarks, his bishop doesn't seem at all certain that his priests would pass it. It seems to me that Fr Smuts needs to face this truth-in-labeling issue when he identifies himself as a "TAC priest". There are times, frankly, when reading his blog I've questioned whether his frequent use of the chi-rho sign to identify himself is a case of taking the Lord's name in vain.

Bishop Gill's Motives Are Difficult To Fathom

After all, since he knows the Catholic Church has no plans for an Ordinariate in South Africa, he's never been under the direct threat that his US colleagues have seen, with parishes (and much of a diocese) leaving the denomination. All he has to do is sit tight, and nothing's going to change within his see.

Yet in November 2011, Gill spoke to a world conference of Anglican continuers in Brockton, MA. Clearly Ordinariates were on his mind.

The Rt. Rev. Michael Gill, Bishop of Pretoria and Southern Africa, told his listeners that trouble makers who come in to destabilize parishes, those who proselytize from other churches, and the Pope's offer of Anglicanorum Coetibus were little more than "cunning plans" that "never won a single soul for the Lord Jesus Christ nor did it add one soul to the Kingdom of God."

The bishop shredded the Pope's offer saying, "We are all aware of the furor it has created in Anglican circles and of the people who have been polarized by the various, and usually naïve interpretations given to the document. The blogs have been the most hysterical and creative by far, with some fascinating views on the future liturgies that will be used and just who the Ordinaries will be."

Gill said the offer was little more than an attempt by Rome for Anglican Christians to "swap allegiance" and join the Roman Catholic Church - to "convert" as individuals or groups and become Roman Catholics.

"That the arrangement is entirely on Rome's terms should have hardly been a surprise to anyone who has read any Church History."

The only thing we seem to be missing here is Jesuits plotting behind curtains! But as I said yesterday, I simply can't understand why he's so exercised that things would be "entirely on Rome's terms". That was the whole point of the Portsmouth Letter, which he signed after all, and notwithstanding any blue-sky estimate by John Hepworth of 500,000 in the TAC, he must surely have recognized that even half a million wouldn't be an inducement to the Pope, much less 5,000. The Pope has the Orthodox in his sights, then the Lutherans. Somehow I've got to wonder if Gill is way above his paygrade here, and that even has me wondering about his mental balance.

But let's go farther into Gill's motives (though as someone remarked about someone else in a different context, "Who would want to?"). From the same Brockton meeting:

Gill said he had a face to face meeting around Anglicanorum Coetibus with Roman Catholic Archbishop George Daniel who is in charge of Anglican/Roman Catholic dialogue in Southern Africa. Gill was told that not only would there be no Ordinariate in Southern Africa, but that the conversion to Roman Catholicism required, would in many cases, go back "as far as Baptism" depending on the original church background of the convert.

"This was fizzed over by the blogging community. Archbishop Daniel (a former Anglican) is a highly sophisticated man, someone I have known and respected for more than 20 years, and he was as gentle as possible in breaking the news that we (all the Continuing Anglicans in Southern Africa) were an immature lot, and a long way away from the levels of theological education expected for acceptance as Roman clergy.

His real objection -- though again, it's theoretical, since there's no Ordinariate planned for South Africa -- is that some priests aren't going to make the grade. Perhaps by extension too, nobody's going to be grandfathered in as a bishop. And I don't know why he should be disturbed that care would be taken with conversions: Catholics in the US who want to become Episcopalians or any other Anglican flavor still have to take the Anglican confirmation class and be "received" by an Anglican bishop. Why would he expect Catholics to be less punctilious with Anglicans?

Considering the style of baptism that may possibly have occurred in rural parts of Africa, if it wasn't done with the correct elements or in the name of the Trinity, it might indeed need to be redone. For heaven's sake, this is the 21st century, and people who grew up in Scientology or as Unitarians or whatever else in the US are baptized as adults into Christian denominations every week with no qualms at all. For that matter, a very snooty Los Angeles Episcopal parish put an ad in the paper saying they'd baptize all comers at the Easter Vigil "no questions asked" -- would a Catholic bishop be correct in accepting even that baptism? Where is Gill's problem here?

He doesn't even have a dog in this fight. No South African Ordinariate means he doesn't need to bother his head aobut this stuff. He remains a bishop, his priests stay priests, his parishioners stay baptized no matter what. So why is he going to Massachusetts -- to buck up his fellow TAC bishops, Strawn and Marsh, who do have a dog in this fight? In that case, he's simply stirring up trouble. He may well have felt insulted on behalf of his colleague Strawn in particular, whose formation at an unaccredited seminary would certainly disqualify him for the Catholic priesthood.

It may well be, too, that he's simply bristling at the implied comparison between the Catholic Church and the TAC -- as we've been seeing here, the TAC is tiny, its priests and bishops are almost always marginal and sometimes just disreputable, and the prognosis for its continued survival is not good. It's a bad sign that he seems to be so lacking in humility or simply realism that he should become so defensive and upset about the situation. On the other hand, he's not unique within the TAC.