What's Up Now With Our Lady Of The Atonement?

When I decided to stop regular posts on this blog back in 2021, I reserved the right to post now and then as new developments come up, and I've belatedly become aware of new problems at the Our Lady of the Atonement Ordinariate parish in San Antonio, TX. Let's recall that this parish, under the then-leadership of Fr Christopher Phillips, was both the showplace for the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision and then, briefly, its successor, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, which contained parishes and groups that worshipped using the Divine Worship liturgy, a Catholic missal that blends elements of the Anglican and Catholic liturgical traditions.

However, Fr Phillips backed Our Lady of the Atonement out of the Ordinariate-in-formation in 2012. What's known of these events is covered in this post here from 2019. The parish remained one of a tiny number of remaining Anglican Use-Pastoral Provision parishes until 2017, when faced with disciplinary action by the Archbishop of San Antonio, Fr Phillips elected to take the parish into the Ordinariate after all. Nevertheless, discipline eventually caught up with Fr Phillips when Bp Lopes of the Ordinariate restricted his priestly faculties in 2019 and banned him from the parish property. This appears to have been connected with a series of unpublished abuse allegations against Deacon James Orr, who had effectively run the parish's Atonement Academy, that Fr Phillips appeared to have covered up.

The passage of time, a different bishop, and a new pastor don't seem to have helped heal the parish at all. And typical of the Atonement saga all along, very little has been released. In January, Bp Lopes sent a letter to the parish discussing the health problems of its pastor, Fr Mark Lewis, and announcing that in March, Fr Lewis would begin a sabbatical (i.e., a leave of absence), during which he would "relocate to another region" and take early retirement as Atonement's pastor.

However, Bp Lopes indicated that he is in discussions with the bishop of the region to which Fr Lewis will relocate on senior priestly opportunities there which, however, do not require meetings. This appears to be a reference to the stresses Fr Lewis underwent at Our Lady of the Atonement. Bp Lopes appointed one of the associates currently at the parish as its administrator until he names a pastor in July -- and beyond that, as usual, we know very little, except that in the wording of Bp Lopes's letter, he and Fr Lewis had been discussing the possibility of the move "for some time".

In what must be a related move, on May 31:

The Atonement Catholic Academy has announced it will permanently close at the end of the school year, citing declining enrollment and rising educational costs as the primary reasons.

"Throughout the years, the Academy has been substantially subsidized by the generosity of the parish. Despite the support of our parish, the financial situation of the school has not improved and is not viable. The outsized amount of the necessary subsidy has negatively impacted the resources of the parish to a level that is no longer sustainable. Despite the efforts of the devoted faculty, staff, and school families who have supported the Academy throughout the years, maintaining the Academy, a tuition-based enterprise, is not possible," the school said in a statement.

. . . However, the facility won’t be empty for long as Valor Education, a tuition-free charter school offering K-12 instruction, will take over the space.

Typical of the parish's saga from the start, little concrete is disclosed here. A visitor provides some context:

Each week the Sunday bulletin of OLA posts the previous week’s collection and the weekly amount required by the budget.  For the last several months that I have been monitoring it there  has usually been about a 40% shortfall, although there were occasional “special gifts” which wiped out the weekly difference.  But obviously this was not sustainable.  Fr Kramer was appointed to the parish with some title like “Financial Oversight Officer” a few months ago;  Fr Lewis then took early retirement as Pastor (he is 65) and Fr Kramer became the PA.  A former seminarian has been serving as PV since his ordination to the priesthood last year.  

The weekly collection is around $25,000, which is comparable to what Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston [the Ordinariate's cathedral and largest parish] receives on a typical Sunday, so the problem appears to be management/expenses, not giving.  You reported on the parish’s attempt several years ago to raise $4 million towards the debt it had incurred for an expansion of the school building which in fact was never carried out.  

The post from 2019 that I linked above covers the school's difficulties as of then. Fr Phillips had started a very ambitious expansiom of the school that incurred heavy debt, but apparently due to continuing financial difficultes was never completed, and much of the school building remained empty while debt payments continued. At the same time, enrollment peaked around 2015, so the expansion was less and less justifiable.

This also leaves aside continuing internal problems at the school that don't appear to have been resolved following the death of Deacon Orr just before the Archdiocese of San Antonio announced that he had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct in 2019. It appears that even beyond the published allegations, taken below from bishopaccountability.org,

Accused in 1992 or 1993, prior to ordination as a deacon, of molesting a boy in a neighborhood pool. Orr was a volunteer at Our Lady of the Atonement at the time. The parish pastor admitted in 2016 to having received the allegation in the early 1990s, and decided at the time that it was not credible. He did not inform the archbishop. Accused in 2007 of attempting to sexually abuse a boy in about 1995. Allegations in 12/15 that Orr sexually abused two boys in the 1990s.

there is a grest deal else that hasn't been published. There is a reddit thread of former Atonement students and teachers recovering from their experiences at the school.

As you’re aware, Orr died in Jan 2019, days to weeks before the credible accusations of sexual abuse against him were published. At that time I was teaching the entire high school, including the senior class of 2019, who had been the last to have Orr as a geography teacher in their 8th grade year. The students in that class told me that he had “accidentally” showed them p*rn during class while attempting to teach them about Ancient Greece, googling “naked Greek men” on the projector in an alleged attempt to show them classical statuary. None of this was ever reported, of course. It’s also the only story I remember of theirs, but the impression I got was “why would we report this to anybody? And to whom? This is just how he was.” They knew, as everyone, that Orr was Fr. Phillips’ favorite.

Anyway, knowing that their experience with Orr was a cause of pain and confusion to my senior students, I went to Fr. Lewis’s office and asked him to come listen to them and say something - anything . . . . He agreed, and showed up one day. He asked zero questions and said nothing of substance, basically: “We honor people until proven guilty, and we don’t have any proof against Dcn. Orr.” (As you recall, these students themselves had had collective, credible, adverse experiences with Orr.) Then Fr. Lewis said, “If you have any further questions on the matter, you can ask Ms….Ms….[gesturing at me]…your teacher.”

I had been at the school a few months longer than Fr. Lewis (less than two years), had never met Orr, and had been working 70-80 hour weeks for those nearly two years (wish I were exaggerating). The combined fact that in that moment I realized that Fr. Lewis, my boss, 1) was also a company man more concerned with covering credibly accused clergy’s asses than with even listening to the experiences of the students of the school for a second, and 2) did not know my name after I had bled, sweat, and cried for the kids at this school on a daily basis was the turning point for me. That’s when I knew I had to leave.

I have the imnpression that Valor Education, which operates several charter schools in Texas, gets its money from public funds and would be in a position to pay rent for the space. This would solve several problems, ending the school's drain on the parish resources, helping to retire the debt, and finally closing the door on the school's unfortunate history.

But this doesn't solve the bigger conundrum that the Ordinariate poses: In recent years, Christianity overall, including Catholicsm, has ended its long declinie in the US, and membership has stabilized.

In fact, part of this stabilization has involved both younger Catholic laity and clergy who've become more conservative, even in mainstream novus ordo parishes. But the Ordinariate, which might have originally been thought to appeal to just that market with archaic-sounding liturgy, doesn't seem to have benefitted from this trend. The Atonement parish was -- at least maybe 35 years ago -- thought to be a bright spot in the conservative movement, but the results in subsequent years have been anything but bright.

When this blog was active, I covered many instances of scandal or implosion, especially resulting from inadequate vetting of candidates for the clergy, and early clergy burnout. This trend appears to be continuing, with seminarians originally under Ordnariate sponsorship electing to stay with their local dioceses for ordination, suggesting that the more conservative younger priests are finding novus ordo a more attractive and stable environment.

Somehow the Church has moved on; novus ordo priests are wearing cassocks, there are now other and better solutions to "beige Catholicism". The temporary apprarent success of the Our Lady of the Atonement model hasn't been replicated in the Ordinariate.

Another Squabble On The Catholic Far Right; Vaughn Treco Resurfaces Yet Again

Just days after the Church Militant board was forced to demand Michael Voris's resignation, the news broke that another organizationon on the Catholic fringe had fired its founder:

All, it with a heavy heart that I share this press release. Thank you, for my brother priests for their support. For now, please discontinue your support of the Coalition until the current board resigns. This is a Hostile take over by the board for their own secular purposes. pic.twitter.com/fLEoIVHhqp

— Fr. John Lovell (@Fr_Lovell) December 2, 2023

According to this post from 2022,

Fr. John Lovell is known as a “Canceled Priest.” Sadly, he is not alone. Fr. Lovell, who co-founded the Coalition for Canceled Priests in 2021, first ran into problems with his own bishop, the late Thomas Doran, in 2009 after reporting allegations of sexual misconduct by a teacher in the diocese. Fr. Lovell was immediately reassigned from his parish and sent for a psychological evaluation. Later, he was told to enroll at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. And in 2012, he was removed/canceled by the new bishop of Rockford, David J. Malloy. Ever since, Fr. Lovell has fought for his good name and helps other priests in the same or similar situations.

I simply can't comment on the circumstances of Lovell's removal, except to note that in 2009, only two years after his ordination in 2007, he'd gotten crosswise with one bishop, and by 2012, following apparent attempts to get him back with the program, he was "removed/canceled" by another. Whether this was a legitimate case of Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, we'll likely never know, except that now, Lovell has been removed/canceled by the board of the organization he founded. All we know is that the board is saying nothing, and this isn't unusual in many cases of termination, as organizations want to avoid being sued for defamation, while the legal issue is often that employees can be fired for any reason anyhow.

Four "canceled priests" have signed the appeal on Lovell's behalf. They all style themselves "Fr", although I don't know how many have been laicized -- I do know that one of the signatories, Vaughn Treco, was undergoing laicization when I covered his situation here in 2019-20, so if this has been concluded, he isn't entitled to call himself "Fr". I'll get to Treco in more detail farther down, but let's look briefly at the other three signatories.

• Henry Clay Hunt III was removed from his parish, St. Joseph in Del Rio, TX, by Abp Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio in 2018 and made the chaplain for the criminal justice ministry. This followed a meeting at the Del Rio city hall in which Hunt objected to the election of the openly gay mayor, Bruno "Ralphy" Lozano, from which Lozano had Hunt forcibly ejected. Two years later, in 2020, the archbishop removed Hunt's faculties to celebrate mass in public and began the process of laicization. As is normal in such cases, the archdiocese did not provide other details.
• Joseph Nicolisi had his ministry restricted by the Diocese of Rockford, IL, in 2011 for the delict of living in concubinage with an adult woman. He appealed the penalty to the Roman rota, where it was upheld. According to the link, Fr Nicolisi continues to be forbidden from exercising the power of orders except for celebrating mass without anyone else present.
• Michael Suhy was removed from his parish in Plymouth, MI by Archbishop of Detroit Allen Vigneron following multiple meetings "in the hopes of assisting him to become better equipped to handle such a large parish with a school". He was removed, according to the archdiocese, because "Ultimately and unfortunately, his intransigence triggered a canonical process for his removal." Suhy claims that instead, the reason for his removal was his repeated attempts to report an archdiocesan employee for sexually harassing a man. Although Suhy was removed as pastor, his clerical functions were not restricted.

These are three widely diverse cases, and in at least one of them, there was a clear violation of canon law leading to the priest's restriction. The cases are so diverse that it's misleading to characterize them under an umbrella of "removed/canceled". In the case of Suhy, I think it's reasonable to trust the judgment of the archdiocese that the man was overwhelmed by the job of running a large parish. This can happen. I suspect as well that if that large parish had been up to date with the Bishop's Appeal, the pastor would have had wider latitude over any private cantankerousness about gays.

But this brings us to the case of Vaughn Treco, with which I'm much more familiar, since I covered it here. Vaughn Treco was removed as administrator of a tiny ordinariate group in Minnesota in late January 2019 due to the contents of a sermon he delivered the prior November, which in the view of Bp Steven Lopes of the North American ordinariate were heretical. Treco was offered the opportunity to recant his position and submit to further education, but he refused.

This had nothing to do, at least directly, with any views Treco might have held on same-sex attraction, but it was due to Treco's expressed view that Vatican II was illegitimate. We may argue about this in general terms, but to a Catholic priest, Vatican II is authoritative, and if a priest says it isn't, the bishop is fully within his rights to remove him. Case closed.

Treco was ordained a priest in the ordinariate in 2014, and I was expressing full-fledged reservations about him here as early as August 2015. He had been angling for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest for over a decade before that, despite the fact that he was married. On the establishment of the US ordinariate in 2012, which provided for the ordination of married former Anglican priests, this was a new potential route for him, but another difficulty was that he was a citizen of the Bahamas, and he'd been ordained there in a fringe Anglican denomination, when the ordinariate was intended for former US and Canadian Anglicans.

The best I could conclude as of the 2015 post, based on input from knowledgeable parties, was that there was some back-channel deal between the Archdiocese of Nassau in the Bahamas and the Archdiocese of St Paul-Minneapolis to ordain Treco via the ordinariate, when every indication was that Treco was never a serious candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood, in particular because he was married. However this was arranged, it wasn't a problem for the Archdiocese of St Paul-Minneapolis, because Treco would be under the ordinariate.

In addition to his minimal duties with the tiny Minnesota ordinariate group, he was also a hospital chaplain in the archdiocese there, which is where his problems began -- apparently his preference for celebrating daily mass at the chapel ad orientem rubbed the hospital sisters the wrong way, and for all I know, he might have been preaching heresies in his homilies there as well. Eventually pressure appears to have built from the archdiocese -- which had facilitated Treco's ordination in the first place -- for Bp Lopes to remove him. I never thought Treco was ever anything but an utter misfit who never should remotely have been considered for the priesthood, and his career was brief as a result. As far as I'm aware, he was undergoing laicization as of the time of his removal.

That Treco should be a signatory in this latest fringe squabble and feel entitled to style himself "Fr" says a great deal about the Priests for the Coalition. These little tempests in teapots also say way too much about the current Catholic fringe.

Yet More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

There have been coninuing accounts on YouTube and elsewhere from former Church Militant employees, both those who had left before Micael Voris's forced resignation and others, like Christine Niles and David Gordon, who've left amid the recent controversy. Ms Niles's YouTube statement is here. As a quick recap, I've already linked to Christine Harrington's first YouTube here; she's put up a second one that includes an interview with another former employee, Kristine Christlieb, here This in turn links to Ms Christlieb's Substack account, The Entire Board Should Resign.

All of the versions above, however, have been remarkably coy about identifying the effective cause of Voris's departure, speaking in more general terms about the inability of Church Militant's board to control Voris, since the members all had conflicts of interest, especially those who were also Church Militant employees. Ms Harrington in fact deferred to another former employee, David Gordon, expecting him to provide the lurid details; his account has now been posted here. At 4:37, he says,

As you can imagine, it's that Michael Voris was living, up til, up to recently, I don't know if it's ceased yet, I don't know if his behaviors have ceased yet, but living a life that involved active homosexuality. . . . The board itself, when this came to light, were scrambling to do damage control, [were] floating lying to everybody, lying to donors, lying to people and saying you know, Michael Voris, he stepped down for health reasons.

Gordon claims that the board mentioned the morality clause in its statement due to his insistence that some mention of the issue be included. However, in searching for more background on l'affaire Voris, I dscovered a 2016 book by E Michael Jones, The Man Behind the Curtain: Michael Voris and the Homosexual Vortex, which puts the current crisis for Church Militant in the context of an ongoing series of barely averted disasters since the group's founding. The PDF is available at the link. David Gordon says he was concerned that the board would find a way to put Voris on some type of temporary leave that would allow him to return after a decent interval, and in light of Jones's book, this isn't far from what's happened at least twice in the past.

I would say that none of the former employees who've made various statements on Voris's departure is on any sort of media A-team, nor indeed on anything much more than junior varsity, and this applies to E Michael Jones's book as well. Nevertheless, it provides necessary additional information on the organization in light of two earlier crises:

On January 23, 2016, Michael Voris, the Internet TV personality who was the face of Church Militant TV, placed an emergency call to his spiritual advisor, who was in Mexico at the time, asking for prayers. A homosexual had gone on Facebook claiming that he knew the man who had given Michael Voris AIDS. He was now claiming that Michael Voris was “as gay as they come” and that he was going to reveal what he knew about Voris’s homosexual past. The announcement precipitated a crisis at the Church Militant studio in Ferndale, Michigan.

. . . The January 2016 posting on Facebook was not the first time that someone from the homosexual scene had come forward and accused Michael Voris of being gay. In each instance he denied the allegations.

. . . In spite of the denials emanating from Church Militant, the blogosphere kept insisting that Michael was gay. Before long the staff realized that “the clock was ticking.” This was not going to be another tempest in a teapot like the SSPX affair. By the time the new allegations began to arise during early 2016, Voris’s spiritual advisor had seen pictures of Michael in his gay lifestyle period. Now he was hearing from good priests who were telling him that Voris was harming the Church by accusing priests and bashing bishops.

Buit this waan't the first such crisis:

In February 2012, Voris’s spiritual director discovered that Voris had had a past that included sexual activity with both men and women and that he was HIV positive. The fact that Voris had been a homosexual and was now engaged in public denunciation of clergy and bishops for the very sins he himself had committed turned Real Catholic TV into a bombshell that could go off at any moment. Voris remained oblivious to the danger, saying in typically narcissistic fashion that God would never let this come about. He continued in the same vein by claiming that he, as the prodigal son, had a right to talk about sodomy. If anyone had that right, it was Voris. Pressure was building both inside and outside RCTV. By the end of 2012 Voris was in a precarious situation because a gay priest he had targeted was demanding financial statements.

. . . [Later that year,] Marc Brammer got a call from Mark DeYoung, a seminarian at Dunwoodie, the same seminary which Voris had attended for two years during the ’80s. The current crop of seminarians at Dunwoodie were avid Voris fans, but they were being told that Voris had been dismissed for good reason and didn’t know who to believe. DeYoung had told Brammer during one of his trips to New York that the seminary officials were willing to release Voris’s dossier to the public if Voris felt the rumors were false. Voris had always maintained that he had not been dismissed because of homosexual activity but because of his spiritual immaturity, failing to understand that spiritual immaturity had become a code word for homosexuality. Unaware of that point, Voris has made some effort to prove that he was not kicked out because of a gay lifestyle.

On April 10,. . . Brammer met with Voris’s spiritual director, who then told him what he knew about Voris’s homosexual past. At this point, “the dam broke.” Both men now felt that Church Militant TV could not go forward with Voris as its director, and the two decided to join with a number of stakeholders at CMTV and come up with a plan that would allow Voris to go quietly to avoid scandal.

In each of these previous crises, Voris was able to hang on, in 20l6 because he was able to convince his audience that this was all in the past, while in 2012 he appears to have been able to use the intricacies of Church Militant's legal position to avoid termination.

The bottom line here is that Church Militant and some of the key figures behind the scene have known about both Voris's history and his ongoing conduct throughout the life of the organization, and up to now, Voris had been able to remain in his position there, due in some measaure to nonfeasance by the board and knowledgeble backers. Let's hope that the current publicity can drive a final stake through the heart of his career.

More On Michael Voris And Church Militant

I ran into this intriguing video by someone named Christine Harrington, whom I hadn't previously encountered. She says she was briefly an employee of Churdh Militant, and it isn't hard to see that the experience left her disgruntled, but just comparing her account to my own experience in various workplaces, I'd have to say her version has the ring of truth. Some excerpts, at 4:05:

There wasn't much Catholic going on inside of Church Militant, other than the chapel. Now, there were a few people that were very courteous, very accommodating, very nice to work with, but for the most part, everyone was vying to be a little Michael and to eventually take Michael's place, so they all emulated Michael and Michael's behavior.

At 7:05

There are some things that I'm not going to be able to talk about, but I will talk about what Christine Niles put in her statement after Voris released his, and in that statement, she said that Voris often did not attend chapel. Now, I can substantiate that that is true. I can also substantiate that we were all required and mandated to attend chapel. But Voris wasn't the only one that wasn't attending chapel. There were managers and board members that didn't attend chapel as well. Now, I don't know why they were given a special privilege not to attend, because my understanding and what I was told was that everyone was mandatory to chapel.

But let me give you my story about chapel. So my first week there at Church Militant -- you know, chapel is from 8:00 AM until 8:45, we do the noon Angelus, and then 5:00 evening vespers until 5:30 or 5:45, it depends -- so, 8:00 rolls around, everybody, you know, shuffling in the chapel, and I'm new, so I sit in the back. And they let it go the first day, but then the second day, they told me I had to sit either up front or in the middle, and I'm thinking, "Well, why is that? Why do I have to do that?" I went ahead and sat up front, and then I was told the third day, when I went and sat in the back again, that I had to sit in the middle or up front.

And I said, "Why, what difference does it make?" and they said, "Because you're not on camera when you're sitting in the back." Oh -- so we're in chapel for the audience? We're in chapel to show that we're praying? I thought we were in chapel to show reverence for Jesus and to God and to increase our spiritual life, and to pray for the day that we may honor God in our work. . . . But no, I had to sit where I could be seen.

Confer Matthew 6:5:

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.

At 9:46:

On day one working there, I was told that I was not to speak to Michael; I was only to speak to Michael if Michael spoke to me; I was to not try to catch his eye; . . . I'm to be seen and not heard, and not to ask him any questions, because he was a very important man.

At 13:05:

Back to Christine Niles's statement about the chapel. Christine had different hours than everybody else in the studio. She usually came in about late morning or early afternoon. Sometimes she was there for the Angelus, sometimes she wasn't, but she was always in chapel for evening prayers.

. . . As far as working in the studio, there was constant crisis going on all the time, constant drama all the time, and since I was writing scripts for Evening News, during that five months, the set for Evening News changed five or six different times during that five month period I was there.

Her overall point is that the Church Militant morality clause is so vague and broad that there's no clear way to identify what Michael may have done to violate it and force his resignation. On the other hand, she points out the the Church Militant board is made up of Michael's friends, as well as Church Militant employees who had a vested interest in letting Michael do as he pleased, so whatever forced his resignation must have been such a major issue that the board had no choice but to force him out.

She notes that Church Militant has been in financial crisis at least since mid-2022, so what the future holds with or without Voris is uncertain. Ever since I'd learned of Church Militant, I've seen occasional accunts from disgruntled former employees who left in frustration or were fired, so this version from Ms Harrington is nothing new. The lesson to be taken here, I think, is that it never hurts to be skeptical of people who insist that the Roman Catholic Church has gotten things all wrong, and the true pathway to heaven lies with the likes of Michael Voris. This is and always has been a con.

I'm a little amused to see so many YouTube commentators so disillusioned at Voris's sudden downfall, but then they conclude it's somehow un-Catholic to criticize him too much, best just to pray for his healing and not ask too many other questions. It's true that focusing inordinate attention on Michael Voris's possible failings could be sinful curiosity or detraction, but learning his methods of deception can help us avoid being led into such errors as he led us into in the future. I made a similar point about Taylor Marshall back in 2019.

So far, it looks like there was quite a bit of deception behind Church Militant, and we shouldn't simply ignore what was done there.

Thoughts On Michael Voris

Over the past two days, the level of YouTube commentary from conservative Catholics on Michael Voris's resignation from Church Militant has far exceeded the commentary on either the recent Synod on Synodality or Bp Strickland's removal by Pope Francis. Based only on that, an observer from Mars might conclude that this was a much more significant event in the life of the Church than either of the others, which has me puzzled.

I started this blog in 2012 as I was in the process of converting to Catholicism, at that time trying to do it under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus, which didn't work out. After a year or so, my wife and I were able to come in via RCIA. At the time, influenced in part by the second sex abuse crisis in the US Church driven by the McCarrick-Wuerl scandal, I tended to follow more conservative influencers like Voris and Church Militant and Fr John Zuhlsdorf.

In part, I was also driven by the conservative orientation of the former Anglicans hoping to form Roman Catholic ordinariate parishes under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus. However, over the period of covering the formation and early administration of the US ordinariate, I became gradually disillusioned, in some measure due to the level of scandal associated with the former Anglican (and other Protestant) priests the ordinariate ordained. A remarkable number were laicized or otherwise removed from clerical roles during the ordinariate's first decade, which I covered here; others probably should have been but weren't.

What changed my viewpoint even more was finding a vibrant diocesan parish that exposed us to a fully functioning novus ordo model. Among other things, I saw actual committed diocesan priests regularly rotating through the parish as pastors and associates who formed a remarkable contrast to the caricature of the diocesan priesthood offered by people like Michael Voris and, maybe more importantly, the sometimes pretty sketchy examples in the ordinariate.

I occasionally posted about Michael Voris here. In this post from 2016, I generally referenced remarks he'd made at the time about his former days as an active same-sex-atrracted person, but I tended to agree with his position that Pope Benedict was overrated. As I recall his various quasi-confessions around that time, he said he made them because, in the light of his criticisms of the Church over the McCarrick-Wuerl scandals, sources close to the US bishops might leak his background to discredit his own accusations, so he felt the need to air the information first -- but this was all in the past.

Well, apparently not. I've been listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast -- I don't know what conservative inflencers think of it, but of course the John Paul II CCC is a thorough product of the Second Council -- but I note that CCC 1131 says the sacraments are efficacious. They aren't mere formalities. If you go to confession sincerely wanting not to do certain sins, you can make definite progress via God's grace. Somehow, this didn't happen with Michael Voris. People who've known him say he went to the gym a lot, which seems to be reflected in the photo above.

Not always, of course, but the gym to some people can be a near occasion of sin. Maybe he needed to stay out of the gym and work out at home, just for starters. And if he was going to the gym all this time, I quetion whether he'd ever actually left his prior life behind. But for whatever reason, I gradually stopped following Michael Voris and Fr Zuhlsdorf, but I kept going to mass and confession. I've probably grown as a Catholic as a result.

These days I follow Bp Barron and Fr Mike Schmitz. I find Michael Voris less of a disappointment than maybe an indication for me of how I've moved forward as a Catholic. I'm really sorry for people who depended on him. On the other hand, I'm wondering if the Church is moving toward a crisis bigger than the first two sex-abuse crises of the past decades, and we're going to need characters much more solid than Michael Voris or Fr Zuhlsdorf to bring us through it. In the meantime, the sacraments continue to be efficacious.

Letter From India To The Traditional Anglican Church Leadership

Following my post here on the history and questionable status of the TAC-affiliated Anglican Church in India, the visitor sent this letter via e-mail to the leadership of the TAC.

Dear Sir,

This is to bring to your attention that some people using the name of TAC and Church of England are involved in fraudulent activities in India. They are trying to sell off Church properties across India under false authority. These people claim themselves to be Secretary of the Church (Madhulika Joyce) Gurlal Singh Sahi, Hendrik James and others. Most of these people are non-christians and the Christian members which are shown by them are mere dummies.

They have already made a deal of a property belonging to the Church in Azadpur Fruit Market, New Delhi (This is the burial ground of the British Commandant - Sir Gordon Highlander) . Now they are trying to sell off properties in various districts like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh. There is already a complaint registered against them in a police station in New Delhi for taking money for a piece of land but not delivering it to the buyer. The said matter is of the year 2010. This is only one part of their shoddy activities. Their website which claims for conducting so many christian activities in India is actually a scam since these pics are of actually from their school which they are running in Vikas Nagar Dehradun.

The main participants of the scam are Samuel Peter Prakash (Metropolitan), his Son John Ashish Prakash (Next projected Metropolitan) Daughter Madhulika Joyce Khanna (She has been married to a punjabi Hindu family and hence should not be a part of any Christian activity let alone heading the Church as Secretary). Sir, as far as I know there is no such post of Secretary in Anglican Church of India.

Sir, on their website they have shown John Ashish Prakash as the Bishop of Nagpur Diocese. The real fact is that they have no missionary work in that area. Not a single Church is being run by them. All claims are false and bogus.

Sir I am writing to all of you so that you may kindly remove them from your list of affiliated Churches since they are also tarnishing your name by showing them as being associated with you and people in India are being duped because of this affiliation.

Sir, with most respect I beg to say that if your organization is not taking any action upon these people we would be left with no other choice but to take the matter to the legal authorities and your connections to them will also be questioned.

Your Brother in Christ
An Anglican

I think the basic issue is that the TAC has been a futile effort from the start, with leadership tainted by scandal and its most visible project, the effort to enter the Roman Catholic Church via Anglicanorum coetibus, collapsed in bad faith and years of litigation. The situation in India has been little other than a confirmation that you don't get figs from thistles or grapes from thornbushes -- and unfortunately, this applies as well to the current generation of TAC leadership.

These men are false prophets, no better than their colleagues in India, and it's unrealistic to expect them to change. The most anyone can do is convince their followers, especially anyone who thinks remonstrance will have any effect with these men, to put their faith elsewhere.

"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.