Who Is Jeffrey Steenson? -- I

As a newcomer to the dissident-Anglican movement in 2011, I certainly didn't see Jeffrey Steenson as a leader. Most attention was focused on David Moyer, whose quarrels with The Episcopal Church were much more visible, and in fact whose connection with the upcoming US Ordinariate was also plainer: John Hepworth had made him bishop for the TAC Patrimony of the Primate, the vehicle by which TAC parishes would go in. The TAC, via the Portsmouth Letter, was seen as the prime mover behind Anglicanorum coetibus, and the handicappers were putting both Hepworth and Moyer in major positions once national ordinariates were erected. The handicappers, of course, were influential bloggers at The Anglo-Catholic and elsewhere, and events proved them wrong in nearly every prediction.

When it became known in late 2011 that Steenson would become US Ordinary, it struck me as nothing I hadn't seen in the corporate world: a colorless unknown rises to the top, to the surprise of just about everyone except those in the loop. Steenson, who had been Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande, resigned that position in 2007 and was received into the Catholic Church the same year. Married, he was ordained an Anglican Use priest in 2009 and took up a position teaching in a Catholic seminary in Houston. Other than regular appearances at Anglican Use conferences, he maintained a very low profile, with most discussion in the blogosphere, insofar as it took place, centering on whether he'd betrayed Episcopalians in one or another way by becoming Catholic.

It wasn't until I learned of the 1993 approach by Steenson and his bishop, Clarence Pope, to Cardinal Ratzinger requesting a path to corporate union with the Catholic Church, that the reasons for Steenson's selection began to fall into place. Following the 1993 meeting, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith returned to Bishop Pope with a set of questions, to which Pope responded in 1994 with a detailed proposal that clearly formed the eventual basis for Anglicanorum coetibus: there would be ordinariates, similar to those for the military, on a national basis. Anglican Use style parishes with specifically Anglican liturgy would exist under the ordinariates. Married Anglican priests in these parishes would have dispensations from the normal requirement of celibacy. Parishioners would be catechized and received in a manner parallel to RCIA. It's worth pointing out that the TAC's 2007 Portsmouth Letter simply requested communion with the Catholic Church under whatever terms the Vatican chose to grant. The terms the Vatican granted were, with only a few differences, the terms of Pope's 1994 proposal, which we must assume was drafted in large part by Steenson.

In other words, I figured when Steenson was designated US Ordinary that he'd had some sort of inside track. I didn't realize that not only did he have the inside track, but he'd designed the whole race course! The 1994 proposal specified that, oh by the way, whoever was eventually designated US Ordinary would need to have been an Episcopal bishop. At the time, this probably meant Clarence Pope. However, Pope was diagnosed with cancer soon afterward, while the CDF fell into a decade-long silence over the proposal, which would not be revived until Ratzinger became Pontiff. At that point, the only credible candidate for US Ordinary, if the requirement remained that he be an Episcopal bishop, was Steenson himself -- Clarence Pope was still alive, but in very poor health (he passed away in 2012).