I said yesterday that this case is full of hidden agendas. Chatting with my wife last night, I revised this interpretation: these agendas are what I might call "group hidden agendas", which for the time being do not rise to the level of criminal conspiracies, and may never do so, although on the other hand, they might. It's plain that there are still many facts we don't have, which we may never get, or may not get for years. But I'm still looking, and so, it would seem, is the Armchair Detective.
As a shorthand for "group hidden agenda so far falling short of criminal conspiracy", I'm going to bring back the term "frammis" that I used in an earlier post on my theory of the case. This term was used by the US noir crime novelist Jim Thompson to mean an elaborate scheme of deception, or con, perpetrated by two or more people. That's the sense in which I use it here.
The extra information I've gained from the Bush vestry v Church Mutual Insurance lawsuit is that the et als among the parishioner plaintiffs, Patrick Omeirs, Langley Brandt, and Marilyn Bush, are the in-group, simply because they appear to have pledged personal assets toward the legal expenses involved in the April-May 2012 seizure of the parish. This, however, leads to a puzzling question: why is Mrs Bush in this group? Omeirs and Brandt are long-term parishioners, among the angriest of the angry "continuers". But Mrs Bush joined the parish only in early 2011 after, by her account, 40 years of not going to church. In other words, she would be something of an Anglican Rip Van Winkle, waking up to find she'd missed the controversies over prayer books, women's ordination, lady bishops, John Spong, Gene Robinson, Anglicanorum coetibus, the whole history. What would bring her to St Mary of the Angels, and why would she care? And why would she suddenly care enough to pledge money to lawyers over this stuff? Interesting question.
The knowledge of who the in-group is, though, clarifies some of the political dynamics in the parish from 2011-2012. I think I can now say there were three broad factions in the parish during that period. The largest, a majority (though probably not enough to constitute the supermajorities that did variously vote to join the Ordinariate and leave the ACA) simply thought Anglicanorum coetibus was a good deal and sincerely wanted to become a Catholic parish. This group, on balance, admired Fr Kelley's strength of character and erudition and saw no reason to replace him. A second group was basically a clique of younger parishioners surrounding Andrew Bartus, who had only graduated from Nashotah House in 2010 and had back channel connections with the group of former Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clergy that had the inside track in the US Ordinariate. That clique supported his ambitions. The third group was the long-term angries led by Brandt and Omeirs, which Bush joined, unknown to the parish at large.
The two smaller factions had in part competing agendas. The long-term angries did not want to go into the Ordinariate, for whatever reason. Only Omeirs among this group had a divorce and remarriage that might have been an obstacle to becoming Catholic; the others in this group may simply have been anti-Catholic but sorta-kinda Anglo-Catholic; it's still hard to fathom their full motivation. The clique around Bartus wanted to become Catholic, and some did separately become Catholic with Bartus after he left the parish. However, Bartus's agenda was to bypass Fr Kelley, using his Diocese of Fort Worth connections in the US Ordinariate, knock Fr Kelley out of the running for Rector, and place himself in that position once the parish went into the Ordinariate. The Bartus clique and the long-term angries, though together never a parish majority, shared one short-term goal: get rid of Fr Kelley.
What of the odd man out among the et al group, non-parishioner but diocesan official Anthony Morello? I think Morello was the link to Stephen Strawn and the other ACA bishops. This in turn brings us to the question of how the frammis got its start. We know that a major subtask of the frammis was to create the impression of financial misconduct on Fr Kelley's part, in the beginning by stopping quarterly payments to the IRS for salary withholding from parish employees beginning with the January 2011 payment, although the money was in the bank to do this (this could, of course, rise to the level of criminal conduct if all the facts led in this direction once they came to light). I think it's important that the IRS payments stopped beginning with the payment for the final quarter of 2010, soon after the parish entered the Patrimony of the Primate.
The parish treasurer who apparently facilitated this subtask by not writing checks to the IRS was a member of the Bartus clique, but she was clearly furthering the ends both of Bartus and the hard-core angries. (She left the parish in the summer of 2011, separately became Catholic herself, and has since become an active, sincere, and devout member of a local parish. We will never know what she may have said to her confessor.)
Fr Kelley and the vestry briefly made me interim treasurer of the parish following her departure. It was plain that, by early summer 2011, almost no bills had been paid, and the parish van was close to being repossessed. It's difficult to know if the previous treasurer was facilitating a plan to create an impression of financial misconduct, or if struggles with her conscience had left her unable to function in that position. All I can say is that by September 2011, many bills were long overdue, while ample funds were available to cover them.
How much did Anthony Morello know about any of this? But that's a different way of asking how much Stephen Strawn knew, and when he knew it. "Before you do anything like this, you have to plan it," says my wife. We know that the ACA bishops were deeply concerned about Hepworth's formation of the Patrimony of the Primate at the end of 2010. This led to the ACA Chancellors' letter of February 5, 2011. While we know for certain that Stephen Strawn attempted a formal meeting with the core group of angries in January 2012, a discussion I had with Patrick Omeirs in December 2011 indicates that there had been informal contacts between that group and Strawn prior to that date. A key question would be how far back those contacts extended, and whether Strawn was in any way aware of plans to create the impression of financial irregularity by ceasing payment of IRS and other obligations beginning in early 2011.
