As we noted , the St John Fisher community website was all about Fr Sly. Whether that was a cause or a symptom of the group's failure to grow, it was inevitable that it would not survive his departure. I would imagine that there are at least another dozen US-Canadian groups that will fold when their pastor dies or retires, usually because they have not grown beyond an elderly remnant of his former ACCC/ACA parishioners. Succession planning is also difficult even for larger, more viable groups. Unlike the UK Ordinariate, the US-Canadian Ordinariate has drawn almost no one directly from mainstream Anglicanism. Surely the supply of candidates from the "continuing" alphabet soup is drying up, and as for celibate seminarians, good luck. Even the large and successful Texas former and current Pastoral Provision congregations have not produced candidates for ordination in their several decades of existence, perhaps because there was no celibate parish priest to model that vocation in a positive way. An organisation made up entirely of retreads faces fundamental difficulties.This brings up a bigger question that I'm only starting to get my head around. The basic assumption behind the 1993 meeting between Pope-Steenson and Cardinal Ratzinger was that as many as 250,000 US Episcopalians (25% of the denomination) were prepared to leave in a bunch and go over to a special dispensation to be set up by Rome. The reasons for their disaffection were essentially the same as the reasons behind the St Louis Affirmation of 1977, which led to the "continuing Anglican" movement. However, the one diligent study of Episcopal disaffection, Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand, draws one big conclusion: the actual numbers have never matched the wildly exaggerated projections, and TEC never notices the departures. In this sense, the US-Canadian Ordinariate has simply repeated the pattern of the 1970s and 80s.
There's another pattern that's been creeping into my thinking: Jeffrey Steenson simply isn't the first renegade Episcopal bishop: that honor, as far as I can see, belongs to James A. Pike. Other Episcopal bishops have certainly been controversial and even in some cases subject to trial or discipline, including John Spong, Charles Bennison, and Eugene Robinson. But none of those specifically abrogated their vows, and as far as I'm aware, all retired still able to exercise priestly functions. Pike resigned as bishop and was subsequently de facto deposed by his successor; in his subsequent public career, Pike advocated against Christian doctrines.
Steenson, as far as I can see, is closer to Pike than any other Episcopal bishop, at least in the specifics of his career. Although he and Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori were careful to ease him out with a minimum of public disturbance (unlike that with Pike), Steenson resigned as bishop and left the denomination, presumably no longer able to exercise priestly functions within it, however politely this may have been finessed. I've commented before on the tone of self-absorption that can be seen in his resignation letter. (In fact, revisiting that post, I'm struck by the similarity between Steenson's remark, "An effective leader cannot be so conflicted about the guiding principles of the Church he serves" and Pike's statement at the time of his 1965 resignation that he "cannot be twins".)
Neither "continuing Anglicanism" nor the example of James Pike strikes me as a recipe for success. What's beginning to bother me about the whole idea of Ordinariates (something Steenson was involved with proposing from the start) is simply the presence of conflicting jurisdictions. The Anglican Use Pastoral Provision involved a sympathetic diocesan applying consistent policies across a diocese. The Ordinariates involve designating clergy with radically different backgrounds (as well as mostly being married) from diocesan priests, under different expectations, in a situation that can potentially be exploited, with ambitious self-promoters able to play the diocesans off against the Ordinary and vice versa.
Like my anonymous visitor, I'm less and less comfortable with what I'm seeing.
