Parish Annual Meeting February 7, 2016

With the improving legal environment, the parish held its first annual meeting as mandated in its bylaws since February 5, 2012. This was a remarkable event. My wife and I attended as invited guests and friends of the parish, but one of the remarkable features of the event was the number of other guests from the Hollywood-Los Feliz community who also attended, clearly supporting the parish and eager for it to return. Because the sheriff has not yet evicted the squatter group, the meeting was held at the Our Mother of Good Counsel Catholic parish nearby.

Another remarkable feature was the news that retired TAC Archbishop John Hepworth is actively supervising the parish. Its renewed or continued membership in the Patrimony of the Primate is active and not simply a legal formality. Abp Hepworth underwent a serious health crisis at the time of his "expulsion" from the TAC and the ACA's seizure of the St Mary's property in 2012. It appears that he has recovered and is beginning to resume an episcopal role.

For several years, the parish had been canonically isolated, with the US-Canadian Ordinariate denying any connection and the ACA impersonating a parish through a bizarre and disreputable group of phony priests and unbalanced dissidents. The renewal of the Patrimony is a very important event, visually as much as canonically.

It seems to me that it represents a restart of the Anglicanorum coetibus process. As Fr Kelley pointed out in yesterday's meeting, the original intent was for Steenson to receive the parish in January 2012 as the first to join the US-Canadian Ordinariate, since the first meeting that led to the establishment of Pope St John Paul II's Pastoral Provision was held at St Mary's in 1978. Forces both inside and outside the Ordinariate managed to derail that process in 2012.

My own view, not reflecting Fr Kelley's opinion but not necessarily inconsistent with it, is that up at least to Jeffrey Steenson's retirement, the process of growing the Ordinariate has been in the charge of people who seem to wither everything they touch. Indeed, the reconstituted "Anglicanorum Coetibus Society" has not borne fruit consistent with even its lukewarm introductory fanfare; its new members should, in my view, look toward using the upcoming Lenten season to reconsider their roles.

The disappearance of the once-enthusiastic Anglo-Catholic blogosphere also reflects the so-far disappointing outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus. The St Mary's parish has always been an important part of this process. The bungling that has so far characterized the startup of the US-Canadian Ordinariate isn't going unnoticed.

The parish wants to restore itself. The community wants it back. The Anglicanorum coetibus process needs it. Please continue to pray for the parish, its vestry, Fr Kelley, Abp Hepworth, and Bp Lopes.