St Mary Of The Angels And The Anglo-Catholic Project

I had several e-mails over the weekend that were food for thought. In one, a gentleman who is a member of an Ordinariate group in Canada said he'd found himself in Los Angeles on a recent weekend and, given recommendations he'd heard, went to mass at St Mary of the Angels. He was sorry that this was the Sunday before the squatter group was evicted. (A knowledgeable party told me that, among other things, Williams the phony bishop never genuflected at the altar, so the visitor missed that and probably a great deal else.) But that's an indicator of where St Mary of the Angels stands even now in Anglo-Catholic estimation, and occupied by squatters.

Another e-mail reiterated the view, notably publicized at The Anglo-Catholic blog shortly before its demise, that the US-Canadian Ordinariate has hobbled itself with in-groupery, nepotism, and even class bias -- emulating a certain style of Anglicanism a bit too much, it would seem. This view was definitely not popular in 2012 (it predated the start of this blog, and I had no opinion about it at the time), but it's hard to argue that it hasn't been borne out by events. In retrospect, it comes off like one of those initially outrageous pronouncements by Mr Trump that, on reflection, turn out to be telling.

The US-Canadian Ordinariate has failed to thrive. At the same time, the Anglo-Catholic blogosphere, only a few years ago optimistic and supportive, has practically disappeared. I think two big events were responsible: the change of mind at St Aidan Des Moines, which left a prominent Anglo-Catholic blogger stranded without the parish he'd meant to lead into the Ordinariate, and the protracted disaster at St Mary of the Angels. Steenson was prominently involved as he belatedly explained to the St Aidan parish about things like Freemasonry, and he was prominently uninvolved as, deprived of the effective protection the parish had had from David Moyer, he stood aside to let Anthony Morello and a clique of ranters seize the property.

Clearly, going back over posts from 2012, the Anglo-Catholic blogosphere foundered and broke up over Steenson and, to a lesser extent, Abp Hepworth. The dilemmas surrounding the bungling of St Mary's, St Aidan's, and overall failures to thrive dissipated the atmosphere of optimism and support pretty quickly. A visitor who frequently sends me his comments suggests that events, reflected in fundraising crises and declining statistics, are simply proving that there is no market for the sort of Anglo-Catholicism promoted by the Ordinariates.

That's hard for me to understand. My wife and I, finally fed up with the liturgical and musical abuse at our local declining diocesan parish, fled to one a few miles down the road that has good music (with hymns recognizable to those brought up on the 1940 TEC Hymnal) servers in procession with red cassocks and cottas, genuflections at the altar, and, during Lent, the Sanctus, the Memorial Acclamation, and the Agnus Dei sung in Latin. There's a fanny in every seat. The budget is double that of our former parish.

In the middle of last week, I went to the pickup first noon mass at St Mary of the Angels -- no choir, just Fr Kelley, his deacon, and the sense that the Holy Spirit was present. If the atmosphere at the new diocesan parish was great, this was even better. There's a market for this.

Right now, what remains of the Anglo-Catholic blogosphere is dominated by cranks like Mr Chadwick and outliers like Fr Hunwicke. Smuts, I think, has been shown up as a phony, just as much as the phony bishops he serves. This is almost certainly why he's mostly quit blogging. If he hasn't, I challenge him to address his role in defaming Fr Kelley and the St Mary's parish. But Gill and Marsh will never allow it. That Smuts will knuckle under speaks volumes.

I think the restoration of St Mary's is cause for larger reassessment and recalibration.