It's too long to reprint in full here, but the relevant passage is a quote from Cardinal Mahony's 1986 letter unequivocally rejecting the St Mary of the Angels application to become an Anglican Use parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese:
"I wish to acknowledge your letter of October 14, 1986," wrote Mahony, "with respect to your desire that St. Mary of the Angels Church community be received into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. The history of your parish community is not paralleled with any other similar Episcopal community which has been received into the Roman Catholic Church in our country. Your letter to His Eminence, Cardinal Bernard Law, does not reflect the long and very volatile public legal proceedings which you took against the Episcopal Diocese, a process which proceeded through both the Superior Court and the Appellate Court. This factor distinguishes your history from every other application of which I am aware. You indicate that your numbers continue to dwindle, and there is still division and divisiveness among the community. In addition, you seem to require that a major focus be upon the physical plant of St. Mary of the Angels community. All of these considerations compel me and my consultants to look negatively upon your interest in union with the Roman Catholic Church as an Anglican Use community. I am hopeful that this letter will help to crystallize once again the problems which have been so prevalent in the past efforts of your community to seek union with the Roman Catholic Church."If anyone can now locate a copy of the October 14, 1986 letter from the parish to Cardinal Mahony, this would go a great length to complete the historical record.
From my point of view, the letter is remarkably perceptive about the parish and its difficulties. The references to "long and very volatile public legal proceedings", as well as continued "division and divisiveness among the community", have a very contemporary ring. In fact, the letter has given me some reason to reflect on how the troubles that began in 2011-12 relate to the parish's overall history.
The parish's "First Lawsuit" period of the late 1970s has always interested me, because it hit the local news around the time I was deciding to return to the Church as an Episcopalian. Mrs Brandt, as I recall, was then telegenic and was the parish spokesperson in the news segments -- she remained a long-term member until the 2012 troubles and was something of a doyenne among the dissidents. I remember her telling the 1970s interviewer that The Episcopal Church, in ordaining women priests, had taken away the parish's "Catholicity".
This caused me to ask the Episcopal priest who was conducting my confirmation class at a nearby parish what this was all about. His answer, which I've quoted here before, has stayed with me: "These are people who want to have the prestige of calling themselves Catholic without paying the real dues you have to pay actually to be Catholic." My subsequent experience at the parish itself has confirmed that there was a substantial group to whom this definitely applied.
On top of that, an observation in other local media was that the parish was "more an exclusive social club than a church", and Mrs Brandt, from a prominent and well-off California family, represented this side of the parish as well. One one hand, there was punctilious liturgical observance. On the other, anything more seriously related to the Roman cathechism was treated with a wink.
Garry South, a longtime member of the parish and a benefactor, is a political consultant who advises liberal Democrats exclusively, helping them to stress "women's health issues" in order to get elected. (Although Mr South appears to have sided with the pro-Ordinariate members in the 2011-12 votes, he does not appear to have returned to the parish since its restoration by Judge Strobel.)
With the perspective of Cardinal Mahony's letter, I think I have a better understanding of the deep divisions in the parish that led to the 2011-12 troubles, and they probably stem from Fr Kelley's arrival in 2007. Fr Kelley, an erudite, sincere, and conscientious priest, wasn't much interested in social prestige. The long-term parish stalwarts like Mrs Brandt, and the new wannabes like Mrs Bush who wished to emulate her, were poorly catechized -- these were the people who struggled with the Church calendar and promoted "Angelicanism" once they had control of the parish web site.
Fr Kelley, on the other hand, was concerned with Anglo-Catholic theology, adult education, and Bible study. He was disinclined to wink at the things the parish stalwarts had winked at. The formal catechesis the parish undertook on Sunday afternoons in the summer of 2011 in the runup to its attempt to join the US-Canadian Ordinariate probably did not help things one bit.
At this point, I think there may be grounds for optimism that the angry, snobbish, poorly catechized faction of the parish of which Cardinal Mahony seems to have been fully aware may finally have purged itself in the 2011-2015 troubles. On he other hand, the qualities of conscientiousness, erudition, fortitude, and faith that did not endear Fr Kelley to this faction also left him out in the cold with the ACA, and so far as well with the old-boy network in the US-Canadian Ordinariate.
The future of the parish is uncertain -- but then, so is the future of the Ordinariate.
