"Out Of Balance For The Sake Of The Project"

As I noted yesterday, a visitor used this phrase with reference to the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision of John Paul II, but I think it's valid for the whole Anglican outreach project, or however one might wish to characterize it. Coincidentally, another visitor yesterday sent me a long and thoughtful e-mail that goes into more detail on this whole issue.

When a summer cold forced me to rest this weekend, I started reading -- occasionally skimming - -your archives in chronological order. I’m up to mid-2016, and the motif of careerism really pops out of the narrative. Or rather, the failed career of Cardinal Law. Following his fall from power in Boston, he seems to have spent considerable time consolidating his power and rehabilitating his image. Two of his pet projects after his disgrace were the promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus and the discipline of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Look at a partial timeline. Everything goes swimmingly for Cardinal Law until Pope Francis is elected in 2013. Then Law’s projects fizzle. [But see my observations below -- things fizzled pretty consistently for the Anglican project throughout this story -- jb]

• December 13, 2002 - Pope John Paul II accepted Cardinal Law’s resignation. Within weeks of his resignation, Law moved from Boston to Rome. The state attorney general severely criticized Law, but said that Cardinal Law had not broken any laws, **because the law requiring abuse to be reported was not expanded to include priests until 2002**. (Emphasis mine).
• May 2004, Pope John Paul II appointed Law to a post in Rome, as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, a sinecure with only ceremonial duties.[However], Law was [also ] a member of the Congregations for the Oriental Churches, the Clergy, Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, Evangelisation of Peoples, Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, Catholic Education, Bishops as well as the Pontifical Council for the Family. He held membership in all these congregations and of the council before resigning from the governance of the Archdiocese of Boston, and at that time was also a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture. He became even more influential in those Vatican congregations and, being based in Rome, he could attend all their meetings, unlike cardinals based in other countries. ... In Rome, Law was considered an active and important conservative voice within many of the Vatican offices in which he served.

  [I would add that after he left Boston for Rome, Law's eyes and ears in the US for the Pastoral Provision were with Msgr William H Stetson, who was secretary to the PP delegate after 1983 and until 2010. Stetson was closely associated with Law since both were at Harvard in the 1940s. Stetson was heavily involved in the bungling that led to the St Mary of the Angels Third Lawsuit in 2012. -- jb]

• April 2006: Six priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, along with Bishop Iker, meet in Rome with Cardinal Law to discuss causes of Catholic-leaning Episcopal dissatisfaction.
• April 8, 2008, Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) under Pope Benedict XVI, met with Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) leaders in Rome and communicated that the CDF will conduct a doctrinal assessment of the LCWR, who are a large group of American women religious. Note: As reported by the National Catholic Reporter and The Tablet in May 2012, Cardinal Law was "the person in Rome most forcefully supporting" Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori's petition to investigate and discipline the LCWR.
• December 1, 2008: Steenson was ordained a transitional deacon by Cardinal Bernard Law, the archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome.
• November 4, 2009 - Pope Benedict XVI promulgated the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.
• January 1, 2012: Jeffrey Steenson was named Ordinary of the newly erected Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.
• In April 2012, the CDF "announced a major reform of the LCWR" and described "the need to remedy significant doctrinal problems associated with the group's activities and programs.
• February 28, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI resigned
• March 13, 2013 - papal conclave elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio to be next Pope.
• April 16, 2015, Vatican "unexpectedly ended" the CDF "investigation and oversight of US nuns." The leaders of the LCWR later met with Pope Francis for an hour and emerged from the meeting beaming.
• November 24, 2015, Steenson resigned as ordinary of the OCSP. He was only 63 at the time, well under mandatory retirement age. On the same day, Pope Francis appointed Steven J. Lopes the first bishop of the OCSP.
• December 20, 2017 - Cardinal Law died.

Maybe Bishop Lopes’s orders, spoken or unspoken, are to close this chapter down & truly bury Cardinal Law.

One could certainly extend this timeline backward, going as far as Law's contacts with Fr Jack Barker, an Anglo-Catholic TEC priest already at odds with that church before the 1976 Congress of St Louis. At the time of the Congress, Law was at pains to try to get the secessionists not to set up their own jurisdiction and ordain bishops, but presumably to wait until Rome could set up a prelature to accept them.

In hindsight, this was only the first of many efforts Law bungled; in 1976, he failed to recognize how Protestant the TEC dissidents were, and in the subsequent meetings that resulted in establishing the ACC and ordaining "continuing" bishops, proposals from Barker and messages relayed by him from Law were not taken seriously.

A major flaw in the whole Law project centers on St Mary of the Angels Hollywood. It's hard not to infer that Law encouraged Fr Barker to take his parish out of TEC, which had the result of inciting at least 40 years and three rounds of lawsuits. But as of the late 1970s, there was nowhere Rome could have put the parish had its withdrawal from TEC been unopposed -- so this was a futile and destructive move, and quite possibly Law encouraged it mainly just to cause trouble.

And that's just the start of the saga that continues now. I'm skeptical, though, that Bp Lopes's marching orders differ from those given to Msgr Steenson: since Lopes's arrival in 2015, there has been no essential change in Houston's apparent policies or behavior, which continue to focus on lowering normal diocesan standards for vocations in order to hire supernumerary priests with minimal responsibilities.

If Lopes's instructions were to shut things down, we'd have seen the signs by now. Instead, we're seeing the continuing results of hiring marginal priests with minimal duties, poorly supervised and with time on their hands.