Setting The Record Straight

Yesterday I quoted an e-mail from a visitor who said in part, "Soon after the canonical erection of the ordinariate, Msgr. Steenson told Fr. Kelley and the congregation of St. Mary of the Angels that the Catholic Church would provide facilities for them if they abandoned the property." That sounds awfully authoritative, doesn't it? But it struck me as so much at variance with what I'd lived through, attending all those meetings at the time, and so much at variance with reason (why would an ordinary urge a parish to give up a property that would contribute a substantial tithe?) that I did what I could to confirm it.

I checked with an individual who was even more familiar with all the communications from Houston to the parish than I was, including to clergy, but who no longer lives in the area. His response was, "I have no recollection of that -- good catch. I certainly wasn't told that by anyone; I would have been onboard if it were so." So I got back to the commenter, asking where he'd gotten this. His reply was remarkably mealy-mouthed:

I don’t have the source materials from that time period, and the actual communication probably was verbal through Msgr. Stetson. However, I do know that the blogs reporting on the formation of the ordinariates at that time reported that the parish was given the option of abandoning the claim to the parish property and joining the ordinariate without it, but chose not to do so. There were several blogs over the past several years — yours, The Anglo-Catholic, Ordinariate Expats, Foolishness to the World, Freedom for St. Mary, and others — so it simply is not practicable for me to go through all of them to look for the report, which may have appeared in the discussion comments to an unrelated article, in the few minutes that I can take to pass information along to you.

Well, the guy I checked with would have heard anything verbal via Msgr Stetson, too. It didn't happen. Other than that, the commenter sorta-kinda made it all up, claiming that someone musta put it on a blog someplace, so it's gotta be true. I guess this is a matter that, if I'd done it, I would need to take to confession. My visitor, not so much. Not my problem, but I would suggest it may be his.

Last year our parish had the Jeff Cavins course on James's epistle on DVD.

What strikes me is that the epistle was apparently written within a generation or two of the Resurrection, but James seems to have had a great deal of insight already into what can happen in a parish. Look at this pasage from Chapter 3:

5 In the same way the tongue is a small member and yet has great pretensions. Consider how small a fire can set a huge forest ablaze. 6 The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna.

The visitor freqently posts on blogs like the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog and that of Mr Chadwick, whose comment sections are not, shall we say, always a model of Christian charity, and from which I think serious people should normally stay away. He posts under the handle Rev22:1. It's just as well; at least he doesn't post as James3:5-6.

Basically, Norm wasted my time with that comment, where I needed to follow up to determine whether it was true, and it turns out that he spread falsehood with it, making claims about Msgr Steenson, Fr Kelley, and the St Mary of the Angels parish that were derogatory to the parish and untrue. When I confronted him about it, he basically said it was OK, because he thought he'd heard a rumor about it.

In the future, I'm not going to post any more comments from him. Again, I cannot recommend visiting the blogs where Norm posts comments; I think they foster an overall atmosphere where people like Norm thrive.