St Catherine Of Siena, Pray For Us

A post by Msgr Charles Pope about St Catherine of Siena caught my attention earlier this week. One of her achievements, according to Msgr Pope, was to end the Avingnon papacy entirely by writing letters of complaint. This is a practice that's always been dear to my heart. Sometimes it gets results, but even when it's ignored, I know deep down that people have been tweaked. This in itself is deeply satisfying.

Msgr Pope suggests this is a remedy that laity should revive, and I certainly agree. Inspired by Msgr Pope and St Catherine of Siena, I sent the following:

September 25, 2018

Fr. Joe Moons, CP, Provincial Superior
The Passionists of Holy Cross Province
660 Busse Highway
Park Ridge, IL 60068

Dear Fr Moons,

I attended a weekend retreat at the Passionist Mater Dolorosa Retreat Center in Sierra Madre, CA, September 21-23, 2018. I learned that the center has a new retreat director, Dr Michael Cunningham, who has radically changed the focus of retreats since his arrival this past summer.

What’s of concern to me is that Dr Cunningham has clearly and wholeheartedly embraced the “centering prayer” movement, which he and other Mater Dolorosa staff represent as coming from the desert fathers, St Theresa of Avila, and St John of the Cross. However, there is nothing traditional about the movement, as it was developed in the 1970s at St Joseph Abbey in Spencer, MA, in consultation with Buddhist representatives.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has addressed these issues, especially in the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, October 15, 1989. It quotes St John Paul II emphasizing that St Theresa of Avila specifically rejected the type of meditation that the “centering prayer” movement practices.

But even if one might consider that such practices could be of optional interest to retreatants, a problem that I see is that “centering prayer” was in effect compulsory to all attendees unless they chose to stay away from all conferences, and homilies and prayer sessions in the chapel made frequent references as well.

I have a particular concern that, when I cited sections of the Catechism that contradicted statements Passionist Dcn Manuel Valencia made in the conferences, he refused to consider them and strongly implied to the attendees that I was a “skunk” who “wanted to spray on everything”.

At minimum, it seems to me that retreatants should be advised at the start of the retreat that they are being exposed to highly controversial practices that some have suggested leave believers open to demonic influence. An alternate program really should be provided to retreatants who do not wish to be exposed to this controversial material.

However, I think a greater concern is that this material is simply Buddhist and not Christian and not appropriate for a Catholic retreat.

Very truly yours,

John Bruce

I haven't heard back from Fr Moons, and I don't know if I will. From a e-mails I've received from Dr Cunningham and Dcn Valencia, though, the powers that be are aware of my concerns, and these guys have been tweaked.

This Is A Symptom Of A Much Bigger Problem

Regarding my observation that what we see of Dr Cunningham's career is oddly similar to what we've seen of many ex-Protestant OCSP ordinands who've been on the denominational carousel with little success,

[H]e certainly seems to illustrate the fact that the shortage of Catholic priests and religious is opening up lots of career possibilities to those who have failed in other lines of work. And my experience with such people is that no matter how apparently free-wheeling, open, and new-agey their approach, if you question their content or method they come down on you like Joe Stalin. Because in their hearts they know they have no idea what they're doing, beyond chapter six of the training manual or whatever. You have already had more than your share of threatening emails from those who felt you failed to appreciate sufficiently their ministry of caring and sharing.

I think this is an important insight: what's feeding the problem overall is a lack of vocations in the Church. I tend to side with observers like Fr Z, who say that an irreverent atmosphere in mass is a factor that leads potential candidates to disregard vocation as a serious option. Some also suggest that if you tell believers that sin and confession aren't important, they'll take you seriously.

The other side of the coin is what I see at our parish, with dedicated and inspiring clergy, an active server program, a reverent atmosphere, and additional activities across the board like Bible study, LifeTeen, Steubenville, and so forth, for some inexplicable reason, there are always several seminarians in the pipeline there.

Naturally, it doesn't help to read that in some cases, vocation directors and seminary psychologists actively discourage straight candidates while encouraging gay ones. It's going to take more than one pope and more than one saint to clear this up, as it did during the Reformation and during the Avignon captivity.

My correspondent is also correct in commenting on the rigidity of "centering prayer" advocates. It puzzles me that Dr Cunningham, having somehow acquired advanced degrees in theology from Catholic institutions, should display so little basic familiarity with the Catechism. My sense of things is that handsome is as handsome does; he seems to last about two years at jobs where someone is paying attention, and he'd been at the Massachusetts parish for two years before he moved on -- to California.

I don't foresee a happy outcome for this guy.

The Payoff?

Let's look at the broad outline of what our parish contingent found at the Mater Dolorosa Retreat Center last weekend. Groups from our parish and others had been attending retreats there for more than 50 years, and, based on what I'm told, they had standard retreat formats, confessions, prayer (the kind in the Catechism, that is), eucharists, good meals, conferences on various subjects, scripture study, and private reflection. All of a sudden, the retreat center hires a new retreat director. Nothing wrong with that, the former one, a Fr Houlihan, had delayed his retirement for some time.

But the new guy, a Dr Michael Cunningham, makes a radical change in the format right when he arrives. He started this past July; our retreat last weekend was only the third one on his watch. Under the new regime, every conference is aimed at "centering prayer", which we've come to see is a cultish "new age" innovation from the me-generation 1970s, with its own jargon and its own private redefinition of terms in the Catechism. I've talked with several guys who've been on previous retreats, who said that "centering prayer" had been at best a sort of side option in prior years, but now, the whole retreat focused on it.

Homilies at the eucharists, for instance, drew on points made in "centering prayer" conferences to illustrate scripture, with predictably woozy results. Seemed like everyone at the retreat center had gotten the message from new CEO Cunningham, huh? So this is an innovation from Dr Cunningham. Who is Dr Cunningham?

Well, he has a LinkedIn profile. I don't think you can link directly to a LinkedIn profile, but if you do a web search on "Michael Cunningham" and "Mater Dolorosa", it'll come up. The first page is at left; you can click on the image for a larger view.

The first thing that strikes me is this. LinkedIn is basically an on line resume. Its intent is pretty purposefully either to get you a job or otherwise further your professional career by helping you build contacts. So why on earth does Cunningham have a photo of himself wearing sunglasses? When I worked, I sometimes helped with job interviews and got input from hiring managers.

One of the sure killers in a job interview was for the guy to walk in wearing sunglasses -- in fact, this happened once or twice. The written comments managers passed around after the interview were along the line of "Guy wore sunglasses throughout interview." Nothing else.

Well, maybe it was a real sunny day when he got his picture took, huh? No reason he had to use that photo in his profile. I sure wouldn't. On LinkedIn, a business oriented site, I'd be wearing a blue suit and a foulard tie, with a sincerely noncommittal smile, if that were me. Not Dr Cunningham. All I can say is it's not a point in his favor when we try to figure out who he is.

If you scroll farther down on his LinkedIn entry, you find more that's worth at least adding to the case file. His career listing starts in 1990 as a corporate vice president for OpenText; continues in 1992 as President/CEO of LaserData, which, like the first entry, lasts about two years. Then, leaving the President/CEO job in 1994, he opens his own business, Harvard Computing, which, according to the LinkedIn profile, is still in operation.

According to its website, Harvard Computing is located at 225 Cedar Hill St, Suite 200 Marlboro, MA 01752. A Google search shows this is a Regus office space, "virtual office services", basically a glorified mail drop. Not a very successful business is Harvard Computing, at least by appearances.

Beyond that, a web search shows that Michael J Cunningham and his wife, Sally Michele Cunningham, filed for Chapter 11 in Massachusetts Bankruptcy Court, case # 10-40043, on January 5, 2010. A thorough review of public records shows this is the same couple, based at the same addresses, as the Dr Cunningham we now see at the Mater Dolorosa Retreat Center.

The LinkedIn profile shows Cunningham began working in 2011 on a Master's in Theology and Ministry at St John's Seminary in Boston, which he received in 2014. It sounds as though Dr Cunningham, after nearly 20 years of struggle to run a computer training and consulting business, decided, more or less in desperation, to take up a new line of work. He worked on a Doctorate of Ministry, Spirituality, at Catholic University from 2015 to 2018, which is presumably where the "Dr" comes from. But since CU is in Washington, DC, and Cunningham was a lay employee of St Eulalia Parish in Winchester, MA during this time, I've got to assume this was "distance learning", and the DMin was a mail order degree.

So Cunningham had a brief career as a corporate high flyer, but that flight seems to have crashed around 1994, following which he seems to have struggled for almost two decades as a "consultant" until he finally filed for bankruptcy. And then inspiration struck! He could remake himself as a charismatic spiritual leader, selling "new age" Kool-Aid to Catholic marks!

This is a story not too different from the one we've seen many times under the auspices of Anglicanorum coetibus: a very marginal guy is looking for one more chance to rescue a floundering career. And in this case, he wears sunglasses while he does it. Hey, this kind of thing is up to me, and I'm not going to take spiritual direction from a guy who wears sunglasses and has filed for bankruptcy. Sorry. Wish I'd known this going into the retreat.

Naturally, if Dr Cunningham or anyone else can provide information that can correct or clarify what I've found here, I'll be very happy to correct or clarify the record.

What's In The Kool-Aid?

I used the common metaphor of drinking Kool-Aid in my last post. To be clear on what I mean in using the term, I'll cite this definition in the urban dictionary:

[D]rinking the Kool-Aid usually refers to people who blindly accept the "truths" of charismatic charlatans that have alternate agendas, which can lead their followers to physical, emotional, or financial harm and even death. . . . Drinking the Kool-Aid usually refers to well-known religious leaders like Jim Jones and David Koresh, but should also include lesser-known religious leaders, who can be more subversively destructive to relationships and general well-being.

One thing that strikes me about "centering prayer" advocates is how they seem to limit their apologias to a very small number of highly circumscribed examples, which they repeat as a formula, like "St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the desert fathers". But the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has addressed these issues, partly in the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, October 15, 1989:

Pope John Paul II has pointed out to the whole Church the example and the doctrine of St. Teresa of Avila who in her life had to reject the temptation of certain methods which proposed a leaving aside of the humanity of Christ in favor of a vague self-immersion in the abyss of the divinity. In a homily given on November 1st, 1982, he said that the call of Teresa of Jesus advocating a prayer completely centered on Christ "is valid, even in our day, against some methods of prayer which are not inspired by the Gospel and which in practice tend to set Christ aside in preference for a mental void which makes no sense in Christianity.

The responses to people who express reservations like this concerning "centering prayer" are also set-pieces.. When I raised my question, which struck me as sound, that the Catechism says that prayer requires deliberate effort, Passionist Dcn Manuel Valencia oddly reverted to repeating the term Imago Dei, which I'm discovering is "centering prayer" jargon that has a specific and non-Catholic meaning within the movement. This site, for instance, says that "Imago Dei" is parallel with "Buddha-nature", and that "Christ within you" is parallel with "Realizing your Buddha-nature".

The "centering prayer" movement doesn't have a catechism of its own -- in all honesty, it should, because it seems deliberately to say things that sound Catholic, but that it's using in a non-Catholic context.. So there's no way anyone can conclusively say it's selling Buddhist ideas dressed up in pseudo-Catholic clericals, but I'm increasingly convinced this is what it's doing. But the real Catechism in paragraphs 355-361 takes a very different view of the Imago Dei:

355 "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." Man occupies a unique place in creation: (I) he is "in the image of God"; (II) in his own nature he unites the spiritual and material worlds[.]

The series of explanations in the Catechism contrasts very clearly with the muddled idea of "realizing your Buddha-nature", which doesn't appear anywhere in the CCC. And Dcn Valencia's retreat into jargon is in clear contrast to an ordinary Catholic apologist's willingness to pursue questions transparently with appeals to reason. But Dcn Valencia went farther: in exasperation, he said, "These techniques are thousands of years old! The Buddhists use them!" Just after he blurted this out, he seems to have caught himself; I raised my hand, and if he'd recognized me, I'd simply have asked if he's teaching Buddhism. He ignored me, of course.

According to Catholic Culture,

Centering prayer originated in St. Joseph's Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts. During the twenty years (1961-1981) when [Thomas] Keating was abbot, St. Joseph's held dialogues with Buddhist and Hindu representatives, and a Zen master gave a week-long retreat to the monks. A former Trappist monk who had become a Transcendental Meditation teacher also gave a session to the monks.

My regular correspondent noted that, if Dcn Valencia became so clearly exercised at my question, in which I basically challenged him to explain how "centering prayer" is not in conflict with the CCC's clear statements that prayer is deliberate, requires effort, and is a dialogue in a dualistic universe, then something else must be going on. In the end, this isn't about "centering prayer", it's about something else.

Good point. Well, of course, Pope Francis's non-response to Abp Viganò isn't just about gay cardinals, either. Something else is going on. If I could e-mail my questions to St Alphonsus, I'd have a much easier time. I'll try at least to nibble at the edges of this tomorrow.

A Heterodox Innovation!

So, wondering how I might start to address other subject areas, I had one dropped right in my lap this past weekend. Our parish has an annual men's retreat, and a friend suggested a couple of us try it out this year. This is held at a nearby retreat center, Mater Dolorosa, run by the Passionists. What should I discover at the retreat but, in the context of what I might begin to address on this blog, a heterodox and syncretistic innovation!

What gets me about this stuff is how, like some cults, it masks its hidden agenda. A number of local parishes come together each year for this retreat, and sometimes it's a family tradition, with fathers, sons, and grandsons attending for 50 years. This year, though, they had a new retreat director at the Mater Dolorosa center. The new guy seems to have had some new ideas. Innovative ideas. Heterodox ideas, in fact.

So the retreat got through much of Saturday with no change. There was helpful study of a scriptural passage that would be the theme of the retreat. There was a eucharist and confessions. The conference sessions began to get onto less steady ground, talking about Thomas Merton and Teilhard de Chardin, but I could let that go. Then, after dinner Saturday, the schedule listed a "conference and prayer".

In the spirit of full disclosure, in the mid 1970s, after I'd fallen away from my youthful Presbyterianism in college, I got involved in Zen. Serious Zen, not dilettante stuff. I studied under a Japanese Zen master, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 107. When allegations of misconduct surfaced a few years before his death, it turns out that, even when I was active in his center,

His career of misconduct [ran] the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interview, to sexually coercive after hours ‘tea’ meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students. . . . Joshu Roshi’s behavior has been ignored, hushed up, downplayed, justified, and defended by the monks and students that remain loyal to him.

Those around him were so good at covering up that I never heard, or suspected, anything. Actually, I didn't need to. He would frequently complain in his homilies about how racist and anti-Japanese the Americans were after World War II, but living in LA, I had lots of Korean neighbors and co-workers, many of whom at the time had grown up in prewar Korea, when it was a Japanese colony. Their stories of mistreatment at the hands of Japanese were hair-raising.

I wound up having logical difficulties with Zen, in addition to Sasaki's own extreme ethnocentrism, which contrasted starkly with Buddhist claims of universal non-attachment, and one day it dawned on me that the dullest Episcopalian associate priest would actually be preferable to this Zen guy, and I promptly went to TEC confirmation class, filled out a pledge card, and got involved. But the point here is that I'd studied Zen, I knew it quite well.

That Sasaki was as bad as a Catholic cardinal could be was something I found out only much later, but it was just the icing on the cake. Bottom line, I can recognize "new age" when I see it.

So now let's fast forward to the Mater Dolorosa retreat, where after dinner Saturday, the new retreat director started explaining to us about a great new prayer technique. It was, he said, how Christians prayed for the first 15 centuries! The Our Father and Hail Mary are, apparently, modernist departures. The examples we must follow are instead St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the desert fathers.

So OK, he began to teach us how to sit, back straight, arms at the side, a little like a loosey-goosey West Point plebe. We had to select a holy word that we would repeat. We had to close our eyes and sorta-kinda not-concentrate on our holy word and just let our thoughts go. After a short time with this, I began to realize I'd seen this show before. And I knew enough about the not-thinking, and I knew enough about Aquinas, to recognize that Christian holiness requires the intellect and the will, we aren't meant to empty our heads.

This is all called "centering prayer". It's very close to Zen, and it's even closer to Transcendental Meditation, which in more recent times has come to be recognized as a cult. After I got up on Sunday morning, I started to search the Catechism on my cell phone and came up with passages like this:

2725 Prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. It always presupposes effort. The great figures of prayer of the Old Covenant before Christ, as well as the Mother of God, the saints, and he himself, all teach us this: prayer is a battle. . .

I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't want to come off as a curmudgeon about this stuff, and I was almost determined just to grit my teeth and keep my mouth politely shut. But Deacon Manuel, the Passionist who was making this presentation, began talking about the gospel passage where Jesus leaves his disciples and goes up on the mountain to pray. This was, Dcn Manuel said, just like "centering prayer". I raised my hand.

"Yes?" he asked.

"Doesn't the Catechism say that prayer is a battle? And I don't think that when Jesus went up on the mountain, he was just going to his happy place."

Dcn Manuel was not pleased. He began talking about the kind of people who are like skunks and who just want to spray on everything. And he started going on about how some people want to deny the Imago Dei. He had a lot to say about the Imago Dei. That was Latin! Maybe he thought I'd cringe, huh? I tried raising my hand again, but he wouldn't acknowledge me after that.

Once I got home, my curiosity was piqued enough that I began searching the web in earnest about "centering prayer". One thing that struck me was the cut-and-paste apologia that I heard from the new retreat director and Dcn Manuel Saturday and Sunday: it comes from St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the desert fathers. But according to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of all people, this isn't the case! St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the desert fathers aren't new age gurus after all! I'll go into more detail on this later this week.

It was becoming more plain to me that the new retreat director, a Dr Michael Cunningham, had, figuratively speaking, ordered the kitchen to stir up a batch of special Kool-Aid, and he was wheeling in a big bowl of it for us to drink.

More to come.

Expanding The Scope

Fringe fans know that in Season 5, a male-only race of technically enhanced humanoids from the future called the Observers invades 21st-century Earth, and the FBI's Fringe unit is deployed to keep the earthlings under control. Agent Broyles, the head of the unit, reports to a high-rankiinig Observer named Windmark. (For anyone familiar with Fringe who might want to know what Msgr William Stetson is like in person, I would suggest Windmark is kinda close.)

One of my favorite lines in the whole Fringe series is this one, at about 1:50 (the only clip I could find of this has Spanish subtitles):

Broyles asks Windmark, "What did you do, up there, in the future, to get yourself such a crap detail?" This is a question I keep wanting to ask Bp Lopes. Anglicanorum coetibus is a footnote at best, in a footnote papacy that will probably rank with that of Adrian VI for inconsequence. Implementing it has got to be a crap detail, and the whole story is starting to fade in importance as other issues confronting the Church take center stage.

I've given a lot of thought to how I might adjust the scope of this blog. I don't want to make radical changes, but clearly the story of St Mary of the Angels comes close to other issues, including the problem of same-sex attracted priests and bishops, heterodox and syncretistic innovations, petty careerism, and so forth. Without wanting to tie myself down too closely to a specific subject area, I'm now going to start to address more of these, from a perspective of personal experience and using writing and research skills I've developed as part of this project.

While Anglicanorum coetibus is a crap detail, I'll continue to cover it as groups form and dissolve, as other priests beat their wives or whatever else, as ordinaries come and go, or at least until the CDF decides that other issues facing the Church are much better uses for its resources.

As it happens, a new subject presented itself to me just this past weekend while I was on retreat, and I'm in the process of developing a post on it, so stay tuned.

False Dichotomy?

Regarding yesterday's post, a visitor commented,

The problem is, at least in San Antonio, there are no traditional Catholic parishes with a reverent liturgy. I cannot emphasize that enough.

He then referred to an older post on Catholic Answers speaking about Our Lady of the Atonement:

While I was in dental school in San Antonio, I was a parishioner of Oru Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church (3 out of my 4 years in school). It was heaven on earth. I literally pined away for Sunday to hurry and get here. I took a friend who was entering the Jesuits to church there, and he said, “THAT’S how Mass should be EVERY time, EVERYWHERE!”. . . . They have a Latin Novus Ordo Mass in the evening, but their signature Mass is the Anglican Use High Mass. The architecture is magnificent (and growing in size), and the artwork truly brings you into a prayerful state of mind.

Naturally, I can't speak for the situation in San Antonio, or anywhere else, for that matter. But the first point I would make is that in the Archdiocese of LA, often thought of as quite liberal, when we got fed up with the parish closest to home, the first one we tried, a 15-minute drive away, had a hard-cover missal with something like 800 hymns, servers in red cassocks and surplices, an organ and choir with paid section leaders, cantors of operatic quality, and a reverent atmosphere with inspiring clergy. (Come to think of it, the marble altar/reredos at our parish is nicer than the one at OLW in yesterday's post.) We've had no cause to go looking elsewhere, but if we did, my understanding from our friends is that there are other comparable parishes in the area.

We go to Napa, CA frequently, and when there, we go to St John the Baptist. This is a little more casual, the architecture more 1970s, but it's a good, friendly place, and if we lived in Napa, I'm sure we'd be very happy at that parish.

I've had fairly regular e-mails from others who are now, or have been in the past, parishioners at OLA, and at least two felt it had a bad atmosphere and typically held on for only as long as they had kids in the school there.

But a second point I'd make is that, for all the stress the Catholic press puts on the DW services at, basically, the two biggest Texas parishes, the rest of the 34 (by the published total in the current story) communities are nothing like those. A number have guitar masses, and the groups are more typically two dozen people in a basement chapel or cafeteria. I would question how many of the full parishes outside of Texas can even have paid choirs.

The problem is that Catholic media is complicit in building a fantasy of the ordinariates that they alone have reverent masses, and the only alternative is to find a Latin mass. This is simply false and destructive and feeds the purist-separatist traddy view. When we got fed up with Dan Schutte masses and happy-birthday-Jesus, we got off our butts and found something better not far away. I can't imagine our situation is unique.

I'll be on retreat for the next few days, and so I won't be posting until next week.

Looking For A Next Generation Of "Continuers"

My regular correspondent referred me to the most recent press effort by Bp Lopes, a piece in the National Catholic Register by the reliable Peter Jesserer Smith. (I don't mean to discount Mr Smith's efforts; a much better piece by him appears here. The Register needs to keep him on this kind of reporting.)

Two things strike me. At left is a photo I found on the website of St Luke's Episcopal, Evanston, IL. While this isn't a commission by Cram or Goodhue, it comes from the same pre-World War I era when the wealthy families of gilded-age industrialists were generously funding medieval-romantic edifices. Certainly if what you want is just dignified liturgy punctiliously observed in an over-the-top setting, go here, don't bother with cheap imitations. Go to St Thomas Fifth Avenue, St Thomas Hollywood, St Martin's Houston, or any number of others, which far outnumber OCSP groups that meet in shabby storefronts or basement chapels.

At right is a photo of Our Lady of Walsingham Houston from the Jesserer Smith article in the Register. All I can say is nice try. There's a cramped atmosphere and a budget reredos, and this is via a multimillion-dollar donation. The exterior is similar; it struggles to look like something more expensive than the gothic option for your prefab parish building, but it falls short even there.

In fact, when Bp Lopes invited the TEC bishop to attend a mass at OLW, I'm more and more convinced the TEC bishop was being polite when he said it was almost as good as All Saints Margaret Street. No, it wasn't. It was trying to do something with seven figures that past generations of Episcopalians were doing with eight, and it shows.

Let's go to the rationale for Anglicanorum coetibus that Bp Lopes makes in the latest Register piece:

Bishop Steven Lopes, the head of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, which covers North America, spoke about its mission and ministry at a Aug. 25 “Meet the Ordinariate Night,” a meet-and-greet event sponsored by the Fellowship of St. Alban, an ordinariate Catholic community based in Rochester, New York. Bishop Lopes explained that. . . . Benedict XVI. . . recognized the Anglican patrimony is a “treasure to be shared with the whole Church.”

But to the extent that the "Anglican patrimony" is an over-the-top, medieval-romantic style dating from early Victorian times that peaked a century ago, it's outdated and far too expensive to try to reproduce -- especially when there are plenty of Catholic church buildings that are just as opulent but can sustain themselves with far larger memberships. So what else is there? Bp Lopes goes on,

He also added the ordinariate serves the mutual enrichment of the Church in a pastoral sense. Ordinariate communities, he said, have “a sense of parish as family” by not only worshipping at Mass together, but spending extensive time with each other in fellowship over coffee hour.

“It is kind of expected that you stick around after Mass; no ducking out the side aisle,” he said.

The Catholic Church today, he said, has to figure out how to form “intentional communities” within a large parish setting, and the ordinariate helps contribute to that discussion.

“The feeling of anonymity in Church is the death knell of faith, particularly for millennials,” he said. Many feel that “if it doesn’t matter if I’m there [at Mass], then it doesn’t matter if I’m not there, and I have better things I can do on Sunday.”

Er, Bishop, you're suggesting diocesan parishes don't have a sense of parish as family? There's no coffee hour? Everyone's anonymous? Well, of course, Lopes spent only a couple of years in a parish; he was on the fast track, and he just had to get his pastoral ticket punched, so he wouldn't know. And maybe he thinks there's an advantage in going to a 5:00 PM evensong in a side chapel with a no-hope priest-wannabe who's taking his last ride on the denominational carousel.

It's significant that he's mentioning millennials, although as a group, these haven't had the best publicity. I find under the Urban Dictionary definition of dilettante:

The dilettante has reached its apotheosis in contemporary millennials, especially college-educated ones. They tend to feel alienated by corporate culture and spurned by the economic crisis, and postpone taking on family responsibility, which usually ends dilettantism, until later than previous generations.

The dilettante is an easy target for scorn, but essentially tragic, often overwrought, full of angst, sometimes tormented by the “grass is greener” fantasy. Most dilettantes eventually grow out of their dilettantism—making it a phase disease—and settle into something that provides constancy and direction to their lives.

Isn't this in fact a good definition of the target market for the OCSP? The problem is that the little group-in-formation in the basement chapel is going to be just another phase for these people, and only the largest of the existing OCSP parishes are going to give those who pass through them anything like the resources they need to find constancy and direction in their lives.

In fact, they'll find something much better if they look carefully at diocesan parishes a few blocks or a few miles away -- or in fact, maybe show up at the 9:30 OF mass rather than the 5:00 evensong.

Because I'm Special

At the end of yesterday's post, I had a question that's stuck with me: why were the disaffected Episcopalians in the tiny Pro Diocese of St Augustine of Canterbury under Barker, Brown, and Tea willing to wait seven years to be received as Catholics, when they could have gone a few blocks to an RCIA class at a nearby Catholic parish and been received within a year? Apparently Catholic wasn't the whole appeal, and at best, we're at Luke 9:61-62:

61 And another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.”

62 [To him] Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.”

I also thought about the account I had here some time ago of St Mary's in the early 1980s:

Well, in July 1984, two of the parishioners -- namely my wife (Dr. Jeanne) and I -- were ready to be confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church via the Anglican Use Rite. We, in fact, were the very first from L.A. to be confirmed -- from St. Mary of the Angels (or St. Mathias). But -- we were not confirmed in Los Angeles. There was a different plan.

After discussing the matter at length with Fr. Barker, it was decided that we, who would be the FIRST, should be confirmed in Las Vegas, Nevada by Fr. Clark Tea, who was the pastor of the AUR church of St. Mary the Virgin's in Las Vegas -- under the permission of the Bishop of Las Vegas, of course. This way we could by-pass any potential problem that might arise from Cardinal Archbishop Timothy Manning in L.A. We carefully orchestrated all of the necessary arrangements.

Apparently there was some extra twist, some necessary body English, that required them to go, with Fr Barker's explicit counsel, to be received as some special kind of Catholic in Las Vegas. Just being RCIA Catholic simply wasn't the point. It had to be Catholic according to a special gourmet recipe, the macaroni and cheese version simply wouldn't make it.

A visitor got the same impression from yesterday's post:

Reading your last post, this song from the Pretenders sprang into my head, the one that goes

'Cause I gonna make you see
There's nobody else here
No one like me
I'm special, so special
I gotta have some of your attention
Give it to me

I also thought about the fact that much of this breakaway movement was set in motion seemingly around the ordination of women to the Episcopal priesthood. Normally, the priest's conversion from this era of converts is recounted with evidence of the Episcopal church becoming more liberal, and finally, with the ordination of women, it is clear that this church is not the church that Christ founded.

But why? Having just come through the social upheaval of the 60's, and seeing the churches respond by adopting certain elements of the revolution, it is understandable that some could have had their eyes open, and realize that "open-mindedness" can lead to empty headedness.

But from my own observations, those that continue along in Anglicanism, waiting for the water to be just right, and even those who have come into the pool, but immediately demanded certain bathing salts - they have one thing in common. They are special. So Special.

Likewise, when one reads about the Protestant histories, and how they are told in tales with lines like "here I stand, I can do no other", it sounds marvelous. Right or wrong, they stood on principle.

But did they? A proper understanding of the Protestant revolts cannot be understood without understanding the economics, kingdoms, and taxations of the day. So I wonder how much of the conversions have factors of specialness, and allowing women into the priesthood made a crowded room even stuffier.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that a conversion, even an imperfect one, and one for imperfect motives is good, and will lead to good. But the church seems to be increasingly full of pretenders (and I refer to the grand scandals disrupting the church's highest hierarchies).

I think this is spot on, and I also agree that the issues of "continuing" Catholic Anglicans tie into the larger crisis in the Church.

The Rest Of 1977

In a press release dated August 18, 1977, the Episcopal News Service very succinctly summarized the outcome of the exit by the five California-Nevada parishes, along with some others:

Five Episcopal priests in the Diocese of Los Angeles and one in the Diocese of Colorado have recently been deposed as a culmination of their actions in opposition to the approval of the ordination of women to the priesthood by the 1976 General Convention of the Episcopal Church.

The priests had been inhibited by their bishops from priestly functions for the past six months. According to the Canons of the Church, the depositions were automatic following the six-month period during which the priests had not retracted their acts or declarations.

The priests -- supported by their congregations -- had renounced the authority of their bishops.

In June, Bishop William C. Frey of Colorado deposed the Rev. James Mote of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Denver, the first of a number of parishes and missions to vote to sever relations with its Episcopal diocese in opposition to the ordination of women.

In August, Bishop Robert C. Rusack of Los Angeles deposed the Rev. John Barker and the Rev. Elwood Trigg of St. Mary of the Angels Church, Hollywood; the Rev. William T. St. John Brown of St. Matthias, Sun Valley; the Rev. Forrest Miller of Our Savior's, Los Angeles; and the Rev. George H. Clendenin of the Church of the Holy Apostles, Glendale.

Meanwhile, litigation of a property dispute involving the Los Angeles area breakaway parishes and the diocese is still pending in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The release continues, covering the short-lived Diocese of the Holy Trinity:

According to a recent announcement by the Rev. Canon Albert J. duBois, the executive vice president of Anglicans United, and a leader, together with Bishop Chambers, in the separatist movement, the Los Angeles based Diocese of the Holy Trinity now includes more than 40 parishes and missions.

Canon duBois -- himself currently under suspension by the Bishop of Long Island -- said that he has assisted in the creation of new deaneries in the Midwest, the East, and the South, which, he said, adds "over seventy other congregations seeking attachment to the Diocese of the Holy Trinity pending their own formation in five other new American Dioceses."

Canon duBois reports that there are at present "over one hundred separatist congregations" in the U.S., and he predicts there will be "over two hundred and fifty such congregations by the end of 1977, with many more in 1978."

Canon duBois said that members of the separatist movement "envision a new 'Anglican-Episcopal Province of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church' based in the U. S. A. by the end of 1977."

These predictions, of course, were only the earliest of the grandiose overpromising characteristic of the "continuing" movement. DuBois himself had been inhibited in April 1977:

One of the charges upon which the bishop and standing committee took the action is that Canon duBois has formed a new church, a charge which he denies [Huh??], contending that the action of the General Convention has placed the Episcopal Church outside the traditional doctrine, discipline, and worship of Anglicanism.

Canon duBois has become international president of Anglicans United, a group which has broken with the American Church Union and he asserts that the "threatened deposition was simply an effort to single him out.. in order to crush any organized opposition to the Minneapolis actions."

However, the Diocese of the Holy Trinity didn't outlast the year. According to Fr Barker,

The Diocese of the Holy Trinity joined the FCC and attended its September 1977 meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. This meeting in St. Louis produced a loose amalgamation of several groups into the Anglican Catholic Church in North America (ACNA), and this was destined to become a new "Anglican" church in the United States and Canada Some of the members of the Diocese of the Holy Trinity identified with the aims of the FCC as it moved toward founding the ACNA. Canon DuBois and the Anglicans United (successor to Episcopalians United) did not. Those in the Diocese of the Holy Trinity who agreed with the aims of ACNA kept the name Diocese of the Holv Trinityand remained with them Those who desired reunion with Rome then formed the Pro-Diocese of St. Augustine of Canterbury (PDSAC) to act as the "corpus" for transitional jurisdiction to full unity with the Roman Catholic Church. Catholic life requires a bishop as the center of unity for a diocese. As indicative of the tension between the two factions of the clergy regarding the role of a bishop, a question was put to the bishop-elect regarding whether he be willing to pursue reunion with Rome. It was the strong negative response to this question which resulted in the splitting of the Diocese of the Holy Trinity.

The short version of this is that the Anglican program within the Catholic Church was a direct outgrowth of the "continuing" movement, which has been marked by splits and division from the early months of its inception. A successor to the Douglas Bess history of the movement (assuming one should be written) really ought to include the Catholic side descended from DuBois, Barker, Law, and Stetson, as well as the Protestant side descended from Chambers, Mote and Falk.

Fr Barker's history continues with the trip he and Brown made to Rome in the fall of 1977. The most concrete outcome of the trip was to firm up the split in the "continuing" movement:

Before leaving Rome, confidential letters from the delegation were mailed to Bishop Albert Chambers, the retired Episcopal bishop of Springfield, Illinois, and Fr. James Mote, bishop-elect for the Diocese of the Holy Trinity. Bishop Chambers was scheduled to be the chief consecrator at the ordination to the episcopate of four Episcopalian priests, including Father Mote, which would inaugurate the new Anglican Catholic Church in America as planned by the FCC. In those letters both were advised of the results of the Rome meetings and that Rome would see those planned ordinations as a serious obstacle to reunion.

Two weeks after returning from Rome, the delegates spoke at a joint synod of the priests of the Anglican Dioceses11 of the Holy Trinity and Christ the King, on December 15, 1977. Bishop Chambers presided at this meeting and allowed less than ten minutes for the report on the meetings held in England and Rome. It seemed apparent to all present that the bishop was not interested. For example he said: "Your people don’t want to be Roman Catholics." This sentiment was echoed by bishops-elect Mote (of Denver) and Morse (of Oakland). Bishop Chambers continued to plan for the consecrations to take place in January 1978.

Here's what continues to puzzle me. The small groups of congregants in the PDSAC parishes would wait until 1983 -- six years -- to receive valid sacraments of any sort. But as far as I can see, the PDSAC never had a bishop, so that none of the sacraments that require a bishop, such as confirmation and holy orders, could be celebrated at all. The PDSAC was nothing but a creature of fevered imaginations.

Yet, for all their fervor of somehow becoming Catholic, any of these people could have gone to a nearby Catholic church, gone through RCIA, and been received within a year. These folks wanted to be special from the start.

The January 1977 Mass Exit

The timing of the jointly choreographed exit of four Los Angeles-area parishes and one in Nevada from TEC raises important questions. Let's look at a timeline:

• April 1976: Clark Tea is signatory to an open letter to all TEC diocesan bishops objecting to the election of John Shelby Spong as bishop coadjutor of Newark, NJ.
• April 1976: A public letter from the Anglo-Catholic and conservative American Church Union to the bishops of TEC asserts that Canon Albert J DuBois

  does not advocate and has never advocated schism or any other kind of separation. Specifically -- and quite contrary to an erroneous account in the January issue of The Canadian Churchman -- he did not advocate schism in an address to the Council for the Faith in Toronto on November 22, 1975, nor did he state that legal steps were being taken to ensure a "continuing" Episcopal Church if the ordination of women were "authorized" by General Convention.

• September 1976:The TEC general convention in Minneapolis authorizes the ordination of women.
• September 1976: DuBois and Frs WT StJohn Brown and Jack Barker publish a newsletter during the convention that includes a "plan of action" for dissenting parishes to leave TEC.
• September or October 1976: Albert DuBois travels to Rome, having met with sympathetic Catholic clergy during the Minneapolis convention and has unspecified discussions with Catholics in Rome.
• November 1976: Jack D Barker as chairman of ACU's Policy and Planning Committee issues a statement that the ACU has "absolutely rejected" the general convention's decision to ordain women. Clark Tea, secretary of the committee, is noted as sitting at the head table.
• January 23, 1977: St Mary of the Angels Hollywood, St Matthias Sun Valley, Church of Our Saviour Los Angeles, Holy Apostles Glendale, and St Bartholomew's Boulder City, NV leave TEC.

Several things strike me. One is that, within the press releases from TEC covering these events, it becomes clear that the American Church Union was feeling less and less comfortable with the actions of DuBois, Barker, Brown, and Tea, to the point that they renamed their newsletter during the September general convention to distance themselves from the ACU. The November release suggests some felt Barker's statement was hotheaded at best.

Another issue is that I can find no reference to either Brown or Barker having an MDiv at the time they were ordained Episcopal priests. Both Brown and Barker became rectors of parishes in unusual circumstances. Normally when a rector position becomes vacant, the vestry notifies the bishop, who appoints an "interim rector" or a "priest in charge" subject to the bishop's authority. The vestry then works with the diocese to identify the parish's profile and locate candidates who best suit its needs. This process can easily take a year or longer. The vestry then selects a rector "with the assent of the bishop".

Naturally in the normal course, the bishop has a good deal of input in the process. However, according to Fr Kelley, even when St Mary of the Angels was part of the TEC diocese, it never trusted the bishop, and in the cases of the second rector, Fr Jordan, and the third, Fr Barker, the vestry hired existing curates as rector directly without going through the diocese. As a practical matter, the parish was "continuing" before there was a "continuing" movement.

One question that comes into my mind is whether Frs Barker and Brown knew each other before Brown wound up at St Matthias Sun Valley, and given the proximity of the parishes, whether Barker had any influence on its hiring Brown, especially if Brown was in some sort of extremity in the circumstances under which he left the rector's position at St Luke's Evanston.

Another question is how much the parishioners at both St Matthias and St Mary of the Angels were told of the agenda Barker and Brown had in becoming Catholic as of early 1977. This could well apply to Tea in Boulder City as well. The reporter who followed up on the 1977 cases for the Long Beach Press Telegram in 2005 reached some former parishioners at St Matthias and got these reactions to the 1977 events:

Neil Paquin was a St. Matthias congregant in the '70s and deeply involved with the church. He said beyond the money the parish spent, the greatest toll was to his relationship with the clergy.

"Most of us really put our hearts and souls into it," Paquin said, "which I will never do again to any church. I wouldn't put my faith in a priest or minister or any man. That's where I stand now."

Paquin and Ruth Zuber are among former congregants who believe their clergy had ulterior motives in seceding from the church, although they agreed with the move at the time.

"The rector of our church seemed to lead us to Roman Catholicism," Zuber said. "That's not the way it was presented to us at first."

Paquin puts it in more stark terms.

"(Brown) sold us down the river," Paquin said. "He kept telling us he was doing it for the Anglican church."

A visitor here gave a similar account several years ago:

[A] group called themselves "St. Mary's in Exile," under Senior Warden Walter Kressel. (We were introduced to Anglo Catholicism through "St. Mary's in Exile," via their ads in the L.A. Times, but once we went to "the real St. Mary's," we never went back.) The "Exile" group was intimately involved in the law suit to get St. Mary's church property back into the hands of the Episcopal Church. They lost the case. Fr. Barker and his legal team prevailed (due to the way that Fr. Dodd, the founding priest, had written the legal papers regarding the property of St. Mary's).

The various published accounts of this period from Fr Barker have many gaps, sometimes omit critical information, and leave many unanswered questions. In particular, evidence continues to emerge that shows that Barker, Brown, and Tea were close and maintained contact up to the deaths of Brown and Tea, and it's hard not to think they had extensive contacts even before the events of 1976.

Any further information anyone might be able to provide will be most appreciated.

Fr Clark A Tea Jr -- Part II

We saw in the first installment of this series that, at the instigation of Fr Tea, the St Christopher's TEC parish in Boulder City, NV voted on January 23, 1977 to pass a resolution declaring "that St. Christopher's Church affirms that it is no longer a part of, or in communion with, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, or the Diocese of Nevada". Based on the record of the Nevada supreme court's denial of the appeal, the TEC diocese moved quickly to remove Tea as rector and evict the dissident group from the property. Based on a Google search, that TEC parish still exists in that building.

Thanks to research by my regular correspondent, who was able to locate an ad on the Church Directory page of the Las Vegas Sun Saturday September 17, 1977, a group claiming to be St Christopher's Anglican Catholic was meeting for an 11:30 AM high mass on Sundays at Christ Lutheran Church in Boulder City, while a new group calling itself St Mary the Virgin was meeting for a 9:00 AM low mass at St John's Greek Orthodox. (I can't locate the address given in the Las Vegas area.)

The St Mary the Virgin name is the one that the group took when it was admitted to the Catholic Church under the Pastoral Provision a full seven years later, and it had moved from Boulder City to Las Vegas. How many congregants were involved at any time is an open question. Since the St Christopher's TEC parish survived in the original property (and I assume the TEC diocese was able to prevent reuse of that parish's name), we must surmise that the St Mary the Virgin group was never more than a rump of the original TEC parish.

At some point after 1992, Fr Tea was removed as pastor, the Roman Catholic bishop declined to appoint a replacement, the parish was suppressed, and the property was sold. If anyone has more information, I'll be very grateful to hear it. It's hard to avoid thinking, though, that the number of congregants was never more than marginal, especially in light of typical group sizes in the OCSP, and it would probably have been a no-brainer for the bishop to close the parish.

Also at some point after 1992, Fr Tea moved to the Palm Springs, CA area. Palm Springs on one hand is a retirement destination for many people, but it's also an important gay mecca on a par in California with West Hollywood and Laguna Beach. My regular correspondent found a property record for Clark A Tea Jr at 29613 Calle Tampico Cathedral City CA 92234. A Stephen Delacruz is also listed at this address. Delacruz appeared in Tea's 2014 obituary as Tea's surviving friend. However, a Jack Duane Barker, currently of Murrieta, CA also appears at the same address. Barker appeared in the obituary as officiating at Tea's funeral mass, but it would appear that there was a connection with Tea that went beyond that in later years.

The whole question of how and why the exit of four California TEC parishes and one in Nevada was organized for January 23, 1977 seems to me to be very complex, and we've never learned the whole story. Barker, who was pretty clearly the organizer, was relatively new to the Episcopal priesthood and, like other marginal performers, had apparently come to it late as a second career. Tea appears to have been marginal throughout, while Brown, after a highly prestigious first assignment, seems to have fallen some distance by the time he wound up at St Matthias Sun Valley. All three found themselves in the Palm Springs area by the 1990s and appear to have been close while there.

I'll have more to say about the 1977 move tomorrow.

Smoking Gun?

I still intend to continue the story of Fr Tea, but a visitor very kindly sent me a link to this blog post, in which the blogger quotes an article in the Long Beach (CA) Press Telegram from 2005. This was newsworthy at the time, because several TEC parishes, including one in Long Beach, withdrew from the Diocese of Los Angeles due to the consecration of openly gay Eugene Robinson as TEC Bishop of New Hampshire, a gesture similar in futility to the earlier 1977 departures. The writer got in touch with Fr Barker in Murrieta, who sorta-kinda made no comment, but sorta-kind did:

When the subject of his time at St. Mary's is brought up, Barker politely declines to discuss it.

. . . In 1980, Archbishop John R. Quinn announced a "pastoral provision' by which Episcopal and Anglican parishes could become Roman Catholic. In 1983-84, the clergy and parishes of five churches were accepted into the Catholic Church.

Although Barker and Brown won the war, they lost the battle.

In his paper describing the history of pastoral provision, Barker wrote that in October 1984, Catholic Bishop John Ward, on behalf of Cardinal Timothy Manning, told the clergy of St. Matthias and St. Mary of the Angels that no pastoral provision would be offered to the parishes. This happened despite what Barker said were private assurances by Bishop Bernard Law, one of the point men for the Catholic Church in the process, that the Southland parishes "would have little difficulty' being admitted into the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

The last attribution to Bp Law appears in this version of the history of the Pastoral Provision by Fr Barker in the context of his 1981 visit to Los Angeles. However, it's very hard not to assume the "private assurances" from Bp Law would have been made in 1976. We know that five TEC parishes, four in the Diocese of Los Angeles and one in the Diocese of Nevada, withdrew on the same Sunday in January 1977. If Al Qaeda hijacks four airliners on the same day, we may assume it's been planned beforehand, and somebody was coordinating the resources to do it.

By the same token, I think we can assume Law was talking, possibly through a close underling, with Barker, as well as Canon Albert DuBois of the American Church Union. According to Barker's account (or actually, one of his accounts),

While still in Minneapolis, the site of the 1976 General Convention, Canon DuBois was introduced to sympathetic Roman Catholic clergy. After writing an initial letter to Rome, he was invited to go in person to visit the Holy See.

We already know that Barker and DuBois had been working together at the time of the November 1976 public statement by the American Church Union. I think we can reasonably conclude that some type of assurance was made to DuBois and/or Barker around this time, and Barker then proceeded to organize the January departure. If you think about it, considering that Advent and Christmas were coming up and the departure would have happened soon afterward, this had to have been a very hasty set of plans, something we're beginning to see was characteristic of Barker.

Law, of course, allowed this to happen, with no definite plan on his end. In fact, it took him three years just to get the USCCB to approve bringing in married Anglican priests. But beyond that, to refer to any sort of assurance, private or otherwise, given to DuBois or Barker, and transmitted by Barker to Brown, Tea, and the others, would have been clear evidence of poaching, pure and simple. This is unethical. But that was Bernard Law, after all.

Fr Clark A Tea Jr

Fr Clark Tea was a member, with Frs Barker and Brown, of the West Coast triumvirate of Anglican Use priests who took their parishes out of TEC in January 1977. With Fr Tea, I think the best approach is to start at the end, an obituary posted at Forest Lawn:

Rev. Clark Arthur Tea, Jr., born on May 4, 1934, in Detroit, MI, passed away September 19, 2014 at the age of 80. He resided in Cathedral City, CA at the time of his passing. Clark was a Commander in the US Navy, served as a Chaplain in Vietnam, and was awarded several medals and two Bronze Stars. Although the Navy was a major part of Clark's life, he also was an ordained Catholic priest who was in charge of five parishes before he retired. Clark is survived by his friend, Stephen Delacruz; sisters, Dorothy Kelty and Patricia Phillips; niece, Heather Roloff; and nephews, Ken Leege, Jonathan Phillips, and Andrew Phillips. A funeral mass, officiated by Fr. Jack Barker, was held at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Palm Desert, CA on September 22. On Friday, September 26 at 10:00 a.m., a military service with honor guards will be held at Forest Lawn, Cathedral City, CA where he will be interred in the Mausoleum.

Two passages are most telling. The first is that the Navy was "a major part" of his life, but not the only one -- he was a Catholic priest, too! This strikes me as a peculiar set of priorities that most Catholic priests wouldn't agree with. He's also survived by "his friend, Stephen Delacruz". In 21st-centuryspeak, this would presumably mean his same-sex partner, which is also an odd juxtaposition for someone identifying himself as a Catholic priest. Or these days, maybe not.

Tea's Anglican Use parish was St Mary the Virgin Las Vegas. Based on a reference in Crisis Magazine, it was still in existence as of a 1992 article, but the best I can determine, Tea was removed as its pastor some time after that, and the bishop declined to appoint a replacement. The address listed for the parish, 5083 Judson Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89115, is an empty parking lot according to Google Street View.

If we back up a little farther, we come to the 1980 Nevada case of Tea v. PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH, ETC.. This resulted in a declaratory judgment by the Nevada Supreme Court:

This is a declaratory judgment action to determine title to church property. The trial court concluded that respondents, the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada and the Bishop of Nevada, had the right to control property held in the name of a local church and therefore decreed that respondents were entitled to possession of the property. This appeal followed; we affirm.

. . . On January 23, 1977, a parish meeting was held, at which a majority of the voting members passed a resolution declaring "that St. Christopher's Church affirms that it is no longer a part of, or in communion with, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, or the Diocese of Nevada... ."

Pursuant to the internal procedures of the Episcopal Church, the Bishop of Nevada deposed appellant Tea as Rector of St. Christopher's, and assumed the position of rector himself, under the authority conferred upon him by the regulations of the Episcopal Church to assume vacant rectories. The Bishop and the Diocese of Nevada then brought the instant action in district court for a declaration that the church property was held by the corporation "The Rector" in trust for the benefit of the Diocese and the national church.

. . . Following a trial to the court, the district court found that the Episcopal Church structure is hierarchical, . . . . and it therefore declared that the Bishop and the Diocese were entitled to possession of the church property in question as the legal representatives of the corporation "The Rector," the record owner of the property.

. . . We perceive no error in the district court's conclusion that respondents are entitled to possession of the church property in question.

Therefore, the decree of the district court is affirmed.

In other words, this was simply a version of the St Mary of the Angels story, writ small, and since there was only one round of lawsuits, on the cheap. The same arrivste hothead, Fr Barker, seems to have been behind this as well. But Tea himself is a puzzling case.

As best I can determine, like many of the more recent ordinands in the OCSP, he had a marginal TEC career. He graduated from Seabury-Western seminary in 1963 and was ordained that year by the TEC Bishop of Western Michigan. But rather than go into a parish as an associate, he became the "bishop's chaplain", which is typically a short-term assignment as the bishop's driver (the bishop rides in the back seat of the dignified auto). My impression is that this goes to also-rans among that year's class of ordinands, and it gives them a little more time to land a job as an associate.

By the following year, he got a job as curate at St. Thomas’s Battle Creek, and he was also commissioned in the US Naval Reserve to serve as a chaplain. In 1969, he was called up and went to Viet Nam, where he apparently served honorably, partly in combat assignments. He stayed in the Naval Reserve and eventually retired as a Commander, which is probably how he survived financially over much of his life.

His active duty ended, he next turned up in 1972 as vicar of St, Alban's church, North Muskegon, MI, which is now closed. A TEC vicar is the priest in charge of a mission. Missions do not have vestries, and they are directly supervised by the bishop; the vicar is appointed by, and serves at the pleasure of, the bishop. How long Tea remained there is unknown.

By March 1976, he appears as rector of St Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Boulder City, NV, a suburb of Las Vegas, where he suddenly begins an absolute frenzy of self-destructive activity. As in the case of Sun Valley, CA, it's hard to imagine this sort of desert community having Anglo-Catholic scruples about this, that, or the other actions at TEC general conventions, but apparently it did. By April 1976, Tea's name appears on a letter from the American Church Union protesting John Shelby Spong for, basically, being John Shelby Spong.

In November 1976, he sat at the head table as Fr Barker issued the American Church Union's statement on the decision to ordain women at the 1976 TEC general convention. By January 1977, he took St Christopher's Boulder City out of TEC at the same time as Frs Brown and Barker took theirs out. It looks to me as if Fr Barker, the youngest in the group, took the lead; I strongly suspect as well that Brown and Tea, by this point in their lives reduced to marginal TEC careers, were sometimes impaired and not fully capable of exerting independent judgment.

The next steps in the story warrant their own post, which I'll deal with tomorrow.

Fr W T St John Brown

A name that's mentioned only in passing in the early histories of the Pastoral Provision is Fr W T St John Brown, who went to Rome in November 1977 with Fr Jack Barker to meet with Cardinal Seper after Canon DuBois suffered a heart attack. However, he's almost completely dropped off the record, while Fr Barker, who was much less senior at the time, has been able to take much of the credit for what little the two accomplished. Self-promotion has clearly been a major factor in Anglican outreach from the start.

I found this obituary in the newsletter of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah, where Brown was native, but where he never served in his pastoral career. Brown, born in 1922, was ordained a TEC priest in 1947 and served variously as curate, priest-in-charge, and rector of St Luke's Episcopal, Evanston, IL. His career in Evanston isn't clear after that; while St Luke's is still in existence, there's no history page that might list past rectors. The obituary mentions that he had dinner with the Archbishop of Canterbury and an audience with Paul VI on a trip to Europe in 1965.

By 1971, Brown had become rector of St Matthias Episcopal Church in Sun Valley, CA. This is puzzling indeed. By roughly age 30, he'd risen to become rector of St Luke's TEC Evanston, IL. I know a little about Evanston, it's an upscale place. My uncle, a corporate CEO who was able to endow a university chair, retired to Evanston. The median family income there, based on web searches, is $102,706. Quite a plum assignment for a TEC rector. But by age 50, he'd moved on to St Matthias, Sun Valley, CA. I know a little bit about Sun Valley, too. It's a largely commercial-industrial area along the I-5, where the median family income is $44,959.

Something happened, and we don't know what, but it looks like he'd found a parish after considerable effort that would pretty much allow him to finish out a TEC career, but that's about it. And in TEC, clergy have careers. If someone can provide additional insight here, I'll appreciate it. St Luke's Evanston did note his 2005 passing in its newsletter.

It's also difficult to imagine that a hardscrabble place like Sun Valley, CA would have a TEC parish that was ultra-particular about its Anglo-Catholicsm. But the obituary mentions that "From 1977-1980, he was theological advisor to Canon Albert J. DuBois, Director of the American Church Union." This was the Anglo-Catholic dissenting group that issued its statement following the 1976 TEC General Convention, so that Brown would have been closely associated with DuBois and Barker during this period.

In fact, Brown's relative seniority and his history with the Archbishop of Canterbury and Paul VI suggest he might have had more credibility with the Vatican in 1977 than Barker, a hot-headed upstart. Even so, I can only theorize that by age 50, something had caused Fr Brown to be not the man he was at age 30 or age 40. The obituary continues,

Assigned to Saint Matthias Episcopal Church in Sun Valley in 1971, Father W.T. Brown served as pastor at Saint Matthias until 1986. In 1987, he moved to Palm Springs and began what was to be a brief “retirement.” He was received into the Catholic Church and subsequently ordained a Catholic priest on June 29, 1992, by Bishop Rene H. Gracida of the Diocese of Corpus Christi.

Not mentioned here is that St Matthias Sun Valley would have been one of the parishes in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles that left TEC in January 1977, so that Brown's position with that parish would have paralleled Barker's at St Mary's Hollywood -- after 1977, like Barker, he was rector of a parish without a denomination, without a diocese, and without a bishop. The two parishes were about 12 miles apart.

But something else doesn't fit: St Mary's Hollywood was at that time an upscale parish, drawing members from the prosperous Hancock Park and Hollywood Hills areas, unlike Sun Valley, where nearby communities were little better off. It's hard not to think Barker was the leader here, Brown the follower, and Barker's advice, wherever it came from (Stetson is a person of interest here) was not helpful to either priest or either parish.

The 1986 date for Brown's departure from St Matthias would have also been consistent with Cardinal Mahony's final rejection of the St Mary of the Angels application to go in as a diocesan parish in Los Angeles under the Pastoral Provision. St Matthias has subsequently dropped off the record completely.

Another parallel with Barker is that, following his departure from the breakaway TEC parish, Brown attended a seminary distant from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles -- in Barker's case, Menlo Park, CA; in Brown's case, Corpus Christi, TX. Both were ordained Catholic priests the same year. It's hard not to speculate that ordination under these circumstances, beyond Mahony's jurisdiction, must have been something arranged by Stetson-cum-Law as some sort of Plan B to make good on promises that were probably made to Brown and Barker 15 years earlier.

Brown, interestingly, was subsequently kept out of parish work in Corpus Christi. Per the obituary,

Father Brown served as Vice Rector and Spiritual Director of the diocesan House of Studies of the diocese, founded Saint Anselm Mission and acted as spiritual director for the local Newman Center, the Incarnate Word High School, and Incarnate Word Minor Seminary.

However, Brown reached the canonical retirement age of 75 in 1997 and moved to Palm Springs, CA. According to the obituary,

In 1997, 75-year-old Father William T. Brown began his “second retirement.” Again, he did not truly “retire,” but acted as supply priest to Saint Theresa Catholic Church, Palm Springs, “continuing his priestly ministry in surrounding parishes almost to the day he passed away, December 27, 2005,” as stated in his obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

Before moving to St Martha's in Murrieta, Fr Barker was Pastor of St Francis of Assisi, La Quinta in the Palm Springs area from 1994, so he would have reconnected with Fr Brown. In fact, following his own retirement, Fr Tea, formerly of the St Mary's Las Vegas Pastoral Provision parish, one of the original parishes to enter in 1984, moved to the Cathedral City, CA area near Palm Springs, and Fr Barker officiated at his funeral mass.

I can only assume the three men were close.

Fr Barker And The St Mary's Exit From TEC

Information on Fr Barker's career as an Episcopalian priest is sketchy, and in fact, it was pretty brief. A thumbnail provided with one version of his history of the Pastoral Provision says he was ordained in TEC in 1970; elsewhere, information suggests he graduated from UCLA in physics and mathematics and worked in the NASA space program for several years before ordination in TEC. Apparently St Mary of the Angels was his first and only TEC assignment -- if anyone can corroborate or correct this, I'll appreciate it.

He was hired as a curate (a fancy word for associate) under the second rector, Fr James Jordan. Fr Jordan suddenly passed away in 1971, and the version I heard from Fr Kelley was that the vestry, deeply suspicious of the Episcopal diocese, chose not to perform a formal search for a successor and instead immediately hired Fr Barker as rector, though he'd been a priest for only a year. Just five years later, Barker became intensely involved in conservative dissent from the agenda at the 1976 TEC General Convention. I find it somewhat disturbing that Barker was by no means a senior figure in TEC at the time.

In early November 1976, he issued a lengthy statement on behalf of the conservative dissidents in his capacity as chairman of the American Church Union's Planning and Policy Committee. The statement said that, among many other things, The Council of the American Church Union

absolutely rejects the Minneapolis General Convention's Canonical changes authorizing the ordination of women to the episcopate and priesthood, because General Convention is incompetent to legislate on matters of Apostolic Faith and Order.

The history linked in the first paragraph above says the next move was that

Four parishes in the Los Angeles Diocese and one in Las Vegas all left on the same Sunday in January 1977.

The lead in this case was St Mary of the Angels, which "left" TEC by revising its corporate bylaws to remove any mention of the national body or the local diocese. This almost immediately prompted the first round of litigation. Neither Fr Barker nor Msgr Stetson in any of their various accounts mentions any contact between Fr Barker or the American Church Union with any Catholic authority or representative. Instead, the first we hear from anyone about such things is from Fr Barker's account above:

The group’s leader, Canon DuBois, was invited to Rome, but he suffered a heart attack and was unable to travel. Father Brown and I went in November 1977 in his stead to meet with Cardinal Seper at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

So, who set up the November 1977 meeting with Cardinal Seper? Just wondering -- if I'm a priest in any denomination, how do you suppose I might be able to get to Rome and meet Cardinal Ladaria? Do I just ring up his secretary and ask if he's got time on his calendar next Tuesday? Clearly not. So I wonder, how long did it really take to set up this meeting? Who talked to whom? Who vouched for whom? Who decided this would be an OK thing to do? Nothing's been said, and likely nothing ever will be.

Did anyone from the American Church Union signal to anyone in the Catholic hierarchy what they might have in mind following the 1976 TEC General Convention? Did anyone from the Catholic side float a potential plan for what might be done for the dissidents?

Was the simultaneous departure of the five parishes in 1977 coordinated or discussed with anyone from the Catholic side? Certainly the Las Vegas parish, or its successor, did eventually go into the Pastoral Provision seven years later.

After reflecting on these questions overnight, here's my current thinking:

• Exactly who spoke to whom in 1976-77 is almost certainly covered by Vatican secrecy and will never be known, unless some lightweight like Taylor Marshall can get Stetson talking about himself, and he'll let something loose.
• Stetson spent time in Rome at the Villa Tevere in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At the same time, Bernard Law was in seminary and doing early parish work in Mississippi. But we know they maintained their Adams House relationship, and it seems as though Stetson was building networks in Rome, while Law was rising in the esteem of the USCCB.
• This could have allowed them to work as a tag team, with Law working proposals through the USCCB while Stetson used his Vatican contacts (Pope Francis himself has referred to a gay mafia) to get approvals and set up meetings.

To what end? This is still part of the mystery. Apostolicae Curae settled the question of Anglican orders in 1896, and it certainly got a prior generation of Anglicans like Kinsman and Knox to serious up about Anglo-Catholicism. The path for reception into the Church and possible ordination as Catholic priests for Anglicans remained the same in 1960. A faint but worthwhile thread of opinion has been that both the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus are a back-gate way of relaxing Apostolicae Curae and making it a little easier to bring Protestant syncretism into the Church.

It's worth noting that, although back-channel and still-confidential discussions with dissident Episcopalians like Barker and Brown likely took place between 1976 and 1978, no real progress could be made until Pope John Paul II arrived later in 1978. Paul VI, I'm gradually learning, was no friend of Opus Dei. (I think that, like Leo XIII, Paul VI is underrated.) John Paul II was much more favorable to Opus Dei and somewhat more favorable to Anglican initiatives.

Did the impetus for Anglican outreach in fact come from Josemaría Escrivá? There's a whole page on the Opus Dei site about the time Escrivá spent in England.

More On Adams House

From a piece in a 2011 Harvard Magazine:

IN THE FALL of 1973, Robert J. Kiely ’60, his wife, Jana, and their three young children moved into Adams House, and he began a 26-year tenure as master. Now Loker professor of English emeritus, Kiely was asked by the Adams House alumni magazine, the Gold Coaster, to write a recollection of those years. He gave Primus a look.

“Early on I was informed that Adams House had traditions and what some thought of as anti-traditions, things that Adamsians did not do, such as lock entry-doors…or wear bathing suits in the swimming pool.” Among the many traditions he recalls is the reading of a chapter from Winnie the Pooh at the Winter Feast. “Students and members of the Senior Common Room, solemn and unsmiling in formal dress, paraded into the Dining Hall, sat on stools, and gave a dramatic reading of ‘Expotition to the North Pole’ or ‘Pooh Sticks.’”

Kiely cites a transformative event in his first decade that “changed (for the better) life in the House for years to come.” It “began one lunchtime when a small group of students I thought I knew well joined me. When others at the table left, they began a bit shyly to explain that they were gay and hoped to form a student organization that would be recognized by the College and could hold meetings in Adams House. When they asked me to be one of their faculty advisers, I was deeply touched by their trust. (We have to try to remember that in the Harvard of that time, homosexuality was not part of the public conversation. When mentioned, it was either on the sly or with embarrassment. I recall a dean telling me that he had heard there were gay students at Adams and wondered if I wanted him to ‘do something about it.’ I told him that I never asked students about their sexual orientation and, in any case, I did not want anything to be ‘done about it.’)

According to Wikipedia,

Before Harvard College opted to use a system of randomization to assign living quarters to upperclassmen, students were allowed to list housing preferences, which led to the congregation of like-minded individuals at various Houses. . . . Later, under the aegis of Masters Bob and Jana Kiely (1972–1999) Adams became an artistic and literary haven; during this period, Adams also became widely regarded as the most gay-friendly house, in an era before equal rights for people of different sexual orientations were even considered a viable alternative at Harvard. . . . The House has continued to uphold its most beloved traditions, including Halloween's Drag Night and Masquerade; a Winter Feast, which features a black-tie reading of Winnie-the-Pooh; house formals; and Masters' Teas that are well known throughout the University. House events, including Carpe Noctem, are coordinated weekly by the Adams House Committee.

However, Tom Lehrer had suggested by the 1945 date of this tune that different sexual orientation was a viable alternative at Harvard much earlier.

Some Minor Mysteries And A Bigger One

The more I follow recent leads, the more I think we're getting into literary territory somewhere between George Eliot and John le Carré. The mystery at the heart of Middlemarch resonates across a social tapestry. The mysteries in le Carré are boondoggles created by self-perpetuating deep-state bureaucracies. I think we're dealing with a little of both here, with some Hollywood thrown in. But our forebears include Chesterton and Ronald Knox, though also Raymond Chandler and even Charles Bukowski, so let's push on. (Bukowski, by the way, is buried in a Catholic cemetery.)

Msgr Stetson is a puzzling figure. For someone centrally involved in a highly secretive enterprise, he himself has actually gone out of his way to create a flamboyant legend of his time at Harvard. The Gueguen Early Days at Harvard document linked here a few days ago is intriguing. John Gueguen is an Opus Dei numerary (I must assume from context; more in accordance with Opus Dei style than Stetson, he does not out himself) who went to Notre Dame, later taught there, and in 1970 received a PhD from the University of Chicago. He was instrumental in founding Opus Dei centers in South Bend and Chicago, which I assume is how he became connected with Stetson.

Gueguen himself never went near Harvard, as far as I can tell, but he wrote several hundred pages about Stetson, Law, and prominent Opus Dei members there in the 1950s. Much of the material is footnoted as oral history provided by Stetson. Among the details of Stetson's life given in the Gueguen history are that he drove a Buick and lived in Adams House, which Wikipedia describes as a complex of "Gold Coast" luxury residences for wealthy students.

Another detail is that Stetson took a few companions on a road trip, presumably in the Buick, to visit his family in Greenfield, MA. So OK, this is information Stetson has made public about himself. This allows me to search other public records, including census and city directory information available via Ancestry.com, and from it, I find that William H Stetson Jr, born 1931, was the only son of William Stetson Sr, a plumber, and Irene Stetson, a utility company cashier, who according to the 1940 census lived in rented accommodations in Greenfield. Stetson's paternal grandmother lived with the family. Stetson's parents were eventually interred in a nearby Catholic cemetery, which suggests this was a Catholic family.

So this was by all indications a mildly prosperous blue-collar Catholic family. What was Stetson doing at Harvard, and not just Harvard, but driving a Buick and living at Adams House? Or maybe he wasn't exactly driving a Buick and living at Adams House, and this is just flamboyant legend. For that matter, I have a distinct memory that Stetson told at least some listeners when he was at a meeting at St Mary's in 2011 that he was involved in Anglicanorum coetibus because he came from an Episcopalian family. I'm trying to follow up with other sources who may have heard this as well. As far as I can see, his background is blue-collar Catholic, but somehow an undergraduate Buick and Adams House at Harvard are involved. What would have been wrong with UMass Amherst, for that matter?

If the stuff about the Harvard lifestyle is true, how did his parents afford it? A scholarship would be credible, but Adams House and the Buick are beyond even that. George Eliot, are you listening?

But here's the bigger mystery, tied in some ways to the minor ones. How in fact did Law and Stetson get involved in this whole decades-long Anglican boondoggle? John L Allen, Jr in Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church says:

Another cardinal with historical ties to Opus Dei is the former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, currently archpriest of St Mary Major in Rome. Law met Opus Dei while a student at Harvard in the 1950s, when an early group of members came to the campus from Spain. Law, born in Mexico, spoke Spanish fluently and befriended them. When he left Harvard in 1953, he asked a friend, William Stetson, to keep an eye on the Spaniards. Stetson went on to become a priest of Opus Dei, living for a period at Villa Tevere in Rome, then serving as vicar in Chicago. . . . Stetson and Law have remained friends, and when Law was designated by the Vatican to handle cases of Episcopalian clergy who wish to be received in the Catholic Church, Stetson served as his aide.

Stetson himself in his History of the Pastoral Provision mentions feelers from The American Church Union and the Society of the Holy Cross toward ordaining married Episcopalian priests in the Catholic Church during 1976-77, but this is in an entirely procedural context. He mentions in passing a 1977 trip to Rome by former Episcopal priests Fr W.T. St. John Brown and Fr John Barker, then of St Mary's Hollywood, to meet with the CDF.

However, it was not until 1978 that the USCCB voted to allow ordination of married men to the priesthood under those special circumstances, and it was not until 1980, two popes later, that Bp Law was specifically designated to develop the Pastoral Provision. As a result, we still know almost nothing about what kind of discussions took place in particular between Fr Barker in Hollywood and Bp Law in Missouri. But Barker took St Mary of the Angels out of TEC in early 1977, before the Congress of St Louis, and during and after the Congress, he was, by his account, serving as an intermediary between Rome and the very small number of Rome-leaning TEC dissidents.

Whatever was going on, as far as I can see, it had to have gone back before 1977. When did Fr Barker start talking to Catholics, exactly? Who were those Catholics? How did those contacts begin? Was Stetson involved? Where, in fact, was Stetson in 1976-77? How did this relate to the idea that Barker could take St Mary's Hollywood out of TEC? What sort of completely unauthorized promises were made or hinted at?

Raymond Chandler, are you listening?

UPDATE: Lists of famous Adams House residents also routinely include Bernard Law. This official Adams House page notes the opinion of the Harvard Crimson from 1949, roughly when Stetson arrived at Harvard:

Socially, Adams men are above par. They wear their share of dirty white shoes and striped ties, and drink brandy or sherry freely. The house’s dignified yet comfortable atmosphere is well-suited to impress a date.

"Above par" means above par for Harvard, which we've already seen was a snobby place for people like Ted Kaczynski just a few years later. How did Stetson wind up there? Who bankrolled it?

More On The Stetson Timeline

Further web searches bring this out: William Stetson is mentioned several times in Chicago media over the reopening of the St Mary of the Angels parish there under the Opus Dei prelature. This 1991 Chicago Tribune story provides background:

When Rev. William Stetson arrived in Chicago in 1983 to head Opus Dei`s Midwest office, he recalled: ``I spoke to Cardinal Bernardin about the possibility of providing a couple of priests to run an inner-city parish when the time was right.``

Apparently, Bernardin has decided that time has come. On Jan. 1, Twist and Debicki went on the archdiocesan payroll for an initial three-year assignment at St. Mary of the Angels.

Bernardin did not issue a statement with his appointment, which was announced on Dec. 28. But Sister Joy Clough, archdiocesan director of public information, said the decision was supported by the nine-member archdiocesan Priest Personnel Board, as well as by parishioners at the church.

``Given the shortage of priests in the archdiocese, the current needs of this parish and the willingness and ability of Opus Dei to take on the challenge involved, the cardinal decided this was an appropriate action,`` she said. ``It was difficult to find anyone else for this parish.``

She noted that Twist, 44, and Debicki, 52, speak Spanish, and that Debicki also speaks Polish.

Nonetheless, the appointments are being questioned privately by a number of Chicago priests who said they were shocked by them. And Monsignor John Egan, a former archdiocesan official who is now assistant to the president for community affairs at De Paul University, was outspoken in his opposition.

According to the timeline given in Stetson's Wikipedia entry, which says he was the Chicago vicar for 17 years, this would put him in Chicago between 1983 and 2000.

So here's the timeline we have:

• 1952-53: Stetson is recruited for Opus Dei as a Harvard student by Bernard Law
• 1953: Stetson joins Opus Dei as a numerary member
• 1957: Stetson graduates from Harvard Law School and moves to Rome to study at the Roman College of the Holy Cross, in effect the Opus Dei seminary
• 1962: Stetson is ordained a priest in Opus Dei
• 1960s (presumably): teaches on the faculty of Canon Law at the University of Navarre, the Opus Dei university
• 1960s-1983: so far, a blank
• 1983-2000: Vicar for the Opus Dei Midwest office in Chicago
• 1983-2011: Consultant and then Secretary to the Delegate for the Pastoral Provision.
• 2004-2007: Director of the of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC
• 2007-2010 Operates Pastoral Provision office at Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston
• 2009: Stetson appears with Abp Myers of Newark on an EWTN program regarding Opus Dei
• 2011: Moves to Los Angeles and briefly supervises the abortive move of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish into the OCSP.

The job of Secretary to the Pastoral Provision seems to have been part-time, although there are periods where that was all he was doing. According to Wikipedia,

The number of personal parishes established is only 7, but, since 1983 over 80 former Anglicans have been ordained for priestly ministry in various Catholic dioceses of the United States.

So Stetson had about 28 years in his role as consultant and Secretary to the Pastoral Provision. This means that between three and four former Anglican priests per year were ordained Catholic on his watch. One parish came in about every four years. Even as a part time effort, this isn't much of a record.

So far, we still don't know exactly where he was or what he was doing for a roughly 20-year period between 1962 and 1983, and in particular, what role he may have played in the early stages of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood debacle. I suspect Fr Barker will never be of much help.

More Context For Msgr Stetson's Career

William Stetson is an important topic for this blog, since he was assigned directly to supervise the St Mary of the Angels parish transition into the OCSP in 2011-12. Less clear is his role in encouraging Fr Barker to take the parish out of TEC in 1976-78, but Barker's own account cites Bernard Law's role, and we must assume that during this period, Stetson was transitioning into his later job of Secretary for the Pastoral Provision under Law. Any information visitors may be able to find on Stetson's role in the earlier period, or indeed in facilitating the 1993 meeting between Jeffrey Steenson and Cardinal Ratzinger, will be most welcome.

We first encountered Msgr Stetson here in 2013, when I discussed the statement he made to a parish meeting in late 2011 that he "didn't check passports at the communion rail", which many took to mean that he would handle the question of what kind of pastoral care could be given to members of the parish who did not become Catholic at the time of the transition by ignoring it.

Knowledgeable visitors immediately brought up actual Catholic doctrine, which simply says that non-Catholics who have not been properly received into the Church via the sacraments are not eligible for Catholic communion. In fact, it would be a violation of canon law for Stetson to offer it to people he knew to be non-Catholics. The more I learn about Stetson, the more this episode strikes me as important.

Stetson's Wikipedia entry mentions that he was vicar of the Opus Dei operation in Chicago for 17 years, and in that time Opus Dei took over the St Mary of the Angels parish there. A visitor points out that this Chicago parish was in fact the first Opus Dei parish in the US, and at least according to the visitor, Cardinal Bernardin was the one who approved it. However, Bernardin was Archbishop of Chicago from 1982-1996, which may be a little late for this chronology -- any help from other visitors will be appreciated. However, Bernardin is regarded as a major liberal and apparently at least a tacit supporter of the gay agenda in the Church; that he would allow an Opus Dei parish under Stetson suggests he never saw either as a threat.

Following Cardinal Law's departure for Rome in 2002, he was succeeded by John Myers, Archbishop of Newark, as Delegate for the Pastoral Provision. Stetson continued to work for Myers as Secretary. Myers is a member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, an association of diocesan clergy associated with Opus Dei, and, although a conservative, is rumored to be gay. Myers, according to this visitor, took care of the settlements concerning Cardinal McCarrick's time in Newark.

According to his Wikipedia entry,

Msgr. Stetson was appointed Director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC, by Theodore Cardinal McCarrick in 2004. He succeeded Fr. C. John McCloskey who had been director since 1998. The operation of the Center has been entrusted to priests of the Prelature of Opus Dei since 1993. In fall of 2007, Msgr. Stetson left as head of the Catholic Information Center.

So there seem to be connections with gay, gay-tolerant, or gay-friendly bishops, two of whom became subjects of major scandal, throughout Stetson's career, while Stetson himself seems to have viewed matters of canon law with considerable flexibility whenever it suited him. Theological liberalism or conservatism seems to have been at best a secondary matter throughout the recent history of the Catholic Church in the US.

My visitor speculates, "I think that McCarrick was OD-friendly because they had dirt on him. I even wonder if OD started this McCarrick thing to bring down Francis." In the current atmosphere of crisis, of course, anything could be the case. Elsewhere I saw someone try to parse the crisis as entirely an issue of Opus Dei vs Jesuits -- they are, it seems, traditional enemies. In that case, as Henry Kissinger remarked in a different context, it's too bad they can't both lose.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to keep Opus Dei as a force in the world in perspective. If we establish 1960 as a rough point at which the prelature began to plant numeraries in influential careers to forward a Catholic agenda, we've seen:

• Abolition of prayer in state schools
• Universally legalized contraception
• Universal adoption in the US of no-fault divorce
• Legalized abortion
• Mainstreamed gay culture
• Legalization of same-sex marriage in the US
• The rise of militant Islam as an enemy of the Church
• Substantial progress toward legalized euthanasia in the US.

If Opus Dei was set up as an attempt to forestall any of these things, we can get a good idea of its success. Stetson himself, apparently a trusted operative who functioned at a high level, continues to strike me as a bungler. If he was tasked with bringing the St Mary of the Angels parish in Hollywood into the Church, it must have been seen as an important task -- he failed at it utterly. Darth Vader would not have been amused.