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.