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.