On the other hand, Msgr Stetson, a priest of Opus Dei who apparently came in at the numerary level before he was ordained, is a key figure in this story, and whether or not it's a coincidence, the only personal prelatures that now exist in the Catholic Church are the Anglican ordinariates and Opus Dei, so I can't ignore the subject altogether. I do think the record we have on Msgr Stetson suggests that if Opus Dei is working with the Illuminati to run the world, it isn't doing a very good job.
A visitor corrected me on one point: I'd surmised that Fr Phillips retained his position at Our Lady of the Atonement despite friction with the Archdiocese of San Antonio due to protection from Msgr Stetson as the Secretary to the Pastoral Provision. It turns out, according to this visitor, that Phillips and Stetson hated each other and never tried to disguise that. Yet Our Lady of the Atonement and Fr Phillips were by far the most prominent and successful examples of the Pastoral Provision, and Fr Phillips was by far the most prestigious Catholic Anglican celebrating Anglicanorum coetibus, at least, that is, until he wasn't.
Did the Illuminati bungle this, or were they on break?
Or let's look at this passage from Fr Barker's history of the Pastoral Provision linked yesterday:
In an attempt to proceed in a uniform way with the implementation of the pastoral provision, each of the diocesan bishops who were scheduled to have pastoral provision parishes at that time, met with Bishop Law. Present at this meeting, which was held at the home of the bishop of Reno-Las Vegas, Nevada, on 4 July 1983 were: Bishop John Ward representing Cardinal Manning and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Bishop MacFarland for Nevada, Archbishop Patricio Pores for San Antonio and Bishop Law. Bishop Ward’s presence at this meeting indicated a continuing willingness on the part of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to consider the implementation of the pastoral provision for the two parishes which had made such a request. However, both Bishop Law and the Ecumenical Relations Committee of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had made it clear that sensitivity to ecumenical relations would be paramount in the carrying out of the pastoral provision. It is well to note that the ecumenical relations committee was adamantly opposed to the erection of a pastoral provision parish. It has been subsequently demonstrated that this policy has perdured in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for no parish of the pastoral provision has ever been erected for that area despite the fact that the group of laity there was the largest of any of those in the nation which had been received in other dioceses. It was in October 1984 that Bishop Ward, in behalf of cardinal Manning, reported to PDSAC clergy in Los Angeles that no parish of the pastoral provision would be allowed in the archdiocese and that both clergy and laity would have to be received into the Catholic Church on a strictly individual basis through their local latin rite parish. Meanwhile, dates were set for the first ordinations and establishment of parishes in various dioceses. They were as follows: 15 August 1983, Fr. Christopher Phillips and Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, Texas; 10 September 1983, Fr. Clark A. Tea and St. Mary the Virgin, Las Vegas, Nevada; 25 February 1984. Fr. Joseph Frazer and St. Margaret of Scotland, Austin, Texas; 7 April 1984, Fr. James Moore and Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston, Texas: 13 April 1984, Fr. David Ladkau and Good Shepherd, Columbia, South Carolina.Although Msgr Stetson's name isn't mentioned, he was either the "consultant" or the full-blown Secretary to the Pastoral Provision at the time, and it would have been his responsibility actually to implement Law's vision. Somehow, as Fr Barker puts it, although "the group of laity there was the largest of any", the Anglican Catholics in Los Angeles couldn't make it in. The reason expressed by Cardinal Manning in this account was an unwillingness to disrupt relations with TEC, but significantly, Manning's successor, Cardinal Mahony, referred to an unwillingness by the St Mary of the Angels parish to accept ecclesiastical authority as a reason not to receive it.
The record of Fr Barker's repeated trips to Chicago, Rome, and wherever else in preceding years must have figured in Mahony's deliberations. Stetson must have been the guy who facilitated all of this. In fact, the clear circumspection with which he managed Jeffrey Steenson's negotiations with the CDF and his transition from TEC to Rome under the Pastoral Provision probably reflects what minimal lessons Stetson must have learned from the St Mary of the Angels debacle in the 1970s and 80s.
The list of the first Pastoral Provision parishes received in 1983-4 is also significant: of those, only OLA and OLW survived, and they remained the most prominent of the small number that were admitted over the next 30 years. As it happens, Msgr Stetson has left his own synoptic account of Pastoral Provision history, and he concludes,
How might we assess the success of the Pastoral Provision after its 25 year History? The answer is quite well, according to a survey of Catholic Bishops and former Episcopal priests, done at the request of Cardinal Law two years ago.Well, if this is the best Opus Dei can manage in running the world, I'm not too worried about either it or the Illuminati. By the same token, the more I learn, the more I'm confirmed in my view that Msgr Stetson, despite his Harvard credentials, has been a bungler. A question worth pursuing might be whether a more skillful individual could have made the St Mary of the Angels story turn out differently, but we're in alternate universe territory here. If someone other than Jefferson Davis had been in charge, could the outcome for the Confederacy have been different?
