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.