The visitor says, and commenters certainly agree, "It's still not clear which of his words or deeds rise to the level of excommunication." The only thing to add to that is Treco's own summary of his situation:
I have had the good fortune of wonderful canonical and superlative brother priestly council throughout this process. My canonical counsel has pursued all available recourse, and he has done it adroitly, promptly, and we have simply not heard anything from Bishop Lopes throughout this period. But the time frame in which a petition for hierarchical recourse gets a response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could be anywhere from a year to many years. And so, in a sense, what we have to do now is simply wait.I've certainly been in situations myself where an organization wasn't acting in the interests of justice, and I got the short end of the deal. I remember a situation were the manager, who was pretty clearly abusing drugs on the job, was having an affair with a subordinate, caught by a senior executive in flagrante, and both were on very shaky ground. The problem for them was that, if the organization removed them, it had at least a temporary stopgap in that I could have been put in temporary charge. and things would probably have run more smoothly.
So the pair's clear remedy was to get rid of me to prevent the organization having a good contingency. They fixed on a project I was working on, which had a plan that had been approved with milestones stretching out over a period of months. They began to agitate that a certain task, which according to the approved plan was not to be completed for some weeks, had not been completed. Of course it hadn't, the schedule, approved by the same pair, didn't call for it to be completed. But they were able to use the "uncompleted" project, with a lot of fuzzing and mumbo-jumbo, to get me out. This didn't save them; they were out anyway, but so was I.
One reason I went into high tech was that new jobs were easy to find, so I simply picked up and moved on. Whatever the justice or injustice of a particular situation, I really think that's about the only healthy response. It's hard to avoid a sense that whatever Treco may or may not have said in his homily, the focus was on Bp Lopes -- my tentative theory is that Treco had been rubbing people the wrong way in the Archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis by doing things like celebrating mass ad orientem in the hospital chapel, and the homily, whatever particular words were or weren't in it, was but part of a package, and that package in turn was part of a bigger one. Quite possibly Abp Hebda spoke to Bp Lopes via the CDF, and the outcome was foreordained.
There's another issue here that I think again is beyond Treco's control. A Catholic priest who's formed via seminary does field work and gets practical training before ordination as a deacon. After that, he's usually assigned to a parish as an associate and works under supervision. But the theory behind Anglicanorum coetibus seems to be that all "Anglican" pastoral experience is, first, interchangeable, and second, fully equivalent to Catholic formation, with only a bit of distance-learning touchup here and there.
But the best I can tell from the full text of the interview linked above, Treco had about two years experience as a priest in the Charismatic Episcopal Church between 1997 and when he became Catholic in 1999. His seminary formation was sporadic and desultory in various denominations over decades, never resulting in a divinity degree. Yet somehow, Houston thought it could send him out to Minnesota without, as far as I can see, any type of on-the-job mentoring, and without any sort of supervision. I suspect we simply don't know the full story here, and I suspect that "schism" and "heresy" are convenient ways for Bp Lopes to avoid other questions about how the whole situation could have potentially risen to the attention of someone like Abp Hebda.
I just don't think the homily was the real issue. Reading the full text of the interview, I do have questions about focus, discipline, and stability in Treco's case -- he seems throughout his life to go on reading jags, pursuing a certain direction, when something suddenly inspires him to go in another direction, and he pursues that intently until something else comes up. As best I can tell, he starts out as Plymouth Brethren until he becomes a Presbyterian until he discovers liturgy, which makes him an Episcopal seminarian until he finds out TEC has gone to the dogs and drops out of that, and then goes into the Charismatic Episcopal Church for all of two years, when he decides he has to resign and become Catholic.
Until, of course, after a few years as a priest he's discovered the Church has got it wrong. How would a diocesan vocation director or seminary rector have responded to this? What did Houston miss here, because just reading the text of the interview, it's hard to avoid thinking there was a lot for them to miss. I'm convinced the homily was, for Bp Lopes, the most convenient way to address a problem that was probably quite a bit bigger, and if the real problem came to light, the focus would be on someone other than poor Treco.
Who really needs to be looking at how to pick up and move on.
