I'm Still Looking For That Joke That Starts, "So This Catholic Convert Walks Into A Bar. . ."

because I'm convinced many of us are part of the punch line. Here are some factors that feed into my summertime thinking:

• The Roger Mahony conundrum. Mahony is one of the villains in Randy Engel's The Rite of Sodomy. He was certainly the patron for a number of unfortunate West Coast bishops, especially Bishop of Santa Rosa George Patrick Ziemann -- but Ziemann was eventually removed, and the current Bishop of Santa Rosa, Robert F. Vasa, is a conservative and an inspiring leadership figure. My wife and I were at a mass where he personally thanked first-responders during the 2017 Santa Rosa fires. The Church has a way of healing itself, it would seem. Beyond that, from the start, my position on this blog has been that Mahony was correct in denying the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood application to become a Pastoral Provision parish in the 1980s. And the biggest puzzle of all for me has been that capable men were ordained to the priesthood and promoted throughout his tenure as Archbishop of Los Angeles. Our parish would not have remained the successful one it is without that circumstance.
• A visitor very kindly sent me copies of B.C.Butler's The Church and Unity and The Idea of the Church, which I've been working my way through. Butler, himself an Anglican convert, works out in meticulous detail the nature of the Church and argues from that the nature of schism. He concludes that Anglicanism is a separate case from the Orthodox divide, and it is problematic in denying the authority of the pope. I think several things follow. One is that it's very sloppy, and in fact simply incorrect, somehow to think Anglicanism retained some sort of liturgical or doctrinal purity, from which modern Catholicism deviated. On that basis, the ordinariates are not another flavor of SSPX or a refuge from modernist heterodoxy, although some ordinariate priests seem to have built a following with that suggestion. What's the difference between Fr Hunwicke and Vaughn Treco, especially if people are insisting nothing objectively heretical can be found in Treco's infamous homily? Aren't we playing some dangerous games here?
• We have scriptural authority in the person of St Peter that popes are fallible men, sometimes impulsive, who are capable of putting their feet in their mouths. We have scriptural authority in the Council of Jerusalem that matters of doctrine have been controversial from the earliest days of the Church, and resolving those issues can be messy. We have scriptural authority in St Paul's circumcision of Timothy that apostles will act in seemingly inconsistent ways over doctrine. Clearly the Holy Spirit doesn't work in exactly the way any of us would like to fantasize.

I'll be taking a few days off from posting and will resume next week.