An extended exchange between James Henry Schweiter Lowe and Christian Clay Columba Campbell ensues, which touches on the issue that Fr Phillips was "involuntarily retired", although they "never told us the full story and actual reasons".
I think there were plenty of public reasons. When Abp Garcia-Siller removed him as pastor, he said it was because the OLA parish, under the Pastoral Provision, had become "not just unique but separate" from the archdiocese, an attitude that continues to seep out in ordinariate-related discussion threads, not excepting this one.
Beyond that, the archdiocese listed Phillips's deacon at OLA, James Orr, among clergy credibly accused of sexual abuse. The specific allegations involved dated from the 1990s, but complaints against Orr, such as kissing pubescent boys on the lips, were reported to me from much more recent years, with the assertion that when they were made to Phillips, he discounted them and took no action.
In other words, Phillips had been enabling and covering up abuse by Orr for at least 20 years. In fact, the parish and school probably could not have operated without Orr, based on accounts I've heard. Up to the time of Orr's death, Phillips continued a strange relationship with him, allowing him on parish property in spite of a ban and taking him on at least one pilgrimage.
Other reports indicate that Phillips cut financial corners, setting up parish accounts outside archdiocesan supervision (from which he apparently paid Orr) and other irregularities in areas like the bishop's appeal.
If Houston ever seeks to engage a church consultant, a worthwhile question would be why Our Lady of the Atonement is the only parish in either the Pastoral Provision or an ordinariate ever to grow de novo into a full Catholic parish with a school. Efforts to send Fr Phillips to other ordinariate communities following his retirement have not resulted in a reproducible formula, and in fact the few bits of advice he's given that have reached me involve things like tips on how to spoof building inspectors.
That the Phillips formula at Our Lady of the Atonement has so far not been reproducible should be deeply troubling.
My own view is that Fr Phillips is largely just an opportunist and a charlatan. That he should continue as some sort of eminence grise among the lay wannabes in the forums and elsewhere says a great deal about the whole Anglicanorum coetibus movement. Why has no stronger leader come along? Why is no younger successor rising in the ranks? Just yesterday Mrs Gyapong announced a forthcoming conference to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus
Our keynote speaker is Fr Christopher Phillips, the first Catholic priest in the world dedicated to an Anglican patrimonial form of liturgy and the founding pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, Texas. He will be joined by other speakers, including respected Canadian Catholic writer David Warren, who has written at times about “things I miss from my Anglican days”.It's worth looking back, in fact, to the runup to the establishment of the North American ordinariate, when Fr Phillips was a cheerleader who keynoted gatherings at places like St Mary of the Angels Hollywood -- that is, before St Mary of the Angels failed to go in and Fr Phillips himself held Our Lady of the Atonement out, until Abp Garcia-Siller removed him and he had no choice but to go in.
I was thinking just the other day that back in 2011-12, many of us thought Anglicanorum coetibus was a good idea because Fr Phillips said it was -- and we weren't sure quite who Fr Phillips was, of course, but he must have been an important guy.
Some of us are ten years older. Some apparently aren't.
UPDATE: My regular correspondent comments,
Contra the last sentence of your penultimate paragraph, I think Fr Phillips had decided to enter the OCSP before Abp G-S went so far as to remove him. I think that is the obvious reading of “not just unique but separate.” But I now concede that Fr Phillips’ decision to take OLA into the Ordinariate must have been made ahead of some kind of threatened intervention on the part of the archbishop, if not one as drastic as removal from the parish. I have accused Abp G-S of being an enabler as long as OLA and the Academy were contributing to the diocesan coffers, but that does not explain why Fr Phillips woke up one day and decided to join the Ordinariate in the first place. More likely, the Deacon Orr situation and perhaps other instances of Fr Phillips's financial hanky-panky were becoming hard to ignore and Fr Phillips hoped to avoid diocesan reckoning by switching jurisdictions. His immediate sidelining, albeit without the disciplinary language employed by Abp G-S, suggests that whatever it was it was too egregious for Bp Lopes to ignore, whatever Fr Phillips might have hoped in jumping ship.
