Fr Barker finesses his own 1977 futile and stupid gesture, in which he led a small group of dissident Episcopalian parishes out of TEC following the 1976 General Conventionm, in his latest account of himself at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog:
Following the Minneapolis General Convention of 1976 [Canon Albert DuBois] and Fathers Barker and Brown formed “Anglicans United” to lead the way in finding a new home for catholic minded Episcopalians.So naturally, the first thing you do in finding a new home is to make an impolite gesture to the landlord and just move out, living out of your car for the next several years while the landlord chases you down with process servers, is that it? I don't see any other way to extend that metaphor. Maybe it was a 70s thing, like disco or the Pinto.
It's also a little puzzling that, while he mentions Fr W T S Brown in passing, he doesn't mention Fr Tea by name at all, when Fr Tea was the only member of that group ever to become a Pastoral Provision priest, and indeed, while Fr Barker says of himself that he "went on to run Catholic Charities in Nevada for two years" (presumably after being terminated by the St Mary of the Angels vestry in 1986, according to its minutes), this would have been under the good offices of Fr Tea, who had become a Pastoral Provision priest in Las Vegas.
We must also assume Fr Tea was the priest who, by Fr Barker's account, received a small group of stalwarts from the St Mary of the Angels and St Matthias parishes into the Church after the 1986 fiasco, fully nine years after Fr Barker's futile and stupid gesture:
Finally in 1986 many members of St. Mary of the Angels together with 100% of St Matthias formed a new combined parish and where all were received into the Catholic Church at a single Mass celebrated by a Roman Catholic priest who was part of what was known then as the Pastoral Provision.I question the accuracy of this statement on several grounds, besides its pusillanimity in not mentioning Fr Tea. The implication that only a few members remained at St Mary of the Angels in 1986 is incorrect; its vestry was still in charge and was the body that fired Fr Barker, a fully justified move considering what he'd put the parish through with no result. In addition, the St Matthias parish remained in Sun Valley for about another 15 years as a "continuing" mission of the St Mary of the Angels parish, at the end of its existence under the ACA associate Fr Scott Kingsbury.
UPDATE: I'm told by Fr Kelley that the St Matthias TEC parish or mission (its exact status is unclear) in Sun Valley, CA was closed by the Diocese of Los Angeles when it won its legal action after 1977, and those members then went to St Mary of the Angels. A separate ACA mission, St Barnabas, was begun later in Sun Valley, but it is not clear if any original members of St Matthias ever joined the St Barnabas mission.
Unless someone can add additional information to correct me, neither a St Mary of the Angels rump nor the St Matthias mission actually became Catholic in any significant numbers in 1986. I think Fr Barker is trying to airbrush history here to make his position as a "pioneer of the Pastoral Provision" more significant than it was. The actual Pastoral Provision was not established until 1981, four years after Fr Barker's futile and stupid gesture, and the record of Barker himself and the St Mary of the Angels parish clearly made them unsuitable for admission to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles -- Abp Mahony's reply was characterized as "not just no, but hell, no".
How on earth was Fr Barker's version of a 1970s futile and stupid gesture in any way "catholic minded"? It owes much more to the James Pike-Edward Crowther Ich kann nicht anders school of Episcopalianism under which Barker received his early formation. Indeed, it owes something to the provocation Crowther staged to get himself thrown out of South Africa, in which a putative attempt to deliver relief supplies to homeless Africans did no good to the Africans themselves, but allowed Crowther to hitchhike on their victim status.
Barker pretty clearly misled an Episcopalian parish, convincing it it was somehow "catholic minded", and subjected it to nine years of division and trauma, in the end to be able to promote himself as some sort of pioneering hero. In a no-brainer, the Catholics saw right through it.
The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. not so much.
