The exception to the general radio silence is Virtue Online, which carried a lengthy and generally complete story by Mary Ann Mueller on Tuesday. Before I go into that, I'll comment that the dog that isn't barking here is that so far, there seems to have been no "Save Atonement" parish rebellion of the sort that broke out over Abp Garcia-Siller's removal of Phillips in late 2016.
While Ms Mueller does her usual very conscientious job in reporting, a certain pro-Phillips bias does come out.
Fr. Phillip's [sic] lack of judgement may have been because through the years he and Deacon Orr became close friends. They worked together, they prayed together, and they labored together in Our Lady of Atonement's vineyard. This close relationship may have clouded Fr. Phillips' thinking and sacerdotal actions concerning the allegations leveled against his friend, the deacon.She goes on to put a similar soft focus on Abp Flores:
It was on Aug. 15, 1983 that Archbishop Flores ordained former Episcopal priest Christopher Phillips into the Roman Catholic priesthood, and a strong lasting spiritual relationship was cemented.The real villain here is Abp Garcia-Siller, who, the implication seems to be, made too big a deal out of one or two slips in judgment based on true spiritual friendship, which in any case are long in the past. She then speaks with someone close to the USCCB, who tells her,
[I]n today's #METOO climate, bishops are more than willing to throw a priest under the bus to avoid civil and criminal litigation.While Ms Mueller has the chronology generally correct, I think her interpretations lean toward sympathy for Fr Phillips that I don't think is justified. She places the Atonement parish decline beginning with Abp Garcia-Siller's removal of Fr Phillips in late 2016, but the accounts of several people familiar with the parish indicate that Phillips had chased away key donors and the school enrollment was declining for years before that time, and in fact while still under Fr Phillips, the school undertook an unjustified expansion for which construction was never completed.
The uncompleted interior remains a drain on morale and a fire and safety hazard, while the parish must still pay off loans for the ill-advised project. Personnel issues that began well before Fr Phillips's removal have continued to plague the organization.
And we simply don't know how many additional credible allegations were made against Dcn Orr, their exact nature, and exactly what Fr Phillips didn't report, when that was, and how many times. It's hard to avoid thinking that Abp Garcia-Siller had accumulated a backlog of concerns about Fr Phillips and the Atonement parish by 2016 and placed a new administrator there in an effort not just to avoid litigation but to turn the parish away from a course that was inevitably leading toward where it finds itself now, on the verge of bankruptcy with dwindling numbers.
Ms Mueller doesn't mention a troubling issue that's been covered here in some detail, the Our Lady's Dowry charity that was outside diocesan control and which appears to have operated in some years exclusively to pay Dcn Orr a substantial salary. A question remains whether Orr was paid as a deacon in the parish and a teacher in the school a salary in addition to the one from Our Lady's Dowry, which itself was generous for a man in his position.
That Orr lived in a house adjoining Fr Phillips's property suggests the relationship was close in ways beyond the spiritual, and the connection between the two seems to have been tangled. More than one visitor has suggested that by covering up for Dcn Orr and apparently by providing him with financial rewards beyond those normally paid to a vocational deacon, Phillips may have been responding to some sort of leverage Orr could exert. Exactly what Abp Garcia-Siller may have learned about Phillips, and what he may eventually have transmitted to Bp Lopes, we'll never know, but I think what's public is just the tip of an iceberg.
Since I broke the news of Fr Phillips's inhibition on Sunday, my traffic has more than doubled. My regular correspondent suggests this is because other outlets have provided no news at all, and I think Ms Mueller's analysis falls short, so people have had no choice but to come here. However, I think it says something about the growing maturity of the audience for Anglo-Catholic news that so far, there's been no "Save Atonement" movement to restore Fr Phillips equivalent to what took place in 2017.
I think Fr Phillips is a deeply flawed but charismatic figure, a minor league version of John Corapi or Fr C John McCloskey. Men like these develop a following because they tell people what they want to hear, although what people want to hear in these cases usually involves some way to bypass the teachings of the Church, and such figures prosper as a result. There's always a payoff.
Certainly naive but well-intentioned people have been led to believe there's something special about Fr Phillips, although what I've learned from numerous visitors here has been that the better people came to know him, the more disillusioned they became. The best solution, as a priest whom I've come to respect deeply said in Sunday's homily, is to pray for the grace that will let us realize the gifts of the Spirit we received in baptism, Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord.
Again, I think it says something about the people who've been following ordinariate news that Fr Phillips's inhibition in fact hasn't caused the level of hysteria that his removal incited even two years ago.
