I do think it's worth discussing as indicative of Steenson's state of mind in the years just before he resigned as Episcopalian Bishop of the Rio Grande. The vacillation is apparent, but it's worth noting that, first, he did allow himself to be elected a bishop, and second, resigned only when he'd reached the age where he'd be fully eligible for an early retirement pension, the amount of which would presumably be calculated based in part on the salary he'd received as a bishop. His scruple, we may infer, extended only so far.
Here;s what he said at the start of the essay:
Let me begin with a personal reflection. A year ago I was elected to be the bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of the Rio Grande, the 1000th bishop in the Episcopal Church's history. God being my witness, I can honestly say this was not an appointment I sought or expected; I had a somewhat negative assessment about whether North American Anglicanism could legitimately claim to be part of Catholic Christianity. I suppose that I was identifying with Jonah, who was encamped in the desert outside Ninevah in anticipation that God's judgment was about to fall upon the city. But it seems that I too was called to go in to the city, and so I went forth with a trembling heart.But of course, with a trembling heart, he allowed those episcopal paychecks to keep coming into his account, notwithstanding the secret 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger. But he then moved on to discuss, in somewhat pedantic detail, the history of Donatists and Augustine's arguments against them.
Augustine emphasized that the Church on earth remains a work in progress, a necessarily imperfect reflection of the perfect Church in heaven. It is in the process of coming to be, and it will only realize perfection at the Second Coming of Christ. I like the way the saintly Fr. Robert Crouse puts it: "the present and future church, not as two churches, but as two moments in one and the same church."' The Donatist church by contrast was marked by an urgency to get things sorted out and by an anxiety that the true Christians would be contaminated, defiled, if within the Church they were to be in contact with the wicked.But then he moves to the major contradiction in his position, to which he proposes a Burkean solution:
The Catholicism of Augustine's day is not the Catholicism of our own. We are living in a divided Christian world where the divisions have become an accepted feature. Roman Catholic apologists see us Anglicans as Donatist-like, and so they would say that our situation today is about Donatists contending with Donatists. The horse is already out of the barn, so to speak, and further divisions are to be expected. Augustine's Catholic Church by contrast, even accounting for its idealization by later generations, was clearer about its unifying principles, including the conviction that the primacy of St. Peter continued to find its expression in his successors as Bishop of Rome. Is the imperative of maintaining the Anglican Communion's unity of the same magnitude as maintaining Catholic unity in Augustine's day? Would separation today represent a similar sin against charity? Or should we see this as a realignment with the Christian mainstream whose ultimate purpose is greater Christian unity?In effect, he's saying that we're in a different world with lots of schismatic denominations, but a good Burkean would say that's now the tradition, and we should sorta-kinda stick with just the ones we have as of now and not make new \ones, because that would be icky or something. And he then moves to argue from the Book of Common Prayer, "a liturgical space to gather and hold a doctrinally diverse community". And as well,
. . . the discipline of living in a "national" church, where the determination about who is in and who is out is not a matter for individuals or special interest groups to decide. Related to this is the responsibility delegated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, both in English law and in the nascent polity of the Anglican Communion, to determine the boundaries of communion, chiefly through the composition of the Lambeth Conferences.But of course, he's addressing a US and Canadian audience, where the Church of England is not established as a "national" church, so this argument veers into incoherence. I much prefer Episcopal Bishop Bruno's much simpler and more succinct defense of Robinson's consecration: it was licit under canon law and conducted with full transparency.
Steenson also argues from the XXXIX Articles, in particular Article XXVI, "Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacraments". The biggest problem, of which he must surely have been aware, was that the 1979 BCP placed them in the "Historical Documents of the Church", which distanced the modern TEC from them, so on one hand, they are no longer strictly binding, but on the other, they are specifically Protestant-Reformed, so that Steenson is back in the dilemma of using a Catholic argument against schism with a Protestant audience made up of schismatics themselves. Indeed, without irony, he quotes a Catholic on this subject:
In the famous words of Ronald Knox, "Almost always schism begets schism; once the instinct of discipline is lost, the movement breeds rival prophets and rival coteries, at the peril of its internal unity."Steenson's somewhat muddled and vacillating positions in this essay are reflected in many other public and private statements in the years he continued to rise in The Episcopal Church. This official history of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande reflects the overall sense of betrayal felt there concerning his stewardship:
There was great hope that his “kinder and gentler” conservative style would usher in an era in which differing perspectives would be respected, while at the same time honoring the generally traditional character of the Diocese. For all of these reasons, Bishop Steenson’s decision to resign as Bishop, renounce his orders in The Episcopal Church, and seek priestly ordination in the Roman Catholic Church, was greeted with a mixture of sympathy, consternation, and anger.There are other indications of his uncertainty -- indeed, muddleheadedness -- over his beliefs throughout his later Episcopalian career, which i'll cover here over the next several days. While Steenson is retired as ordinary after a tenure not much longer than his time as a TEC bishop, I think these examples raise serious questions about the planning and preparation that took place in Rome in the runup to Anglicanorum coetibus.Both prior to and following his departure on December 1, 2007, people struggled to deal with this unanticipated and unwelcome turn of events. For some, his action, though understandable given Steenson’s concerns about the direction of the national church, was viewed as a repudiation of their own beliefs. Others were angry that he had allowed his name to be placed in nomination for Bishop, given his own ecclesial uncertainty. Still others wondered whether the direction in which he had begun to take the Diocese would continue.
