Jeffrey Steenson And Women's Ordination

Tuesday's post covered a story at Virtue Online from 2006 on Jeffrey Steenson's address to the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande's annual convocation. It turns out that following that story, a priest of that diocese sent an e-mail to Virtue responding to the story. Virtue, although he didn't publish the e-mail, which didn't quite claim full confidentiality, did forward it to an unknown number of people, who forwarded it again. I received a copy from an individual who'd had it from one of the first group to whom Virtue forwarded it, who has since passed away.

Here's the meat:

In your report on Convocation, you wrote "Steenson, a traditionalist bishop who does not believe in the ordination of women. . ." That was his position.

In our wide-ranging discussion [at lunch], he told me that after coming to this diocese he had come to believe that women can be priests as he had seen priesthood in several of the women in this diocese. Maybe [Pennsylvania] didn't have many good examples for him? . . . So, +Jeffrey has personally received WO by faith while understanding that a reception process is still underway within the [Anglican Communion].

Please don't use that quoted statement anymore. +Jeffrey is as Orthodox as any of the other GS bishops that believe in WO and more patrisic than any of them by education and inclination. Do not expect him to abandon this stance for the AMiA or any other traditionalist group.

The context of the e-mail seems to have been that Steenson invited the priest to lunch, posing as the priest's friend and supporter, and in the course of a "wide-ranging discussion" unburdened himself more or less confidentially of his evolving position on women's ordination. This, of course, less than a year before he resigned as bishop to become a Catholic priest in a denomination that isn't even discerning women's ordination.

I'm not aware of any public reaction by this priest to Steenson's departure for Rome, though the impression I have from the e-mail is that the priest felt that he and Steenson were in agreement that whatever the battles that needed fighting within TEC, they were nevertheless post-2000 TEC to the core.

Even by 2012, four years after Steenson's departure, the sense of betrayal in the Diocese of the Rio Grande remained, as carried in this Virtue Online story:

The Rev. Jeffrey Steenson's announcement three years ago to step down as the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande to become a Catholic priest shocked and saddened many New Mexican Episcopalians.

Now many of those same people feel "betrayed" by Pope Benedict XVI's recent appointment of Steenson to head a special Roman Catholic diocese for disaffected Episcopalians.

Church leaders say the announcement reopened old wounds and created new ones among Episcopalians here.

"When he left (in 2007), it was painful, but we respected his decision," said the Rev. Daniel Gutierrez, canon to the ordinary for the 18,000-member Diocese of the Rio Grande. "But then for him to turn around and take this position and try to lure other priests is a betrayal."

The Rev. Michael Vono, Steenson's successor as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, said that sense of betrayal is particularly strong among gay and female priests in the diocese.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which bars women from the clergy, women can be ordained as Episcopal priests. Women comprise a "sizable" minority of the 180-member clergy in the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, he said.

Steenson "seemed to have no trouble working with women priests" during his three years as bishop, Vono said. "He was celebrating with women at the altars."

Steenson did not respond to messages left at his office at Our Lady of Walsingham Catholic Church Monday in Houston.

It's hard to avoid thinking that Cardinal Law and Jeffrey Steenson had at least one thing in common, an ability to project different things to different people. If Steenson could convince David Virtue that he opposed women's ordination, it's nevertheless worth pointing out that The Episcopal Church had approved this in 1976, before Steenson even went to seminary. This ought to have been a factor in his vocational discernment, or at least in his willingness to accept clerical jobs in TEC.

Yet on one hand, he posed as a center-right bishop who'd fight the good fight, while on the other assuring others privately that he was actually squishy on said fight, if that's what they wanted to hear. And then, when it suited him, he decamped for Rome.

I've got to wonder, once again, what the real reason was for that move.