I say this because the more I look at the origins of Anglicanorum coetibus, the bigger the air of unreality that seems to surround it. Consider a major principle that governs the (largely theoretical) admission of existing Anglican parishes into the ordinariate. Such a parish must have no litigation associated with it. But we know from more than four decades of experience that The Episcopal Church does not allow existing parishes to leave the denomination with their property or endowment without litigation.
In an e-mail exchange I had in 2012 with Mrs Chalmers, the canon lawyer who was over her head in a situation that would result in litigation, she said, "We don't have the money for litigation". Well, doesn't that say something? The CDF had written an apostoilic constitution that allowed Episcopalian parishes to become Catholic, that is, if they could do it without being sued. Hey, I'd like to drive a Maserati, that is, if I can do it without that pesky car payment.
As I said yesterday, the big thing Steenson and Clarence Pope didn't bring with them to their meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger was at least $100 million in pledges. Otherwise, this whole idea was just blowin' smoke, and smoke to a particular kind.
Fast forward to 2007. Nothing had changed, except that apparently Cardinal Law had phoned up Steenson to say, OK, His Holiness has greenlighted the big project, c'mon over! In 2007, Steenson was 55, the minimum age for early retirement. But he had a private plane to support, and any subsequent benefits he got as a Roman Catholic priest would not cover his wife. I've got to think he was taking a financial hit to do this, but the story up to 2007 was that Steenson traveled first class.
A visitor reports that sometime prior to 2007, Bishop Steenson remakred at a private meeting that he had "changed his mind" on women's ordination and now tentatively in favor of it. The visitor remarked that for much of the 1990s he was Rector of St. Andrew's Fort Worth, a church which in its earlier days had been quite "high church" but in the 1940s and 50s had become much more middle-of-the-road, and is now consciously low church. It was long one of the "high society" churches of Fort Worth.
As rector, Steenson wrote articles on his "renewed appreciation" of the value of the XXXIX Articles, and I'm told that, still characterizing himself as an Anglo-Catholic, he advocated that Anglo-Catholics should eschew practices which, although good and laudable in themselves, would alienate their Evangelical Anglican brethren and get in the way of their collaborating effectively against "liberalism" in the Anglican Communion. The example he gave was the practice of "Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament" - which he insisted that Protestant Anglicans could not understand and would never accept.
So in many ways, he was theologically all over the map, and he often did what was convenient. The reason he gave in The Causes Of My Becoming Catholic was a last-straw obscure procedural move in the TEC House of Bishops -- he'd already called those who objected to Gene Robinson's consecration schismatics.
So my inner detective wants to know: Why did Steenson really resign as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande when he must have fully understood the project as approved could never succeed as a practical matter?
