One of the reasons why I post this, is because my old pastor at St. Agnes in St. Paul, the late Msgr. Schuler, accompanied to Rome some of the early priests looking for this provision for a meeting with Card. Seper, who was Card. Ratzinger’s predecessor at the CDF. Fr. Barker, one of those priests and now a member of the Ordinariate, was a guest at St. Agnes. I remember him.
Well and good. Nine years ago, I would have taken all this as seriously as Fr Z does, but the whole journey of this blog has been to try to find out what really happened when Fr Barker took St Mary of the Angels out of The Episcopal Church. This has turned out to be a long journey with an even longer story connected with it. Fr Z moderates comments, and whatever others he may have reviewed, he seems to have approved only one as of this morning. "amicus' posted:
Fr Barker is not a member of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. He remains incardinated in his diocese because his bishop refuses to release him to the Ordinariate, even though he is already retired.Although the commenter is correct that Fr Barker is not in the ordinariate, the other business was completely new to me. I ran this by my regular correspondent, who said:
That’s one interpretation. Would Fr Barker retain his retirement benefits if he were excardinated to the OCSP? These “pension plans” are generally not portable. That is why St Mary the Virgin, Arlington did not enter the Ordinariate until Fr Hawkins retired, and why Fr Bradford at St Athanasius remains a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston.Even if Fr Barker were to retain a retirement stipend from the Diocese of San Bernardino, I question whether his medical benefits there could be transferred to the ordinariate. I'll appreciate any input from more knowledgeable parties. In any case, Fr Barker has done only supply work for California ordinariate parishes, while Fr Bartus has basically hitchhiked on his prestige.
What does concern me is that Fr Z is basically being sold the narrative of the "brave Episcopalian priest who bucks the system", or some variation of that. Msgr Steenson characterized Fr Christopher Phillips in these terms until he got a closer view of the guy, apparently.
This reminds me of the conundrum of the lawyers for California and Illinois parishes who recently took their cases through the appeals process to the US Supreme Court, in the course of which they forced the governors to relax or eliminate restrictions on church services during the COVID lockdown. The effect of the governors' actions was to render the appeals effectively moot, which kept the court from issuing a landmark decision, but it got the churches what they wanted.
In brief, the lawyers acted in their clients' interest, and whether there was a landmark court decision or not was beside the point. It's a first cousin of the contradiction posed by Clarence Darrow, who had a record of losing cases for his clients but looking good as a social justice crusader. He may have been that, but by and large, he didn't get his clients what they needed, so he wasn't a good lawyer.
Consider Fr Barker's record as a "brave Episcopal priest". (I leave aside his record in the Catholic Church, which appears to have been far better.) His first responsibility as rector of the St Mary of the Angels parish was to act in the interest of the parish and minister to his flock. But after 1976, his parish seems to have been less and less important as he put so much effort traveling to Rome and palavering with Bernard Law's representatives over pro-dioceses and such, while at the same time, he and the parish were preoccupied with litigation, all of which can only have been major distractions from the prayers and sacraments.
At the same time, almost no attention has been paid in the conventional, and largely self-serving, histories of these events about the bitter divisions within the parish itself. A considerable faction, to which we must attribute only good faith, chose to remain under Bp Rusack and formed a parish-in-exile under his aegis. Another large faction became Orthodox. The public record of angry conflict eventually led both Cardinals Manning and Mahony to question how a rump St Mary's parish could fare under Catholic authority if it had such inherent resistance to authority of any other sort.
By 2015, Fr Barker's successor as rector, and the successor Anglican bishop over the parish, were convinced that the building itself badly needed an exorcism. Fr Barker played no little role in this outcome. A fourth round of litigation, in the near-constant series that Fr Barker initiated by his action as rector in 1977, is under way.
I'll have more to say about the authentic ecumenism part tomorrow.
