Deconstructing The Process

The visitor whom I quoted yesterday has prompted me to try to figure out a more basic set of questions: what problem, among other things, was the Vatican trying to solve when it published Divine Worship: The Missal? Two papers have emerged from principals involved, Bp Lopes's 2017 address and one from 2013 that my regular correspondent has tracked down, '“Anglican Use of the Roman Rite”? The Unity of the Liturgy in the Diversity of Its Rites and Forms', by Hans-Jürgen Feulner. This piece is ponderous, it copiously footnotes matters not in question, its English is infelicitous, and it's opaque over any issues of remote interest.

With so little insight from those close to the project, I'm inclined to want to approach the overall question the way a strategist, an engineer, or a corporate manager might. So let's start with a given: someone decided that Anglicans need to be brought into the Catholic Church with a unique liturgy that expresses their diversity in the unity of the Catholic Church, or something like that. I won't question this for now, I'll just proceed from the given.

What Problem Were They Trying To Solve?

It seems to me that there were three problems that stemmed from the existing Book of Divine Worship (a given) that needed to be addressed:

1. The Rite Two modern language version of the Holy Eucharist in the Book of Divine Worship was suppressed in 2011 with the issuance of the revised Novus Ordo translation of the mass. Thus the BDW needed revision in any case.
2. The Book of Dvine Worship, which reflected the 1979 US Book of Common Prayer, was seen as US-centric.
3. A standardized Anglican rite for use in all Anglicanorum coetibus ordinariates was thought desirable.

What were possible solutions?

It seems to me that the simplest solution would have been simply to rewrite the Rite Two section of the BDW to conform to the 2011 Novus Ordo. For that matter, mutatis mutandis, other aspects of Rite Two could be rewritten to reflect a modernized ordinariate liturgy. As someone who's undertaken similar corporate writing projects, I would estimate that a capable writer, under the supervision of liturgical specialists, could accomplish this in a matter of weeks, and approval could proceed as approvals proceed, with political pressure applied at higher levels as needed to stop any dithering or resolve concerns in a timely way.

What were the disadvantages of this approach? I think the biggest was that the 1979 BCP was problematic not so much because it was US-centric, but because its use of contemporary language and optional eucharistic prayers was Vatican II-centric. Cardinals Law, whose pet project the Anglican business had been, and Levada, prefect of the CDF, were part of a strange "conservative" wing of the US Church that had nevertheless been mentored by the liberal Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and also actively enabled the tolerationist status quo over clerical abuse.

A continued "modernizing" of the Anglican liturgy was apparently not in the cards, notwithstanding a traditional-language rite would still have been included. An alternative that was clearly under consideration, given the record of what emerged, was the uniate masses that originated from Anglican papalist sources in the UK in the early 20th century. Unlike the 1928 or 1979 BCP, these had never been authorized by any Anglican denomination and were highly controversial among Anglicans generally, since they incorporated specifically Catholic doctrinal references. The Anglican papalist wing was also seen as heavily homosexual, with the published texts reflecting a highly romantic style in art and typography.

It is not known what other options may have been under consideration. The decision that emerged appears to have been against a pragmatic, "modernist" choice and in favor of an archaizing, "romantic" style that specifically rejected contemporary language or choice in eucharistic prayers in favor of a made-up simulacrum of Tudor prose.

What were the resources?

Time: Bp Lopes made it clear in his 2017 address that the project took place over a five-year period, from 2010 to 2015. From a real-world perspective, this is an absurdly long time. Corporations rise, merge, and go bankrupt in that time. National leaders undergo re-election in that time. Wars are fought, lost, or won in that time. We're talking about a specialized liturgy that will apply, so far, to something like 10,000 people worldwide, in a Church that has billions of members.

Personnel: According to Bp Lopes, there was an interdicasterial committee. The full membership is published here. We know that Bp Lopes was a representative from the CDF, and that Prof Feulner of Vienna was apparently also on it as a liturgist. (His command of written English is not encouraging.) My regular correspondent suggests a Clinton Allen Brand was on the committee (a published article here), and

Probably Msgr Andrew Burnham, an experienced liturgist, produced a first draft for comments. He is credited as the co-author of the Walsingham Customary, closest thing to a Daily Office Book so far produced in the Ordinariate, and he is on the committee which has been attempting for about five years to produce a version acceptable to all three Ordinariates.

I would be interested in any further information or insight visitors may have on the makeup of the committee. My overall impression is that these are people who met, by Bp Lopes's account, about three times a year on this project. This is not hard work by any estimation. Msgr Burnham, after more than five years, seems to have struggled to produce a finished product of any sort in his own assigned area.

But the actual result, the Divine Worship missal, it seems to me is recognizably derivative of a single source, the Anglican papalist uniate mass from the early 20th century. A committee of experts spent five years to bring it to birth. A follow-on is indefinitely delayed. The altar missal version is out of print. The project it supports is stalled.

I'll have more to say about this boondoggle tomorrow.

Good Questions!

A visitor sent an e-mail with questions that, while they might initially seem to have simple answers, started me on a train of thought.

What do you think the effect was on ordinariate communities when they switched from a 1979 BCP based liturgy in the Book of Divine Worship to whatever DW: The Missal is? Might the instability and low numbers reflect what seems like a bait and switch -- shifting from an approachable liturgy known and loved by Episcopalians who sought union with the Church to this expression of a patrimony that was foreign to most?

My initial answer was that Bp Lopes says basically nothing about the reason for the change, or even what the substance of the change was,. in his 2017 address in Vienna. But the drop in expectations for the ordinariate was plain by late 2012, even by March of that year, well before the DW missal came into use. The two parishes about which so much optimism had been expressed, St Mary of the Angels Hollywood and Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, were going to stay out, while David Moyer, a key figure in the runup, was denied a votum for ordination. The visitor replied,

I won't argue that there was a profound drop in expectation by the end of 2012....an ordinary who considered leadership to be his side job against teaching patristics is at the core of that....aided by a vicar general who also considered his role to be a side job against writing books. [The vicar general, then-Fr R Scott Hurd, left the priesthood to remarry after his divorce, which of course says something as well.]

I was interested in this project when it appeared to be the object of Ratzinger's thought in his paper on ecumenism in the compilation, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith. I thought that's what the story was on the ordinariates. Now, despite a lifetime of being in TEC, I'm pretty confused by what the 'Anglican patrimony' is - and that's kinda funny.

Poor leadership can be developed or replaced. In this case, the entire project changed frequency, at least once, maybe more.

I think Anglicanorum coetibus was a bad idea horribly implemented. Just yesterday I asked who thought it would be a good idea to invite Protestants into the Church via a little group, where they could spend their time explaining to each other how Rome had gotten everything wrong, and they were going to fix things.

But the visitor raises new questions about the implementation, and he raises the issue as well of what the heck the Anglican patrimony is supposed to be. Let's just start with the question of Jeffrey Steenson as a patristic scholar. According to Wikipedia,

Steenson earned a B.A. from Trinity International University in 1974, a M.A. in church history from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1976, and a M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School in 1978.

He went on to earn a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1983 with a dissertation entitled "Basil of Ancyra and the Course of Nicene Orthodoxy".

An Oxford PhD with a dissertation on patristics is about as Anglican as you can get. One problem I see is with the context: keep in mind that Protestants adhere to some variation on the theme that the Church was clearly doing things right in the apostolic age, but at some point after that, Rome became corrupt and added unnecessary "accretions". A basic question for any variety of Protestant would be where things went wrong. Most Protestants, as far as I can tell, would agree that by the time Aquinas came along, the situation was past rescue.

However, it seems to have taken several centuries more until Wycliffe, Hus, Luther, Knox, and Calvin saw the light and cast off the Roman darkness. Anglicans, who in latter centuries have cast themselves as moderates, seem to take the position that, although the Protestant Reformation was justified, the Church Fathers were authentic guides, which places the point of Roman deviation some time after the death of St Isidore of Seville in 636.

That Steenson would specialize in this field basically makes him a respectable Anglican, which he certainly was, although I'm not sure if he ever held any academic position, even part time, during his Anglican career. (This indicates he had some adjunct positions in the 1980s.) As far as I can see, his PhD qualified him to hold academic posts once he was designated ordinary, but this was fairly clearly a supplemental income source, and I'm not sure how good a teacher or scholar he ever would have been.

Nor, of course, did he turn out to be an effective administrator in The Episcopal Church, since the Diocese of the Rio Grande seems to have found him a disappointment overall, failing to develop any clear path for conservative parishes and clergy in a liberal denomination.

What, if you get right down to it, did Pope Benedict, Cardinal Law, or Cardinal Levada expect him actually to do? Did they even ask that question? Or did they just figure they needed a guy who'd been an Episcopalian bishop to occupy a position pro forma?

As far as I can see, once Steenson was activated as North American ordinary in January 2012, he froze. His first job would have been to facilitate the entry of the two most prestigious potential parishes. Apparently there were questions about the pastors of each (in my view, justified in the case of Fr Phillips, but not in the case of Fr Kelley). But the clear path forward would have been to move quickly to bring both in and address questions about their fitness once they were under his authority.

Instead, he dithered, so that months after he should have brought St Mary of the Angels in, the ACA sued to keep it out. Again, early in the game, it appears that he gave Fr Philips plenty of warning what bad things would happen and time to react. He should have brought the parish in and temporized with Fr Phillips down the road.

It's hard to avoid thinking Fr Hurd was probably not qualified to serve as a vicar general at all, but he was apparently distracted by personal issues in any case.

But this is before we even get to the subject of liturgy and the new missal, which I think is a symptom of pre-existing dysfunction and not a cause. I'll work on this tomorrow.

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.

My Inner Detective Has Another Question

Why did Jeffrey Steenson really resign is Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande?

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?

How Things Looked In 2007

A visitor sent me links to two threads at the Anglican Continuum blog that are contemporary with Jeffrey Steenson's 2007 resignation as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande. The first asks why he didn't become a "continuer" instead of going to Rome, and the comments reflect widely varying assumptions about Steenson's motives. If you think about it, if certain churchmen see Anglicanism as "true", then the response of an Anglican bishop, who must certainly endorse the "truth" of Anglicanism more than most others, must be to seek out a version of Anglicanism that must be more faithful to its "truth".

(On the other hand, if you're a Burkean Anglican, which Roger Scruton pretty clearly is, then you endorse Anglicanism because it's traditional and a repository of good ideas, not because there's any central "truth" there, just a certain soundness, and your response to gay bishops, gay marriage, the ordination of women, or the revision of prayer books is basically to fulminate. I'm not endorsing this, either, and I don't believe this was necessarily Steenson's position, nor the position of the commenters at the Anglican Continuum blog, just an observation on a particular approach to the problem.)

A commenter at the blog says,

Jeffrey Steenson has been an Anglo-Papalist for many years, probably even since before his ordinations in ECUSA in 1979 and 1980. . . . In several conversations that I have had with him over the past three years he has more than once stated that "the answer is B16."

I would guess that this was a Delphic way of telegraphing that Big Things were in fact under way in Rome even then, though nobody would be able to put the pieces together until knowledge of the 1993 meeting with Ratzinger and continued contacts with Cardinal Law over the course of Steenson's career became more generally available. But the author of the original post concludes,

Both ["continuing"] Parishes and clergy appear to come and go and it is difficult to countenance a stable future ministry within something that appears so ‘fragile’ and ‘unpredictable’.

For those who have families / dependants and who seek a refuge from the instability of modern Anglicanism I can see why Rome appears the most straightforward option.

But this is again something of a modified Burkean option, a least-bad solution to circumstances that would make adhering to fully sound, whether or not "true", doctrine impractical.

The second post expands on this dilemma.

If anyone truly believes in the claims of the Papacy, he should go to Rome because of his conscience. If someone does not believe those claims, as I do not believe them (as defined in our time), he should not go to Rome. Furthermore, it is risky to enter our Continuing Anglican world unless one is sure of his financial health should the ministry fail to provide a living, which is often the case. Nonetheless, the only reason for a clergyman to join us is because he actually believes that the Anglican Way is right and good, and worth saving from the wreckage of the Cantuarian apostates. If Bp. Steenson believes, as it seems he does, in the claims of the Roman Magisterium, then I can only be happy for him to find a place among that branch of God's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The author then proceeds to examine the claims of Steenson's now-lost essay "The New Donatists" which currently seems to exist, like the writings of pre-Socratic philosophers, only in commentary. (The visitor who sent me the links says he may be able to locate a paper copy, which I will at least excerpt here if it becomes available.)

Second, he assumes that traditionalists question the sacramental validity of ECUSA and its allies on the ground of the personal unworthiness of ECUSA's leaders. This would be true Donatism but it is in fact a false depiction of the reasons for that question. Instead, those of us who doubt that ECUSA today either possesses or can confer valid Orders, and therefore doubt that it can validly confect and administer those Sacraments that depend upon an Apostolic ministry, do so not because of the manifest unworthinesss of ECUSA representatives such as Vickie Gene Robinson but on quite another ground.

I think the author and the commenters are all struggling to find noble motives for Steenson's move, but they're understandably based on incomplete information, which Steenson, Bp Clarence Pope, and indeed Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Law had been at pains to keep strengstens geheim since 1993. "The New Donatists" was written a year or two before Ratzinger rose to the papacy, and Steenson would have had no clear path forward beyond remaining a good Burkean Anglican, so as a good Burkean, he endorsed the "traditional" path as more recent Burkeans endorsed Barack Obama as the most traditionalist candidate over two Republicans.

But knowing Ratzinger's agenda -- as he not too clearly implied in the B16 remark quoted above -- he simply saw a new path after 2005. A few of the commenters in the first thread linked above recognized that Steenson was a man on the make from the start, probably even before his Episcopalian ordinations, as indeed observers noted throughout his subsequent TEC career.

I've wondered, in fact, exactly where the Anglican personal prelature stood in Cardinal Law's own agenda, assuming the remarks from people who to some extent knew him, like Philip Lawler, are true, that Law expected to become pope after John Paul II. It's possible that had John Paul greenlighted the prelature idea in 1993 instead of placing it on indefinite hold, Law might have been able to use it as an achievement comparable to the Catechism in the runup to a conclave.

John Paul, for that matter, may have understood this about Law better than anyone else. Whatever the actual circumstance, it wasn't such a bad idea to put it on hold, and it would have been a better idea to keep it there.

How Things Looked In 2011

A visitor found a link to the USCCB's page, still up on their site, covering the report of Cardinal Wuerl to the November 2011 General Assembly on the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus. In hindsight, several things stand out. Perhaps the biggest is what a psychologist might call "flat affect".

What is Anglicanorum coetibus?

This is an apostolic constitution issued by Pope Benedict XVI in November 2009 that authorized the creation of "ordinariates," geographic regions similar to dioceses but typically national in scope. Parishes in these ordinariates are to be Catholic yet retain elements of the Anglican heritage and liturgical practices. They are to be led by an "ordinary," who will have a role similar to a bishop, but who may be either a bishop or a priest.

Note: Anglicanorum coetibus is pronounced Anglican-orum chay-tee-boose.

While the weepy grandiosity we often now see from spokespeople for the ordinariate is happily not to be found here, the lack of any particular enthusiasm for the project is also apparent.

• In September 2010, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, was asked by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to be its delegate for the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus in the United States.
• The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops created an ad hoc committee that includes Cardinal Wuerl, Bishop Kevin Vann of Fort Worth and Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester to assist the CDF with implementation of the document and to assess interest in an ordinariate for the United States. Fr. Scott Hurd, a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, was named as a staff liaison to the committee.

(Note the reference to "in the United States". Even by November 2011, there was an expectation that there would be a separate Canadian ordinariate, something that appears to have been disapproved by Cardinal Collins at the last minute, but which was never discussed publicly.)

Another item that stands out for two big reasons is this:

Has an ordinary been named yet?

No. The canonical establishment of the ordinariate will take place on January 1, 2012, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. An ordinary for the United States will be named at that time.

The first issue is that the identity of the presumptive ordinary had to have been known to all in the loop since his resignation as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande in 2007, moving to Rome under the auspices of Cardinal Law, whose pet project had always been the Anglican personal prelature. Jeffrey Steenson, who had attended the 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger that effectively presented a draft of Anglicanorum coetibus, was the clear choice for the job once TEC Bp Clarence Pope's failing health rendered him unsuitable.

So why the big secret? I would guess that ecumenical issues were in play, and Rome didn't want to present a picture of poaching an Episcopalian bishop directly to become a Catholic ordinary. But if Steenson left TEC in 2007, and the North American ordinariate wasn't erected until 2012, couldn't someone have decided there'd been a decent enough interval and announced his designation in, say, mid 2011?

I ask this because, in hindsight, the process of setting up the North American ordinariate was in fact ongoing, with an ad hoc committee and a staff liaison at work from 2010. The fact was that a Yale-Nashotah House clique that included Scott Hurd, Jon Chalmers, and his wife, as well as the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clergy who'd previously surrounded Steenson, all had an inside track, and it's not unreasonable to assume that the parishes to be formed and the clergy who'd be appointed to them were all known well before January 2012.

So the process was anything but transparent. Oddly, though, nearly all those who were on the inside track. from Hurd to Steenson, flamed out within a few years of the ordinariate's erection. Might the project have benefited from better personnel procedures? Not only that, but I think the implementation suffered from the assumption that everything would start up just fine on January 1, 2012. Before that magic date, nobody was in charge, there was no clear line of authority, and people were looking, for instance, to David Moyer for guidance on how TAC parishes should prepare, when Moyer, preoccupied by that time with his own legal problems, could be of no help.

The second question was simply Steenson's suitability for the job. While he was a member of an Anglo-Catholic clique within TEC, he wasn't an inspiring leadership figure, and his public utterances were few and in fact highly politic. His essay "The New Donatists", which has apparently gone down the memory hole (does anyone have a copy?) implied that those who objected to gay TEC bishops were schismatic. (Why call them Donatists otherwise?) Yet he himself made what from an Episcopalian point of view was a schismatic move only a few years later, when his career prospects improved in Rome.

His later essay "The Causes For My Becoming Catholic" is obscure and disingenuous, since it makes no mention of his still-secret position as ordinary-in-waiting, while he also sees the need to dance away from his prior accusation that those who disagree with TEC's current course are schismatics.

I continue to think the assumptions at the basis of Anglicanorum coetibus are flawed, but it's hard to avoid thinking that the project could have been implemented better if more capable people had been identified and the process had been more transparent, with clear lines of authority, from the start.

How Things Looked In Early 2013

A visitor sent me a copy of a 2013 essay by Aidan Nichols, OP, "Catholics of the Anglican Patrimony: The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham". It's worth pointing out that he makes clear that he's talking about the UK ordinariate exclusively, but this skirts a basic problem that Anglicanorum coetibus as it emerged began as an American initiative that had been proposed by Bernard Law in the late 1970s. His idea was of a personal prelature from the start, and the Pastoral Provision was only a partial realization of Law's original proposal.

The actual constitution was drafted as a result of a meeting between TEC bishop Clarence Pope and Fr Jeffrey Steenson and Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, and the work product resulting from that meeting appears to have formed the eventual text of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Complementary Norms. Nichols's narrative relies largely on hypostatized Trends, a Catholic element, a Protestant element, a Latitudinarian element, Catholic-minded Anglicanism, ecumenism, and so forth. The puzzling thing is how few individuals, specific events, or actual documents are referenced -- there's just Henrician Reformation and other cloud-like entities drifting over the narrative.

The one thing that strikes me is the section on Pope Benedict and His Vision. On one hand, I think it's hard to attribute a vision to Benedict when Anglicanorum coetibus appears to have been drafted primarily by the American Jeffrey Steenson at the instigation of the American Cardinal Law, with the intent of addressing a specifically American set of circumstances, to wit, the 1970s Episcopalian prayer book revisions and ordination of women, which had created a specifically American dissident movement that Law's proposals were meant to address.

It's worth pointing out that Nichols requires the Traditional Anglican Communion. which he characterizes as "a worldwide (if somewhat ramshackle) body of Continuing Anglicans" to justify his postulating a larger intrnational movement, though he doesn't identify John Hepworth as the main actor, he doesn't mention that Hepworth's initiatives were almost immediately repudiated by the TAC bishops, and he seems to be completely unaware of the 1993 meeting between Pope, Steenson, and Ratzinger.

The real puzzle is that Nichols imputes a much larger agenda to Benedict, an evangelization project that would embrace not just Anglicans, but Lutherans, Lefebvrists, and Eastern Orthodox. Well, this was written in 2012 and overtaken by events early the following year. Someone may be able to help me out here, but I'm not aware of any concrete proposal for evangelizing any of these other groups that involved any sort of personal prelature or other special structure to bring them into the Church. And as of 2013, for reasons that aren't at all clear, Benedict seems simply to have dropped the project and abdicated. Whatever his agenda. other things clearly supervened.

I've exchanged e-mails with a friendly ELCA pastor who plans to retire this summer. He describes himself as an "Anglican wannabe" and seems to be a high-church Lutheran who vests in alb and chasuble. I don't think I'll ask him about the prospects he might see in an equivalent evangelization move toward Lutherans from some future pope until he's well and truly retired, because I have a feeling that just about any observation he might make could be problematic otherwise.

My guess is that, if he's aware at all of how Anglicanorum coetibus has fared in the US, tearing parishes apart as it has, attracting only those clergy who had few career prospects as Protestants, with insignificant interest among its target market of disgruntled Episcopalians, he would simply respond that the idea as it's emerged has proven unworkable from a practical standpoint. Maybe if the CDF went back to the drawing board, something better could be developed.

So I find Nichols's essay an odd artifact of an optimism that simply hasn't proved justified.

Comments On Yesterday's Facebook Exchange

Several visitors have commented on the Facebook exchange I reported in yesterday's post. One visitor says,

Reading the exchange between Mr. Smith and Mr. Beeler it felt like they were talking past each other and drawing different pictures. Mr. Smith makes the point some of the issues with the Ordinariate brand have to do with unforced errors: not utilizing optimized search engines, keeping their messaging up to date and not so overly fussy nobody actually reads it. Mr. Beeler seems to think boutique Catholicism is the way to go. Neither one seems to grasp that theologically mature Catholics understand the mission of Christ’s Church AND that it can be promulgated from more than one Rite.

Real Catholics I know are not rabid, fanatical and obsessing over only attending one kind of Mass. This was a lesson Fr. Phillips couldn’t seem to learn. He counted on regular Diocesan Catholics but misunderstood why they attended his Parish. Most Catholics who make the time to attend Mass every Sunday understand the Mass is the Mass and the decision about which Mass to attend has more to do with the times offered, the distances involved and whether or not they have something pressing to do on that day.

I know plenty of folks who enjoy attending TLM about once a month or so but also attend and support their Novus Ordo parish the rest of the time. Plenty of regular folks “put up with” the DW version of Mass because their kids go to the school. Even run of the mill Catholics know they can attend Mass in another language and it still counts as Mass even if they don’t understand a single spoken word, and most of them have done it at least once! My experience: extremely rigid systems fail much sooner than systems with strength and flexibility. I find neither Mr. Smith or Mr. Beeler’s postulations very compelling but they both seem overly rigid.

I think this goes to the sense Mr Smith's remarks give me that he's continuing a collegiate quest for authenticity past its normal expiration date. He seems to want to see authenticity in "working class" Catholics without understanding how "working class" authenticity works. Tasks in the crafts and trades are learned in some part through muscle memory, so that the "work" often seems to be done in an offhand manner, and it's hard for an outsider to parse out what the actual purpose is, or to separate the individual pieces of each task.

But what's being done is highly deliberate, and "the rules are written in blood", as rail workers say. But the workers "just do it". This goes to what the visitor here says about "authentic" Catholics going to mass. They aren't overanalyzing things, and they certainly aren't getting weepy about precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony. Mr Smith's approach will gain respect mainly over high tea with Mrs Gyapong.

My regular correspondent has a take that's not all that far from this:

Mr Smith feels that “ordinary people” —- let’s leave aside how we define them —- are looking for certain things in a Catholic, or even just a Christian, community, and if they find them then the specifics of the liturgy are of secondary interest at best—-possibly of no interest. I find this a more appealing idea than that there is a big thirst for the superficial trappings of Anglo-Catholicism, which is the alternative hypothesis presented. Of course I am not sure that the latter is what Anglicanorum coetibus was talking about, although that is certainly how it is being generally interpreted. If it is about that, it seems far below the theological sophistication one generally expects from Benedict XVI. Bp Lopes has chosen to interpret it in the spirit of this account of the conversion of St Elizabeth Seton, i e, that in the Episcopal church, as in others, there are “many elements of sanctification and of truth” which, rightly perceived, already belong to the Church and impel one towards unity with it. So, nothing new here—-these are the sentiments expressed by Pope Paul VI in his homily at her canonisation in 1975.

The dumbed-down interpretation, as expressed by Mr Beeler and found widely elsewhere, is that elements familiar from Anglicanism will make former Anglicans feel at home and lessen the trauma of making a switch. This of course is vulnerable to the rejoinder that Anglicans are an endangered species and not worth the effort to attract (Fr Bartus’s point, before he disappeared from Facebook). So was Pope Benedict just echoing sentiments expressed thirty years previously? Was he somehow pressured into enlarging the “soft landing” which the Pastoral Provision provided for former Episcopalian clergy in the US to serve the agenda of interested parties? Or was he trying to make some new theological point about some “treasure to be shared” which Anglicanism could bring to the Church? Mr Smith clearly rejects this last interpretation. TLM, Melkite, DW, OF—-any congregation which followed his rules would grow and flourish and its liturgy would become as the “mother tongue” of the congregation. The fact that no one seems able to explain this “shared treasure” in any intellectually respectable way does lend support to his point.

The question of just what Benedict had in mind with Anglicanorum coetibus is a conundrum, and I'm not sure if we'll ever have a good answer. My own hunch is that this was a secondary agenda item that was somewhere on Bernard Law's overall plan to become pope. It was certainly not as high on the priority list as the Catechism, but he was pretty clearly pursuing it throughout the 1980s and 90s. The interpretation I've heard is that Law was wrong-footed in his strategy when John Paul lived half a dozen years longer than expected, while Law had to flee Boston in disgrace instead of leaving for the big conclave he expected before 2000.

So Law, I would think from this version, decided to push Anglicanorum coetibus as something to do when he got to Rome and another guy was pope instead of him. And Benedict may simply have credited Law for knowing what he was doing. This might explain the overall incoherence of the project. But I think both Mr Smith and Mr Beeler are taking this far, far too seriously.

The Gavin Ashenden Problem

Gavin Ashenden, who had been a "continuing" bishop and an Anglican priest before that, was received into the Catholic Church in December 2019 and is characterized as "England’s highest-profile Catholic convert" (presumably meaning in recent years). My regular correspondent commented,

As I troll Ordinariate-themed websites etc Gavin Ashenden’s decision to join the Catholic church has been an over-reported topic. He was, of course, a “bishop” (of a “continuing” micro-denomination) and a former Queen’s chaplain (one of 33 honorary chaplains at the time) so this was very exciting news to some, leading to considerable speculation on his future relationship with the OOLW. So his decision to seek ordination in the Diocese of Shrewsbury has come as a big disappointment to Mrs G and others, coupled now with criticism of the Ordinariates in this interview . This has led to 31 mostly anguished comments on the Anglican Ordinariate Facebook page so far.

I went to the Patrick Coffin interview at the link. It's more than an hour long, but the subject in question is brief. At about 5:05, the interview turns to the ordinariate. The remarks run to about 6:50, and I transcribed them in full:

PC: Are you drawn to the ordinariate? It seems like a natural fit.

GA: No, I'm, I'm not, interesting the United Kingdom ordinariate and the American ordinariate are rather different ideas, I mean it's the same thing, but I think the difference is this, that in America, where the plan originally came from, the idea was that a number of Episcopalians who were very fond of their Anglican heritage wanted to be able to come over celebrating their -- their -- liturgical roots, really, and not lose some of the beauty of the Cranmerian liturgy. Interestingly, Anglicans in England haven't taken the same point of view; they've said basically if we're going to be Catholic, we're happy to shake the dust of Anglicanism off our feet and become fully and properly and entirely Catholic, and although there is some beauty in 17th century Anglican liturgy, it's a very mixed bag, and indeed for many of us, we've struggled with it for quite a long time, because as you know, Anglicanism in the 17th century tried to ride two horses at once, both -- both Catholic and Reformed, and one of the reasons you've become a Catholic is because you've come to the position that you think, now that was a real failure, they didn't manage that, so from an English point of view, few members of the ordinariate have wanted to bring in their -- the echoes of their Anglicanism, and I think I'm one of them, if I'm going to become a Catholic priest, which God willing maybe happen, then I'm very happy not to come with a slightly foreign cultural ethos attached to my baggage, but to throw myself into the family as a full member, drinking of the same culture.

PC: Mm-hmm, yes, that all coheres.

I think Ashenden's view is well-informed. Recall that the Anglican project began in the late 1970s surrounding the Episcopalians' 1976 General Convention, when they approved prayer book revisions that were in fact modeled on Vatican II, including multiple choices of liturgical style, multiple eucharistic prayers, and the three-year lectionary. The puzzling thing here, of course, is that the Episcopalians were moving their liturgy in a Catholic direction, while a fringe faction of hotheads, including Fr Jack Barker, insisted that this somehow deprived the liturgy of its Catholicity or something.

For reasons that aren't clear, then-Bp Bernard Law began treating with Barker and a few others, apparently well behind the scenes and through intermediaries. They came up with an incoherent plan for an Anglican personal prelature, though the strategy for its implementation led only to protracted litigation that destroyed half a dozen Episcopalian parishes, either gradually or all at once. The outcome of this phase was the Pastoral Provision, whose intent continued to be what Ashendrn correctly interprets as allowing a fringe group to "bring in the echoes of their Anglicanism".

Again for reasons that aren't clear, after the establishment of the Pastoral Provision in 1981, Law persisted in attempts to establish a personal prelature for Anglicans, via negotiations with Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, and finally via a push that resulted in Anglicanborum coetibus when Ratzinger rose to the papacy.

In 280 words, Ashenden has gotten to the heart of the matter: this is an American proposal that tries to enshrine Anglican liturgy within the Church, without any understanding of where that liturgy comes from and oblivious to the message that's being sent, which is correctly interpreted by people like Mrs Gyapong, who believe they're going to bring Anglicanism into the Catholic Church to the Church's benefit.

And he's having none of it. I'd be fascinated to hear Fr Longenecker's take on this, as he's also a former Anglican priest who cane into the Church outside the Pastoral Provision or Anglicanorum coetibus -- but I'm sure this would raise trouble Fr Longenecker sees no reason to stir up. In any case, I think Ashenden's view is the correct one.

Another Atonement Insider On Fr Phillips And Anglicanorum Coetibus -- I

As we come closer to the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus, it's very useful to develop all the information we can on the leadup to its implementation and, not incidentally, the trail of destruction it's left in its wake. Some time ago, we had input from an insider at Our Lady of the Atonement who gave one perspective on Fr Phillips's stewardship there and the reasons that led him to keep the parish out of the North American ordinariate until 2017.

More recently, I've had extensive correspondence with a second insider who confirms aspects of the first account, but he adds perspective from someone who saw the parish from a different point of view, including that of the several hundred parishioners who attended the Sunday evening OF Latin mass almost exclusively. For this substantial group, of course, "Anglican Use" was of very little meaning. This visitor's account is quite detailed, and I'll present it in posts over several days, with my own observations interspersed.

I will start out by saying I was not one of the original parishioners at OLOTA, so I do not have knowledge of some of the early events that took place at that time. I will try to give an overview of the facts as I know them. I do know that when OLOTA first started, with about 17 people, a moderate sized house was purchased for Fr. Phillips and his large family. Again, this was before I arrived at the parish so I don't know all of the details, but the house was owned by the parish, not Fr. Phillips. Not long after this, a small church and a school were built.

As I understand it, some Franciscan nuns were brought in to teach at the school. This did not work out well. The nuns had their own idea about the school and Fr. Phillips had his idea. A battle ensued that brought in the Archbishop of the diocese to negotiate a settlement. Fr. Phillips won and the nuns left. The interesting thing here is that one of the nuns left the Franciscan order, joined a new order and is to this day still at OLOTA.

This whole affair created bad blood between Fr. Phillips and Archbishop Flores. To my knowledge the Archbishop never came back to OLOTA. When Fr. Phillips needed a bishop for any occasion, such as confirmations, he called on an older retired bishop to come out and officiate.

Because of his falling out with the diocese, Fr. Phillips became somewhat nervous about his precarious position at OLOTA. He once said to me that he wanted his own house, one not owned by the parish, to protect his family in case something happened. An aside here is that sometime after he bought this larger home, he installed a pool. When asked by a parishioner if this luxury was necessary, he responded that he never took a vow of poverty.

Interestingly, we see this tendency echoed in the priests at Our Lady of Walsingham, who live in million-dollar McMansions. (It would be worth investigating how Fr Perkins is housed as well.) The visitor also commented,

All of Fr. Phillips's family members and their spouses with the possible exception of his elder daughter were paid employees of OLOTA in different capacities. I think that the new regime has put an end to this. To my knowledge, none of Fr. Phillips's family members are still employed by the parish.[But see below]

This goes to the oh-by-the way opportunism and self-aggrandizement that seems to be so common among ordinariate priests. It seems as though both the ordinaries Houston has had so far would suggest this is not a bug but a feature. The visitor goes on,

Now on to the Ordinariate. As is well known, JPll and B16 were favorable to the whole Pastoral provision/Ordinariate idea. As this was progressing to become a reality, Fr. Phillips started a campaign to sign up the parishioners at OLOTA. He wanted big numbers, so he strongly asked that we all sign up. Most did. In the interim Fr. Phillips was invited to a bishops conference in, I think, Washington, DC. Many of us felt that Fr. Phillips was invited to this conference to be made head of the new ordinariate.

Fr. Phillips told me that one day when the conference was in session a cart was rolled out with a birthday cake on it. The cart was placed in front of Fr. Phillips and the whole assembly got up and sang happy birthday to him. I am sure, with this display, he must have felt that he was on the inside track. Unfortunately the ordinariate announcement did not materialize at that conference. He came home full of joy. It would only be a matter of time until the announcement was made.

One day in conversation with Fr. Phillips, I asked who he thought were possible candidates to be head of the upcoming ordinariate. He thought he was the rightful choice because of all he had done to bring it about. I mentioned Msgr Stetson because he was a Roman Priest who could be elevated to the rank of bishop. A married man cannot be a bishop. He was also the liaison between the Pastoral Provision and Cardinal Law who, as I understand it, was put in charge of overseeing the ordinariate by the Vatican. [see below]

I should not have mentioned Msgr Stetson's name as this precipitated a volley of expletives unbecoming a priest. Fr. Phillips did not like Msgr Stetson, but had to tolerate him because of Cardinal Law. Fr. Phillips went on to say that there are four ranks of Monsignor and the highest rank was equal to a bishop.

This confirms the earlier insider's account that Fr Phillips and Msgr Stetson were on very bad terms. What we do know in hindsight is that Msgr Steenson had been working with Cardinal Law since at least 1993 to draft what went to Cardinal Ratzinger as a proposal for Anglicanorum coetibus. Had this been implemented under John Paul, it appears that TEC Bp Clarence Pope would have become ordinary, with Steenson likely vicar general and heir presumptive. Given the more than 15-year delay, Bp Pope's declining health made Steenson the clear choice once Steenson became an Episcopalian bishop himself.

This was kept a deep dark secret, since Steenson would likely never have been voted a TEC bishop in 2004 had the plans with Law and Ratzinger come to light prematurely. In fact, the actual reason for Steenson's 2007 resignation as TEC Bishop of the Rio Grande and journey to Rome under Law's auspice never was made clear even after Steenson's designation as ordinary in 2012.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl was made delegate for implementing Anglicanorum coetibus when it was promulgated in late 2009. Wuerl in turn made Fr R Scott Hurd his day-to-day designate. Hurd, a married Anglican Use priest, continued as Steenson's first vicar general. In the spirit of mutual self-promotion and self-aggrandizement we see throughout this history, he seems to have favored a clique of young graduates from the elite Nashotah House Episcopal seminary in recommending ordinations for Episcopalian and Anglican candidates.

Msgr Stetson's position in the implementation is something of a puzzle. Fr Phillips saw him as a prime candidate for ordinary, and it's true that he had a strong link to Cardinal Law since they were both at Adams House in Harvard together in the late 1940s. However, Stetson was 80 and already retired from Opus Dei. He was given the task of supervising the entry of the St Mary of the Angels parish in Hollywood, CA into the ordinariate, since he had moved to Los Angeles.

But between Stetson himself, Hurd, Steenson, and Steenson's legal adviser, Margaret Chalmers, the project of bringing that parish into the ordinariate was bungled disastrously over a five-month period that culminated with parish dissidents starting a seven-year round of litigation that is still not over. We should not neglect this chapter in recognizing the trail of destruction Anglicanorum coetibus is leaving in its wake.

The money in the blogosphere as of 2011 was on either Fr Phillips or David Moyer to become ordinary. Moyer, a "continuing" bishop, in my view might have been the best choice among all the potential candidates. He had what I think was a realistic vision of what the ordinariate could actually become, a sense of the risks in what it quite possibly would not, and a sense of personnel and personalities, which I don't believe any other candidate had. But Steenson in hindsight was the only reasonable choice, while if nothing else, Moyer's hidden health issues would quickly have killed him if he'd gone to Houston.

I'll continue with the visitor's account tomorrow.

UPDATE: The first insider who contributed to earlier insights comments, regarding the employment of Fr Phillips's family at the parish:

This account is all correct with the exception of Fr. Phillips's eldest daughter, named Christian, was employed by the parish, in the very early days of the school, as a librarian/aide.

With the exception of his second eldest daughter, all five of his children have worked at the parish in the past - and her husband was a custodian for a time.

His only son, Nathan, had an extremely lucrative contractual relationship with the parish, during the construction of the most recent buildings ($millions spent but not completed), and he still receives payment for services rendered, from a facilities maintenance point of view.

It has been an extremely challenging endeavor for Fr. Lewis to extricate this family from the cash flow of the parish.

Let's Take A Closer Look At Fr Barker's Anglican Mentor, Bp Crowther

From the start, based on the sketchy and incomplete Wikipedia entry, I found something strange about Bp C Edward Crowther, the Church of England priest who, at the start of his career, had a "preaching tour" of the US that led to his becoming UCLA's chaplain -- but that was just a way station in his seemingly foreordained progress toward greater things.

It's hard to avoid thinking there were people who had greater things in mind for him from the start, with a remarkably choreographed series of career moves for a 15-year period between his ordination in 1956 and his installation as an assistant bishop in 1971. But by early middle age, Crowther seems to have gone off the rails. All that in turn makes me wonder how Fr Barker fits into the story.

My regular correspondent has this to say about the parish where Crowther began his Anglican career, St. Philip and St. James' Church, Oxford:

This rang a late bell, as this is the church C. S. Lewis attended, usually referred to by him as “Pip and Jim.” Although there were and are a number of Anglo-Catholic destinations in Oxford, Lewis was a firm advocate of attending one’s local parish church rather than shopping for a more congenial one elsewhere. The implication was that “Pip and Jim” would not otherwise have been a draw, and I see that it eventually became redundant. A curacy there even in the late fifties was probably a sinecure.

It appears that soon after he left his position as UCLA chaplain, he was well-connected enough in the media to get a mention in TIME. A January 14, 1966 story entitled "Anglicans: Angry Young Bishop" says,

Episcopal Father C. Edward Crowther, who got his rookie training in civil rights by picketing against racial discrimination in fraternities at U.C.L.A. , is now battling in the big league: South Africa. Two years ago in Los Angeles, Crowther, an English-born U.S. citizen, was just a campus chaplain, but a fast rise in the Anglican hierarchy has made him Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman and, at 36, the church's youngest bishop. His office in Kimberley has a picture of Martin Luther King on the wall. . .

A TEC press release gives the most detail we currently have on what putatively led to Crowther's expulsion from South Africa:

Bishop Crowther went to South Africa as Dean of St. Cyprian's Cathedral in Kimberley and was elected Bishop in 1965. He was visited many times by the special branch of the South African Police, incurring their wrath by his steadfast opposition to apartheid. When he was banned from the African reserves in his diocese, he defied the order and personally delivered truckloads of food to starving Africans who had been dispossessed of their homes.

While in South Africa, Crowther was clearly connected with international bien pensant elites. A meeting, which can only have been orchestrated, took place with then-Sen Robert Kennedy on Kennedy's South African visit on June 5, 1966.

Kennedy, who was invited to South Africa by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), was en route to Cape Town to deliver an important speech. Instead of using a special airport room provided by officials, Kennedy and Crowther walked back and forth on the airstrip to converse for 20 minutes while reporters and members of the Special Branch stood at a distance. Kennedy used the trip to express support for the struggle against apartheid.

This account of Crowther's election and tenure in South Africa is also suggestive:

Bishop Crowther, who was born and raised in England, received worldwide notice when he was arrested by South African police in June, 1967, and told that he would have to leave the country in two weeks. He had upset the South African government since he went to the Country in 1964. He had been elected to the post of Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman by the Anglican Cathedral Council. At the time of his election he was the Episcopal Chaplain at UCLA and had been active in civil rights in the United States.

In other words, apparently soon after naturalization as a US citizen, and apparently without setting foot in South Africa, he was suddenly elected Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman. This is a thumbnail written probably by Crowther himself for a speaking engagement, and it may not be reliable. But if it's true, and parts of it certainly are, how'd that happen?

But by May, 1967, prior to his expulsion Crowther was already associated with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, headlining a conference in Geneva. A possible extrapolation might be that he'd been inserted into South Africa as some type of provocateur, and plans for his extraction already existed before his final confrontation with police. As a globetrottting do-gooder, he made no sacrifice.

On February 2, 1968, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly with Dudley Do-Right good looks:

It's hard to avoid thinking that Crowther, like our contemporary Greta Thunberg, had well-connected handlers with an agenda of their own.

When a reorganization at the Center for Democratic Institutions apparently ended his fellowship there, Crowther was appointed by John Hines, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, as Executive Director of something called Operation Connection in Washington, an ecumenical non-profit that was going to heal the cities. An indication of where this job stood on the food chain was that Crowther replaced Paul Moore, Jr, who was moving up the ladder himself to become the socially impeccable Bishop of New York.

Crowther appeared, along with Malcolm Boyd, at the usual protest venues during this period, including the 1970 Mass for Peace at the Pentagon though Boyd was the headliner. But something must have changed that year, when Crowther was 41. He was installed as an Assistant Bishop of California, Pike's former diocese, in late 1971.

My regular correspondent thinks an assistant bishop in The Episcopal Church is something of an honorific position, typically given to retired diocesan bishops, who assist at less important episcopal functions. As a result, there's some question how active Crowther was in this role. In any case, he was out of Washington and out of the public eye.

By age 42, when his contemporary Bernard Law had only just begun to rise high in the Catholic Church, Crowther had been shunted into a position normally held only by retired diocesan bishops. We simply don't know what happened in his case, but it does come in the context of other public disintegrations during that period, from James Pike to Benjamin Spock to Bertrand Russell to Timothy Leary, not to mention half a dozen prominent musicians.

By 1975, still identifying himself as an Episcopalian assistant bishop, he was spouting New Age psychobabble to Quakers and Unitarians:

My wholeness as a human being consists of the consummation, the putting together of those three great loves within my own skin, which, analytically speaking, is my life. And so I increasingly accept life as being an ongoing interior journey into the potential wholeness which you and I possess.

California records show two divorces from his first wife, Margaret, in 1977 and 1980. He remarried to Ingrid Schunemann in 1982. He ran for a seat on the Santa Barbara City Council in 1982 but apparently lost. He seems to have lived mainly in Santa Barbara ever since his time at the Center for Democratic Institutions. By 1991, Crowther was apparently working as a therapist, though retaining a title as assistant bishop, now in the Diocese of Los Angeles:

Also asking for leniency was Gabrie’s therapist, C. Edward Crowther of Montecito, who also identified himself as an assistant bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

“This is not your run-of-the-mill criminal person,” Crowther said. “I was very, very impressed by her remorse.

He has had several residences in Santa Barbara, a very swanky place, so apparently he's never been destitute, but there is no information on where the money came from.

There are many unanswered questions in Crowther's biography. Why did he change careers at Oxford to go into the Church of England, when he seemed to be successful as a law professor there? Why did he stay in a holding pattern as a curate for three years, when he suddenly went to the US and fairly quickly became chaplain at UCLA? Why did he become a naturalized US citizen, in the minimum time necessary? Where did the connections come from that allowed him to get the level of press attention he had throughout his time as a bishop?

What was up with that choreographed visit and photo op with Bobby Kennedy, held outside to avoid a potentially bugged conference room? How did he reach the ultra-elite inner circle of the Center for Democratic Institutions and then succeed Paul Moore, Jr as head of an elite Washington non-profit? And what led to his rapid flameout at age 41? My inclination is to see the letters CIA behind this case, but to go much beyond that would be even more speculative.

Where does Jack Barker, his protégé (by Barker's account) from UCLA days, fit in? I have a sense that Crowther was never actually in much of a position to take on a protégé but may not have understood this earlier in his career. The story we have suggests that whoever called the shots was going to send Crowther to South Africa, perhaps to fix the place like a Desmond Tutu 1.0, and he knew this while he was still at UCLA.

But his assignment sounds like it was never going to be more than to fly in, stage some scripted provocations, and get thrown out as a martyr. It was unrealistic to suggest to Barker that he'd have any kind of future as a priest in South Africa under those conditions, when Crowther would hardly be there long enough to ordain anybody, much less look after his career.

I would guess that if Crowther was able to influence Barker's hiring at St Mary of the Angels in 1970, it would have been at the tail end of his effectiveness, and his ability to sponsor Barker any further beyond that would have been minimal. This may have had an effect on Barker's apparent change from a liberal at the Pike-Crowther end of the spectrum to protégé of a new mentor, Mr Catholic.

It's also been suggested to me that Bernard Law, who comes in later in Barker's story, may also have had CIA connections via his father, his activity with the Church in Latin America, and his friendship with the Bush family. Law also rose in his career via civil rights at the same time Crowther was doing the same thing. I can't rule out connections in that direction, with the caveat that the CIA, a creature of the elites and the deep state, has not been a model of competence or effectiveness then or now.

I sometimes hear from visitors who have corrections, insights, or new information to add about personalities covered here. I would welcome any such in the case of Bp Crowther, who is still alive. As has been my consistent policy, I will keep any such contacts confidential.

Anglicanorum Coetibus vs Mission Dioceses

A visitor comments,

I'm a Roman Catholic in the diocese of [redacted] with family both in the Ordinariate and in the Episcopal Church. I've been reading your blog for a few months. I think you raise some important concerns, but I wanted to push back on the idea that ordinariate groups are irredeemably small compared to "regular" Catholic dioceses.

You mentioned that most groups/parishes don't grow beyond a few dozen. I imagine that's true, but that tracks pretty closely with what we experience in mission dioceses in the Midwest and South. Of the diocesan parishes I have numbers for, the majority have fewer than 125 registered households. Parishes with 20-30 families are common, and two parishes have, respectively, six and seven registered households. "What will we do when Fr. X retires or is moved?" is a live question in many of these places. Even our cathedral parish is only a little bit bigger (~850 families) than OLW Cathedral (~600?).

To be fair, these numbers are balanced out in our diocese by eight or ten parishes with 1,000-2,500 households. I imagine the North American ordinariate doesn't have those numbers in any parish. But it's not unusual for a Catholic diocese, for historical, geographic, or other reasons to have a generous definition of "stable group" and for a parish to max out at a few dozen. Unless all the US mission dioceses have failed, I don't think a small target audience should be used to claim that the Ordinariate has failed.

This got me thinking pretty hard, and I ran it past my regular correspondent as well. I looked up the term "mission diocese" and could only find Home Mission Diocese on the USCCB site, which says, "These dioceses lack the resources to provide basic pastoral ministry to their populations." The practical effect of this designation is that they receive grants from the USCCB for specific purposes. In fact, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter does receive a $155,000 grant for travel and administration. (Does Bp Lopes fly first class?)

On the other hand, if I think about "mission diocese", I normally think more in the direction of Prince Gallitzin or Bp Lamy. My regular correspondent thinks of a mission parish as being in a very poor area, a sparsely populated area, an area where Catholics are in a small minority, or an area where the population is entirely unchurched. The problem with calling the North American ordinariate a "mission" is that the target population, and the groups actually being reached, fit none of these categories.

Let's try to parse out the original intent behind Anglicanorum coetibus. Bishop-then-Cardinal Bernard Law was behind the project from the start, working through intermediaries with dissident Episcopalian clergy in the controversies surrounding the 1976 Episcopalian General Convention. The dissidents intended to set up a secessionist Anglican jurisdiction responding to TEC's approval of women's ordination, with a subsidiary issue being the projected revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. It goes without saying that everyone involved was a baptized Christian, and Episcopalians have always been recognized as an affluent and influential group of people.

The accounts we have make it clear that, although then-Bp Law worked with about half a dozen Episcopalian clergy interested in joining a new Roman Catholic jurisdiction, this was a minority view among the 1976 dissidents, and in fact the group was seen as hotheaded and unserious by the majority. But beyond that, Douglas Bess's indispensable history of the movement, Divided We Stand, makes it plain that all the dissidents, who coagulated as "continuing" Anglicans, wildly overestimated their size and influence from the start

Exactly why Law associated himself with a splinter group among a larger assortment of oddballs is unclear. The best insight I've had, from someone who knew him in the 1970s, is that Law was extremely ambitious, and he may have felt that bringing in a significant group of Protestants would be a feather in his cap. By the late 1990s, he in fact expected to succeed John Paul II as pope, and this may have been part of a case he expected to make with a conclave.

Law's first effort was with the Pastoral Provision, although this was itself a Plan B after John Paul resisted creating a personal prelature for the dissident Anglicans in the late 1970s. The problem was that only a handful of parishes succeeded under the Pastoral Provision over the 1980s, with a notable failure when successive archbishops of Los Angeles refused to allow several former Episcopalian parishes to come in under the provision. Clearly Law, probably for the sake of his own agenda, felt the concept had more potential than it did. He apparently still hoped a personal prelature would somehow change its dismal prospects.

Law facilitated a meeting between several conservative Episcopalian clergy and Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, which resulted in a draft of Anglicanorum coetibus. John Paul, still skeptical, told Ratzinger to put it to a vote with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which presumably both understood wouldn't pass, and Ratzinger kept it in a drawer in his desk, figuratively speaking. It's worth pointing out that during the 1993 meeting, an Episcopalian bishop gave Ratzinger the estimate that 250,000 Episcopalians would join a Catholic personal prelature.

The best estimate we have is that as of 2019, the North American ordinariate numbers in the mid four figures, somewhere between 1% and 2% of the original estimate. I think a perfectly reasonable question would be whether Pope Benedict XVI would have issued the apostolic constitution if he'd been aware of its actual level of interest. Indeed, might Cardinal Law have been better advised to focus his efforts elsewhere? My regular correspondent points out,

[S]ome of the smallest OCSP groups are in cities with very large Anglican populations. The Anglican Diocese of Toronto has 54,000 people on its parish rolls. The ["continuing"] ACCC community in Greater Vancouver led by the now-administrator of Our Lady of Walsingham, Maple Ridge had 100 members and had purchased a church---it was probably the second-largest group in the ACCC. The target market is large, but the Ordinariate uptake is almost non-existent. . . . in calculating the size of the target market here, there must be hundreds of thousands of current Catholics with family connections to the United Church of Canada or the ACC, (Canada's two largest Protestant denominations), qualifying them for Ordinariate membership.

Missions or not, bishops are called to be effective stewards of the Church's resources. Closing and merging parishes are part of their job. Ending one form of outreach can enable a more effective one.

So, What Did Bernard Law Have In Mind?

I ended yesterday's post with, "And that goes to the question I'm still wrestling with -- what on earth did Bernard Law have in mind with this whole project?" The project, it's pretty clear, was meant to be an Anglican personal prelature from the time he first began talking to then-Episcopalian Fr Jack Barker about 1976. The difficulty I see is that, as of the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus, the faithful in that prelature are stuck in the mid four figures. It's a non-geographical diocese that buys and renovates buildings, but it has no property department.

It has schools, but no school department. It ordains priests, but there's no single process of formation, and bloopers happen that are expensive in remedy and publicity. It theoretically catechizes laity, but it trains and licenses no catechists, while it tolerates a wannabe semi-official blog whose proprietors often demonstrate an embarrassing ignorance of Catholic basics. Mrs Chalmers, its former chancellor, told me in 2012 that "We're making it up as we go along," but seven years in, nothing seems to have changed.

In short, this is a half-baked effort that's showing no signs of growing out of it. It reminds me of when I was really young, and I knew a couple who'd gotten involved in one of those cult-like pyramid marketing schemes. (The guy was a Yalie, come to think of it.) I was well-informed enough even at the time to recognize a Ponzi, and I asked them about it: at some point, I told them, you run out of suckers and their money. What are you going to do when the whole thing collapses? They answered they were sure that at some point, it would sorta-kinda turn respectable in some hidden way and continue. Sure enough, it collapsed within months -- the only good part was they themselves weren't indicted.

I can't avoid a sense that there's a faction of Kool-Aid drinkers in the OCSP who are convinced that at some point, the thing will have to become respectable. I'm more and more convinced the outcome will go the other way.

I'm told that Bernard Law, by the 1990s, fully expected to become pope, and a book, Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness, was published in 2002 in premature expectation that John Paul II's failing health would result in a conclave several years sooner than it did, and it was intended to introduce Law to a world eager to learn about him. (The book now sells at a premium at Amazon, for whatever reason.) Luckily, the scandals surrounding Law emerged well before the conclave was needed.

The visitor here who knew Law when he was Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau reported that Law was extremely ambitious, the sort of person who, while he shook your hand, was always looking over your shoulder to see if there was someone else in sight who might be more important to schmooze. This, of course, was the period when Law was working through intermediaries to interest the 1976-77 first wave of dissident Episcopalians to secede into a new Catholic jurisdiction that would just sorta-kinda happen.

I would guess he got that idea from Opus Dei, which was angling to become the first personal prelature at about the same time. Law took part in early Opus Dei activities while at Harvard in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and he was always closely associated with William Stetson, an early Opus Dei numerary and powerful figure in the US movement by the 1970s. The visitor says that Stetson traveled frequently and visited Law in Springfield during this period. It's hard not to think discussions on personal prelatures took place on those visits.

Opus Dei was erected as a personal prelature in 1982 in the apostolic constitution Ut Sit. Commentary suggests this was because Opus Dei was able to impress John Paul II with the money it was able to direct to the Vatican. John Paul was never as enthusiastic about creating a second personal prelature for Anglicans, and the substitute, the Pastoral Provision, turned out to be largely a headache for the diocesan bishops who hosted its parishes -- two archbishops of Los Angeles turned down repeated applications from several parishes to join.

I think the half-baked character of the Anglican ordinariates is a product of Bernard Law's ambition to become pope, but from the start, the whole project was nothing but a Hollywood stage set, a Potemkin village. Unlike Opus Dei, it's simply not a money machine -- it seems to have some difficulty even maintaining a skeleton chancery staff.

One question I have is why, after Law left Boston for Rome, probably to avoid prosecution, with any hope of being elected pope out of the question, he continued to press for the Anglicanorum coetibus project. My impression is that Law's energy was unabated in Rome, though possibly his judgment was gradually impaired.

I would be interested in any additional insights visitors may have.

More On RCIA And Whatever Problem They're Trying To Solve

Regarding the ordinariate groups that have been catechized via parish RCIA classes, my regular correspondent adds,

The St Aelred, Athens community, including their intended priest and his wife, was part of the 2017 RCIA class at St Joseph, Athens. The priest there celebrates DW for them once a month, and is apparently mentoring Mr Tipton as he prepares for priestly ordination this summer. Our Lady and St John, Louisville had a similar experience at St Martin of Tours, Louisville, and of course Holy Rosary, Indianapolis provided Luke Reese with a job as Music Director for four years while he attended seminary, and then gave the group a daily DW mass slot.

I think it is very much up to the individual pastor. When Blessed John Henry Newman, Victoria lost its service time at Our Lady of Fatima, Fr Reid canvassed most of the parishes in Victoria without success until the pastor of the parish that also hosts the local TLM group agreed to take them in, although he could only offer an afternoon service time. St Luke, Washington shares a diocesan parish. But most OCSP groups without a building of their own use free-standing chapels which do not put them in apparent competition with a diocesan parish.

The St Alban Rochester group also meets in a diocesan parish. This still leaves open the question of how other groups-in-formation receive, or will receive, catechesis. I wondered here what's up with the Denver group, for instance -- we don't know if they're Anglicans-in-waiting or already Catholic, and in either case, whether they're somehow connected with a diocesan parish for the sacraments or RCIA. Isn't it odd that this doesn't seem important, it's just there for evensong? The same applies to the Tampa Bay group, which may or may not still be active at all -- are any Anglicans in need of reception, or, if they're all diocesan Catholics, have they simply dispersed back to existing parishes?

So we're still looking at unanswered questions, the range of which certainly includes how many attendees at ordinariate parishes are diocesan Catholics. A visitor reports,

Your comment about the Infant of Prague statue in Murrieta reminded me to ask this of you.

My friend (who had NO affiliation with the Anglican/Episcopal before the Murrieta group started) mentioned that there is a basket of veils in the back for women to wear when they attend Mass at Holy Martyrs. Is veil-wearing an Anglican tradition?

I'm sure that you are aware that Catholic women until Vatican 2 wore something on their heads for Mass. Horror of horrors if you forgot your veil. Thank goodness a kleenex would suffice (a memory from 1st grade). Of course, women a la Jackie Kennedy wore hats until the late '60's.

Episcopalians have a pretty wide range of styles and behaviors, but I never noticed chapel veils in any of the TEC parishes I visited, and certainly no baskets in back. As far as I can see, the veils in ordinariate parishes are an affectation for the Anglicans. For the diocesan Catholics, who are apparently a majority in the California communities, I assume they are ostentatious markers of pre-Conciliarism, and the basket in back would indicate an assumption that they're compulsory in this particular alternate universe.

There is, of course, no canonical requirement that either women or men cover their heads, and in our parish's reverent OF mass, only two or three women out of the hundreds I see at Sunday masses wear them. The visitor continues,

I'm a bit put off with the veil-wearing of today. There are some very strange explanations why women should don the veil.

When you speak of formation of the ordinariate members, I wonder how a small parish could make that possible. (I belong to a medium-sized parish in [redacted] diocese. Our RE program includes RCIA, RCIC(hildren), 3 different confirmation classes for youth, youth graduated from high school & adults , as well as, classes for elementary grades. Needless to say, it takes an army of volunteers to make this happen.)

With the limited number that would be versed in RC teaching, it could become a rather timely commitment if those coming into the ordinariate parishes do so all year long. I don't think a married priest with children would have the time to add this to all the other duties he might have administering a parish & possibly working a job for some hours a week to support his family.

As I say, one question to start with would be how many at ordinariate parishes are diocesan Catholics, so catechesis (as opposed to ongoing formation) would not normally be an issue -- and if, as I begin to surmise, these people verge on sedevacantism with their pre-Conciliar pose, they've got it all figured out anyhow. Why bother with formation?

The question I would put to Bp Lopes or Fr Perkins if I ever made it to an open forum would be whether the North American ordinariate would survive at all without more or less sedevacantist Catholics swelling its ranks. And that goes to the question I'm still wrestling with -- what on earth did Bernard Law have in mind with this whole project?

Fr Longenecker On Religious Neverland

I first found Fr Longenecker during a Lenten conference at our parish a year ago. I found his story engaging, not because it was somehow romantic, but because it struck me, as someone who'd been wrestling with the whole Anglicanorum coetibus puzzle, as something like the opposite of what I'd seen with the North American ordinariate.

Longenecker was raised an evangelical Protestant, became a Church of England priest, decided to become Catholic when C of E ordained women, at a time when the English Catholic hierarchy in response made it easy for married Anglican priests to do so, but was thwarted due to bureaucratic inertia.

So his story involved bureaucracy and effort reminiscent of the persistent widow in the parable, not the life he envisioned for himself in this post at his blog:

I was going to be a George Herbert kind of chap, living simply in my country parsonage, writing poems, visiting the poor and wandering off to my crumbling thousand year old church to ring the bell and kneel among the hassocks and cassocks and the musty dust of ages to mutter my prayers from a dog eared prayer book.

This is the stuff of immaturity–to run off after a romantic dream, and the religious romantic dream is the most seductive of all because, of course, one sees oneself as a courageous pilgrim–an adventurer who sets out in faith to follow the star. The religious romantic dream is the most seductive because it is so elusive and because one is being otherworldly and holy for pursuing it.

He's responding to a review of a new Thomas Merton biography, and of course, he thinks Merton is an example of someone pursuing a religious romantic dream.

This is also why I’m increasingly suspicious of any kind of romantic Neverland religion. It’s not real, and because it’s not real it makes you unhappy.

It makes you unhappy because it is never good enough. The reality never fits the dream. I’ve seen this time and again as people go church shopping. Their local parish isn’t to their liking so off they go to some other kind of religion or some other denomination, but of course that church is never good enough for them either.

. . . I had one friend who had a taste for traditionalism so off he tootled to the local parish that had good altar servers, nice music and high ceremonial. But it was the Novus Ordo shock horror! So he began reading more traddy literature online and started driving an hour and a half to attend a Fraternity of St Peter parish where everything was in Latin. Then when reality hit he grumbled, “They’re just a bunch of homos and liars too.” From there it was the Lefevbrists and then full blown sedevacantism.

As I mention here from time to time, I've never quite figured out what Bernard Law had in mind when he cooked up the Anglican outreach project. Whatever the original intent may have been, the reality is that in the US -- the key target market as Law originally saw it -- pretty much the only people who've been attracted to it are religious romantics, either ex-Anglicans (dominated by "continuers") or cradle Catholic traddies, often those disillusioned in the course of some other pursuit, already having found this, that, or the other that was never good enough.

This is probably a big reason why "Anglican" has never quite been defined in the Complementary Norms. If you went even as far as the Pastoral Provision does in including Methodists but excluding the Charismatic Episcopal Church, you'd be limiting your target market, which is a small and scraggly bunch no matter how you define it.

A Back-Door Entry To The Catholic Priesthood?

A visitor asks,

For those who wanted to “preserve some elements of our Anglican heritage,” the Ordinariate-offered DW mass exemplifies, “be careful what you ask for.” I really can’t see how any right-thinking person could believe this would have sustainable appeal.

So I’d like to know what you think: did the founding potentates of the Ordinariate really give a tinker’s damn about “preserving Anglican heritage,” or were they more interested in gaining a back-door entry to the Catholic priesthood?

Let's go back to the earliest inception of the Anglican outreach project, the discussions between Fr Jack Barker and representatives of then-Bp Bernard Law surrounding the 1976 General Convention of The Episcopal Church. Last year I went into some detail on the events and personalities involved. Fr Barker has represented himself as something of a leader in this process, but his career as an Episcopalian priest was actually quite marginal. As I said in the link,

A thumbnail provided with one version of his history of the Pastoral Provision says he was ordained in TEC in 1970; elsewhere, information suggests he graduated from UCLA in physics and mathematics and worked in the NASA space program for several years before ordination in TEC. . . . He was hired as a curate (a fancy word for associate) [at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood] under the second rector, Fr James Jordan. Fr Jordan suddenly passed away in 1971, and the version I heard from Fr Kelley was that the vestry, deeply suspicious of the Episcopal diocese, chose not to perform a formal search for a successor and instead immediately hired Fr Barker as rector, though he'd been a priest for only a year. Just five years later, Barker became intensely involved in conservative dissent from the agenda at the 1976 TEC General Convention. I find it somewhat disturbing that Barker was by no means a senior figure in TEC at the time.

So far, I've found no information that Barker ever attended seminary before his ordination in TEC; he definitely did have to enter a full program at St Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, CA and receive an MDiv there before his eventual ordination as a Catholic priest. It's worth noting in the context of the "continuing" movement that those favoring the Roman option were a small minority among the 1976 dissidents, and Barker's efforts received short shrift among those seeking a new conservative jurisdiction. Barker, in fact, was seen as something of a hothead.

The two other priests most closely associated with Barker are St John Brown and Clark Tea. Both were older than Barker, but their careers seem to have stalled, and by early 1977, they were all busy burning their bridges. A more senior figure, Canon Albert DuBois, provided some degree of prestige to the group until poor health forced him to drop out. I have two major questions:

• Bp Law must have been fully aware of the low quality of this group, yet he appears to have given them some sort of back-channel encouragement to leave TEC (and in every case destroy their parishes). Why?
• By the same token, the TEC dissidents took their parishes out in 1977 without any jurisdiction to bring them into. In fact, it would be four years before the Pastoral Provision was erected. Meanwhile, the only outcome was expensive and destructive litigation. What on earth did they and Law have in mind?

Fast forward to Law's effort to restart Anglican outreach in 1993 with a proposal to Cardinal Ratzinger for a personal Anglican prelature that eventually became Anglicanorum coetibus in 2009. The TEC lead in this effort was Clarence Pope, who had risen to bishop in TEC and was on the verge of retirement. But he soon enough proved to be unstable and in poor health, hardly someone to provide serious leadership, and he had little credibility among the Catholic clergy who knew him. We know less of what Law's actual estimate of Jeffrey Steenson may have been, but Law did ordain him to the diaconate and presumably endorsed his designation as ordinary.

Steenson in turn, once the North American ordinariate was erected, brought with him a clique from the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth who had already in 2008 clumsily telegraphed their intention to leave and go to Rome. The question I've always had is how they were able to keep their jobs there after that -- Charles Hough III was Canon to the Ordinary, for instance. The subsequent history of the Fort Worth group in the ordinariate suggests that none was a high performer.

So my answer to the visitor is that no, the founders of the North American ordinariate actually knew next to nothing about the "Anglican heritage" (Barker didn't have an MDiv, after all), and in fact they seem to have been a group of opportunists who'd mostly exhausted their career possibilities in TEC, hoping instead to become bigger fish in a smaller new pond. Whatever we may say about Fr Phillips, he wasn't the same sort of bungling marginal performer the others were, and I think it's significant that his entry to the OCSP was delayed as long as it was.

We're left, though, with the impression that everyone from Barker and Brown through Pope and Steenson, up to Hough III, appears to have been identified and selected by Bernard Law, and insofar as Anglican outreach was one of his pet projects, he seems to have protected figures like Steenson as long as he was able.

But there are many questions left in this story to which we still don't have answers. Now and then, visitors fill me in.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds,

The "Fort Worth Six" were quite a mixed bag. Fr Chuck Hough IV became pastor of OLW, Houston at the tender age of 30, which I cannot feel reflected anybody's discernment of extraordinary gifts. But he did need a full-time job. Fr Whitfield, then 34, was in similar circumstances and he was excardinated almost immediately to diocesan ministry and has had nothing to do with the OCSP, even identifying himself as a PP ordinand in assorted on-line thumbnail bios.

Fr Cannaday, then 63, started St Gilbert's, Boerne but was associated with it for less than two years before going into apparently full retirement. It has now folded, of course. Fr Perkins, then 57 we know is now Bp Lopes' right hand man. Fr Stainbrook, then 52 was reassigned from the group he brought into the Church and put in charge of St John Vianney, Cleburne, a group started up by Fr Chuck Hough III.

The fate of this last is mysterious. He was Msgr Steenson's Vicar General and Vicar for Clergy, also sponsored by Steenson for a Distinguished Alumnus award from Nashotah House, but was ousted from his administrative positions almost immediately when Bp Lopes became Ordinary. Although he is now only 64 he has no assignment; he was removed as Priest in Residence at OLW, Houston some years ago.