Fr Z Is Being Sold The Anglican Narrative

I have a lot of respect for Fr Z, although I think that, like all men, he has his limitations. A visitor sent me a link to a post at his blog yesterday that commemorates the "40th Anniversary of the Anglican “Pastoral Provision”: a landmark of authentic ecumenism". He mainly cites his personal connection with his old pastor, the late Msgr. Schuler, who by his account facilitated trips to Rome by Fr Jack Barker and others in the late 1970s.

One of the reasons why I post this, is because my old pastor at St. Agnes in St. Paul, the late Msgr. Schuler, accompanied to Rome some of the early priests looking for this provision for a meeting with Card. Seper, who was Card. Ratzinger’s predecessor at the CDF. Fr. Barker, one of those priests and now a member of the Ordinariate, was a guest at St. Agnes. I remember him.

Well and good. Nine years ago, I would have taken all this as seriously as Fr Z does, but the whole journey of this blog has been to try to find out what really happened when Fr Barker took St Mary of the Angels out of The Episcopal Church. This has turned out to be a long journey with an even longer story connected with it. Fr Z moderates comments, and whatever others he may have reviewed, he seems to have approved only one as of this morning. "amicus' posted:

Fr Barker is not a member of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. He remains incardinated in his diocese because his bishop refuses to release him to the Ordinariate, even though he is already retired.

Although the commenter is correct that Fr Barker is not in the ordinariate, the other business was completely new to me. I ran this by my regular correspondent, who said:

That’s one interpretation. Would Fr Barker retain his retirement benefits if he were excardinated to the OCSP? These “pension plans” are generally not portable. That is why St Mary the Virgin, Arlington did not enter the Ordinariate until Fr Hawkins retired, and why Fr Bradford at St Athanasius remains a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston.

Even if Fr Barker were to retain a retirement stipend from the Diocese of San Bernardino, I question whether his medical benefits there could be transferred to the ordinariate. I'll appreciate any input from more knowledgeable parties. In any case, Fr Barker has done only supply work for California ordinariate parishes, while Fr Bartus has basically hitchhiked on his prestige.

What does concern me is that Fr Z is basically being sold the narrative of the "brave Episcopalian priest who bucks the system", or some variation of that. Msgr Steenson characterized Fr Christopher Phillips in these terms until he got a closer view of the guy, apparently.

This reminds me of the conundrum of the lawyers for California and Illinois parishes who recently took their cases through the appeals process to the US Supreme Court, in the course of which they forced the governors to relax or eliminate restrictions on church services during the COVID lockdown. The effect of the governors' actions was to render the appeals effectively moot, which kept the court from issuing a landmark decision, but it got the churches what they wanted.

In brief, the lawyers acted in their clients' interest, and whether there was a landmark court decision or not was beside the point. It's a first cousin of the contradiction posed by Clarence Darrow, who had a record of losing cases for his clients but looking good as a social justice crusader. He may have been that, but by and large, he didn't get his clients what they needed, so he wasn't a good lawyer.

Consider Fr Barker's record as a "brave Episcopal priest". (I leave aside his record in the Catholic Church, which appears to have been far better.) His first responsibility as rector of the St Mary of the Angels parish was to act in the interest of the parish and minister to his flock. But after 1976, his parish seems to have been less and less important as he put so much effort traveling to Rome and palavering with Bernard Law's representatives over pro-dioceses and such, while at the same time, he and the parish were preoccupied with litigation, all of which can only have been major distractions from the prayers and sacraments.

At the same time, almost no attention has been paid in the conventional, and largely self-serving, histories of these events about the bitter divisions within the parish itself. A considerable faction, to which we must attribute only good faith, chose to remain under Bp Rusack and formed a parish-in-exile under his aegis. Another large faction became Orthodox. The public record of angry conflict eventually led both Cardinals Manning and Mahony to question how a rump St Mary's parish could fare under Catholic authority if it had such inherent resistance to authority of any other sort.

By 2015, Fr Barker's successor as rector, and the successor Anglican bishop over the parish, were convinced that the building itself badly needed an exorcism. Fr Barker played no little role in this outcome. A fourth round of litigation, in the near-constant series that Fr Barker initiated by his action as rector in 1977, is under way.

I'll have more to say about the authentic ecumenism part tomorrow.

Fr Phillips's Faculties Restricted

In a letter to the Our Lady of the Atonement parish dated December 6, 2019, to be read at all masses there today, Bp Lopes has announced that effective immediately, he is restricting Fr Phillips's priestly faculties. This apparently means that he is no longer authorized to celebrate public masses in the North American ordinariate and "will no longer participate in the life of Our Lady of the Atonement parish, nor Atonement Academy".

The reason given is an additional past instance of inappropriate conduct toward minor boys by the late Dcn James Orr beyond those reported by the Archdiocese of San Antonio in January of this year, an incident which was first reported to Fr Phillips, but which Fr Phillips did not then report to the archbishop, as policy required. Bp Lopes in his letter also referred to additional documentation provided by the archdiocese covering repeated additional instances of abuse reports against Dcn Orr, which were made by parents to Fr Phillips, but which he deemed not credible on his own initiative and did not refer to the archdiocese.

However, it seems to have taken the one recent complaint that Bp Lopes received first hand, on top of multiple additional documented instances from the archdiocese beyond those reported publicly to provoke this new action, a bit of a puzzle -- as in the Calgary case of flagrant cohabitation by ordinariate priests in a decades-long same sex relationship, Bp Lopes seems to move very slowly. One wonders whether additional pressure had to be brought to force Bp Lopes's hand in this new move.

Another context to this move is the sudden withdrawal of Fr Phillips as keynoter of the recent Toronto Anglicanorum Coetibus Society conference. I believe "health" reasons were given at the time, but my regular correspondent feels it confirms impressions that it was in fact not health related. How long was this sitting on Bp Lopes's desk until he finally took the necessary public action, though?

Fr Barker was then named Fr Phillips's replacement as keynoter, but he then withdrew at the last minute as well. It seems like the ordinariate has no grand old men left, but no credible young leaders, either. Recall that Fr Phillips headlined well-publicized and well-attended meetings in San Antonio and Hollywood promoting the upcoming ordinariate project. What's come out in subsequent years, beginning with his keeping his own parish out of the new ordinariate, suggests the level of hype and disingenuousness behind his involvement.

But if the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society had to hold a new conference next month, who could they make a keynoter? The only possible choice now would be Bp Lopes, himself a late addition to the Toronto program. But he's simply not a charismatic leader, he's at heart an organization bureaucrat with no inspiring message. Says a lot about things going forward.

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.

A Reaction To Stetson's Passing

A visitor who studies Opus Dei noted,

Has Stetson fallen out of favor with OD? No OD site has mentioned his death or funeral. Wikepedia is a weird place to get that kind of info.

Actually, my regular correspondent heard about this from an indirect source, and I went to Google to confirm it. The only mention was in Wikipedia, but the indirect source where my correspondent found it struck me as credible. So this certainly raises a worthwhile set of questions. A Google search today also brings up no further mention of his death. It's entirely possible that only the small group of now-Catholic clergy who'd previously worked with him as Anglicans felt his passing was worth noting, although I've been told that Fr Phillips hated Stetson, and the feeling was mutual.

Stetson, born in 1931, would have been 87 at the time of his passing. He would have reached 75 in 2006. According to Wikipedia, he was put in charge of the Catholic bookstore ("information center") in Washington in 2004, but left it in 2007 to continue to serve as secretary to the Pastoral Provision in Houston, where he remained until 2010. Meanwhile, Abp John Myers of Newark was made delegate for the Pastoral Provision in 2003, replacing Stetson's patron, Bernard Law, who left the country. (We may assume that Law, once he got to Rome, focused his efforts on Anglicanorum coetibus.)

It appears that Stetson left his position as secretary, what must have been a de facto retirement, before Bp Kevin Vann replaced Myers as delegate in 2011. At the same time, Stetson moved to Los Angeles. The Wikipedia account, almost certainly written by Stetson himself, makes no mention of a main reason for the move, which would have been to supervise the reception of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood Anglican parish into the to-be-erected North American ordinariate in early 2012. Abp Gómez also was installed in Los Angeles in 2011, and Stetson has sometimes been called a confidant of Gómez.

On one hand, finally receiving St Mary of the Angels into the OCSP would have been a key focus for Bernard Law, who had dealt extensively with its then-rector, Fr Jack Barker, in the late 1970s, and he would have seen it as a major piece of unfinished business in the context of Anglicanorum coetibus. But Stetson, 80 years old by the time this project began and effectively retired from any Opus Dei position (even that of bookstore manager) for several years, was probably not the best choice.

I wouldn't rule out that Stetson felt he didn't have enough to do and approached Law for some role in setting up the new ordinariate. Law may have given him something where he felt he couldn't do too much damage, and far enough away from Houston that he couldn't meddle with Steenson, but even there, Stetson managed to bungle things.

The visitor above asked another question:

I'd love someone to do research on Chicago. Did Stetson blackmail Bernardin to get that parish? There has to be something.

My money would be on Law. Law was just as liberal as Bernardin -- something both the visitor here who knew him has pointed out, as well as Philip Lawler in The Faithful Departed -- and I would guess that Law arranged the project for Stetson, who might already have been on shaky ground in Opus Dei. Law and Bernardin were close; no blackmail necessary. But others may have insights.

Since St Mary of the Angels never went into the Church, Stetson never had a chance to serve as "chaplain" to the parish during its transition, and in fact, although the original plan had been for every parish coming into the OCSP to have a Catholic priest serve as a temporary pastor while its Anglican rector waited to be ordained, as far as I'm aware, this almost never actually happened. But also, David Moyer, the ACA bishop over the parish, seems never to have been consulted by any Catholic authority for his insights, which I believe he had, and which I think were perceptive, over both personnel and physical plant.

Stetson, as far as I'm aware never a parish priest or a pastor, wouldn't have been a good choice to lead the parish in any case. From what anyone can gather, he and Jeffrey Steenson relied instead on Anthony Morello, a disgraced ex-TEC priest then in the ACA (he passed away in 2013), and Andrew Bartus, a fresh Nashotah House graduate who couldn't manage to get ordained as an Episcopalian, for whatever advice they had.

It's hard not to conclude that Stetson owed whatever career success he had to his patron Bernard Law, but in spite of that, his record in very secondary assignments appears to have been less than stellar.

Criswell Predicts!

Last night, our parish had the Jeff Cavins Bible Timeline session on the return of the Jews from exile, which covered Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. One of the many things that struck me was the accurate prophecies by Isaiah and Jeremiah that a Persian King Cyrus would order and finance the return to Jerusalem, well before there was even such a thing as a Persian empire. I'm not a prophet. If anything, I'm The Amazing Criswell. But I keep seeing parallels, or actually not-parallels, between the return of the Anglicans to Rome and the return of the exiles to Judah. My regular correspondent fed my disquiet in commenting on yesterday's post:

Merging the St Mary's group with OLG, Pasadena would be tantamount to handing it over to Fr Bartus, who runs OLG as part of his franchise operation. The three parishes of BJHN, OLG and HM run the same FB posts, except for occasional pictures taken at local services. Frs Barbour, Barker, and Bayles are essentially Bartus's employees. Mr Coulombe is the lay administrator of OLG. I think that integrating worship with the local diocesan parish is a far better idea. As you point out, there are many potential areas of mutual benefit.

The story of St Mary of the Angels, especially the period between the late 1970s and now, is in many ways a story of personal agendas, often hidden, overriding the welfare of the parish and the will of God. For a not-parallel in the return of the exiles, we need look no farther than the book of Esther, wherein Haman, in his hidden personal agenda to take revenge on Mordecai, orders the ethnic cleansing of the Jews in Persia. The only thing that thwarts him is Esther, who becomes aware of God's will and after fervent prayer prevails on King Ahasuerus to discover the real service Mordecai performed for him and recognize Haman's agenda.

So far, there's no Esther who'll go to King Ahasuerus, who might be Abp Gomez or Cardinal Ladaria, and get them to figure out what's really going on. Right. Msgr Stetson, who is retired but in residence in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as a confidant to Abp Gomez, will likely make sure no such thing gets done, and even at the Our Mother of Good Counsel parish, there's a pro-Bartus anti-Kelley faction, one of whom tracked me down at our new parish to complain to its pastor about this blog. Nothing good is going to come of this, says The Amazing Criswell.

One funny footnote is that Mr Coulombe, who we now understand to be the lay "Team Leader" of the tiny and shrinking Pasadena group (is that any kind of coincidence?), a cradle Catholic of French Canadian background, has no discernible Anglican connection. The only possible one might be that, by his account, his family once lived in an apartment building owned by The Amazing Criswell. There's something Old Testament peeking out here, if you ask me.

Criswell's prediction is that, although some assurance has apparently been given to Fr Kelley and the St Mary's group that they would be received in some sort of near term and Fr Kelley ordained with them, this assurance has been made before. I'll believe it when we see a flight to Los Angeles and a reception mass on Bp Lopes's schedule. The characters here have more in common with Haman than Ezra or Nehemiah.

"Any Of Them Could Have Become Roman Catholics At Any Time"

I had two e-mails yesterday that provide worthwhile angles to approach what I think are contradictions and even obstacles to the faithful in Anglicanorum coetibus. The first:

My appreciation of the generosity extended to the now homeless SMA parishioners is tempered by the fact that any of them, Fr. Kelley included, could have become Roman Catholics at any time during these difficult years. They could have “joined” the Ordinariate as well. This business of holding out until a priest gets in or a building gets in, or “we all get in together,” still seems to me to be a misreading of the ultimate reward of reception.

This is completely correct, and in fact the parish was told essentially this, twice, by Cardinals Manning and Mahony when it sought to go in under the Pastoral Provision in the 1980s. As I've said here repeatedly, I think the cardinals made the correct call at the time.

A major question I have, to which we'll never get a complete answer, is what role Cardinal Law played, along with Msgr Stetson, in allowing this story to continue the way it did from the late 1970s up to recent weeks. Law and his representatives (probably including Stetson) we know worked closely with Fr Jack Barker, then Rector of St Mary of the Angels, not only in developing a plan for St Mary's to leave TEC, but in attempting to get other founders of the "continuing Anglican" movement to enter an inchoate personal prelature in the context of the 1977 Congress of St Louis.

By Fr Barker's account, the "continuers" never took this seriously (not that their own approach was any more productive). But I've got to think some assurance was given to Fr Barker that the parish would be received in some way under Law's aegis, notwithstanding the Pastoral Provision was years in the future, and whatever assurance Law gave Barker proved utterly worthless by the mid-1980s. But we also know that Law continued to pursue the idea of a personal prelature, continuing back-channel contacts with Jeffrey Steenson and other "conservative" (read opportunistic) TEC figures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Any of them could have become Catholic at any time, for that matter.

Anglicanorum coetibus was effectively drafted by Steenson, very likely with major input from Law, in the wake of a 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger; it stayed in Ratzinger's desk when St John Paul II proved lukewarm (quite correctly; he'd already promulgated the Pastoral Provision), and it emerged in 2009 only after Ratzinger became pontiff and could implement it himself.

Among the problems I see in it is its treatment of "groups of Anglicans" as something special -- it allows them to enter the Catholic Church on a vaguely streamlined basis, and it creates a major exception for their married clergy. What we see as a practical matter with the clergy in particular is that it's allowed the CDF to bypass effective diocesan vocations procedures and ordain whomever it chooses based on whim -- no MDiv is required; psychological review is cursory; no serious consideration is given to the numerous pitfalls connected with making married men Catholic priests.

By treating "groups of Anglicans" as something special over and above groups of Baptists or whatever else, it also feeds on existing feelings of Episcopalian class bias and exclusivity among both clergy and laity who come in, while at the same time it ghettoizes them into parishes that are outside dioceses and under their own jurisdiction -- as one US bishop put it, not just unique but separate. I agree with the commenter that this is a "misreading of the ultimate reward of reception".

On the other hand, I'm not inclined to be too hard on Fr Kelley and those of the parish who stayed out until the latest developments. The promise that was made to them in late 2011 was that they would in fact come in quickly. Once things began to go south -- a result of bungling by Stetson, Steenson, Hurd, and Mrs Chalmers -- the OCSP provided no serious guidance to the parish and effectively cut it loose, with only token communication in succeeding years. Much of the fault is on the pastoral side here, aided by the false impressions given by Anglicanorum coetibus. It's worth pointing out that the effective pastoral guidance the parish received after about 2014 was from Abp Hepworth, who stepped up to the plate when Houston did not. Fr Kelley also had a continuing pastoral obligation.

In addition, prudence is a virtue. Fr Kelley and the vestry had a fiduciary responsibility to preserve the significant asset in the parish property. I can give a man my cloak, but I can't give him another man's cloak. The property wasn't something they could simply give away. When the legal situation finally changed, their obligation in this matter changed. Given that a promise had effectively been made over decades by Law, Stetson, Steenson, Ratzinger, and many others from within the Church, I can't fault Fr Kelley and the core parishioners for giving it good-faith credence; presumably, this promise will now be carried through promptly.

I say presumably. The second e-mail I had yesterday, from an individual who went through the events of 2010-12 but is no longer connected with the parish or the OCSP, said

I never expected the degree of obfuscation, plausible deniability, and outright deception practiced in OCSP and whatever that continuing Anglican "church" is called. I am no political operator and am certainly unsuited for, and incompetent at, that bs. I pray that Fr Kelley is protected from further harm by those people.

Lucy can still pull the football away, as she has been doing here for decades, for reasons that are inscrutable. Timeo danaos et dona ferentes.

Two Movies On The Same Screen

I had an e-mail in response to the post on Fr Kelley's letter that I need to respond to here, because it's from someone who spends a great deal of time commenting on other blogs that don't approve my comments when I occasionally submit them. So I may as well get things clear here.

The letter from Fr. Kelley clearly is sad, but I think that it reflects what has been the policy of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter from the beginning, formally stated on Page 6 of the ordinariate’s Guide to Parish Development: “Recognized ordinariate communities cannot be involved in civil litigation in their ecclesial community of origin.” Soon after the canonical erection of the ordinariate, Msgr. Steenson told Fr. Kelley and the congregation of St. Mary of the Angels that the Catholic Church would provide facilities for them if they abandoned the property. They could have done what they are doing now back in 2012. Instead, they have lost six years and spent a considerable sum on legal costs that they could have put toward acquisition of another parcel of land and construction of new facilities. In the end, this case clearly shows the wisdom of the ordinariate’s policy.

My visitor says the letter "clearly is sad", when in my post I called it "really wonderful news", so I think this is a case of what humorist Scott Adams calls people seeing two entirely different movies on the same screen.

Let's back up and look at chronology. In December 2011, Houston's representative to the parish, Msgr William Stetson, who had been closely associated with Cardinal Law and his efforts to establish the Pastoral Provision throughout Law's career, told the parish in a public meeting that it would be received into the OCSP during the first weeks of January 2012. Indeed, it would be the first parish to be received. At the time, there was no litigation pending against the parish from any quarter. The parish had voted to enter the OCSP earlier in the year by the requisite supermajority.

Repeat. No litigation. Parish to be received in early 2012. Period.

However, for reasons that have never been clear, Lucy in effect pulled away the football at the last minute. Two weeks into January, the announcement was made that Houston wanted another vote, which was promptly held, and which resulted in an even larger supermajority in favor of entering the OCSP. At that point, the process simply stalled. Again, the reasons why nothing happened after that have never been entirely clear. I've speculated on them here now and then, but in the spirit of Fr Kelley's letter, there's no sense rubbing that sore again.

The Monday after Easter 2012, the Bush group and the ACA made their first effort to seize the parish physically. However, no litigation was filed, and the police removed the Bush group from the property after it was established that they had no right to be present at that time. At that point, it should have been clear to Houston that delaying their intention of receiving the parish posed greater risks than they may have thought.

It's worth stressing that when I was briefly parish treasurer in 2011, I developed a proposed 2012 parish budget that included a 10% tithe to the Ordinariate, which would have been in the range of $25,000 per year. This would have been possible due to the rental from the commercial space on the parish property. For Houston to have ignored this as a factor in its internal deliberations, which as far as I can see it did, was beyond stupid. I have no other way to characterize it.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the vestry's attorney argued to Judge Murphy that the ACA let every other parish that was headed for the OCSP, including Holy Nativity Payson, go in without trouble. The difference in the St Mary of the Angels case was the income from the commercial property. If Houston was ignoring this factor, the ACA definitely wasn't. I keep referring to Houston's strange behavior in this period as bungling, and I see no reason to change it.

(By the way, if Msgr Steenson urged the parish to abandon its property, this is the first I've heard of it. Houston would thereby be giving up a $25,000 a year tithe, which it would have preferred to have.)

No litigation was filed over the St Mary's property until May 2012. If the OCSP had followed through with its intention in January 2012, or at any time between January and May of that year, the move would have been unencumbered by any current litigation. Houston had between January and May 2012 to resolve any issues they may have had, and I can only conclude that the individuals involved, from Msgrs Stetson and Steenson, to then-Fr Hurd, to Mrs Chalmers, a canon lawyer acting as Houston's attorney, were not equal to fairly simple tasks. All are no longer in the picture.

The visitor's comments above remind me a little of the arguments from the secularists who challenge people like Bp Barron: if the laws of physics explain everything, why do we need God? Bp Barron would ask in reply why we have the laws of physics. By the same token, if Houston's policies retroactively explain what happened in 2012, how did the events of 2012 get started?

There's a very good answer here: Fr Barker and the St Mary of the Angels vestry revised the parish Articles of Incorporation in January 1977 to remove the parish from The Episcopal Church. This ensured that every subsequent event would be driven by the idea that extra-ecclesial actions could supersede any other effort to govern the parish. More than 40 years of litigation were the result. Demons are real. The question I have, which will probably never be adequately answered, is what role then-Bp Law and Msgr Stetson played in this event, because by Fr Barker's own account, they were talking to him at the time. The bungling started much earlier than 2012.

On the other hand, I think it's significant that, at least in the account we have via Fr Kelley and Abp Hepworth, Fr Perkins, and by implication Bp Lopes, are moving quickly to receive the parish even without its once-substantial tithe. This is generous and, if things follow through, good news. Nothing sad about it.

Unless, of course, Lucy pulls the football away once again.

"Out Of Balance For The Sake Of The Project"

As I noted yesterday, a visitor used this phrase with reference to the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision of John Paul II, but I think it's valid for the whole Anglican outreach project, or however one might wish to characterize it. Coincidentally, another visitor yesterday sent me a long and thoughtful e-mail that goes into more detail on this whole issue.

When a summer cold forced me to rest this weekend, I started reading -- occasionally skimming - -your archives in chronological order. I’m up to mid-2016, and the motif of careerism really pops out of the narrative. Or rather, the failed career of Cardinal Law. Following his fall from power in Boston, he seems to have spent considerable time consolidating his power and rehabilitating his image. Two of his pet projects after his disgrace were the promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus and the discipline of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Look at a partial timeline. Everything goes swimmingly for Cardinal Law until Pope Francis is elected in 2013. Then Law’s projects fizzle. [But see my observations below -- things fizzled pretty consistently for the Anglican project throughout this story -- jb]

• December 13, 2002 - Pope John Paul II accepted Cardinal Law’s resignation. Within weeks of his resignation, Law moved from Boston to Rome. The state attorney general severely criticized Law, but said that Cardinal Law had not broken any laws, **because the law requiring abuse to be reported was not expanded to include priests until 2002**. (Emphasis mine).
• May 2004, Pope John Paul II appointed Law to a post in Rome, as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, a sinecure with only ceremonial duties.[However], Law was [also ] a member of the Congregations for the Oriental Churches, the Clergy, Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, Evangelisation of Peoples, Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, Catholic Education, Bishops as well as the Pontifical Council for the Family. He held membership in all these congregations and of the council before resigning from the governance of the Archdiocese of Boston, and at that time was also a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture. He became even more influential in those Vatican congregations and, being based in Rome, he could attend all their meetings, unlike cardinals based in other countries. ... In Rome, Law was considered an active and important conservative voice within many of the Vatican offices in which he served.

  [I would add that after he left Boston for Rome, Law's eyes and ears in the US for the Pastoral Provision were with Msgr William H Stetson, who was secretary to the PP delegate after 1983 and until 2010. Stetson was closely associated with Law since both were at Harvard in the 1940s. Stetson was heavily involved in the bungling that led to the St Mary of the Angels Third Lawsuit in 2012. -- jb]

• April 2006: Six priests of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, along with Bishop Iker, meet in Rome with Cardinal Law to discuss causes of Catholic-leaning Episcopal dissatisfaction.
• April 8, 2008, Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) under Pope Benedict XVI, met with Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) leaders in Rome and communicated that the CDF will conduct a doctrinal assessment of the LCWR, who are a large group of American women religious. Note: As reported by the National Catholic Reporter and The Tablet in May 2012, Cardinal Law was "the person in Rome most forcefully supporting" Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori's petition to investigate and discipline the LCWR.
• December 1, 2008: Steenson was ordained a transitional deacon by Cardinal Bernard Law, the archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome.
• November 4, 2009 - Pope Benedict XVI promulgated the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.
• January 1, 2012: Jeffrey Steenson was named Ordinary of the newly erected Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.
• In April 2012, the CDF "announced a major reform of the LCWR" and described "the need to remedy significant doctrinal problems associated with the group's activities and programs.
• February 28, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI resigned
• March 13, 2013 - papal conclave elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio to be next Pope.
• April 16, 2015, Vatican "unexpectedly ended" the CDF "investigation and oversight of US nuns." The leaders of the LCWR later met with Pope Francis for an hour and emerged from the meeting beaming.
• November 24, 2015, Steenson resigned as ordinary of the OCSP. He was only 63 at the time, well under mandatory retirement age. On the same day, Pope Francis appointed Steven J. Lopes the first bishop of the OCSP.
• December 20, 2017 - Cardinal Law died.

Maybe Bishop Lopes’s orders, spoken or unspoken, are to close this chapter down & truly bury Cardinal Law.

One could certainly extend this timeline backward, going as far as Law's contacts with Fr Jack Barker, an Anglo-Catholic TEC priest already at odds with that church before the 1976 Congress of St Louis. At the time of the Congress, Law was at pains to try to get the secessionists not to set up their own jurisdiction and ordain bishops, but presumably to wait until Rome could set up a prelature to accept them.

In hindsight, this was only the first of many efforts Law bungled; in 1976, he failed to recognize how Protestant the TEC dissidents were, and in the subsequent meetings that resulted in establishing the ACC and ordaining "continuing" bishops, proposals from Barker and messages relayed by him from Law were not taken seriously.

A major flaw in the whole Law project centers on St Mary of the Angels Hollywood. It's hard not to infer that Law encouraged Fr Barker to take his parish out of TEC, which had the result of inciting at least 40 years and three rounds of lawsuits. But as of the late 1970s, there was nowhere Rome could have put the parish had its withdrawal from TEC been unopposed -- so this was a futile and destructive move, and quite possibly Law encouraged it mainly just to cause trouble.

And that's just the start of the saga that continues now. I'm skeptical, though, that Bp Lopes's marching orders differ from those given to Msgr Steenson: since Lopes's arrival in 2015, there has been no essential change in Houston's apparent policies or behavior, which continue to focus on lowering normal diocesan standards for vocations in order to hire supernumerary priests with minimal responsibilities.

If Lopes's instructions were to shut things down, we'd have seen the signs by now. Instead, we're seeing the continuing results of hiring marginal priests with minimal duties, poorly supervised and with time on their hands.

What Did Cardinal Law Have In Mind?

I'm increasingly convinced that Anglicanorum coetibus has been a disappointment -- indeed, something more like an embarrassment. It's worth pointing out that St Mary of the Angels has been at the center of the Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenism story from the time of initial contacts between Fr Barker and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1977, and up to December of 2011 -- based on statements by Cardinal Law's surrogate Msgr William Stetson -- it had been intended that the parish would be the first to be received into the newly-erected Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.

This didn't happen, and the details have been the story of this blog. The puzzle has been that Cardinal Law has been involved in the process at least from the time of the 1980 Chicago meetings involving Fr Barker, unsuccessfully proposing a personal prelature, through the 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger that eventually resulted in Anglicanorum coetibus, up to the diaconal ordination of Jeffrey Steenson in Rome in 2008.

From the mid-1980s to 2012, Anglican Use proved to be a damp squib, although there was what appears to have been a notable failure, a sort of anti-proof of concept, in Las Vegas. During the same period, "continuing Anglicanism" turned out to be a comic opera production, something between The Mouse That Roared and Springtime for Hitler, with nothing to recommend it as a starting point for serious ecumenism. The 1993 proposal for Anglicanorum coetibus was simply withdrawn when it became plain that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would never approve it, probably with good reason.

It's hard to avoid the impression that careerism motivated the major players. Clarence Pope was clearly aiming to become a married Catholic bishop, and he disintegrated personally when this proved unattainable. "Continuing Anglican" clergy, frequently without seminary degrees or even four years in college, wanted something as close as they could get to the prestigious, well-paid, and undemanding slots that are sometimes still available in TEC.

Jeffrey Steenson, unlike Pope, settled for monsignor, but he saw the position of Ordinary almost exclusively as a way to look after his cronies and a few favored attractive young candidates, with no serious plan or intent to grow the OCSP. Given 30-plus years of experience, though, there's little that could have been expected other than what's taken place.

But Bernard Law made Cardinal. He made Archbishop of Boston. It can't have been careerism that drove him to promote this losing proposition. What on earth did he have in mind?

And my guess is that Bp Lopes, who must certainly have further ambitions, does not intend to ride the OCSP to the top -- more likely, he'll want to bring about a graceful shutdown.

What Is The Market For Anglicanorum coetibus?

I realize that my approach to Anglicanorum coetibus doesn't match that of other observers. Nevertheless, it's worth posing the question why its outcome has been such a disappointment, and perhaps to go a little farther and ask what might be done to salvage the situation.

It seems to me that the evidence we have indicates that those who advised Pope Benedict in putting Anglicanorum coetibus together had two groups in mind for a target market. In the US, the initiative seems to have come from Cardinal Bernard Law, who initially proposed the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision in the wake of the same movement that resulted in the 1978 Congress of St Louis.

While the "continuing Anglican" movement is usually defined as comprising the breakaway denominations derived from the 1978 Congress and the episcopal consecrations that followed it, Fr Jack Barker also began talks with the Vatican at that time, facilitated by Cardinal Law, under the assumption that conservative Anglicans might choose some type of corporate reunion with Rome instead of forming new Anglican denominations.

I think this was a basic misunderstanding of Anglicanism. It's generally recognized that Anglicans have three factions, high church, low church, and broad church, with broad church dominant. The popularity of Tridentine vestments and gothic church architecture that swept Anglicanism generally since the 19th century has obscured this essential division. "Continuing Anglicanism" and the subsequent secession of the ACNA are low church movements, as was the Reformed Episcopal Church, which the ACNA has absorbed. (Web commentary I've seen notes that even the ACA, felt to be the highest of the "continuing" groups, is in actuality pretty low church.)

The October, 1993 meeting between Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Fr Jeffrey Steenson, and then-Cardinal Ratzinger appears to have been an effort by Cardinal Law to reboot the Anglican Use initiative by bypassing the resistance of Catholic bishops, perhaps attributing an overall lack of enthusiasm for corporate reunion with Rome among Anglicans to certain Catholic bishops' resistance to the idea. I think it's significant that in the 1993 meeting, Bishop Pope pointed to a pent-up dissatisfaction with US Episcopal liberalization that could result in 250,000 Episcopalians coming over.

The flaw in that approach was an unwillingness to recognize that among those dissatisfied in TEC, most were low church, and in fact, "affirming" high church parishes in TEC are closely allied with broad church bishops. This is the sort of thing Frederick Kinsman clearly understood in the 1920s; it's hard to imagine how either Clarence Pope or Jeffrey Steenson could have been so obtuse in the 1990s.

The second bit of evidence for Anglicanorum coetibus's putative market is the Ordinariate liturgy, derived from the Church of England's Papalist movement. As I pointed out in a previous post, the Papalists were a very small high-church faction distinguished by an unwillingness to use the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, substituting either the Roman Latin liturgy in whole or part, or a "uniate" liturgy consisting of an English translation from the Latin mass that incorporates certain Cranmerian prayers. Fr Hunwicke has traced the Ordinariate liturgy now in use for the mass to an English Missal dating from about 1905, illegal in the Church of England but with some sort of naughty appeal to the small number of priests who used it.

The source I noted in my earlier post points out that on the whole, the people of the parishes where Papalist priests were incumbent at best tolerated the Latin or uniate liturgy or were drawn by the charismatic personalities of some Papalist clergy -- but the movement never had widespread popular support. This is borne out by the reported experience of UK Ordinariate parishes, where the people have deserted "uniate" masses in favor of Ordinary Form masses in nearby diocesan parishes, leading Ordinariate leadership to complain that this deprives the Ordinariate of a cohesive identity.

Again, it seems to me that the historical record has been clear in showing that the Papalist movement was esoteric and limited to a small clique of clergy. It never had large-scale popular demand.

Fr Barker's History -- III

Fr Barker's account hints that even as the basic form of Anglican Use was being worked out, the US Catholic bishops weren't completely on board with the idea. He notes their objection to a "personal prelature", which is easy to understand: it means priests and parishes in their territory that aren't under their control. It was a departure from the diocesan system that had been developed in the wake of the Council of Trent. What could possibly go wrong? There's also the basic problem, still noted on the Anglican Use website, that it can be seen as a potential back door to a general married priesthood.

The real problems began to manifest themselves as St Mary of the Angels applied to become an Anglican Use parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. There used to be several detailed accounts of what happened on the web, written by both Fr Barker and Charles Coulombe, but they have since been deleted. If anyone has kept copies or knows where they might still be found on the web, I would very much appreciate the information.

In general, based on my recollection of the on line accounts, there were two stages of failure in the process. The first stage was under Cardinal Timothy Manning:

It is well to note that the ecumenical relations committee [of the LA Archdiocese] was adamantly opposed to the erection of a pastoral provision parish. It has been subsequently demonstrated that this policy has perdured in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for no parish of the pastoral provision has ever been erected for that area despite the fact that the group of laity there was the largest of any of those in the nation which had been received in other dioceses. It was in October 1984 that Bishop Ward, in behalf of cardinal Manning, reported to PDSAC clergy in Los Angeles that no parish of the pastoral provision would be allowed in the archdiocese and that both clergy and laity would have to be received into the Catholic Church on a strictly individual basis through their local latin rite parish.

Fr Barker continues in a footnote:

No reason was given by the Archdiocese for its negative decision after such a long period of time, but it has been suggested that ecumenical relations must figure prominently; in addition, the press had branded the clergy leaders as rebels, and the parishes had been involved in civil litigation with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles over real property, a lawsuit which the diocese ultimately lost and which may have been an embarrassment to Catholic officials.

Following Cardinal Manning's retirement in 1985, the negative decision was reiterated by his successor, Roger Mahony. Mahony based his rejection, as I recall accounts, more specifically on the characterization of the parish as rebellious. A former pariahioner e-mailed me:

I was there when Bishop Law attended St. Mary's [July 14—16, 1981] and believe that he was political along with several others, implying St. Mary's and St. Matthias would be part of the Pastoral Provision. . . . I also know that a TEC priest. . . and a Catholic priest, who I knew who were the ecumenical committee between the two had much to do to ruin St. Mary's chance to become Catholic. The TEC priest could not stand Fr. Barker.

However, the former parishioner notes another issue that hasn't been adequately taken into consideration elsewhere:

The parish split three ways, those in my opinion who loved the building wouldn't leave, some followed Fr. Trigg to the Orthodox and those who followed Fr. Barker to the Catholic Church.

The parish was apparently never unanimous in its desire to become Anglican Use, as it was not unanimous in its desire to join the US-Canadian Ordinariate. The problem was addressed during 2010-11 by none other than Anthony Morello, who asked at a synod what provision would be made for pastoral care of those who did not wish to become Catholic. This question has never been adequately addressed during any proposals for corporate reunion.

Fr Barker's History -- II

Fr Barker covers a great deal of additional territory subsequent to the 1977 Congress of St Louis in his Early History of the Anglican Use. In 1980, there was preliminary discussion of what form the provision for Anglicans would take:

Bishop Bernard Law invited Frs. Barker and Brown to meet with a canonist in Chicago to explore together the form of an Anglican "common identity" in the Catholic Church. In addition to the above, representatives of SSC and the Evangelical Catholic Mission (ECM) were also invited by Bishop Law. The three groups met with Bishop Law’s Canonist at the Hilton Hotel at O’Hare Airport. The Anglicans present favored the proposal on structure modeled on the Military Ordinariate, but the small number of parochial communities, the death of Cardinal Seper who had taken a personal interest in this cause, together with the reluctance on the part of the American Catholic hierarchy mitigated against such a possibility.

It's worth pointing out that the "structure modeled on the Military Ordinariate" was on the table from the start, and this was the option later discussed in the 1993 meeting, facilitated by now-Cardinal Law, of Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Fr Jeffrey Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger that resulted in Anglicanorum coetibus. In this context, it seems reasonable to conclude that Cardinal Law felt a second try at Anglican corporate reunion might be warranted, if the earlier Pastoral Provision had proved a disappointment.

There's another problem:

The conversations in Rome also made it clear that those seeking reunion needed to be clear about their legitimate patrimony; therefore a symposium of Anglican and Roman scholars was held at the University of Dallas in June of the same year. The features of an Anglican patrimony were the subject of that symposium.

It would be interesting to see the proceedings of the University of Dallas symposium; if anyone can make a copy available or point me to them on line, I would greatly appreciate it. Exactly what comprises an "Anglican patrimony" is a question I've addressed here, and frankly, the answers I've received are tentative and unsatisfactory. The question mainly comes down to liturgy (except that the actual purpose of the Anglican liturgy was to finesse differences via calculated ambiguity, as well as to allow for broad winks when inconvenient aspects were deliberately ignored!).

Regarding liturgy, Fr Barker says,

The delegates at [an October 1981 Dallas, Texas] conference agreed on the pastoral necessity of maintaining a pastoral provision liturgy which allowed for traditional as well as [modern] English. . . . Eventually the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship authorized the Book of Divine Worship (BDW) for interim usage in 1984, with final approval on 20 February 1987. This document allowed elements of the older Prayer Book of 1928, but the Eucharistic liturgy was taken only from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer with the use of the Roman Eucharistic Canons and the ancient Sarum Canon (with the modern English "Words of Institution" from the Novus Ordo Missae inserted).

Clearly the Pastoral Provision liturgy was aimed at a US audience, based on the Episcopal prayer books. It's puzzling that the Ordinariate liturgy has so far rejected the idea of contemporary English and relied primarily on ersatz archaisms in a "uniate" liturgy promoted by elements in the Church of England. However, this liturgy does not appear to be popular in either the UK or the US, and particularly in the UK appears to be a cause of the underperformance of the Ordinariate there.

Fr Barker's History -- I

As I'd requested, a visitor pointed me (many thanks!) to Fr Jack Barker's Early History of the Anglican Use. This turns out to be a very useful complement to Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand, since it gives a different perspective on the events surrounding the 1977 Congress of St Louis and in fact fills in several gaps. On the other hand, I think the history also provides an insight into what I think is the miscalculation that has led to the disappointing underperformance of both the Pastoral Provision and the Anglican Ordinariates.

Fr Barker introduces the issue by saying,

[I]t should be noted that Anglicanism has varieties of theological persuasions from liberal to conservative generally tolerated so long as unity of worship is maintained. The Elizabethan settlement had resulted in a Church that very much lived lex orandi lex credendi. Without the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church the commonality of worship through the use of various Books of Common Prayer became the earmark of unity in the various Anglican Churches throughout the world, in the face of what would otherwise have been certain disunity.

However, Catholic commentators from Frederick Kinsman to Richard John Neuhaus have pointed out that the prayer books provide only an appearance of unity, not just from calculated ambiguity in wording, but their effect is vitiated by a deliberate policy of looking the other way at heterodox practices. In fact, the heterodoxy that had been tolerated for about a century before 1977 included Tridentine vestments and Latin liturgy in Anglican services. As Kinsman has pointed out, Anglicanism has calculatedly allowed a faction to fancy itself Catholic.

Fr Barker continues,

It had always been the hope of catholic minded Anglicans that a full scale corporate reunion or intercommunion could ultimately take place between the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

But many of those "catholic minded Anglicans" were the same ones that Kinsman recognized were allowed to fancy themselves "Catholic" as they were. This leads to the first major problem that Fr Barker describes. There was never unity of purpose among the High Church Episcopal dissidents.

Many other groups who had varying degrees of dissatisfaction with the Episcopal Church were active at the same time. The umbrella organization for them was the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen (FCC). The Diocese of the Holy Trinity joined the FCC and attended its September 1977 meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. This meeting in St. Louis produced a loose amalgamation of several groups into the Anglican Catholic Church in North America (ACNA), and this was destined to become a new "Anglican" church in the United States and Canada Some of the members of the Diocese of the Holy Trinity identified with the aims of the FCC as it moved toward founding the ACNA. Canon DuBois and the Anglicans United (successor to Episcopalians United) did not. Those in the Diocese of the Holy Trinity who agreed with the aims of ACNA kept the name Diocese of the Holy Trinity and remained with them Those who desired reunion with Rome then formed the Pro-Diocese of St. Augustine of Canterbury (PDSAC) to act as the "corpus" for transitional jurisdiction to full unity with the Roman Catholic Church.

Note history repeating itself in the Patrimony of the Primate, with about the same result. In 1977, two delegates from the PDSAC, one of whom was Fr Barker, traveled to Rome to present

a proposal for consideration of what later became the Pastoral Provision, i.e. the possibility of Episcopalians returning to the Catholic Church while retaining something of their Anglican heritage.

The proposal was very favorably received by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However,

Before leaving Rome, confidential letters from the delegation were mailed to Bishop Albert Chambers, the retired Episcopal bishop of Springfield, Illinois, and Fr. James Mote, bishop-elect for the Diocese of the Holy Trinity. Bishop Chambers was scheduled to be the chief consecrator at the ordination to the episcopate of four Episcopalian priests, including Father Mote, which would inaugurate the new Anglican Catholic Church in America as planned by the FCC. In those letters both were advised of the results of the Rome meetings and that Rome would see those planned ordinations as a serious obstacle to reunion.

Two weeks after returning from Rome, the delegates spoke at a joint synod of the priests of the Anglican Dioceses of the Holy Trinity and Christ the King, on December 15, 1977. Bishop Chambers presided at this meeting and allowed less than ten minutes for the report on the meetings held in England and Rome. It seemed apparent to all present that the bishop was not interested. For example he said: "Your people don’t want to be Roman Catholics." This sentiment was echoed by bishops-elect Mote (of Denver) and Morse (of Oakland). Bishop Chambers continued to plan for the consecrations to take place in January 1978.

The problems that have dogged St Mary of the Angels and the "continuing Anglican" movement were present from the start. My understanding, by the way, is that Louis Falk did not attend the 1977 Congress of St Louis, was not involved in the consecrations of Mote and the other bishops, and did not make any move to join the ACC until the following year. Yet the pattern of willful duplicity that we saw in later events like the 1991 Deerfield Beach consecrations and the formation of the Traditional Anglican Communion had already been established at the start. But all things considered, Bishop Chambers was right: there never has been a significant movement, even among disaffected Anglicans, to become Catholic in a body.

Further Parish History

A source has provided much greater detail on the Jordan-Barker era at St Mary of the Angels, which I am providing as a narrative slightly edited from two e-mails:

Fr Jordan was one of Fr Dodd's last curates. Fr Dodd retired in [1951}. He was then "Rector Emeritus" and moved out to North Hollywood, but would return to St Mary's on occasion. Fr Beau Davis remembered meeting him one Sunday; Beau was then in his teens. [Beau] would come in from Ontario, the same home parish that Fr Jordan was from. Fr Dodd made some remark about that, with a twinkle in his eye. It was their only meeting. Davis looked upon Fr Jordan as a spiritual father from their first meeting, when Fr Jordan came to his home parish as a special speaker.

About 1960, aerial views of the neighborhood illustrate the acquisition & clearing of land for parking behind the church. Two houses (?) occupy the area of the present bank building. I have seen a record that parishioners purchased these homes, paid down the mortgages on them, at some point turned them over to, or donated them to the parish, leaving sums less than $10,000 to be paid off. (They might have been left as Bequests.)

Fr Jordan was in wide demand as a speaker in various Episcopal parishes, and at one time recorded a number of sermons or teachings on LP records. The remains of these were ill-treated by Fr Wilcox, warped beyond use, and discarded.

Fr James H. Jordan died suddenly of a heart attack early on February 17, 1971. His home at the time was a house (no longer extant) on Hillhurst. It may have been where the small shops are now, just south of the bank parking lot. He had lived there as Fr Dodd's Curate, & chose not to move when he was elected Rector. He did not appear for 7:30am Mass that day. Someone went to check on him & found him dead.

Fr Jordan's niece, Beth Cullom, of Georgia, on a visit to St Mary's one evening, gave the first large donation toward completion of the Tympanum, in his memory. It funded the gilding of the mandorla around the figure of our Lady, and the engagement of Enzo Selvaggi as designer of the mosaic.

Fr John (Jack) Barker was already his Curate, living somewhat farther from the church. The Vestry did not trust the PECUSA Diocese of Los Angeles's program for selecting clergy, so they (after some time) chose to elevate the Curate they knew, rather than an unknown prospect offered by an increasingly squirrelly PECUSA. I seem to think they made this decision within a few months, certainly before the end of that year.

Fr Barker was aware of the intent of PECUSA to dissolve St Mary's because it was a "hotbed" of resistance to the rising secularism & "progressive" (heretical) agenda. Fr Barker knew the property, & the Della Robbia [altarpiece] were valuable items. He had the piece moved inside, as a Memorial to Fr Jordan, completed by St Peter's Day, 1973. He then moved to have the church building declared a "Cultural - Historical Monument" of the City of Los Angeles. This was achieved by December, 1973, by formal action, which was then publicly enacted early in 1974. This would block the Diocese from selling the church for demolition.

Amendments to the Corporate [bylaws] were also made, to update them to accord with then recent changes to CA Law. (Such that if the Corporation were dissolved, it could only be sold to a non-profit.. etc.) When PECUSA finally voted to accept priestesses, at Minneapolis, 1976, the Parish was among the first in the USA to formally separate from PECUSA. This was formalized at the Annual General Meeting of the parish, January, 1977. Lawsuits ensued. At one point, observing PECUSA behavior elsewhere, to sneak into churches by night & change all the locks, & seal out the resistant clergy & congregations, St Mary's installed chainlink fencing around the building, with guard dogs day & night. (You can still see the holes in various places for that fencing.)

Fr Barker & several like-minded clergy appealed to, and visited Rome, seeking some kind of accommodation. He has published some sort of history of all this, which you should be able to find on line. It may have all the detail & dates you need. [I haven't been able to locate this; if someone can point me to it, I'll appreciate it -- jb]

in 1978, a clergy meeting in the undercroft, attended by Fr Christopher Phillips, I believe, made a formal petition to the Vatican for an Anglican Use allowing married clergy who were former PECUSAns. An RC Bishop was in attendance, and celebrated a Mass -- for those in RC Communion, -- at a temporary altar in the undercroft. This was at a time that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was actually in (secret) residence in Los Angeles, we now know, secreted here to preserve his life from Polish or Soviet government assassins. He went from Los Angeles to the Conclave that elected him Pope! (Not public knowledge.) The result of the Petition was eventually Pope John Paul II's "Pastoral Provision" (1980). [One just has to wonder whether, while in LA, he heard anything about the clergy meeting & Petition?]

Fr Phillips was, I understand, the first priest ordained under that provision, in San Antonio, TX.

At about this time, I'm told, a Vatican flag was on a standard near the Crucifix [As I understand it, the crucifix has subsequently been removed by the dissidents -- jb]. (There had been a door there to the stairs, but it was closed off at this time, or perhaps when the sanctuary was remodeled, in 1973.) The Parish won the case against PECUSA in 1981, at the appellate level. In 1984, PECUSA was forced by the Court to issue a Quit-Claim Deed to St Mary's. (This cleared the way for the bank to be erected on church property.)

Fr Barker was unmarried; the Pastoral Provision was not extended to him. The parish was for a time in a "Pro-Diocese of St Augustine (of Canterbury)" as some of the old Prayer Books and Hymnals testify by stamps inside them. It was anticipated that the "Pro-Diocese" would become RC, en bloc.

Eventually, this came to be seen as a fruitless hope. It was at this point that Fr Barker was "discharged." For several months, the parish had visiting clergy from various Anglican alphabet-soup groups. Eventually, the ACC supplied Fr Greg Wilcox, from La Verne, on a "temporary" basis.

Then the Vestry officially called him, ca. 1985/6. He accepted somewhat reluctantly, I'm told. He then got the parish to accept the ACC. Later he led the parish to revolt from ACC, leading to the second lawsuit, settled ca. 1994. {Details of this period appear in this post and the two posts after it.]

I'm enormously grateful for this information. It makes me more hopeful that something can be done to continue this tradition of spiritual commitment at the parish.

My informant indicates that he's put this together from memory, but feels it's as reliable as he can make it. If anyone has clarifications, corrections, or additions to this material, I will be most happy to add them to the record.

Regarding the Pro-Diocese of St Augustine of Canterbury, I found the following:

There is no such thing as a pro-diocese in the Catholic Church.

in the early 1980's, several congregations of former Episcopalians formed what was then called the pro-diocese of St. Augustine of Canterbury. One of these congregations was here in San Antonio and some of its members were individually received into the Catholic Church on the Feast of the Assumption in 1983. At the same time, a parish was erected under the title of Our Lady of the Atonement under the terms of a Pastoral Provision granted by the Holy See. There are several other such parishes in the United States, but they are parishes of the dioceses in which they are located. The pro-diocese no longer exists.

Condolences From A Former Parishioner

A former parishioner at St Mary of the Angels who sometimes sends his reflections writes:

Just read your last two posts, John. the parish has declined greatly from the plummy days of Fr. Jordan when I was a member. Remember, I was baptized and confirmed there as a teenager in the 50s. There was a thriving Sunday School, [and] adult school of religion on Sunday afternoons, before Evensong and Benediction in the evening. Daily Mass, Confessions on demand and scheduled on Saturday evenings. After Fr. Jordan's untimely death [update: in 1971], Fr. Barker took over and things started going south, from my recollection. I left the parish soon after and never looked back. I still think that Fr. Jordan might have taken the parish into a western rite Orthodox jurisdiction, [if] there had been one then. I never in all my years there heard him say anything favorable to the RCC as it existed then.

I checked the timeline on the Freedom for St Mary's site, but unfortunately, it gives no dates for Fr James Jordan's tenure. (The timeline on the Facebook page linked above says it was 1952-1971.) I asked my correspondent what was on the corner property before the bank building (which acquired its tenant in 1984), and he replied,

As I recall, two small apartment houses, I believe two story duplexes. At one time, Fr. Jordan moved out of the little house behind the church, which became class rooms, and moved into the apartment house facing Hillhurst. it was there he died from a heart attack.

It's worth noting that both Frs Jordan and Barker were Episcopal priests. My correspondent has said in the past that Fr Jordan seems to have flirted with becoming Orthodox and possibly taking the parish with him; he notes that Jordan would take groups to Orthodox services. This would have been well before the Affirmation of St Louis. Fr Barker, of course, eventually did more than flirt with Catholicism, but in consequence of his various moves was inhibited by The Episcopal Church on January 28, 1977, which was also before the Congress of St Louis, which took place on September 14-16 of that year.

My correspondent does not venerate Fr Barker as others seem to do; I take no position, since I don't know the man. I do note that other priests who have left The Episcopal Church out of dissatisfaction have resigned, rather than wait to be deposed, and under its current policies (which, however, it adjusts or not depending on what suits its purpose), the US-Canadian Ordinariate does not ordain priests who are under discipline in other jurisdictions.

This short trip down memory lane has brought me back to the time around 1977 when I first became aware of the St Mary of the Angels controversy on the five o'clock news. I believe Mrs Brandt was the spokesperson for the parish at the time, and when asked by the reporter what the parish's objections were to the Episcopal Church's ordination of women, she vehemently insisted that it destroyed "our catholicity". (She was speaking, so I don't know if the "c" was capital, but considering her subsequent positions, I'm assuming it's lower-case.)

The problems facing the parish are generational. Clearly they go back before 1977, and they probably started with Fr Dodd. I will be most eager to hear any other accounts of circumstances under Frs Jordan and Barker, as well as more specific dates for the rectorship of Fr Jordan.

US-Canadian Ordinariate Personnel Changes, Or Not

My own view, shared at least by a few other observers, is that whatever the US-Canadian Ordinariate has going in its favor is largely canceled out by incompetent or nonfeasant personnel. I'm still reeling from attempts to deal with Ms Chalmers when she was Chancellor in 2012, but the May 2015 Ordinariate Observer has, buried in an announcement of Fr Ken Wolfe's ordination, noted that by the way, he is also the new Chancellor. (Fr Wolfe, in Tucson, is yet another exception to the Ordinariates' stated policy of ordaining priests only in connection with the admission of groups.)

So the the US-Canadian Ordinariate continues to churn its officials. The recently ordained Fr Wolfe has also been appointed Director of Child and Youth Protection, with much greater fanfare than his appointment as Chancellor. On balance, this is good -- I have a great deal of respect for the VIRTUS program. My wife and I have both attended classes, and we've found that the material is serious, well-organized, and well-presented. As I've discovered with the Robert W Bowman case, even moribund and graying parishes without a whole lot of kids around can fall victim to priests and volunteers with child pornography arrests on their records.

However, given the record of the US-Canadian Ordinariate over more than three years, there's no guarantee that Fr Wolfe will actually do anything in his new position. One of the first things I'd want to look at if I were he would be the circumstances under which alcohol is served at the Bl John Henry Newman group in California, and other functions in which Andy Bartus is featured. No e-mail contact is given for Fr Wolfe -- wouldn't it be a basic requirement that anyone with any concerns over the safety of children and youth in the US-Canadian Ordinariate have a way to contact Fr Wolfe directly? I eventually found one via a google search, but not via the Ordinariate web site. [A visitor has noted that there's a link at the very top right corner of the home page, but not with the rest of the links.] (Looks like someone's going to audit this function in the Ordinariate. Hey, I used to know something about audits. Maybe I need to get in touch with the auditors.)

We learn from a comment at Ordinariate News that Fr Sellers, the incompetent or nonfeasant "Director of Communications", has been replaced as of July 1. Whoever has replaced him has made no apparent move to update the Ordinariate web site or post any further announcements -- in particular, shouldn't Fr Wolfe have a new page on the site announcing his agenda and asking for everyone's concern and cooperation? At first glance, it looks like the same club members, established or new, are simply trading posts.

Finally, we're into mid-July. The scuttlebutt was that Fr Jack Barker would be assuming some type of function in the Ordinariate as of July 1, possibly as a Vicar Forane. However, although he arrived at the Bl Newman group in Irvine on July 7, there has been no announcement from Houston on what his function will be.

But hey, everything's just fine! If Anglican Patrimony is for us, who can be against us?

Vicar General For California Groups? -- II

I first posted on this possibility a month ago, when I seem to have been the first blogger on the Ordinariate beat to catch wind of what might be coming. Via both a post on Expatriate News and the Bl John Henry Newman newsletter, the picture seems to be getting clearer:

St Luke’s Ordinariate Community in Washington, D.C. posted on their facebook page on March 29 that:

During the (Palm Sunday) Mass, Monsignor Steenson announced that our Pastor, Father Mark Lewis, has been appointed by him as Dean (Vicar Forane) of the Eastern Deanery of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter.

This is interesting news, which would seem to suggest that the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter no longer has only one Deanery, namely in Canada, but that the territory of the United States has also been divided into Deaneries.

More information on "deaneries" is available here.

A vicar forane, sometimes called a dean, is a priest appointed by the bishop in order to promote a common pastoral activity in a region of the diocese and to provide spiritual and pastoral counsel to the other priests in that region. . . . A vicariate forane is a region of the diocese over which a vicar forane exercises his office. Though these regions are sometimes referred to as “deaneries”, this term never appears in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Rather, these regions are called “vicariates” or even on occasion “districts” (cf. canon 555).

Last month, I speculated that Fr Jack Barker, a former Rector of St Mary of the Angels and currently a Catholic priest in the Diocese of San Bernardino, might be involved in the creation of a deanery involving California. An announcement from the Bishop of San Bernardino at the time indicated that Fr Barker would be leaving his position there. The Bl John Henry Newman newsletter I cited yesterday adds this informstion:

We will, however, be welcoming Fr. Jack Barker, who will be assisting with us starting July 1. He is retiring as pastor from St. Martha’s, Murrieta in June. For those who may not know, Fr. Barker was one of the very first former-Anglican priests to be ordained a Catholic priest when the Anglican Use first began. He will be offering the daily masses at 11:50 at our chapel, as well as assisting on Sundays. (Starting in July, the Wednesday mass will be an Anglican Use Low Mass!)

My understanding of the tip I received last month gave me the impression that Fr Barker could possibly become a "vicar general for California", which could well translate to Dean of a California or Western US Deanery. In that case, referring to Fr Barker as "assisting" at Bl John's could be misleading, although as I pointed out yesterday, that would not be the only misleading statement in that newsletter.

Stay tuned!

Vicar General For California Groups?

I'm told -- and I'm not sure how reliable this is -- that a Catholic priest due for retirement from parish work in the area, who is familiar with Anglican Use, may be designated a vicar general for the Ordinariate missions in Southern California. This is apparently based on some comments made after mass in a Latin rite parish in the area, which may have been misunderstood.

However, like the expectation that all parishes and missions use standardized accounting software (and be responsible for that minimal expense), I think this is another indication that adults may be taking over in the Ordinariate. I will eagerly follow developments and will welcome any further correction or clarification. However, the lack of effective supervision has already been pointed out here as a serious deficiency in the current state of affairs.

We do know that Fr Jack Barker, a previous rector at St Mary of the Angels who later became a Catholic priest, will be leaving his Murrieta, CA parish on July 1, 2015.

The Usual Craziness

I wouldn't normally post about something like this, but the combination of ignorance and vitriol in a post from someone calling himself "Norm" on the thread concerning the letter from St Mary's to Pope Benedict XVI on Ms Gyapong's blog seems to me indicative of one theme that goes through the whole St Mary's situation. "Norm" says in part (emphases in original):

The parish clearly lost its case due to bad legal advice and incompetent representation in court. Unfortunately, neither the parishionners nor the bootstrap start-up known as the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter have the financial resources to hire competent attorneys to pursue the matter. Thus, the parishionners’ [sic] best option is to cut their losses and move on.

Here, Msgr. Steenson has stated that the parishionners [sic] are welcome to come into the Catholic Church as members of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, and their numbers are clearly sufficient to establish an ordinariate community in Hollywood. I have no doubt that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles would provide facilities for them. Indeed, there seem to be indications that some, though I have no idea how many, former members of St. Mary of the Angels have taken this step.

As to clergy, the statement from the ordinariate several months ago concerning this parish, which seems to have disappeared from its web site, indicated pretty clearly that Msgr. Steenson would not accept Fr. Kelley for Catholic ordination — which now harkens back to Cardinal Manning’s earlier rejection. It’s very probable that Cardinal Manning’s staff noted the same character issues in Fr. Kelley that dictated Msgr. Steenson’s more recent decision, and thus refused his request for Catholic ordination, with the obvious consequence that the parish did not come with him into the Catholic Church. Of course, this would not bar Fr. Kelley from coming into the ordinariate as a layman.

Backing up a step, this whole scenario begs the question of whom the community that is still gathering with Fr. Kelley is following. Quite simply, are they following the Lord, or are they following Fr. Kelley?

The parish is represented by TroyGould PC, which specializes, among other things, in the corporate governance issues that the litigation with the ACA brings up. Many parishioners with specific knowledge of events and documents related to the case worked closely with TroyGould attorneys, and I believe we developed a mutual respect and appreciation, for Fr Kelley's integrity and that of the Ordinariate-bound majority on one hand, and for the attorneys on the other. Nobody at St Mary's who worked with TroyGould or who attended the court proceedings feels that TroyGould provided "bad legal advice" or "incompetent representation". Judge Linfield in his opinion noted the high quality of legal representation on both sides of the case.

Then "Norm" says (in bold, no less), "It’s very probable that Cardinal Manning’s staff noted the same character issues in Fr. Kelley that dictated Msgr. Steenson’s more recent decision, and thus refused his request for Catholic ordination, with the obvious consequence that the parish did not come with him into the Catholic Church." I simply don't know what "Norm's" relation to the parish is, or where (if anywhere other than a ouija board) he's getting his information. The first attempt by St Mary of the Angels to become Anglican Use lasted from 1980 to 1984, when, according to Fr Jack Barker, who was Rector of St Mary's during this period,

[B]oth Bishop Law and the Ecumenical Relations Committee of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had made it clear that sensitivity to ecumenical relations would be paramount in the carrying out of the pastoral provision. . . . It was in October 1984 that Bishop Ward, in behalf of cardinal Manning, reported to PDSAC clergy in Los Angeles that no parish of the pastoral provision would be allowed in the archdiocese and that both clergy and laity would have to be received into the Catholic Church on a strictly individual basis through their local latin rite parish.

Fr Barker was received into the Catholic Church following Cardinal Manning's refusal to admit the parish and then ordained a priest in a neighboring diocese, so there were no character issues related to any rector of the parish in 1984. Fr Kelley was nowhere near St Mary of the Angels at the time and had nothing to do with its application to join the Anglican Use provision, which clearly was denied due to the Archdiocese's desire not to irritate The Episcopal Church by poaching a parish. Fr Kelley was not hired by the St Mary's vestry until 2007. In addition, during June 2012, Msgr Steenson met with the elected St Mary's vestry and recommended that the parish place Fr Kelley on an extended sabbatical that would amount to a generous severance package. In the letter in which he recommended this, he noted that such an action would be for reasons "not related to the rector's moral character". Nor did this constitute any sort of direct refusal to ordain Fr Kelley.

I simply don't know how random people in the blogosphere, who adopt a highly knowledgeable tone, pick up this sort of misinformation. The last communication I'm aware of between Msgr Steenson and the vestry was the June letter, in which Steenson proceeds under the assumption (however unrealistic) that the parish will resolve its difficulties and enter the Ordinariate as a body. I'm aware of no specific statement from the Ordinary regarding any entry to the Ordinariate by St Mary's parishioners as individuals, and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has made no statement that I'm aware of regarding any other facilities for them.

This sort of misinformation -- especially unfounded attacks on Fr Kelley's character, which "Norm's" comment is specifically, in bold, meant to be -- has been picked up in the past by bloggers like David Virtue and Stephen Smuts and published without question. I have no idea why people with no apparent connection to the parish would wish to do this. False witness, though, is clearly a sin.