I Want To Preface The Next Series Of Posts

with some remarks about how journalists -- both old-media and new -- have covered Anglo-Catholicism, the journey of the Traditional Anglican Communion and its various bishops, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, and the complicated and unhappy situation at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood. I think a lot about a Holy Week sermon I heard 25 years ago from an Episcopal priest: she said she'd had a call from a religion writer at the Los Angeles Times. The Timeswoman wanted to come out to the parish on Easter morning so she could take pictures of little girls in their Easter clothing amid the tulips in the parish garden. Our priest said of course she could -- but only if she came to the Good Friday service as well. You couldn't separate the little girls among the flowers on Easter morning from the pain and suffering of the cross on Good Friday. If the reporter wanted to cover that too, she was perfectly welcome to come out. Otherwise, well, no.

I'm sorry to say that priest has since left the active ministry. Perhaps a part of it was that she understood the madwomen who wear straw hats and velvet hats to church a little too well. The old-media reporters on the religion beat have typically been part-timers not judged competent for the society or business pages, and they've tended to see their audience mainly as those same ladies in the straw hats and velvet hats, coating their stories with cloying sentiment, trying above all not to give offense. The new media, bloggers on the "continuing Anglican" beat like David Virtue and Fr Stephen Smuts, still owe quite a bit to their old-media models. They'll flirt with controversy over stories like St Mary of the Angels, but they'll beat a hasty retreat into received opinion and conventional wisdom at the first poisonous comment from some pseudonymous yahoo on their sites.

Not much sensible has been said, in my opinion, about any of the current developments surrounding Anglo-Catholicism, the journey of the Traditional Anglican Communion and its various bishops, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, and the complicated and unhappy situation at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood. There are few white hats (Fr Kelley wears a biretta). I seem to be the first to take a serious look at some of the players, their dodgy histories and unverifiable qualifications, and the tiny but ever-shrinking numbers involved. I think John Hepworth has been a major figure, for good or ill, who has brought circumstances to their current pass. Some knowledgeable visitors here have sent me some worthwhile information on the Hepworth case, and I want to present as complete a version of that story as I can, but it probably won't resemble much of what's been said up to now.

What To Make Of A Diminished Thing

What originally put me on the line of inquiry that led to this blog was a throwaway remark in an Australian newspaper concerning the scandal in the TAC's Australian branch, in which a TAC priest and major figure in that country's parliament had been accused of gay sexual harassment. I'll have more to say about that later, but what caught my eye in this case was a single sentence halfway down the story:

The ACCA [Anglican Catholic Church in Australia], which is an independent church within the international Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), has about 400 members across the country.

Four hundred members? There are flying-saucer cults in the US with far more than that! And the Australian John Hepworth, who until he either resigned or was expelled earlier this year was the Archbishop of the entire Traditional Anglican Communion, rose to prominence in that church. What on earth does it mean to become a bishop of a denomination with 400 members and then an "archbishop" of a world organization made up of similar rag-tag groups?

Yet Hepworth had become a major figure in conservative Anglican circles due to his approach to the Holy See, which in the view of many led to Pope Benedict XVI issuing the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. The media, even the new media, thus creates myths out of nothing, and that's what led me to question seriously what the heck is going on here. If "John Hepworth, Anglican Archbishop" is a phantom and a con artist, where's the truth?

Regarding numbers in the US, the Wikipedia entry for the ACA lists 5,200 members, but this number was probably always exaggerated, and in light of departures in recent years, it can't possibly be correct. A friend sent me a list of parishes and missions in the ACA Diocese of the West as of January 2010. I've crossed out the names of the parishes and missions that are no longer listed in the diocese as of July 2012 (I'm being generous in including St Mary of the Angels, which did vote to leave the diocese and the ACA in August 2012):

Parishes

All Saints', Fountain Valley, CA
Epiphany, Phoenix, AZ
Holy Cross, Tucson, AZ
Holy Nativity, Payson, AZ
Resurrection, Spokane, WA
St. Augustine of Canterbury, Hollister, AZ
St. Columba's, Lancaster, CA
St. Francis, Portland, OR
St. James', Olympia, WA
St. John's, Sun Lakes, AZ
St. Mark's, Loomis, CA
St. Mary's, Hollywood, CA
St. Peter's, Auburn, CA

Missions:

All Saints, Green Valley, AZ
Holy Cross, Honolulu, HI
St. Anselm's, Sequim, WA
St. Augustine of Canterbury, Hamilton, MT
St. Erasmus, Gig Harbor, WA
St. George, Fairbanks, AK
San Pedro y San Pablo, Phoenix, AZ
St. Stephen's, Fillmore, CA

That's 21 parishes and missions as of 2010 (a number tiny enough; in comparison, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles alone has 85,000 members in 147 parishes). By mid-2012, this number had shrunk to 11 -- in other words, in a little over two years, the diocese had lost almost half its parishes and likely an equivalent membership.

References to numbers elsewhere in the ACA show a similar decline. An article in a local newspaper on Brian Marsh, ACA Bishop of the Northeast (and Presiding Bishop of the whole absurd little denomination in the US), said in 2009:

Then, last month, he was installed as the ACA's Northeast Diocese bishop. In that position, he will oversee 35 churches with about 2,000 parishoners.

As of 2012, there are only 26 parishes listed on the diocese's web site. That's a decline of 31%. If we take the almost certainly optimistic number of 2,000 in 2009, if it's declined by an equivalent 31%, Marsh's flock must now number only 1380. There are, of course, individual medium-size parishes in any number of denominations that have more members than in Marsh's whole diocese. Much has been made of membership declines in The Episcopal Church, to which many observers attribute its increasingly liberal leanings -- but those declines have been nothing like the precipitous drop in the ACA. If current trends continue (though they may not, of course), there will be nothing left of the ACA in less than a decade.

I'll look more closely at John Hepworth in my next post.

Welcome To Visitors From Fr Smuts!

I've noticed that I'm getting some traffic from Fr Smuts's blog in South Africa, and I've been told he's got a post up about my blog, which is what's driving the traffic (such as it is). I haven't had the time to check what he's had to say. What began to cause me serious concern about Fr Smuts is in fact his situation as a priest in the Traditional Anglican Communion and what I've been learning in my research about his fellow priests and bishops. If I were part of such a small organization (and I'll be getting into its actual size in subsequent posts), and I'd begun to learn how troubling the records are of prominent people in that denomination, I'd be doing some intense soul-searching. Not only that, but the information I've developed so far has come from basic web searches of public records. I've got to think that if he knows some of the TAC players at closer range, he should have become troubled well before now. Fr Smuts is part of the tiny breakaway denomination that's brought us Anthony Morello, Stephen Strawn, John Hepworth, and Peter Slipper. What sort of questions does this raise about Fr Smuts, his own judgment, or his choice in associates?

I'm Unable to Locate a Bio for Bishop Strawn

on the ACA Diocese of the Missouri Valley site, and I've checked the Bishop's Page, the About Us page, and the Diocesan Officers and Staff. That's odd. Nor is there a bio for Bp Strawn as the rector of St John's Cathedral, his home parish. But after some digging, I did find a bio on the home page for a DMV parish, the St George church in Leavenworth, KS. Again, as with Canon Morello, it's troubling that one would have to go to such lengths to find basic career and biographical information on a key figure. But the St George bio page, while incomplete, does have considerable detail. On Bp Strawn's education, it says

Fr. Strawn earned his Associate in Science Degree at Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas and his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the University of Texas at Tyler. His Theological education was done at The Anglican School of Theology in Dallas, Texas.

I'd read elsewhere the accusation that Bp Strawn's seminary training was from a mail order school, so I began researching the Anglican School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. After extensive inquiry, I received the following e-mail from St Matthew's Episcopal Cathedral in Dallas:

Thank you for your inquiries. The Anglican School of Theology no longer exists. It closed numerous years ago. In its place we have the Stanton Center which holds classes for lay ministers or those who want to become a Deacon, etc. in the church.

I also spoke via phone with an individual associated with the successor Stanton Center, who said that the Anglican School of Theology had closed in spring 2005, as a result of difficulties encountered in securing accreditation from the State of Texas; the school had never been accredited. She said that only a few priests had ever been ordained as graduates of the school.

The St George parish bio for Bp Strawn also says,

Bp. Strawn was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. In 1981 he married Annette Monier, also of Dallas. A year later they moved to the small East Texas town of Malakoff where they lived 21 years raising their four daughters, Angelique, Christine, Tiffany and Miranda.

Texas divorce records are available on line. These list a divorce for a Stephen D Strawn, born in 1958, from a Tonya A Strawn. The marriage took place in 1977 and was dissolved in 1980. While this is the 21st century, and many marriages now end in divorce, a divorce is more problematic for a bishop in any denomination (and of course, a Roman Catholic bishop may not marry at all). A report on controversy surrounding the election of Daren Williams as ACA Bishop of the West includes a reference to Williams's own divorce as a potential impediment, and this also raises the question of whether the delegates who'd elected Bp Strawn were aware of his divorce.

This may also have been one reason for Bp Strawn's reversal on the 2007 Portsmouth Declaration, whereby the bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion/Anglican Church in America signed a letter to the Holy See that read in part:

3. We accept that the most complete and authentic expression and application of the catholic faith in this moment of time is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its Compendium, which we have signed together with this Letter as attesting to the faith we aspire to teach and hold.

4.Driven by these realizations, which we must now in good conscience bring to the attention of the Holy See, we seek a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See, at once treasuring the full expression of catholic faith and treasuring our tradition within which we have come to this moment. We seek the guidance of the Holy See as to the fulfillment of these our desires and those of the churches in which we have been called to serve.

Bp Strawn was in favor of this until he was against it. It's reasonable to infer that one reason for his change in heart would be that on any sort of reflection, he would have recognized that if the TAC/ACA had in fact entered the Catholic Church as a body, his theological education would almost certainly not have been sufficient to allow his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, and his divorce, unless he were able to secure a declaration of nullity for that marriage from the Church, would be an obstacle to his even being received as a layman.

But this brings us to the whole issue of the TAC, the Portsmouth letter of 2007, and its relationship to John Hepworth, its now-expelled primate.

The Rt Rev Stephen Duane Strawn

is Anthony Morello's boss, since as we saw yesterday, Morello is his Canon to the Ordinary. An Anglican Canon to the Ordinary is an ecclesiastical officer who performs tasks as assigned by the Ordinary or Diocesan Bishop. Since even Anglican priests take vows of obedience to bishops, the bishop's assignments must be considered as compulsory as military orders.

Bishop Strawn's background is slightly easier to find than Canon Morello's, though the record also raises troubling questions. He is one of two remaining diocesan bishops in the Anglican Church in America following a series of retirements and what can only be characterized as a purge between 2010 and 2012. He was originally elected ACA Bishop of the Missouri Valley (a diocese which covers the entire midwest down to Texas) in 2007. I'm told that the election was contentious, with 17 ballots, and Strawn was not elected until late in the day when many qualified electors had already left the meeting. On the sudden retirement of Daren Williams, ACA Bishop of the West, in late 2010, Strawn also became the episcopal visitor (a sort of flying bishop) to that diocese as well, which covers a scattered group of tiny parishes on the West Coast. St Mary of the Angels, however, was not originally among those that Strawn took over -- that story will come in due course.

Bishop Strawn apparently had a bad reputation among his fellow priests in Texas before he was consecrated ACA Bishop of the Missouri Valley. An MS Word document on the web site of the (former ACA) St Stephen’s Anglican parish in Athens, TX begins,

The election of Stephen Strawn as Bishop of the Missouri Valley was accepted with much emotion here in Texas. At All Saints San Antonio Father Chip Harper who had served as Rector at St Stephen’s Athens after Strawn’s move to Quincy as well as had been a candidate for ordination in the old Southwest diocese when Strawn was a priest at St Stephen’s, and other parishioners who knew Strawn in the diocese realized they had to get out of the diocese immediately and so they did.

Some at St. Stephen’s were delighted that the priest they considered even to that day as ‘a real priest’ had been elected. Others who knew him before his move to Quincy or saw his activities during Harper’s and my tenure wished to leave and urged me to seek quick exit like Chip’s parish. One such very active family immediately left St Stephen’s and is now happily ensconced in another jurisdiction.

Neither All Saints San Antonio nor St Stephen's Athens appears on the current ACA Diocese of the Missouri Valley web site; they are in different denominations now and no longer in the ACA. In fact, the ACA now lists only one parish in the entire state of Texas. A news story on the eventual split by St Stephen’s from the ACA in 2009 says

A seven-month struggle for power — punctuated by heated words and constant disagreement between a priest and his bishop — has resulted in St. Stephen’s Anglican Church and the Anglican Church of America splitting up.

The announcement came earlier this week in a press release issued by the Bishop of the Diocese of the Missouri Valley, Right Reverend Stephen D. Strawn.

Strawn was the priest at St. Stephen's Anglican Church and left in 2003.

The cases of St Stephen's Athens and St Mary of the Angels Hollywood are remarkably similar in their contentiousness and complexity. The clearest factor they have in common is the personal style of Bishop Strawn. For instance, the Athens newspaper article contains a timeline:

• February 2009 to June 3 — according to Pardue, the standing committee of the diocese passed a resolution taking the parish to mission status.
• June 4 — the Synod voted unanimously to table the resolution for one year.
• June 14 — the parish vestry called a special session to disassociate.
• June 16 — Bishop Strawn suspends Pardue.
  “He said I spoke badly of him to other priests in the diocese after he tried to Shanghai the church,” Pardue said.
• June 17 — the parish is declared a mission and the Bishop makes himself the rector.
• June 28 — Bishop Strawn fires the entire vestry and names Father Holland Priest in charge.
• July 5 — the parish votes to disassociate from the diocese.

The parishioners at St Mary of the Angels have put up a very similar timeline at the Freedom for St Mary of the Angels website. In both cases, Strawn is accused of going outside the canons of his denomination and the corporation laws of the respective states in summarily removing members of the vestries, or lay governing boards, of the two parishes, and replacing them with his own loyalists, some of whom were not even eligible for service on a vestry. In both cases, he violated the ACA's canons by threatening or initiating legal action to resolve the disputes. In both cases, he suspended or inhibited the priests of the parishes and replaced them with his own loyalists. In both cases, the parishes responded by voting to disassociate from the ACA -- and in both cases, Strawn contested the votes. In the St Stephen's case, his actions were completely counterproductive, resulting in the loss of one more parish to his steadily shrinking denomination. While the St Mary of the Angels case hasn't been resolved as conclusively, it constitutes a continuing scandal that damages the reputation of Strawn and the ACA.

Tomorrow we'll look at other parts of Strawn's background and behavior that are cause for concern.

The Rev Canon Anthony J Morello, PhD,

a onetime Episcopal priest, has been made Priest-in-Charge of St Mary of the Angels by the Anglican Church in America, following the removal of its rector. Morello told a local paper,“There will be an outreach to hire an interim priest for St. Mary’s and I will remain there for the present.”

However, Morello’s record as a priest in The Episcopal Church raises questions about the ACA's judgment. An article in the Modesto, California Bee for June 18, 2005, covers the closing of the Episcopal mission parish St Dunstan’s Modesto, whose final priest was the same Anthony Morello. "The closure is based on dwindling attendance - and giving - at the Carver Road church, which draws about 50 Sunday worshipers,” says the article.

The article goes on to interview Morello on the cause of the dwindling attendance. Although the 2003 election of openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire Eugene Robinson had led to disaffection among many Episcopalians nationwide, this apparently wasn’t the issue in that case.

“[Diocesan CFO Duke] Golden and Morello said they don't think Robinson's ordination is why St. Dunstan's lost membership. Morello said people began leaving in 2003 when he became engaged to a woman from another parish whose children he previously counseled, and to whom he'd provided mediation services before her divorce.

“Attendance went from as many as 250 to about 50 people," Morello said.

“'I think the decline in membership has a direct bearing on that,' Morello said. 'When you have rumors and controversy in church, people leave.'”

In other words, the Episcopalians in Modesto had no need to find a scandal 3000 miles away to drive them out of the church, they had one right in town, courtesy of their own rector! By his own account, the rumors and controversy surrounding his own conduct were responsible for a decrease in attendance as high as 80%. The article goes on, “Current members did not wish to comment on what they saw as rumors. The Rev. Michael McClenaghan, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church referred questions to the bishop. 'He is ... much more intimately aware of the reasons that the people of St. Dunstan's are ending their ministry in Modesto,' he said.”

Following the closure of St Dunstan’s in 2005, I find Morello listed on some parish bulletins in a position called "Associate Assisting Interim Priest” during autumn 2007 and winter 2008 at St John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Lodi, CA. This is a highly unusual title -- a google search brings up nothing else like it anywhere! "Assisting" and "associate" are often used separately to describe priests who are low on the totem pole; seeing them combined in this way is unique -- and adding "interim" just rubs it in a little more! It's almost as though the parish was trying to keep him at arm's length. He simply pops up there, and then several months later he simply disappears again. As of 2012, he is not listed as an Episcopal priest on the web site of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

He moved back to southern California. (He had been Vicar of St Luke's Episcopal Mission in Fontana from 1995 to 1999, but left that post under uncertain circumstances.) By 2010 he had become a priest in the breakaway Anglican Church in America and had become an assistant priest at its tiny parish All Saints Fountain Valley, which currently styles itself a "cathedral" (the rectory is a mobile home in back); he became the parish’s rector in 2012. To add to his comic-opera titles, he is currently also Canon to the Ordinary for the ACA Diocesan Visitor, the Rt Rev Stephen D Strawn, Bishop of the Missouri Valley and, of course, he is now also Priest in Charge at St Mary’s Hollywood.

A profile appearing for Anthony Morello, a member of the Class of 1965 at St Frances De Chantal School, Brooklyn NY, on the Memory Lane website gives further information on what appears to be the same man's background:

In 1979 I relocated to California, and found a new life. I returned to school to complete my education, and married. Openined [sic] my own business (Travel and Charter Bus Company.) After awhile [sic] I decided to explore entering the Priesthood in the Episcopal Church, I was accepted and Ordained a Priest on August 14, 1993. I also earned a Ph D in Counseling Psychology in 1998, and have a practice working mostly with children. I also have a radio talk show called “This Week” on KVIN 920 AM in Modesto, Ca. We deal with Children and Family Issues. I have never lost the desire to laugh, and to treat life as if it is a Carnival. Over the years my Ministry has brought me to the Philippines, and most recently to Taganrog Russia. In both places I have started to build or rebuild Childrens Hospitals. Life has been good to me. The one thing I always attribute my success to in life is the training I received at St. Francis [sic], and those wonderful, wonderful Sisters that taught us. May God always Bless them and keep them.”

Since he referred to a radio show in Modesto, I contacted KVIN there and asked if an Anthony Morello had ever hosted such a show. The reply:

Sorry, no such show on KVIN since we've owned it [1997]. Don't know anything about it.

Doug Wulff,
Co-owner, KVIN

The sketch on Memory Lane refers in the present tense to a period after his PhD in 1998, so this isn't helpful to Morello's overall credibility. There are other puzzling gaps in his background. Since his time in Modesto, he has represented himself as a mediator and Christian counselor as well as a priest, and in the sketch above, he refers to the PhD in Counseling Psychology he received in 1998.

In addition to his position as Rector of All Saints Fountain Valley, he currently operates a mediation business called Mediate Always. Its street address and phone number are the same as the church. He and a partner or associate appear on the Who We Are Page. Although he's representing himself as a mediation professional, his biography is completely blank, as is his biography on the All Saints Fountain Valley site, but there's a bio for his partner or associate, Mike Creek. Although Morello calls himself Dr and uses the degree after his name, no one I've talked to has been able to identify which institution issued his PhD (in fact, one person said this was in spite of repeated attempts). A potential client wishing to engage Morello's counseling and mediation services should be entitled to know where his PhD came from and what other professional certifications and memberships he has. These are typically listed in reputable professional bios, and their absence here should be cause for concern.

And while Morello has (according to the Modesto Bee story and by his own account on the Memory Lane site) practiced as a counselor, since he's an ordained clergyman, he is not required to be licensed by the State of California, and in fact no license record appears for either him or Mike Creek. There is also no state licensure requirement for anyone identifying himself as a mediator, and as this document points out,

Mediation is in its early stages of development as an area of study and professional practice. Consistent with the evolution of other fields, such as Psychology, the early stages of development of a field can seem chaotic as people from various disciplines and backgrounds jump into the new opportunity. Generally at this early stage there are little or no regulations of the field, many disparate professional groups and associations, no articulated standards or code of ethics, and no standardized training or curriculum requirements.

This description of an early stage of development in a field accurately describes the current state of affairs for mediation as a professional method of conflict resolution.

So What Happened?

It's all over but the appeals: the Los Angeles Superior Court has turned the historic St Mary of the Angels parish in Hollywood over to a tiny breakaway "continuing Anglican" denomination, the Anglican Church in America. I was going to start out by describing the ACA and its splinter-group parent, the Traditional Anglican Communion, as tiny, corrupt, and breakaway, but I'm going to leave the corrupt part out for now and simply let my research tell its own story. It's not my intent here to outline the specifics of the case: another site, the Freedom for St Mary blog listed on my blogroll here, does that in detail. As my posts proceed, I'll sketch in history and background as needed, but I'm more interested in the bigger picture: what's really going on here? How can we understand what's happening? How does it relate to some of the basic reasons we go to church -- like the problem of evil, for example? Keep in mind, though, that this is a cold case file. The court has ruled, further legal action is going to be slow, and I don't hold a lot of optimism that anything much will change from how it is now.

The story of what took place in recent months at St Mary of the Angels, a former Episcopal parish that in the past had had members and friends like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Charlton Heston, is complicated and unhappy. More than a few parishioners -- it's probably more accurate now to describe almost all of them as former parishioners -- were deeply affected.  It's been suggested that some may need the sort of counseling that people get for post-traumatic stress, and I'd say that many of us are as shell-shocked as we'd be if we saw the devil appear in a sudden poof right before our eyes, except if that happened, the devil wouldn't be what we expected, no red-colored guy with horns, hooves, and a pitchfork -- we'd be ready for that, after all. The real devil is the way C.S.Lewis thought he'd be, a mediocre guy in a business suit out on a cigarette break, and that's probably the part that bothers us most.

What I want to do here is describe the mediocre guys in business suits, or business casual, or even clerical collars, show what the devil's really up to in this day and age. Best round up an usher and see if he's got any life preservers and signal flares on hand: hold on.