A Few More Updates

In April, I posted some updates on the St Mary of the Angels legal and ecclesiastical situation. I can add some additional changes. The main one is that Fr Kelley's trial on civil theft charges, originally scheduled for this month, has been moved at least to October 2014, due to the California appeals court reversing Judge Linfield's trial court ruling that he couldn't interfere in the ACA's ecclesiastical isdsue regarding the control of the St Mary's parish. The reason for this is presumably so that, if that case goes back to trial, the control of the parish could return to the elected vestry and Fr Kelley, leaving Mrs Bush and the ACA without standing to sue Fr Kelley for "theft".

It's worth repeating that the only evidence that's come out so far in pre-trial proceedings that Fr Kelley has stolen anything was Mr Lancaster's motion for summary judgment against Fr Kelley based on the assertion that Fr Kelley had stolen leftovers from parish potlucks, thus reducing his grocery bill. Other courts, including the California appeals court, have noted that there is no evidence of any financial irregularity on Fr Kelley's part.

Another issue that's been at the back of my mind since I attended the oral arguments at the appeals court is how Mr Lancaster is being paid. When Anthony Morello and Stephen Strawn called a parish meeting (with less than a day's notice) on May 26, 2012, after seizing the parish, my wife asked during the meeting who was paying for the legal work. My wife reported that Morello was not pleased about the question and spoke vaguely that "private funding" was involved.

Possibly. But more than two years later, William H Lancaster and his partner, Damon Anastasia, are still on the case. Lancaster, let's recall, was fired as a partner from a prestige law firm in 2009 after a malpractice suit. If you google "William Lancaster attorney Los Angeles", the first three hits that come up are to his firm's web site, a news article about Lancaster's firing, and the link to my blog's discussion of Lancaster's history. (Hint to Mr Lancaster: there are people who can get rid of bad google hits like these, or at least bury them way down on the list, but they do charge to do this, and there may be situations they can't fix.) I went to the Lancaster & Anastasia web site, and although there is a page for "News", the only item on it is from 2011: they'd moved their office. (I haven't checked to see if this is just a mail drop.)

The problem I can see is that anyone who hires an attorney for the kind of case Lancaster handles is going to google the guy and check references. When two of the first three hits that come up on google are that bad, anyone with any sense is going to decide Lancaster isn't the only attorney in LA and go elsewhere. So, watching Lancaster wearing the same suit he wore at the 2012 trial in the 2014 oral arguments, I started wondering how many other clients Lancaster has. My wife, a retired attorney, thinks the St Mary of the Angels litigation is a full-time gig. In other words, Lancaster, as far as I can speculate, has no other clients, and he's billing full time to Mrs Bush and the ACA. Or maybe him and Lancaster both, huh?

In my wife's estimate, billing for two years of legal work, full time, on the St Mary of the Angels case has got to be into many hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly closing in on a million. With the St Mary's assets tied up in litigation, it's unlikely that the money is coming from the parish. But Lancaster has five kids to put through college and a lifestyle to support. How is he being paid? Mrs Bush lives in a fancy penthouse condo, but I guarantee you, I was the parish treasurer, and she ain't that keen on church work. Candles, yes, lawyers, no (sorry, Marilyn, you know what you did to earn this.) If she ever fronted Lancaster any money, it wasn't for long.

So how is Lancaster being paid? Here's one possibility:

Banks and credit unions will often refuse to advance funds to attorneys and law firms because attorneys frequently have very little physical collateral; legal funding is a viable alternative that exists specifically to advance capital to attorneys. Legal lenders will have comparatively higher interest rates than banks or credit unions, but this expense is usually offset by the application, which is fined-tuned specifically for attorneys, and a faster distribution rate. Legal funding has developed into a viable industry that advances capital to attorneys and law firms who would be denied by traditional lenders.

But here's the problem: the St Mary's case has dragged on for two years, with no end in sight. They're even having a hard time going after Fr Kelley for the potluck leftovers he "stole"! Remember that the ACA thought they were going to seize the parish in May 2012; the temporary restraining order was just a formality, and Judge Jones was going to award it to them permanently two weeks afterward. Right. If Lancaster is getting advances on this thing from a legal factor, the legal factor is almost certainly starting to see that the ACA, Mrs Bush, and Mr Lancaster have at best -- at best -- a 50-50 chance of winning their case. If they lose control of the parish, they won't have the parish property to plunder, and that possibility is long overdue anyhow.

What's going on? I think there may be an answer on the Freedom for St Mary's site, which I hadn't thought about until recently.

Inquiry

I placed the following inquiry on the St Mary of the Angels contact page, giving my e-mail and phone number for any reply:

Robert W Bowman is interim priest at St Mary's neighbor ACA parish, All Saints Fountain Valley. Bowman was arrested in 2009 on child pornography charges, something noted in several newspapers at the time. However, Bowman was hired as a priest by the ACA DOW in 2013, and he is still interim priest at All Saints Fountain Valley. I notified the ACA of Bowman's arrest in April 2014, but it has taken no apparent action over Bowman. Normal church practice in protecting children is to require background checks for all priests, employees, and volunteers. Clearly the ACA is not doing this. What is Bishop Williams's position on this? What actions will he take to assure prospective St Mary's parishioners that their children will be safe, if he hasn't taken any measures to do this up to now at All Saints Fountain Valley? Has Bishop Williams himself ever submitted to a background check?

Last week I was contacted by a newspaper reporter asking for information on St Mary's, who noted that although the parish has a phone number on its site, it doesn't pick up or return calls. I assume I will not receive a reply. If I do, I will post it here.

UPDATE: I sent a copy of this message to the e-mail address of Williams's current parish, Trinity Pro-Cathedral in Rochester, NH. I got the following failure notice:

Sorry, we were unable to deliver your message to the following address.

tac@metrocast.net:
Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 ... User Unknown [RCPT_TO]

Oh, right, the parish e-mail contact for the ACA-DONE Pro-Cathedral is out of order. These people are not adults.

What I Learned at Virtus Training -- II

Let's take a moment to review some of the main points covered in the Catholic Church's Virtus materials. I would call Virtus a very good standard for the 21st century for ordinary prudence in protecting children in a church environment. I would also stress that if ordinary prudence is not followed, there are clearly people everywhere who will do all they can to gain unsupervised access to children, and without ordinary care, they will gain it. Robert Bowman is one example.

Under "Tools for Controlling Access to Children", we find in part:

• Communicate the Church's commitment to keeping children safe.
• Use written, standard employment and volunteer applications.
• Require fingerprinting with subsequent arrest reports of all clergy and staff and those volunteers that supervise children.
• Complete face-to-face interviews.
• Check all references.

The ACA clearly does not follow anything like these guidelines. Parents need to be aware of this. ACA clergy, bishops, standing committee, and vestry members need to be aware of this and insist that all dioceses and parishes follow guidelines like these. Will this happen? I doubt it.

I sent the following e-mail to Presiding Bishop Grundorf of the APA:

Bishop Grundorf, I’m forwarding this to you [an e-mail to Marsh regarding Robert W Bowman] after prayerful reflection so that you might be aware of a problem in the ACA that could reflect on your intercommunion. It appears that the ACA either does not do the most basic background checks on its priests, or if it is aware of things like child pornography arrests, it ignores them. Naturally, if the APA recognizes the ordinations or licenses of ACA priests, it simply takes over this problem for itself. You have no assurance that any ACA priest has had an adequate background check.

I hope you will assist Presiding Bishop Marsh in recognizing the very serious nature of this problem. I would stress that I have contacted both Marsh and the Vicar General of the diocese to notify them of this issue several months ago and received no reply.

We Finally Have A Profile

for The Rt Rev Owen Rhys Williams, something I've been asking for ever since he was named diocesan visitor to the ACA Diocese of the West -- in other words, a year ago. To be noted: he has a BA and an MFA, but not an MDiv. In general, the details correspond to what I could surmise from the limited available information: having attended the spoiled-rich-kid Harvard School in the Valley, what you would expect from the son of an Episcopal rector, he then proceeded to underachieve through much of his adulthood, having apparently spent some time as a ski bum, something I also surmised due to his residence in Granby, Colorado in the 1990s.

Then, as he arrived in middle age, he turned up at St Mark's Portland, where he appears to have ingratiated himself with the abrasive "Bishop" Robin Connors, who by one account from that time reeked of alcohol before noon mass, by another from the same period spoke frequently of how fond he was of vodka-with-grapefruit-juice. That Connors, a Louis Falk protégé who was forced out amid controversy as ACA Bishop of the West soon after ordaining Williams a priest, was responsible for his priestly formation is not a recommendation. Why would anyone want to go near Robin Connors? Couldn't he have done anything better?

Perhaps we finally have a profile for the man -- something every diocese is entitled to, and which it's taken a year to obtain -- because I've been noting its absence. What I'd like to know now is when he learned of Robert W Bowman's arrest for child pornography, what he did when he learned of it, and why Bowman has continued as an "interim priest" under his supervision.

"Bishop" Williams?

J'accuse

Let's look at the facts we know here. The big one, the indisputable one, is that the ACA hired Robert William Bowman, a man with a 2009 arrest for child pornography on his record, as "interim priest" at All Saints Anglican Fountain Valley, CA. He has remained in that position for well over a year. In April 2014, I happened to google the name Robert W Bowman, and one of the top links that came up in the search was a newspaper article covering the child pornography arrest. I contacted several people familiar with Bowman and established that this is the same person. I promptly notified Brian Marsh, Presiding Bishop of the ACA, and Frederick Rivers, Vicar General of the ACA Diocese of the West and self-designated Rector of All Saints Anglican Fountain Valley, CA of the newspaper articles covering the arrest. They made no reply, and Bowman remained in his position as "interim priest", with trusted access to parishioners and their children. There can be no disputing any of these facts.

Now we can move to informed speculation. I have simply got to assume that no background or reference check of any sort was made on Bowman prior to the hiring decision, or at any other time between his hiring and when I notified the ACA of the arrest in April 2014. A reference check to his previous parish, St Luke's REC Santa Ana, CA, would presumably have brought out the fact that Bowman was immediately terminated there (per news reports) following his arrest. So nobody bothered to call St Luke's! (St Luke's did shut down in 2012, but someone should have insisted that Bowman provide contacts for former wardens, vestry, or other parishioners, and an unwillingness to do so should have stopped all negotiations. For that matter, minimal work with Google would have brought up some of those names without Bowman providing them, since I could easily find them myself.)

Where was Frederick Rivers, who as Rector of the parish would have made the hiring decision? Well, among other things, he was 76 years old and an absentee. In his own rambling account of his priesthood, he notes that he doesn't put much stock in seminaries, although he's the vocations director of his diocese. This would be comical, but fall-down drunks can be comical until they get into a car and start driving. This is something a little beyond dereliction of duty.

Where was the All Saints Fountain Valley vestry? Didn't any of them make the due diligence step of asking for a reference at St Luke's or googling the guy? I assume they allowed themselves to be charmed by a psychopath. All the more reason for churches to be very, very careful, and all the more reason to point out that the vestry also fell down, very seriously, in its responsibilities.

Where was The Rt Rev Brian Marsh, Presiding Bishop of the ACA and, at the time of Bowman's hire, episcopal visitor to the ACA Diocese of the West? He presumably knew, or should have known, that Rivers, his Vicar General as well as Rector of All Saints Fountain Valley, was 76 years old, unqualified to be a priest under normal criteria, almost certainly retired-on-the-job, and none too bright. Didn't he have a responsibility to supervise what was taking place on his watch?

Where was The Rt Rev Owen Rhys Williams, after August 2013 episcopal visitor to the ACA Diocese of the West? When I informed the ACA of Bowman's arrest in April 2014, this should have gone immediately to Williams. Oddly, there is no contact information for Williams anywhere on any ACA site, either for his current parish in New Hampshire, the Diocese of the Northeast, where he is suffragan, or the Diocese of the West, where he is episcopal visitor. Given the quality of the individuals involved here, I can't make any assumption that anyone passed my notification to the ACA on to Williams. But following my notification in April 2014, Williams made no reply. As of today, Bowman's profile remains as clergy on the All Saints Anglican Fountain Valley web site.

St Luke's REC terminated Bowman immediately after his arrest. This was an entirely appropriate action. The ACA should have taken the same action immediately on learning of the arrest -- but its hiring process had been so slipshod that minimal checks, not even a phone call, just a Google search, would have told them about the arrest even before they made any hiring decision.

This all goes a little beyond dereliction of duty. But it appears there's more.

What I Learned at Virtus Training -- I

My Catholic parish announced it was short of ushers and put out a call for volunteers. I'd been wondering how I might become more active anyhow, and I had experience ushering at various Episcopal parishes, so I signed up. I discovered the process was involved: I needed to be fingerprinted and have a background check, and I needed to attend Virtus training. While Episcopal and Anglican ushers, at least in my experience, don't get background checks, the logic is compelling. A child can wander out of mass unaccompanied by a parent (a dumb parent, as the trainer pointed out) in search of the rest room. The church needs to be sure an usher is the sort of person who on one hand won't use the opportunity to molest the child, and on the other, will recognize the need to keep the kid safe and under some sort of watch.

The training outlined the facts that many of us know if we've stayed informed: there are people who will go to great lengths to work themselves into positions of trust where they can have unsupervised access to children for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Once they develop a successful pattern, they will keep at it for decades, or until they're arrested. The occupations where this is a potential problem include priests, teachers, coaches, counselors, and babysitters, but relatives, neighbors, and friends can also molest children in home environments.

The Catholic Church began to experience this problem beginning at least in the 1950s, and after considerable struggle, began to address it systematically after 2000. One result is Virtus training for employees and volunteers. The class is very well-presented, with a competent trainer. I've got to say that I've come to expect this standard of excellence from every Catholic institution I've run into. Unfortunately, one effect of it was to turn my stomach at what happens in the real world (the trainer said this is deliberate, and recognized that some people may need to leave the room briefly to regain their composure).

The bottom line is that the class is about evil and the works of the Enemy. They don't say this directly, but clearly that's what the whole thing is about. The purpose of the class is to outline specific actions that parishes, parish employees, and volunteers must take to remove opportunities for this particular evil in their environments, as well as to stress constructive attitudes and the need for vigilance.

A slightly wider topic that came to my mind, since I'd recently learned of "Bishop" Martin Sigillito, is the duty of the Church, and the Christians in it, to protect other vulnerable groups in its care. Not for nothing is Christ the Good Shepherd. The elderly, those with special needs, and well-intentioned but naïve or lonely people are also vulnerable to sexual exploitation as well as more general con artists.

There was some opportunity for small-group discussion in the class. I was so disturbed by what I'd run into about Robert William Bowman, Interim Priest at ACA's All Saints Fountain Valley parish, with a 2009 arrest for child pornography on his record but still in a position of trust with access to children in 2014, that I brought it up. I'd e-mailed Frederick Rivers, the Vicar General of the ACA Diocese of the West, via his parish, and Brian Marsh, Presiding Bishop of the ACA via the ACA contact form, and had heard nothing back, with Bowman still at that parish.

I told the group it was my former denomination, I'd become Catholic via RCIA, but I was still very, very upset about the situation. Several of them turned to me and asked, pointedly, "And what are you going to do about it?" After all, we were in a class where this is important. When children are taught in Catholic education about the issue, they're told that if it happens to them, they must tell someone in authority. If they don't listen, tell someone else, until someone listens.

Another Footnote on the Real Dangers in "Continuing Anglicanism"

A visitor sent me a link to the story of yet another Anglican "bishop", Martin Sigillito, who passed himself off as "Presiding Bishop" of the "American Anglican Convocation". This is not the same as the more reputable Convocation of Anglicans in North America, and it does not appear on the list of churches "not in communion" with the See of Canterbury on the Anglicans Online web site.

In 2012,

A federal jury returned a guilty verdict for Sigillito on April 13 on 20 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in his trial for a massive real estate Ponzi scheme that swindled investors out of more than $56 million.

Sigillito's story was recently covered in an episode of CNBC's American Greed. As far as I can tell from the various news sources, although Sigillito had a wealthy lifestyle, he presided only over a single mission parish with Sunday services at Ambruster-Donnelly Mortuary in Richmond Heights, Missouri. He apparently used this parish as one place to identify and recruit his marks. I am unable to determine where he attended seminary, what bishop ordained him in which denomination, or other details of his clerical career. A person interviewed in the link above said,

"He puts himself out there as this sort of trustworthy bishop figure," says Sebastian Rucci, the Ohio lawyer behind one of the civil suits. "I wouldn't trust a thing that guy says, even if his tongue were notarized."

Frankly, if I had anything to do with the ACA, I'd be asking many, many questions about the Rt Rev Owen Rhys Williams -- and for that matter, I'd be running real fast in the opposite direction from anyone claiming to be a "continuing" Anglican bishop. The fact is that the very nature of the "continuum" -- scores of tiny splinter denominations, "bishops" and "priests" with nonexistent qualifications, tiny parishes meeting in funeral homes -- makes it prime territory for con artists. Which, of course, is another way of saying it's a target-rich environment for the Enemy.