What I'm Learning From The New Diocesan Parish

In brief, there's something like a "high church" Ordinary Form mass. This includes altar servers in red cassocks and cottas carrying candles in procession, six candles on the reredos, organ with professional choir singing real hymns. There are bells. The pastor wears a real chasuble and genuflects at the altar. And this appears to be a prosperous parish, though clearly diverse, nothing WASPy about it.

Another thing that strikes me is that although there are infants and toddlers scattered throughout the nave, there is no distracting screaming, babbling, or banging. There seem to be several reasons for this. One is the acoustical effect of a nave that's nearly full: bodies on either side of the potential distraction tend to muffle the sound. In addition, the screaming and banging have to compete with the organ and a competently installed sound system. You have no choice but to listen to the hymns, the readings (capably read, especially by the deacon), the prayers, and the homily.

The pacing of the mass also has something to do with this. Yesterday's 9:30 mass had a ceremony for the RCIA catechumens, every verse of "All Creatures of Our God and King", extensive additional remarks from the celebrant after the announcements, and a second collection after those. At the end of the mass, I thought to myself they have to have gone long this time, no doubt about it. I checked the clock when we got back to the car -- nope! It had to be a minute over at most.

They get a "high church" mass done in exactly an hour. At the old parish, singing only two verses of guitar-and-tambourine hymns and dumbed-down liturgy, they routinely go over. Why is this? Trying to figure this out, and I'm not done, one reason has to be simply focus. There's no air of fecklessness, no pointless pauses (which, of course, are invitations for the little monsters to start screaming and banging).

Indeed, at the old parish, they dismiss the elementary-grade children before the readings (presumably for a really dumbed-down liturgy), but then the clergy talks down to the adults in the homily as though the kids were still there.

Irrespective of Anglicanorum coetibus, things don't have to be that way.

What Bishop-Elect Lopes Ought To Find

In a recent interview, Bp-Elect Lopes said that once he's installed,

After Feb. 2, I’m looking at my calendar, and it’s an awful lot of time on an airplane. The 43 communities of the ordinariate are spread around 20-something states and five Canadian provinces. To go out and be with the people and meet the pastors, experiencing the life of the ordinariate means going to them, so I will be very often on the road moving to the different communities and back in Houston during the week where our offices and chancery are located.

To start with, though, if there are 43 communities, there is a disparity between them and the number of pastors (or at least priests), who number more than 70, while many of the communities in fact have no pastor.

A visitor very kindly sent me a copy of John Shelton Reed's Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. I'm in the process of giving this book a careful reading.

Reed describes a "High and Dry" high-church faction that immediately preceded the Oxford Movement, consisting of younger sons of the entitled gentry who occupied sinecures and prebendaries. They presided over a church with sometimes empty parishes, or parishes with very small numbers. This has an unfortunate parallel with the US-Canadian Ordinariate, top-heavy with prebendaries and clergy literally without cures, parishes with members in single and double digits. If Victorian Anglo-Catholicism was almost exclusively a movement within the clergy, the Ordinariates seem to be exactly the same thing, the people being a very secondary factor.

I pray that Bp-Elect Lopes will look at his see with a new set of eyes.

Status Conference On "Related Cases" January 8, 2016

I attended this hearing, which was very short. Judge Daniel Murphy is now in charge of Department 32. Mr Lancaster explained that the primary case, decided in the September 2015 trial, is under appeal. The appeal, according to him, is in an "expedited" status, since it is a forcible detainer case. He expects it to be resolved within six months.

Ms Greer, on behalf of Fr Kelley, argued that the "initial action" can be resolved separately from the primary case, and since the courts have ruled that the vestry elected in February 2012 is the legal vestry, the ACA and the Bush group (who represented themselves as "Rector, Wardens, and Vestry") do not have standing in the "initial action". She urged the judge to dismiss the case for lack of standing by the plaintiff.

The judge asked how Fr Kelley would be prejudiced by a delay to wait for the appeal to be resolved. Ms Greer said it was unfair to Fr Kelley to have the matter dragged out. The judge nevertheless ruled that Fr Kelley was not prejudiced if the matter was continued. As a result, he continued the hearing until July 8, on the assumption that the appeal would be resolved by then. Naturally, we'll see.

This case, of course, is not judge Murphy's, and my wife thinks he doesn't want to spend the time it would take to get involved at this point, when the outcome of the appeal will do a lot of his work for him. So it's a delay (nothing new there), but nothing has really changed.

Please continue to pray for Fr Kelley, the vestry, and the parish.

The Visitor's Questions In Yesterday's Post

have jogged my thinking toward a related question about what to consider should the parish regain the property. As of today, the squatters still have "Candlemass" listed for January 2, although I've pointed out that Candlemas should in fact be February 2. In the past, they've sometimes made corrections when I've noted such errors, but increasingly, they haven't bothered.

I think this is because whether Christmas is scheduled for August 16 (as it was for some weeks last year) is beside the point. I think my wife's view that the squatters have worked with the ACA to establish adverse possession of the property is the correct one. Under this theory of the case, their intent was to find a way to eject those with actual title to the property, keep them out for a statutory period while operating as something like a church, and then, having assumed de facto title, sell it. The various disputes over whether Fr Kelley had obscurely heretical views, was paying someone's dental bill from parish funds, or keeping a naked African-American girl in the parish basement, were always pretextual, designed simply to create division, which the ACA, working with Mrs Bush, could then exploit for its own purposes.

For the squatters' purposes, if they announce that Christmas comes in August, it actually suits their agenda. After all, Scientology is just down the street, and under the US First Amendment, churches have extreme latitude. All they need to do is look more or less like a church to satisfy the requirements of adverse possession. On the other hand, looking weird will also keep away people who might be sincere enough to want actually to receive a valid sacrament -- enough of those could give the squatters their own set of problems. The arrangement they have now is temporary, to be retained only until they establish adverse possession and sell the place (receiving their own lagniappes, commissions, and consulting fees in the process).

One potential issue that comes from yesterday's questions is whether, if the parish were to reopen under the vestry, the dissidents could return, renew their inactive memberships, and simply revive the old pretextual disputes. This is possible, but I think it's unlikely. To start with, the dissident group was always smaller than a dozen people. Of these, I assume that a final resolution of the case would include a court order excluding those who had assaulted parishioners or made threats, or they could be covered by a separate protective order. This would eliminate several of the remaining core dissidents.

A final resolution of the case in favor of the vestry would also add a major obstacle to the dissidents' former agenda. The trial court has ruled that the August 2012 parish vote to leave the ACA was valid. The major aim of the dissidents following the initial erection of the Patrimony of the Primate was to return the parish to the ACA, and then probably as well to participate in a sale of the property. With the court ruling that the vote to leave was valid, rejoining the ACA would require a supermajority of the membership to revise the bylaws yet again. Rumors like those spread in 2011-2012 wouldn't be enough to do this.

Good Questions From A Visitor

I opened my e-mail this morning to find this set of questions from a visitor:

Assuming that the squatters are finally evicted, I see great problems for the parish.

1. Will the church have a functioning vestry upon repossession?
2. If so, who will be the members?
3. If not, how long will it take have a parish meeting to form a new vestry?
4. Who will be considered to be voting members of the parish at such a meeting? (Will Mrs.Bush, et al., still be considered active members?)
5. Who will be the rector upon reposssession?
6. Will the parish be an independent congregation without a bishop?
7. Will the parish bylaws provide clear answers to these questions?
8. Is it likely that the Ordinariate will want anything to do with the parish until all the various property and financial issues are resolved?
9. Will members who have become Roman Catholic return to the parish?
10. If so, will they also have to attend Mass at a Roman Catholic parish and only receive Holy Communion there?

I would be most interested in you addressing these matters in your highly informative blog.

For starters, many thanks for the kind remark about my blog! These are very good questions, and some of them have taken the efforts of highly capable legal minds, while others touch on the parish's ongoing legal strategies, which are confidential, and to which as a friend of the parish who nevertheless is not on the vestry, I'm not privy. So I speak here only for myself as a lay observer.

Regarding the status of the vestry, the best answer I can give is to try to extrapolate the intent of the appeals court, which was basically to ensure as much as possible the continued legal existence of the corporation. The vestry in the eyes of the court continues to be the one elected in February 2012. There have been changes in its membership since that date, but they were made in accordance with the bylaws, and they were recognized in Judge Strobel's 2015 decision. By the same token, the 2015 trial court, in ruling that the 2012 vote to leave the ACA was valid, affirmed the appeals court's view that this also makes Fr Kelley the legal rector. Should the parish regain control of the property, it would presumably hold a membership meeting at the earliest possible date in 2016, or whenever it did regain control.

Regarding the membership of the parish, the bylaws say members in good standing are

Registered in the Parish Register as a Communicant of the Parish and upon the books of the Treasurer as a pledged, or regular weekly or monthly contributor to the support of the general budget of the Parish, or a giver of notable service acknowledged by the Rector and Vestry, for at least the preceding twelve months.

Further,

The Rector will submit to the Vestry at its January meeting and again in July meeting the names of those persons who are voting members of the Corporation, and whose names will be displayed in the minutes of the Vestry for those meetings and attested by the Clerk.

and,

Any member who has not participated in the Church activities, has not had contact with clergy or Vestry, and has not made a financial contribution within a year will be put on the inactive membership list.

but,

Persons who have been placed on the inactive membership list may be restored to active status upon reaffirming their active membership.

It's worth pointing out that a continuing core of communicants has held mass on a weekly basis at the residence of a vestry member. Consequently, there is currently a group of members in good standing as defined in the bylaws. Other members as of 2012 who, for fear of personal safety for example, stayed away from the parish during the time of trouble would be eligible for immediate reinstatement.

I simply don't know exactly what has been put before the court regarding whether certain individuals would be required to stay off the property. Several among the squatter group have either physically assaulted regular parish members, threatened to do so, or threatened violence against the property. Others, while listed in the legal actions, appear to have lost interest and moved on. How any of their cases would be handled is a legal issue I can't address.

A number of members in good standing as of 2012 had earlier been baptized and confirmed as Roman Catholics. I believe they returned to Catholic parishes when the troubles began. How, or whether, they would return to the parish if it did not join the Ordinariate is up to them, although I'm sure they would be welcome to return as communicants there in the future, recognizing the canonical issues they would face in doing so. My wife and I became Catholic in 2013 but have continued as friends of the parish, though we receive communion at a Catholic parish. Should it enter the Ordinariate, we would need to consider our future involvement at that time.

At this point, the parish is independent and has no affiliation and no bishop. The courts have deferred to the bylaws as the source for definitive answers to any questions about affiliation, and would continue to do so. The bylaws will need to be revised again for the parish to enter the Ordinariate. The parish has maintained its interest in joining the Ordinariate, and an adviser to Los Angeles Abp Gomez has continued his contacts with the vestry, although he presumably does not speak for Bp-Elect Lopes.

The Ordinariate would almost certainly not receive the parish until all legal issues are resolved. Among other things, it simply does not have the financial resources to protect the parish from continued legal action. However, this assumes that the atmosphere in Houston would be favorable to admitting the parish as well. On that, or on whether the arrival of Bp-Elect Lopes would have an impact, I can make no judgment as of now.

I hope this helps. Please pray for Fr Kelley, the vestry, and the parish.

The Tedious RouteTo Justice

The hearing on the disposition of the "related" Rector Wardens, and Vestry cases is scheduled for Friday, January 8. I plan to attend. As a lay observer, it seems to me that this hearing will at least move the process toward dismissing the "initial action", the case brought by Morello, Strawn, and the dissident central committee against Fr Kelley and the vestry in May 2012. Every judge who's looked at the specific allegations in this action has found them without merit, including Judge Jones, who acknowledged that in granting the temporary restraining order to the ACA, she had acted in error.

I'm hoping that this hearing will continue the process of chipping away the ACA's and the squatters' case. It's worth noting that late last year, "Bishop" Marsh took official notice of this blog, and it appears that there was a renewed effort to stop this blog through Catholic channels. (I'm especially grateful for this effort, since it got me off the dime of simply tolerating the liturgical and musical abuse at the Our Mother of Good Counsel parish and sent me to find a better mass and a different confessor.)

However, both these developments are a sign that the ACA and the squatters are getting nervous. Not that they'd actually try to settle the case on terms that might still carry some advantage for their position -- something's very odd there. At this point, with regular rental income either stopped or suspended, all they can rely on is the offertory from the dozen or so tightwads who attend services there, little more than spare change.

As I've calculated here, the money they have to be spending just to pay utilities and "Bishop" Owen Williams's housing allowance alone must exceed this by orders of magnitude, although we must also assume Lancaster & Anastasia LLP are not yet donating their services.

Where is this money coming from? My wife thinks there can be only two explanations for the squatter's continued holdout: either they have some agenda item they haven't yet accomplished, or they need to cover something up. Both of us think they can only delay the inevitable.

The "Angelican" Calendar

The squatter C team, busy as ever, has updated the calendar once again.

"Candlemass" is January 2 for "Angelicans", although Candlemas is February 2 for the rest of us. A visitor points out that since Christmas was August 16 last year, "Candlemass" should be in September, 40 days after Christmas.