The St Mary's Annual Meeting on February 3

wasn't all that big a deal, to my way of thinking, because it was going to be predictable. Based on what I've heard, it was: a number of former parishioners and continuing friends of the parish tried to get in and were not allowed. A security guard had a list of those approved to enter, and anyone else was barred. This does confirm that, although at least nine people received formal letters of excommunication, a larger number had been excommunicated de facto by not being allowed into the parish's annual meeting, since of those who were barred, only a few had been formally excommunicated.

As I said the other day, I didn't think it was worth the stress and frustration to go down there only to be turned away. The only reason I can think for those de facto excommunications would be that the angry core of dissidents now running the place felt these people were undesirable for reasons not worth specifying. Those reasons might include a likelihood that they would raise legitimate legal and procedural questions in the meeting, such as how vestry members could be appointed without a parish election.

Those who did try to get in report that the security guard had a list about two pages long of people who were specifically approved to attend the meeting. An 8-1/2 by 11 page has 55 lines of normal print, which suggests that the ACA feels that there are somehow still more than 55 members of the parish in good standing, despite at least nine formal excommunications and an additional non-trivial number of de facto excommunications. This is hard to believe, since as of February 2012, there were 64 members in good standing, a number of those had left prior to the April takeover, no one transferred in who was already confirmed, there was no 2012 confirmation class, and no 2012 episcopal visit for confirmations. Talk about elections in Chicago! Or for that matter, 90,000 TAC communicants in India!

This is especially important, because the charges in the presentment against Fr Kelley included

• Calling and conducting parish meetings not in accordance with the parish bylaws
• Removing members of the vestry and appointing replacements not eligible to serve
• Excommunicating members of the parish due to simple disagreements.

Whatever the allegations against Kelley -- and in my view and the view of nearly all the elected 2012 vestry, they were false -- they pale against what the ACA, its "bishops", and its "priests" in charge have done with impunity since taking over the parish. In fact, in an e-mail he mistakenly sent to me, "Bishop" Strawn acknowledged that he'd supervised the uncanonical removal of vestry members, reminding his Canon to the Ordinary to find a way to smooth it over in some subsequent meeting.

This is the most blatant hypocrisy. The few remaining ACA clergy who've been to an accredited seminary won't need scriptural citations. The ACA and the TAC are small organizations. Every "bishop", active or retired, is clearly complicit in this action simply by remaining silent. I have a feeling that the good and sincere priests that had been in the ACA and by and large the TAC got out of Dodge in the circumstances surrounding the Patrimony. If there are any left, this should make them very uncomfortable. If it were me, I'd be, so to speak, hot under the collar.

I'm Not Sure What The Fuss Is About,

but I have some ideas. The blogosphere is a strange thing: some blogs, like this one, are aimed at exposing a particular problem that isn't worth media attention, or perhaps should have media attention but doesn't get it. I'm not doing autobiography here, I'm talking about a somewhat quirky corner of the Church Universal and some of the cobwebs in it. Other people blog, in effect, to remake themselves. They project an idealized persona that they'd like to be, or that they'd like other people to think they are. That's fine as far as it goes, whatever floats your boat.

In the end, though, it seems to me that religion isn't about projecting an idealized persona. Isn't that a little too close to hypocrisy, an issue that's at the heart of the Gospels? I think Stephen Smuts is at minimum a fantasy-style blogger: he's a "priest" in a splinter denomination who clearly spends a great deal of time posting pretty pictures on a blog that's mainly aimed at making him and his denomination look more respectable than they are.

Ms Gyapong and various commenters on her blog speculate that maybe, because the TAC is so small, it can't help ordaining people who don't have an MDiv, so that's OK. Isn't that a little backward? If you feel you have a vocation, wouldn't your motive be to follow that vocation through with as much integrity as you can muster? Wouldn't that include a desire to be properly ordained in a real denomination? St Paul talks about running the race in order to win it. I don't expect every Christian to be a Catholic or a Presbyterian or whatever, but shouldn't a vocation mean taking things seriously enough to dot the I's and cross the T's? If a denomination is so small I can't go to a seminary, shouldn't that make me decide to switch to a bigger denomination?

Stephen Smuts is basically just living out a blogosphere fantasy. There's a small number of people who for whatever reason want to share that fantasy. His main defenders in the comments are themselves a bit weird -- look at Michael Frost, a frequent commenter on various blogs. The guy claims to be Orthodox, and the biographical information he's given in various comments says he lives in the Omaha, Nebraska area. But also from comments, he says he frequently attends the ACA parish at St Aidan's Des Moines, Iowa, which means that although he claims to be Orthodox, he drives 125 miles on a Sunday to have an Anglo-Catholic "mass" at a parish with 25 members and call Louis Falk "Your Grace". This is the web, and none of this may be remotely true, but if this was the kind of person who thought I was a real priest, I'd feel uncomfortable.

UPDATE: Michael Frost has sent me the following e-mail: "I saw your comment regarding me and wanted to correct an inaccuracy in it. I do not live in Omaha, Nebraska. I haven't for a few years. I am Antiochian Orthodox and have worshipped in our Western Rite for a long time. While I love the Byzantine liturgy, I prefer our Western Rite. There is no Antiochian Orthodox Church in Des Moines. The local ACA church is about 4 miles from my house. I first visited this church in 1981 when I was taking a class on Comparative Christian Denominations. I met then Bishop Falk, now retired Archbishop, shortly after his ordination to the episcopacy and have had the great pleasure over the years to visit with him every time I was back home and had the chance to worship with them. So when I moved back home it was natural for me to feel at home worshipping with them on Sundays."

And that's just one of the regulars on the Anglo-Catholic blog comment sections. It's simply a bizarre crew -- Anthony Chadwick, for instance, appears to have undertaken a long and erratic spriritual journey without thinking to bring a GPS along. I don't have personal animosity for any of these people -- this is the web, and people can represent themselves as anything, so how on earth do I know whom to hate when you can be a bald, pot-bellied 55-year-old guy who posts as an 18-year-old redhead named Ingrid? And is it hateful just to point out that Ingrid isn't who she claims to be? What of the webizens who've fallen in love with the fake Ingrid and traded e-mails with "her"? Is it hateful to disappoint them?

I'm blogging about St Mary of the Angels because what happened there is a puzzle, with roots that go back at least two generations. I don't think it's accurate to say any particular individual was traumatized by one or another thing that happened last year. A lot of people have been affected in many different ways, over many years. It's a big story. And oh, by the way, there are lots of Ingrids in this story. Sorry to disappoint.

Ms Gyapong's Reaction

to my recent posts here is predictable. All I can say is that as I've learned more about the ACA and the TAC, my impression is like that of a clerical observer who e-mailed me not long ago: "They aren't just peculiar -- they're evil." I've said here, and others, including clergy, have agreed with me: I never would have gotten involved with the ACA-TAC outside of the Patrimony of the Primate, which in the opinion of the ACA Chancellors was not actually a TAC body, so I can breathe a sign of relief that I never was in it, strictly speaking.

I continue to believe that it was always, and continues to be, a profound error of judgment for anyone to become a member of a TAC parish. It is a tiny, splinter denomination, which is simply a bad sign on the face of it. Such parishes as they have in places like Des Moines, Iowa or Colorado Springs, Colorado, which should normally be centers of church interest and attendance, are struggling, located in prefab buildings, with memberships in the 15-25 range. This denomination is doing something seriously wrong, and it shows in its abysmal numbers.

Let's look at what else we've seen of the denomination, and its largest national franchise, the US ACA, in recent years:

• A majority of the TAC bishops who signed the Portsmouth Petition on an altar during mass have reneged on their signatures, calling their integrity into serious question.
• The TAC College of Bishops purged the Primate who is often regarded as the person most responsible for Anglicanorum coetibus. The ACA House of Bishops purged the bishop who was asked to provide episcopal oversight to those parishes who wanted to join the Ordinariates.
• Of the ACA's two diocesan bishops, one went to an unaccredited mail-order seminary; the other appears to have been turned down for Episcopal ordination, even though, in attending General Theological Seminary, he clearly embraced that denomination's more liberal stances.
• The bishops have repeatedly -- indeed, routinely -- violated the denomination's own canons, including Article XI, Section 1:

  No officer or agent of this Church, of any jurisdiction shall resort to any civil court against the parish, mission, school, or religious community for the purpose of enforcing any temporal claim against the same.

• The ACA routinely tolerates absentee parish priests, with curates designated to serve parishes, a practice that has been regarded as corrupt for nearly a millennium.
• The TAC routinely ordains priests whose formation would not be accepted by any mainstream denomination.

Ms Gyapong seems to think that distaste for such a tiny, corrupt organization is over the top. I have my own opinion of Ms Gyapong's judgment.

So OK, What We Have From Smuts

is now a more detailed acknowledgement that he has not gone through what a mainstream denomination would call priestly formation:

I actually have both an undergraduate degree in Theology (BTh) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Theology) and a postgraduate degree (BA Hons) from two of the best (i.e. recognised) universities here in South Africa. I have been to seminary and I am currently engaged in MA studies specialising in Biblical Archaeology.

Well, my goodness, I have an undergraduate degree (BA) in English and a graduate degree (MA) in English, from two of the best (i.e., recognised) universities here in the US! Except, er, I don't call myself Father. Nor do I call myself Doctor, or anything else. That's the difference between us, Stephen Smuts. You've "been to seminary", but it appears that you didn't complete the course, and I don't know what "been to" means -- your TAC colleague, "Canon" Frederick Rivers, has "been to" two seminaries, by his own account -- he just decided he didn't like them, and what the heck, his denomination thinks it's OK not to go to seminary. That's your denomination, too. You should be ashamed of it.

The fact that you've been to school, even graduate school, the fact that you studied religion as an undergraduate (so did I), the fact that you're now studying archaeology, doesn't make you a priest, no matter how many courses you take. You're a fraud to call yourself one. Your denomination is a fraud to allow you to do it. You are trading on the prestige of real denominations where the designation priest and the title Father actually mean something, and you are misleading people.

So Let's Recapitulate:

I probably wouldn't be thinking this way if I weren't going through the third confirmation class of my life, but confirmation classes talk about the Church of which you will become a full member. Sacraments come only through the Church, and they come mostly via priests. So it's entirely appropriate that I should be seriously revisiting the related questions of what is the Church, and what is a priest. As it happens, I have my recent brush with the "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion" as a way to organize my thinking.

The "worldwide TAC" is a good many things that the Church is not, and this, to my way of thinking, is important.

• The TAC is punctilious about exactly two things: the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women.
• It is not otherwise punctilious about the "priests" it ordains, or whose orders it recognizes. Which would you rather have, a woman priest who's been through formation in a mainstream Protestant denomination, or a male priest who hasn't even been to seminary, or a male priest who's left his mainstream denomination due to a scandal?
• By the same token, dissatisfaction has been expressed in some quarters that the Catholic Anglican Use Book of Divine Worship owes more to the hated 1979 Book of Common Prayer than the fetishized one of 1928. Sorry.
• The "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion" has numbers in all Western countries that do not total more than four digits by any responsible estimate, but are probably at the low end of that range. The consensus also seems to be that numbers in third-world countries are impossible to estimate reliably, but TAC Bishop of Southern Africa Michael Gill has complained that his Catholic counterpart questions whether even baptisms by the TAC are valid. I go with the Catholic guy -- whatever the numbers may be, if even TAC baptisms aren't done properly, how can any TAC numbers be comparable with those of other denominations?
• By comparison, there can be no dispute that the real Anglican Communion has numbers in the millions, while the Catholic Church numbers well over a billion. Even Stephen Smuts seems to think that numbers say something, at least when he talks about his own blog.
• The most prominent TAC blogger, Stephen Smuts, clearly identifies himself as a TAC priest in his profile, and he ostentatiously displays the cross and the chi-rho symbol on his blog and in his avatar. However, as far as I can determine, he has not been to seminary and would not be ordained in any mainstream denomination, nor have his TAC orders recognized.
• As the de facto public-relations voice of the TAC, who frequently posts announcements from TAC bishops, Smuts also makes kissy-kissy references to Ordinariates and Ordinariate priests. However, he himself is completely unqualified to become an Ordinariate priest, his bishop has publicly denounced Ordinariates and Anglicanorum coetibus, and his denomination has purged the former Primate who is often regarded as the prime mover behind Anglicanorum coetibus.
• The founder of the denomination, "Archbishop" Louis Falk, has told several outright falsehoods, documented on this site. He has reversed his own position on the Portsmouth Petition and remained with his 25-member parish in the ACA-TAC.

Frankly, the TAC and those connected with it make me nauseous.

I Take This Post

on Stephen Smuts's blog to be an acknowledgement that he is calling himself a "priest" without having gone through anything like the priestly formation that we expect from Catholic or regular Anglican Communion priests. If someone calls himself a doctor or an accountant or an engineer, and someone points out that that person doesn't have the academic or professional training or license to call himself that, the whistleblower isn't just criticizing, carping, or complaining. The whistleblower is pointing out basic dishonesty. The fact is that Stephen Smuts is calling himself a priest, when his qualifications are largely unknown, but he's clearly acknowledging that he hasn't been to seminary, and he's "ordained" in a denomination whose South African branch apparently numbers in the low to mid three digits. In the US, someone like that is a risible figure.

He points to a whopping 347 "followers". Heck, Jim Jones had more than that.

I Can't Seem To Drop

this truth-in-labeling question about TAC "clergy", whether "bishops" or "priests", representing themselves as other than what they are -- and the fact that some Anglo-Catholic bloggers aren't calling them on it. Nobody seems to be questioning why they feel entitled to call themselves "priests" if they don't have an MDiv or equivalent from an accredited seminary. I once tried to call "Father" Stephen Smuts on this, since it appears that his "priestly" formation consisted of a certain amount of mentoring over a fairly short period of time by some dude with some title in a tiny, corrupt, breakaway denomination. I believe "Father" Smuts's answer was that I somehow didn't understand, but he never answered my implicit challenge to elaborate what specifically made him feel entitled to call himself "Father", with presumably the same prestige as a real Catholic or Anglican Communion priest.

I repeat my challenge: Stephen Smuts, what makes you feel entitled to call yourself "Father"? How, and for how long, did you go through discernment? How did you become a postulant for holy orders -- when and under what circumstances? What accredited seminary did you attend, for what years? How many units of which courses did you study? When did you receive your degree? Where and when did you do your field work? What other qualifications did you present for evaluation that would allow you finally to be ordained as a transitional deacon? Which bishop ordained you, in which denomination? Who consecrated that bishop?

I question that bloggers like Ms Gyapong, as well as the various commenters on "Father" Smuts's blog and elsewhere -- especially those who represent themselves as Catholic -- haven't done much to call this guy on it, because frankly, I think Smuts is a fraud, along with his whole denomination. Last night in Catholic confirmation class, I once again heard the point, no sacrifice, no priest. Smuts is not a priest, and Catholics are complicit in allowing him to call himself one.