Unanswered Questions

Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand ends its narrative about 1999 and is in any case based on an incomplete written record, supplemented by the oral history of participants whose knowledge of the circumstances is incomplete or biased. It's brought us about as much as we can know about Louis Falk and his role in the ACC-TAC-ACA up to this point.

There are numerous unanswered questions.

• Bess was either unaware of, or chose not to mention, Falk's defrocking by The Episcopal Church in 1966, although it appears that this was known to figures in the ACC at the time of Falk's 1991 departure. While we now have confirmation from the Diocese of Fond du Lac that he was defrocked, we still don't know the circumstances that led to that outcome. The Episcopal Church tends to regard deposition/defrocking as a very last resort, and in recent decades has not used it as discipline for things like simple adultery, no matter how conspicuous. I've heard several versions of the Falk story, at least one of which would be, if true, explosive. Should such circumstances emerge, this would probably have a near-fatal effect on the ACA, although the ACA is rapidly shrinking in any case. It would certainly be prudent for the APA, considering merger with the ACA, to investigate this matter further. As the case of retired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony indicates, even a retired or semi-retired status does not insulate a prelate from major scandal.
• His Wikipedia entry says, "From 1976 to 1981 he was President of General Growth Management Company in Des Moines, Iowa." We know nothing of Falk's career from his defrocking in 1966 to his appointment at General Growth Management in 1976, ten years later, nor why, after five years, he left that position. However, the other circumstances of his biography suggest his business career may have been as rough a ride as his ecclesiastical career.
• We know nothing of how St Aidan's Des Moines got its start, apparently de novo as a "continuing" parish, nor how it came to call Falk, a defrocked Episcopal priest, as its rector.
• We know nothing of how Falk came to the attention of "Bishop" James Mote, one of the original "continuing" bishops who emerged from the 1977 St Louis meeting. Mote's motto was "Play dirty and pray!" Did this have a bearing on Falk's rapid rise under Mote within the ACC? It's puzzling that Mote, who left The Episcopal Church over doctrinal issues, would choose to ally himself so closely with an ex-cleric who'd left it due to scandal. One would think the grapevine would have made the circumstances of Falk's departure known to Mote.
• Bess's narrative ends before Falk's retirements, in 2002 as Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, in 2007 as Bishop of the Missouri Valley, and apparently sometime after 2009 as President of the ACA House of Bishops. I've been told that the 2002 retirement as Primate of the TAC was forced and due to a "miscalculation", of which we currently know nothing.
• Nor do we have a clear picture of Falk's continuing behind-the-scenes role in the TAC and the ACA. By his own testimony, he continued to exercise episcopal authority over St Mary of the Angels as of 2010, involving himself in the Patrimony of the Primate, although the Patrimony was specifically the creature of Archbishop Hepworth. What is Falk's de facto current role?
• What was Falk's role in the forced retirement of Hepworth as TAC Primate? It's worth noting that Samuel Prakash, Hepworth's replacement as "acting Primate" of the TAC, was among those consecrated with Falk at Deerfield Beach, FL in 1991, when Hepworth wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye.

As always, information will be greatly appreciated, anonymity maintained.

The More Things Change,

the more they stay the same. A visitor, noting the near-constant maneuvering by Louis Falk, "Archbishop" successively of the ACC, TAC, and ACA in the 1980s and 90s, points out a recent example of similar hyperactive politics, the consecration as bishop of The Rt Rev Robert Todd Giffin, of the Diocese of Mid-America, Anglican Province of America (APA), on Saturday 6th October 2012. Of note is the presence of "Presiding Bishop" Brian Marsh of the ACA as a co-consecrator, along with Walter Grundorf of the APA. Regular visitors here know that Marsh and Grundorf have been kissy-kissy of late, going on an ecumenical cruise to the Greek islands together with their wives last May.

Giffin, I'm told, is a fascinating case, as "continuing" bishops tend to be. A Nashotah House alumnus, as far as my informants are aware, while at Nashotah House he was a seminarian under the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy. However, after graduating Nashotah House he is said to have done some work with the Charismatic Episcopal Church and later served at two ACC parishes (one in Wisconsin and one Indianapolis, IN). He then moved to southern Indiana and entered The Episcopal Church through the Diocese of Springfield, IL and started a parish in Evansville, IN, which has gone through the following mutations:

1. 2004- Faith Anglican Ministries founded (1979 Rite 2 parish under the oversight of Diocese of Springfield- TEC)
2. 2005- Changed name to All Saints Anglican Church (ASB parish under the Diocese of Bolivia)
3. 2007- Changed name to The Shepherds Church (Various liturgies under first the diocese of Bolivia and then CANA)
4. 2008- Changed name to St. Andrew's Anglican Church (Straight 1928 BCP Under 1st CANA and then the ACA)
5. 2009- Changed name to Western Rite Orthodox Mission of Evansville (under the Antiochian Church)
6. Part of 2009- A bit sketchy during some of that year. Every few days a different jurisdiction was listed on the website (one was the APCK). However, my informants do not know what happened and if there was any official connection with any of these jurisdictions.
7. 2009 or 2010 All Saints Anglican Church (1928 BCP and Anglican Missal parish under the APA Diocese of Mid America). This has remained the same since 2010.

And of course, from the "ecumenical" record of the ACC, the AEC, the TAC, the ACA, and the APA, as well as the record of this Evansville parish, they're going to live happily ever after in the APA, don't you think?

The 1991 Merger Between The ACA And The AEC

was troubled. AEC "Archbishop" Anthony Clavier, with his questionable personal history, was a ticking time bomb, something that Louis Falk, with a skeleton in his own closet, almost certainly recognized from the start. Douglas Bess continues the story,

In developments that some members of the ACC could have predicted would occur, Bishop Clavier resigned from the ACA [in 1995] amid allegations of sexual misconduct. . . . He reportedly would invite female parishioners into his office and then "come onto them." He was further reported to have told them that they should be "honored for Jesus Christ to want your body." (pp 210-211)

According to Bess, there were those who sensed an invisible hand at work, and not that of the Almighty:

[T]here were others who thought that Bishop Falk had maneuvered the situation against Clavier. However, Falk continued to emphasize that Clavier's exodus was a serious loss for the ACA, and it was also reported that Falk was "staggered by the news" of the charges against Clavier. (pp 211-212)

The bottom line, of course, was that Falk had maneuvered the AEC into an ACA that, purged of the anti-Falk ACC faction, was now exclusively a Falk domain with the departure of the AEC's Clavier. Nevertheless, the merger soon enough proved unstable.

In the months following Clavier's departure, disputes began to arise over decisions being made by the Standing Committee [of the ACA Diocese of the Eastern United States, which had absorbed the AEC and replaced Clavier pending election of a successor]. Within a short time, over half of the diocese['s] parishes withdrew from the ACA, and eventually formed yet another Continuing Anglican body known as the Anglican Province in America (APA), electing Bishop Walter Grundorf as its new leader, Interestingly, many of those who went with the APA tended to be comprised of original members of the AEC, and those who remained in the newly shrunken ACA tended to have been those who were originally affiliated with the ACC. (p 212)

I don't think it will escape many regular visitors here to recognize that the APA and the ACA have recently formed an intercommunion agreement, with the intention of full merger (actually, re-merger). Since the same players are involved -- Grundorf on the APA side, Falk on the ACA, working through his stooge Brian Marsh, it's difficult for me to imagine an outcome different from the one that took place in 1995.

But Charlie Brown always trusts Lucy with the football.

The ACC Bishops Weren't Fooled

by Falk's behind-the-scenes maneuvering in 1991.

In a meeting held in Deerfield Beach, Florida, in June of 1991, Falk and Bishop Connors of the ACC met with Clavier, Fr Frank Pannitti, and Fr Walter Crespo of the AEC, to discuss selections for potential bishops and priests to serve the TAC in South America. (pp 200-201)

Note that Falk, having created a superdenominational body in the TAC under his exclusive control, then proceeded to deal with the AEC outside the channels of the ACC bishops, who had (correctly) been expressing serious reservations about the dodgy AEC "Archbishop" Anthony Clavier.

An ACC priest from Colombia, Fr Victor Manuel Cruz-Blanco, tried to convince Falk that some of the candidates were unfit for their office, and noted that one of them had been denied the priesthood in the ACC due to some alleged moral misconduct while studying as a Roman Catholic seminarian, only to be ordained later into the AEC. Falk withdrew into a private meeting with Clavier and Connors, eventually returning to inform Fr Cruz-Blanco that the questionable candidates would be accepted into the TAC since, it was declared, the South American region was henceforth under their control. The next day they informed the Colombian priest that he was no longer to refer to himself as the Vicar-General of Colombia, that he was no longer to write letters to any of his fellow priests, and that all of his candidates for the priesthood were to be handed over to Fr Crespo's supervision. (p 201)

Once the ACC bishops realized that Falk had in effect appropriated their authority via the TAC and had been de facto operating a denomination merged with the AEC without their approval, they brought formal charges against him in August, 1991.

In other words (to many within the ACC), his actions gave the appearance of covert machinations of a man who was trying to take as many as he could from his old ecclesiastical body before he bolted for another. (p 202)

However, the September 1991 trial didn't take place, because one of the bishops on the court had to leave due to the death of his mother, leaving the proceeding without a quorum. According to Bess, the ACC then made a compromise, allowing Falk to take his diocese with him out of the ACC.

Falk attended the Deerfield Beach meeting in October, at which the Diocese of the Holy Trinity, a reported 70 percent of the Diocese of the South, and a smattering of parishes from both the ACC and other Continuing bodies merged with the AEC to form the Anglican Church in America (ACA)[.] (p 202-3)

I'm told that in the ACA, Falk kept the titles of Archbishop and Metropolitan of the West and added the title "Primate of All of the United States of America." (Clavier was allowed to call himself Archbishop, Metropolitan of the East, and "Primate of the Untied States of America.") The ACC majority met shortly afterward and elected Bishop Lewis as its new Metropolitan. But even before the October meeting, a new AEC scandal emerged involving Clavier, Crespo, and Crespo's priests in New Jersey.

[E]vidence emerged during the investigation that Clavier had unknowingly ordained a priest who had been a bigamist, but then had only mildly disciplined the priest for concealing the impropriety from his bishop. Worse still, Clavier had "supported" a priest who had been placed in a mental hospital for sexually assaulting young boys. (p 203)

We're seeing a pattern that will continue with Falk and his successors in the ACA-TAC up to the present: a willingness to work with and through priests who have records of scandal in other denominations, as long as they're useful to Falk and his successors. Falk himself, of course, has exactly that sort of record, so it shouldn't be surprising that he's not squeamish when it comes to others. The example of retired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, though, suggests that memory is long in cases like this, and the ACA should beware of it. "Presiding Bishop" Marsh, wouldn't it be wise to get out in front of what could blow up regarding "Archbishop" Falk?

The Fairfield Conference That I Mentioned Yesterday

displayed a pattern that was becoming common in "continuing Anglican" "ecumenical" meetings: there's a head-fake toward unity, followed by a purge of those who, unwisely, come out in favor. I've already discussed "Bishop" Robin Connors, who appears in Divided We Stand sponsoring a similar 1981 "ecumenical" meeting in Spartanburg, SC. Connors's parish, St Francis Spartanburg, had been part of the Polish National Catholic Church until 1982, when the PNCC dropped its Anglican rite provision. Tbe parish then petitioned for direct episcopal oversight from Louis Falk of the ACC (i.e., a "peculier"), something Falk has frequently allowed, and which contributed to several subsequent misunderstandings in the St Mary of the Angels cases.

The outcome of the Spartanburg meeting was that there was no outcome. The ACC was all for unification, except that Falk in particular questioned the consecrations of the bishops in any competing denomination, so that intercommunion, in the sense of each denomination recognizing the episcopal actions (such as ordinations) of bishops in other denominations, would be impossible. Falk was all for unity except when it involved unity! This has been a typical pattern for Falk all along.

Interestingly, St Francis Spartanburg tells me that it has on its records that "In 1987, Father Connors was elected Bishop of the Provincial Synod of New Orleans." This diocese remains in the rump ACC, but does not appear as an ACA diocese, while Connors, as we've seen, followed Falk into the ACA after the 1991 split. At the same time, it appears that St Francis Spartanburg never left the direct supervision of "Archbishop" Falk, so that his home parish wasn't in his own diocese.

AEC-ACC unity talks continued without a resolution into 1990. An added complication was Falk's desire to create the Traditional Anglican Communion as a worldwide body incorporating the ACC. At a meeting in Des Moines in 1990, the ACC bishops were still unable to decide whether they could rule on the validity of AEC orders. Nevertheless, the Traditional Anglican Communion was formed in a meeting that same year in Victoria, BC, with Falk elected its first Primate, though at the time this was essentially just a retitling of the ACC-under-Falk, incorporating as well the small, Falk-allied Anglican Catholic Church of Canada.

Falk either continued to politic for unification with the AEC, or he began laying the groundwork for a future withdrawal from the ACC, according to which side is recounting the events. He began circulating to strategically placed priests, without the knowledge of his fellow bishops, drafts of a pro-unity proposal that he was encouraging them to put forward at their diocesan synods leading up to the Provincial Synod in October of 1991. . . . He was also quite possibly establishing connections by which a potential withdrawal on his part from the ACC could lead to the greatest possible success. (p 199)

He and "Archbishop" Anthony Clavier of the AEC then issued a "Call for Unity", inviting all continuing Anglicans to another "ecumenical" conference in Deerfield Beach, FL in October of 1991.

. . . Falk quickened the pace of his behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Just as the majority of the laity within the Continuing movement had been unaware that he had seeded resolutions into local diocesan synods, and that he had attempted to monitor debates held on these resolutions, they were also largely unaware that he was taking allegedly disgruntled parishes in the Diocese of the South under his wing. In July of 1991, two parishes from Florida and North Carolina contacted Falk with requests to be placed under the Patrimony, the stated reasons revolving around internal parish disputes that had not been handled properly by the diocesan bishop, William Lewis. However, just as likely, the real issue could have centered upon a desire by these churchmen to accompany Falk in what was no doubt perceived as an inevitable coming split in the ACC. (p 200)

From early in Falk's career with the ACC, we're seeing a pattern of intensely duplicitous activity, aimed entirely at furthering his own ambitions at the expense of the overall movement, although by 1990, as Bess points out, a "continuing Anglican" movement was a chimera. The pattern includes working through unscrupulous proteges like Robin Connors, behind-the-scenes maneuvers, extra-canonical actions including the frequent creation of "peculiers" in order to bypass the normal workings of dioceses, and intervention in parish politics at the behest of disgruntled minorities where the agendas of the minorities matched his own.

There's nothing new in what happened at St Mary's in 2010-2012, and the strategy is vintage Louis Falk. Now and then, people have contacted me in effect urging me to back off Falk, his heart is in the right place, he's done things to help St Mary's behind the scenes. Baloney. The only guy he wants to help behind the scenes is Louis Falk. Based on the pattern we've seen, characters like Anthony Morello or Stephen Strawn have acted either on his specific instruction or with his tacit approval. The best way for Falk to demonstrate that I'm incorrect would be for him to announce publicly that he does not support the ACA's campaign of legal harassment and character assassination against Fr Christopher Kelley.

More to come.

The Utterly Misplaced Ambition

that seems to be behind Falk's rise within the ACC during the 1980s, whereby he quite ruthlessly shoved aside the motley collection of alcoholics, misfits, poseurs, and sexual nonconformists who constituted the hierarchy to become Archbishop and stay at the top, is astonishing, especially in light of how inconsequential the tiny ACC was in the overall scheme of things.

Although the full record is incomplete, he first appears as a "Fr. Louis W. Falk" on page 154 of Bess's book,

a man so seemingly high-church that he had once written an article extolling the virtues of Marian devotion, including keeping the Feast of the Assumption (though he tellingly called it a "pious opinion" and tried to justify the practice with Biblical evidence.)

At that time (the Mobile synod of 1980), Falk appears to have been a reliable ally of the Anglo-Catholic Bishop Mote of the ACC, and in consequence, according to Bess, he was "appointed" (p 155) by other bishops as Ordinary of a newly-created ACC Missionary Diocese of the Missouri Valley. It appears that Falk had previously been Diocesan Dean in Bishop Mote's non-geographic Diocese of the Holy Trinity.

Falk's emergence was part of a successful strategy by Bishop Mote to ally himself with influential low-church forces to seize control of the ACC for the Anglo-Catholic party, a pattern of maneuver and betrayal that Falk would continue on his own. Of the history of Falk's parish, the pre-fab chapel St Aidan's Des Moines from which he emerged, we learn nothing, other than to assume it was already in place by then. Nor do we learn precisely how Falk entered the ACC, how he became Mote's Dean, or even whether he attended the 1977 St Louis convention.

According to Bess, low- and broad-church factions within the ACC almost immediately began to express disquiet that the Anglo-Catholic side would purge them, and apparently as reassurance, the ACC bishops began formal discussions in 1981 on merger with the pre-St Louis, broad-church American Episcopal Church under "Bishop" Anthony Clavier.

Clavier is a peculiar figure, who seems to have had little theological education, but who hopped among numerous independent Anglican denominations in the UK and the US until becoming "primate" of the AEC in 1981. Later developments suggest his sexual appetites were as complex as his ecclesiastical affiliations, but it's worth noting that Falk allied himself with Clavier for precisely as long as Clavier was useful to him, but once the usefulness lapsed, Falk quickly purged him.

By 1983, for reasons not given in Bess's history, Falk had become "Archbishop" of the ACC. Even so, while merger talks with the AEC continued through the mid-1980s, Falk's position on the matter constantly changed. Falk opposed the AEC's independent effort to set up a franchise in India, characterizing it as a group "posing" as Anglicans (p 185). By 1986, Falk participated in one of the many quasi-ecumenical "continuing Anglican" conferences, this one in Fairfield, CT, and moved toward advocating union. Bess speculates that this was because Falk saw the likelihood of defections from the ACC if he did not.

The chief culprit in potential defections appears to have been Bishop Tillman Williams of the ACC Diocese of the South (p 186). In behind-the-scenes maneuvers, Williams was edged out.

Bishop Williams resigned from the ACC in March of 1986, announcing that he had been accepted into the [Diocese of Christ the King], and that he had been slandered by the ACC bishops. Although the allegations against Williams seem to never have been replicated in print, several sources have anonymously indicated that he was rumored at the time to have been a homosexual. . .

Since Falk was the top ACC bishop at the time, it's hard to imagine that he didn't at least condone what went on. It's certainly part of a pattern we keep seeing, whereby the "ACC bishops" (and later the ACA bishops or the TAC bishops) in a body take some despicable action, with none of the blame attaching to Louis Falk, who nevertheless always seems to be nearby.

The story will continue. I will greatly appreciate any information that can shed further light on Falk's career between the Affirmation of St Louis and the 1980 Mobile synod.

John Hepworth's Case,

where he alleged serial abuse (by his own admission, well into adulthood) by Catholic priests as a mitigating circumstance to his leaving the Catholic priesthood, got enormous attention when it became plain that, in accordance with well-established Vatican policy, once laicized, he couldn't return to the Catholic Church as a priest.

There was also a certain amount of speculation as to his motives in making the overture to Rome via the TAC in the Portsmouth letter: he somehow, in this view, wanted to make things right in bringing a large number of Anglicans back into the fold, not least himself. It was an interesting case: scandal, the Catholic Church, ecumenism, and so forth. The TAC's consistent misrepresentation of its size ("400,000") certainly made the story seem more important than it was.

It may be that the revelation of Louis Falk's own scandal has everyone shell-shocked, and other than here, there's been no public reaction. I still think it's worth drawing reasonable conclusions about Falk's motives before I move farther into the historical record as recounted in Douglas Bess's book.

In fact, there's a lot in Falk's biography that I find puzzling. A scion of a prominent Wisconsin family that had achieved great success in brewing and manufacturing, he should have gone to Yale or the equivalent in the mid 1950s -- that's what the Ivies were there for. Looking at the parallel career of John Danforth, a contemporary whose family background is also similar, is instructive indeed.

Instead, he went to then-Lawrence College in Appleton. Again, as someone who would be expected to take a key role in shepherding the family's fortunes in his generation, he should have been going on to a prestigious law, medical, or business school. Instead, he went to seminary -- at least it was prestigious. But within a few years of ordination, he found himself defrocked, which certainly raises the question of whether he had an authentic vocation.

As we'll see, by the early 1980s, he'd left the business career he'd taken up, returned to a clerical career of sorts, and began a rapid rise in the new "continuing Anglican" movement, which in the view of the chronicler Douglas Bess was initally thought to have great potential, siphoning hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of communicants away from The Episcopal Church, which had defrocked him. Might it be reasonable to surmise that his eventual role as "Archbishop" of his tiny splinter denomination was a form of, or at least an attempt at, overcompensation for his earlier failure?

I think that's one explanation for the record we see in Divided We Stand, and which I'll be discussing here.

I'll be happy, by the way, to give Falk the opportunity here to present his own version of events -- I'll be happy to do an interview, by phone or e-mail, questions submitted in advance, answers published here without revision. For that matter, he's free to contact David Virtue with his version -- I'm sure Virtue would go with it in a second. The apologia, after all, is a long-established and well-respected literary form. Well handled, it could make me look small indeed. I'm accepting that risk.