At One Point In My Journey,

I was satisfied in calling the story of Holy Week the central event in history, but of course, it's actually the central event in creation, part of the plan from the start. I didn't fully understand that until I came to St Mary's and had several Bible studies and adult-forum discussions with Fr Kelley.

Maybe because it comes up at different points in the lectionary, I've also been drawn in recent years to the story of the anointing in Bethany, which according to the scripture takes place only a week before the Passion:

Mary therefore took a pound of ointment of right spikenard, of great price, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. Then one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, he that was about to betray him, said: Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor? Now he said this, not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and having the purse, carried the things that were put therein.

It isn't part of the Palm Sunday reading, and it's less dramatic than the kangaroo proceedings before Pilate and Herod, the scourging, and the stations of the cross, but it's part of the overall picture, and it's got Judas in it. Here, he isn't just the Betrayer, he's the treasurer, on the vestry, an officer of the church. Somehow, he's part of the plan here as well.

The events at St Mary's in 2011 and 2012 certainly put my wife and me through a spiritual crisis, and we're not alone: not just laity, but clergy in and out of the parish have been seriously affected as well. But from what I've learned, the events that led to Fr Wilcox's departure in 2005 and 2006 put others through just as much of a crisis; some who went through that period have suggested that maybe they're no longer even Christian.

I think again of the individual who suggested to me earlier this week that he'd thought going into St Mary's might be an easy way to become Catholic. He and the rest of us couldn't have been more wrong. I think for all of us, it's led to a form of spiritual growth we couldn't have anticipated, and it's likely not over, but then, the Catholic priest of our new parish prayed over us, in anticipation of our full reception at Easter, that we would continue to grow.

Someone Pointed Out

a post on Stephen Smuts's blog regarding what the Huffington Post piece that he links sees as the Catholic Church's attempt to deal with a shortage of priests by creating a US Ordinariate that would back-door married Anglican priests to relieve the shortage.

First, I'm not sure if Smuts understands about the Huffington Post's agenda: it is, of course, anti-Catholic and bitterly disappointed at the latest Pope's renewed assertions that the Catholic Church continues to be just what it is. The piece needs to be seen in that context: it feeds the notion that perfidious Jesuits are plotting to dupe yet more generations of believers by hypocritically allowing married priests sub rosa, but still condemning just about anything that's fun, for the priests or anyone else.

I think the reality of the situation is that the US Ordinariate is far too small, and in fact too poorly run, to make much of a long-term difference in a shortage of priests (although my understanding is that conventional Catholic vocations are up). It shares with "continuing Anglicanism" the problem that it is largely an abstract entity with few examples on the ground; Anglo-Catholicism of whatever color is a tough sell to the mainstream demographic, and except for the very small number of localities where an Ordinariate parish is an option for worship, Anglicans who want to become Catholic will need to go through the RCIA process and worship at a Roman parish, which, frankly, ain't so bad.

I continue to wonder what "Fr" Smuts's agenda really is here: he seems to play kissy-kissy with the idea of Ordinariates and the like, while being fully aware that such will not take place within thousands of miles of his shark-infested beaches, and perhaps even understanding in lucid moments that he wouldn't qualify for ordination as a real priest in either the Catholic Church or a US main line denomination. Catholic, Episcopal, whatever, it ain't Smuts. So he finds ways to be sorta-kinda snarky about everything but his own tiny, corrupt splinter group, without taking responsibility for it.

However, the comment section degenerates into a food-fight among the usual suspects, which may be the reason the thread was brought to my attention. All I can say is, folks, this is what I'm saving you from. My gratitude to priests like Fr Seraiah, and my sympathy.

Anglicanorum Coetibus As A "Continuing Anglican" Phenomenon

I've said a lot less about the US Ordinariate here than about the ACA and other "continuing Anglican" quasi-denominations, but someone remarked to me yesterday that he'd considered himself an "opportunist" in seizing on St Mary's attempt to go into the Ordinariate as a way (I suppose he meant an easy way) to become Catholic. Actually, of course, there's been nothing easy about it, and relatively few parishioners from 2011 who'd intended to go into the Ordinariate have actually become Catholic (my wife and I will be received this coming Sunday via the RCIA process).

I did notice in my bookmarks the other day, though, this link to a highly optimistic post at the now-inactive Anglo-Catholic blog:

Let’s assume that the 36 groups currently on the map in the U.S. would enter a newly erected American Ordinariate with an average Sunday attendance (ASA) of 2500, which I think would be an incredibly conservative estimate. . . . In all, this would make an American Ordinariate—in a worst case scenario—larger than 21 of the domestic dioceses of The Episcopal Church. [emphasis in original]

This post is from February 2011, about a year before the erection of the US Ordinariate, but it's also just a little over two years ago. I count 24 parishes total on the website of the US Ordinariate, of which three are in Canada, which wasn't the situation envisioned in the February 2011 post (that post expected 30 parishes in Canada alone).

Of the 21 US parishes, some number are missions and meeting between Roman masses at Catholic parishes; very few have their own buildings. Unfortunately, this puts the Ordinariate as of now -- and I simply don't know how many additional parishes are in the backlog -- at roughly the same standing of size and iffiness that applies to the ACA, the APA, the ACC, the APCK, the UEC, etc etc etc. The only upside is there's only one ordinary, as opposed to the half dozen or so that we'd see in each of the other groups.

Not only that, but the sentiment among Catholic observers in Los Angeles was that the admission of St Mary of the Angels to a Catholic Ordinariate would be a positive development for traditionalists within the Catholic archdiocese, many of whom support the Latin mass where it's available. However, Msgr Steenson has issued a statement emphasizing that it is not the primary purpose of the Ordinariate to celebrate the Latin mass, which is reasonable in itself, though it does raise the question of what the purpose of the Ordinariate actually is. (I would point out, though, that Msgr Steenson is not a scoundrel, as opposed to his counterparts in the "continuum", and the clergy and laity in the Ordinariate are not being had in the same way that those in the "continuum" are.)

The thing my wife and I miss about being Episcopalians is the organ and the hymnal. Partly from experience and partly via EWTN radio, I see that it's possible, especially in cathedrals, to hear the organ played in Catholic churches to accompany traditional Christian hymns, Latin unnecessary. The mass is going to have certain essential wording in English no matter what, and from what I understand, the Ordinariate Book of Divine Worship will owe a great deal to the Episcopal Church's 1979 prayer book in any case.

So what, after all, is the Ordinariate for?

Yet Another Check

of the St Mary of the Angels website reveals a new "Priest" (though Rivers is still "Priest in Charge"), Fr Michael Eldred, of whom more momentarily. Almost too late, it now has a listing for Friday evening services during Lent, although naturally by now there should have been a listing for the Holy Week schedule. (Normally, new adult Christians are baptized at Easter, but I'm not sure how many of the core angries now running St Mary's are interested in converting to Christianity.)

A web search on Fr Michael Eldred shows him in cassock, biretta, 70s-hipster sideburns, and sunglasses on the Facebook page of All Saints Fountain Valley, where he appears to have served as a supply priest. The history page for the Episcopal Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Placentia notes that he has been on staff there since 2003, although that site elsewhere says that Eldred has a day job.

Eldred's ecclesiastical status is puzzling; I've got to assume that Bishop Bruno thinks it's OK for Eldred to be doing this, assuming Eldred is still an Episcopal priest (he's still listed on the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles clergy page). Blessed Sacrament Placentia, however, is under the episcopal supervision of TEC Bishop Ed Little of Northern Indiana, a noted traditionalist. On top of that, it has an ACNA parish meeting on its property, so I assume Eldred is familiar with angry people.

Eldred will be the third temporary priest at St Mary's in the year since the ACA seized the parish. The first two, Fr William Ledbetter and Fr Nicholas Taylor, were chewed up and spat out in a matter of months. Another priest turned down the offer after Taylor left. Eldred faces the same situation of his predecessors, an absentee priest in charge, an unelected "vestry" dominated by angry people who know little of religion, and an episcopal visitor who wishes Anthony Morello were other than where he is. We'll have to see what happens with Eldred, but I'm not impressed with the biretta, hipster sideburns, and sunglasses. I guess if his style is 40 years out of date, it makes him a traditionalist, huh?

Another Visitor Asks

I wonder if you might consider analyzing the earlier years of ACA? There seems to be a big blank spot as to what happened the first ten years of ACA (1991-2001), and why DEUS (APA) and many parishes began to leave ACA after a couple years. The ACA began under the impression of being a 'broad' church (as Bess describes-- a tool of FCC/phalanx), but by the end of the nineties it had lost some of the FCC supporters and moved in [a] distinctly anglo-catholic direction via Falk. What happened? Not long ago I ordered Brian Marsh's manuscript/history on the ACA. Marsh billed it at the Victoria conference in 2012, Saints and Buccaneers. I was hoping to fill in some holes left by Bess, but no luck. Marsh is oddly silent on the years between Deerfield Beach and, say, 2002. But, this was a time when ACA decisively transformed itself, expelling not only DEUS but alienating the phalanx in general. What happened? No one seems to want to talk about it, and whatever transpired evidently became a pattern that would eventually create the disaster at St. Mary's of the Angels, etc..

I think one major problem in looking at the "Anglican continuum" is what a logician would call hypostatization, which is treating an abstract concept as something that has a distinct reality. This is one problem with Douglas Bess's history, although despite its flaws, it's the best we have. Basically, the "continuum" consists of small groups of people who give themselves grandiose titles, which give the inevitable impression that they're something more important than they are -- indeed, that they have a distinct existence, when they're little more than the partially shared fantasy (based, however, on individual hidden agendas) of a few key people.

The "worldwide Traditional Anglican Communion" is as good an example as any. It started, as we've seen here based on Bess's narrative, as a way for Louis Falk to bypass political problems within the Anglican Catholic Church by creating his own superdenominational body that would run according to his rules. It was theoretically based on the fallacious notion that large numbers of Anglican Communion members outside the US would defect when the Church of England began ordaining women -- but this didn't happen, any more than large numbers of Episcopalians left when TEC revised its liturgy and ordained women in the 1970s. (However, I'm not sure if even Falk ever really believed this would happen, or whether he ever saw beyond his personal issues with being deposed by TEC.)

Despite John Hepworth's eventual claim of TAC membership in the half-million range, it appears that actual membership in Canada, Australia, and South Africa has never been more than the mid-three figures; in the UK, even fewer; in India, the TAC franchise appears to be essentially non-existent, little more than a legal vehicle for Samuel Prakash to try to seize former Anglican Communion properties. This also raises the question of how big the principal TAC component, the ACA, has ever been. Both the TAC and the ACA seem to have a large number of family missions that somehow appear on lists of parishes as more than they are; inactive parishes; sorta-kinda missions that maybe worship and maybe don't; and so forth.

To call them "denominations" in the sense of, say, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod or the Reformed Episcopal Church, is a mistake; it's hypostatization, giving something that's little more than the personal agenda of a few mail-order "bishops" and a web site a concrete existence. It's even misleading to write a history in that sense: one thing that makes me uncomfortable about Douglas Bess's book is that he implies that the Philippine Independent Church's Anglican Rite Jurisdiction of the Americas was something more important than it was, if in fact it never had more than a dozen parishes, yet had at least four bishops.

In other words, when do we stop writing history and start writing about pathology? The bottom line here is that people are being conned. The most important thing is to point this out. Louis Falk and Brian Marsh are at best -- at best -- con artists. Exactly how Falk in particular has chosen to dress up his con under one or another ecclesiastical title is less important than for people to recognize that it's a con.

A Visitor Asks

We Anglo-Catholics were never among the majority but back in the 50s and 60s we were heard. . . . where has Eucharistic Adoration, Confession gone except underground in ECUSA?

This question goes to my current understanding of Anglo-Catholicism. I was a member of an Anglo-Catholic ECUSA parish for a dozen years, although it was of the "affirming" variety, which means it is gay-friendly, and it's worth pointing out that this has always been part of Anglo-Catholicism. Largely gay, Anglo-Catholic ECUSA parishes are still there and in fact thriving, and I've discussed some of the reasons here. "Not that there's anything wrong with that," as they say, especially in a liberal Protestant context, which is what ECUSA is, after all. Bishop Bruno tolerates Anglo-Catholicism of this style, as does Bishop Bennison, both very liberal.

However, we're also up against the other style of Anglo-Catholicism, that described to me in ECUSA confirmation class 30-plus years ago as the people who want to call themselves Catholic without paying the dues you actually have to pay to be Catholic. As an openly gay, Nashotah-house educated ECUSA priest explained to our parish several years ago, the Anglo-Catholic view of Confession continues to be "all may, none must, some should". The Roman Catholic view is that all Catholics must go to Confession at least once a year, in connection with receiving the Eucharist at least once a year, at Easter.

Beyond that (and this was a hard step for me to take), the Roman Catholic Catechism says that certain sins are mortal, which means that if you don't have them absolved via Confession, you'll go to hell. These include some sins that most Episcopal priests would call minor or not sins at all; I won't list them here. A good Catholic had better get to Confession in a hurry if he or she has committed a mortal sin, which of course goes well beyond grand larceny or embezzlement. (I chatted with a Catholic priest the other day who spoke of a child who confessed that he was angry with his parents, for reasons the priest thought were at least reasonable.) Episcopalian or "continuing Anglican" views on Confession are basically different from this.

But this goes to the heart of what I think is a dangerous confusion in Anglo-Catholicism. Style is one thing, substance is quite another. There is room for Anglo-Catholic style in The Episcopal Church, and that's enough for many people. To break away from The Episcopal Church into a "continuing Anglican" body that is not Roman Catholic, however, while calling yourself "Catholic", is a major mistake. You don't like TEC, you want to call yourself Catholic, then have some integrity and pay the dues you need to pay.

Yesterday Evening, My Wife And I Attended

our Rite of Calling the Candidates to Continuing Conversion at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles, with Archbishop Jose Gomez presiding, assisted by three auxiliary bishops. I found this deeply affecting, for two main reasons. First, it was a procession and ceremony with real bishops in a real Church, not a bunch of guys with mail-order degrees playing dressup.

Second, the number of adult candidates for confirmation in just part of the Archiocese of Los Angeles (with their sponsors) very nearly filled the cathedral, which is not a small place. As I've said here before, numbers are important. It appeared to me that the crowd was well over 1,000, which would put it by itself as comparable to, or indeed larger than, the whole ACA. It was one more thing that convinced me that I'm no longer an Anglo-Catholic, if indeed I ever was one; I'm a Catholo-Catholic.

Archbishop Gomez's homily -- delivered bilingually, a few sentences of English, then repeating himself in a few sentences of Spanish -- reminded me that I've been on a journey of continuing conversion, certainly from the time I returned to the Church Universal as an adult, but especially over the past few years. It has been particularly instructive to see the corruption and disintegration of the "continuing Anglican" movement close at hand; my own view is that the challenges in the Catholic Church seem eminently surmountable in contrast.