The Anglo-Catholic Zone: Not Simply Unique But Separate

In thinking about St Mary of the Angels over the past five years and more, two statements by Roman Catholic archbishops stand out for me. The first is from Archbishop of San Antonio Garcia-Siller, who noted of Our Lady of the Atonement, “expressions in the life of the parish that indicate an identity separate from, rather than simply unique, among the parishes of the archdiocese”. The second, which I quoted here almost two years ago, is the 1986 letter to St Mary of the Angels from Cardinal Mahony:

"I wish to acknowledge your letter of October 14, 1986," wrote Mahony, "with respect to your desire that St. Mary of the Angels Church community be received into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. The history of your parish community is not paralleled with any other similar Episcopal community which has been received into the Roman Catholic Church in our country. Your letter to His Eminence, Cardinal Bernard Law, does not reflect the long and very volatile public legal proceedings which you took against the Episcopal Diocese, a process which proceeded through both the Superior Court and the Appellate Court. This factor distinguishes your history from every other application of which I am aware. You indicate that your numbers continue to dwindle, and there is still division and divisiveness among the community. In addition, you seem to require that a major focus be upon the physical plant of St. Mary of the Angels community. All of these considerations compel me and my consultants to look negatively upon your interest in union with the Roman Catholic Church as an Anglican Use community. I am hopeful that this letter will help to crystallize once again the problems which have been so prevalent in the past efforts of your community to seek union with the Roman Catholic Church."

Whatever one may think about "Red Roger", I continue to believe that he and the consultants to whom he refers came to an insightful appreciation of the dilemma posed to a Catholic bishop by "Anglo Catholic" parishes seeking what they clearly will always expect is some type of special status in the Church -- not simply unique, but separate. But, of course, always with the ability to call themselves "Catholic", with the prestige that brings.

The other characterization that now will stay with me is Judge Murphy's in the courtroom yesterday, who, clearly frustrated and quite exercised, called "ridiculous" any effort to continue legal actions in the Third Lawsuits. I would say at this point that not a whole lot of blame attaches to Fr Kelley and the current vestry, who on one hand were playing the cards they'd been dealt over almost 40 years of history, and on the other made a good-faith effort to enter the OCSP but were thwarted by various combinations of bungling and duplicity.

Certainly Fr Kelley expressed to me yesterday, and Mr Lengyel-Leahu expressed to the judge, that the appeals court decision instant leaves an enormous loose end, the fact that the 2014 appeals court decision recognized the vestry the parish elected in 2012, and there will be no legal way in which the ACA can somehow cancel this out and place Mrs Bush and other associates in as a new vestry. But what about the years of litigation and additional millions it will cost to fix this through the courts? And for what gain?

The original intent of the parish in 2011-12 was to enter the Catholic Church via Anglicanorum coetibus. As a new member of the parish at the time, I had no reason to believe this was anything but a good idea -- indeed, a near-millennial sort of development. This is certainly what all the Anglo-Catholic blogs were saying, but of course, those blogs almost all disappeared within a year of the OCSP's erection, the bloggers scattered to the four winds.

I'm not sure if anyone asked Msgr Steenson, or Cardinal Müller, or then-Msgr Lopes, what any had in mind as to a plan for what would happen after the sale. The complementary norms envisioned parishes entering the prelature as whole entities, or something close. This didn't happen on anything like the scale that would justify setting up even the skeleton chancery that we see. In fact, the OCSP, in size and makeup, is pretty much just a clone of a small "continuing" denomination, and among the characteristics it shares with "continuers" are poorly formed, even sketchy, jurisdiction-hopping clergy, tiny and unstable parish units, and slapdash, make-it-up-as-we-go-along policy decisions.

As Herbert Stein's Law puts it, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." As I said yesterday, I think an outcome that might reasonably be planned for in thinking of a potential future for the parish in the OCSP, if this were now in any way possible, would be that the OCSP will conceivably be dissolved, and the parish, with maybe a dozen others, would revert to a territorial diocese, with the other little chapel groups suppressed. But from a diocesan perspective, this is unrealistic. The St Mary's nave has an optimistic capacity of maybe 100, there is minimal parking available, and a diocesan parish is already only a few blocks away.

Latin masses are available at St Victor's West Hollywood, about five miles away. There's no real need that the parish would fill if it were not in a separate prelature, but even there, if the parish did not have a commercial property it can rent, it would not be viable. In fact, it seems likely that its value, either to the ACA or the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, would be the multimillions that can be realized through its sale.

With this in mind, in light of what could be realized if the ACA were to acquire clear title, the best course would be to find a way to make all parties whole in the form of some generous settlement. The history of bungling, greed, and duplicity here makes this unlikely.

Breaking News -- Appeals Court Overturns Judge Strobel's 2015 Ruling

I attended a trial setting conference this morning in Judge Murphy's Department 32 on the damage suit brought by the St Mary's vestry against certain individuals, the ACA, and the ACA Diocese of the West. However, this was overtaken by events, as I learned that on December 8, 2017, the appeals court issued its opinion on the Bush group's appeal of Judge Strobel's ruling in the 2015 trial. The decision is highly technical, but the crux of it is here:

The bottom line, as has been variously described to me, is that "Essentially, they say that because ballots were not sent to every member [--in particular, the Bartuses], no action may be taken pursuant to Section 9413. Although we argued there was no prejudice because those votes were counted in Defendants' favor, the Court said that it did not matter- that a vote could not be taken at all unless ballots were sent to every member." or, as Fr Kelley put it , "even though they both testified in Court Trial that HAD they been sent Ballots, the RC Church Canons would not have permitted them to VOTE!

"We knew that. They knew that. We knew that they knew that. They knew that we knew that they knew. But the Judges couldn't add that up.

"The Minutes had a reference to 'those who had migrated to the R.C. Church', but did not specifically NAME the two of them. Others, who left in July 2012 were named, recent history. Bartuses had left in April. By July that was 'past history. . ."

All the ruling says is

The August 2012 vote failed to comply with section 9413. Thus, the court erred in entering judgment in plaintiff's favor.

The judgment is reversed. Defendants to recover costs of appeal.

As was discussed in court this morning, the appeals court has not yet issued remanders that would establish the practical effect of the decision, although it seems clear that it renders the remaining case, the damage suit by the vestry that was the original subject of this morning's conference, moot unless there is further appeal. Presumably, unless other action is pursued by the vestry, at some point in the near future, the vestry will have to vacate the parish and turn it over to the ACA.

As far as I'm aware, the vestry has made no final decision on what move, if any, it will make. Judge Murphy certainly made his feelings clear in court this morning, noting that over more than five years, there have been seven cases connected with this issue and saying, "It's ridiculous that we're continuing with this."

As my views on the cases have developed over the years, I've become less and less convinced that there can be a good outcome, whatever the legal developments. I don't feel optimistic about the future of the OCSP, and I think lack of growth and the likely outcomes of poor clergy formation and insufficient supervision will bring about a dissolution of the prelature and transfer of the dozen or so viable parishes to territorial dioceses. However, St Mary of the Angels isn't really set up to be a diocesan parish -- it's too small on one hand, but on the other, it's only a few blocks from a diocesan parish that can't fill its own worship space despite reducing masses.

Meanwhile, the Bush group and the ACA demonstrated between 2012 and 2016 that they couldn't run a parish, alienated the community, and drove away a tenant. I doubt if they seriously expect to operate the parish and will pursue ways to sell the property, especially the Della Robbia altarpiece.

The roots of the situation date back at least to the period immediately before the parish withdrew from TEC in 1977, and probably farther back than that. I'll post more on my reflections about this tomorrow.

The Outlook Going Forward

As I noted a few days ago, I thought 2017 hit a generally discouraging note regarding prospects for Anglicanorum coetibus. I spent the last couple of days wondering in part what to do about this blog. While I haven't reached a final decision, here are some items I've thrown into the pot:

• I think it's basically reckless for anyone, cradle Catholic or Anglican (or whatever else) to attend mass at an OCSP group. For non-Catholics, there's no assurance that they'll have a good catechesis. For cradle Catholics, especially if they're coming back to the Church after falling away, they can be lulled into serious error. For evidence, I simply point to Mrs Gyapong's recent post, in which she asserted that it isn't a sin voluntarily to enter a near occasion of sin -- by her authority, the Anglican patrimony (whatever that is) cancels this out. She seems to think people who believe this are "Jansenists", which suggests her understanding of theology is limited.
• The odd thing is that if I were to post this, I can imagine that at least two or three people would send me e-mails setting me straight, and I'd wind up removing the post or correcting it. (However, these would all be well-catechized diocesan Catholics.) So far, this hasn't happened. Nor has there apparently been any sort of notice taken by OCSP clergy. If I were Bp Lopes, I think I'd want to post something in the Ordinariate Observer correcting any misinterpretations, since this error would otherwise appear to have OCSP sanction. So far, this hasn't happened.
• I've said over and over here that I would not go to an OCSP priest for confession unless the matter were urgent and I had no other option. The circumstances above reinforce this view, but beyond that, I think it might be dangerous for anyone, especially a new Catholic or lapsed cradle Catholic, to go to confession with an OCSP priest. On the other hand, I wonder how many OCSP laity in fact go to confession, and, given the opinion so strongly expressed by Ms Gyapong, what their examinations of conscience would be like in any case.
• One piece of advice I see for Catholics on the web is to stay away from sources of erroneous advice and not to waste a lot of time arguing, because these people aren't going to change their minds. This probably goes to more general advice that it's important to choose one's friends and associates well. It isn't a good use of my time at this point to say more than what I've said above.
• I've probably said about as much as I can say here about the OCSP, barring new developments. I think it's reckless for Houston to continue in its current direction, which seems to be to be to ordain men who probably shouldn't even be candidates at their stage of formation and turn them loose on often well-motivated but poorly catechized laity. It is, as far as I can see, also reckless to let these poorly formed men operate with the closest supervision in some cases thousands of miles away.

At this point, barring new developments, I intend to report on legal developments as they affect St Mary of the Angels, but what I do with the blog beyond that is very much up in the air.

The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society And Anglo-Catholicism

I've given more thought to yesterday's post and the one at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog that prompted it. I certainly go along with the sentiments here, which say

The administrator at the Catholic Answers Forums tells me that she sometimes fantasizes about banning the subject of women's clothing as a topic of conversation on the forums because there are few topics more likely to start flame wars.

It seems to me that the issue is not whether to breast feed during mass, but whether the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society is any sort of authority on the subject. Clearly Mrs Gyapong and Mr Schaetzel feel they are -- and I know from experience that the moderators at the Society's blogs allow only comments they approve of, so the one comment on the post, from Mr Schaetzel, is clearly endorsed by the powers that be.

Let's look at the Society's position on Catholics and sin:

There are some Catholics who take avoiding a “near occasion of sin” to such extremes that they create a whole new set of rules to put a hedge around such occasions, and then act as if violating one of the “preventive” rules is also somehow sinful.

Well, let's take a look at what "some Catholics" believe about near (or proximate) occasions of sin. Per the Catholic Encyclopedia,

Theologians distinguish between the proximate and the remote occasion. They are not altogether at one as to the precise value to be attributed to the terms. De Lugo defines proximate occasion (De poenit. disp. 14, n. 149) as one in which men of like calibre for the most part fall into mortal sin, or one in which experience points to the same result from the special weakness of a particular person. The remote occasion lacks these elements. All theologians are agreed that there is no obligation to avoid the remote occasions of sin both because this would, practically speaking, be impossible and because they do not involve serious danger of sin.

As to the proximate occasion, it may be of the sort that is described as necessary, that is, such as a person cannot abandon or get rid of. Whether this impossibility be physical or moral does not matter for the determination of the principles hereinafter to be laid down. Or it may be voluntary, that is within the competency of one to remove. Moralists distinguish between a proximate occasion which is continuous and one which, whilst it is unquestionably proximate, yet confronts a person only at intervals. It is certain that one who is in the presence of a proximate occasion at once voluntary and continuous is bound to remove it.

What we're seeing here is that, while circumstances and individual proclivities may differ, yeah, if you're drawn to sin by near occasions that you can avoid, then you're sinning, and if you keep doing it when you're able to avoid it, the confessor must deny absolution. Neither Mrs Gyapong nor Mr Schaetzel is especially precise here, but clearly Mrs Gyapong disdains the idea of putting "a hedge around" near occasions of sin, when it seems to me that a good confessor would urge just that. The typical example of avoiding near occasions of sin is for a person who has a problem with alcohol to avoid walking into a bar. Awfully good advice, as far as I can see, but Mrs Gyapong says, on behalf of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society,

I am going to pronounce right now that this kind of thing is not part of our English Catholic/Anglican Patrimony going forward.

This is a problem I've seen with Anglo-Catholicism from the time I first asked Fr David Miller about it in TEC confirmation class and got his reply: Anglo-Catholics want to have the prestige of calling themselves Catholic without paying the dues Catholics have to pay. Certainly we can dispute whether it's a good idea to breast feed during mass, though I would ask why we almost never see it, at least at the half dozen or so parishes where I've gone, and whether the same people who advocate it would also advocate changing diapers in the pew.

But the point here is that, notwithstanding specifics about modesty and decorum, Mrs Gyapong is making statements about faith and morals. As my regular correspondent puts it,

Leaving aside the fact that her experience of Anglicanism was confined to mid-life membership in a small "continuing" denomination for a decade or so, she displays an eclectic range of "pick and mix" liturgical enthusiasms, combined with a conservative political outlook, which are of course no crimes unless you are purporting to edit a blog which is a semi-official organ of a society dedicated to "promoting the Anglican Heritage and Common Identity within the Catholic Church" in which case the lack of rigour is rather unsettling.

On Mr Schaetzel, my correspondent earlier noted,

I personally don't regard Mr Schaetzel as having an Anglican bone in his body. He is a right-wing evangelical, now Catholic, a very common profile. Passing briefly through TEC, which gave him a taste for traditional liturgy. But he is far more animated about his family-values, "subsidiarity" agenda and similar concerns than he is about Anglican Patrimony, about which his ideas are entirely superficial and romantic.

Yet these folks, with fairly minimal exposure to Anglicanism and as far as I can tell, even less to Catholicism, presume to tell us what part of Catholicism we Anglo-Catholics can follow and what we shouldn't.

Fr Bergman, as I understand it, you're a member of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. Do you feel you have any duty to correct any of this? Does Bp Lopes?

Nursing Mothers In Our Parishes: Not Just Unique?

My regular correspondent sent me a reference to a strange post by Ms Gyapong at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, which I normally avoid. In it, a correspondent rants that in the tiny OCSP chapel group she attended,

there were complaints about me breastfeeding my baby without covering her with a blanket in church. I was accused of being immodest.

She then offered several justifications for why she absolutely had to do this. The woman and Ms Gyapong then agree that breast feeding in public and without covering is part of the Anglican patrimony! Yes, I think that happened all the time in Jane Austen -- Sense and Sensibility, all those descriptions, right? And the great breastfeeding scene in Middlemarch! Shame on those philistines for not recognizing the great Anglican tradition, centuries long, which reached its peak in Victoria's reign, of boldly asserting female reproductive capacity!

Apparently it's those prudish ultramontanists who spoil the fun, according to Ms Gyapong and her visitor. Petty concerns about near occasions of sin, the sort of thing you only find in the act of contrition nowadays. You don't like it, then don't look!

I'm not sure where to start. Ms Gyapong and her visitor cite centuries of Catholic art depicting Christ's Mother breastfeeding. OK, centuries of other Catholic art depict Christ's Mother posing with the Holy Infant on her lap, with Mary discreetly pointing to the Child's penis. This is meant in both cases, as far as I can see, to make the theological point that Christ was fully human but did not sin. It does not imply that mothers should bring their infant boys to church to show off their private parts. Indeed, sometimes infants need a change of diapers while in church, but so far, I've never seen anyone make the change right in the pew.

For that matter, there are many depictions of the angel visiting Mary. But this appears to have been a very private event. This is art. Lots of rapes, massacres, battles, murders, and whatever else take place in art. Doesn't mean we're supposed to do them.

Actually, I've only occasionally seen anyone breastfeeding in church, and in my almost five years as a Catholic, I've never seen it, although Ms Gyapong's visitor says it happens at her new flip-flop and halter top parish, where they're cool with it. One thing that strikes me is that there are lots of infants and children at Catholic parishes -- of course. But in our area, many parishioners are from the Philippines and Latin countries. Frankly, I can't imagine any of them just pulling it out and giving suck.

I think there are two issues here, modesty and decorum. This site quotes Pius XII:

Decency involves the "proper consideration for the sensitivity of others to objects that are unsightly, or, above all, as a defense of moral honesty and a shield against disordered sensuality."

Both Ms Gyapong and her visitor take the position that if you have a problem with having to turn away from a bare breast, there's something wrong with you -- in fact, there's something wrong with you if you think it's something you're not supposed to look at! Where does consideration for the sensitivity of others figure in here?

Beyond that, there's the question of decorum. I think this goes to having a reverent atmosphere in church, among other things. For the same reason that loud social chit-chat in the nave is inappropriate, other things like public breastfeeding probably aren't appropriate, either. Think of why travel during the holidays can be difficult: the prevalence of infants and toddlers tends to make all public space a nursery. But ordinary standards of decorum mean that not everything infants and toddlers do is appropriate in public. Certainly the same kind of people who want everyone to eat crunchy granola also want everyone to accept that all public space should be a nursery, but I try to avoid that sort of situation.

So yeah, I can imagine, say, Gloucester in 1883, with ladies just swingin' down the street, a child at each breast, headin' to morning prayer or some such. It's the Anglican patrimony after all, one of its precious spiritual treasures, which those prudish continental Catholics just can't accept. It's that awful non-Anglican priest leading that little gathered group which just doesn't understand these things. Why, they drove her to a new flip-flop and halter-top parish with awful music and a priest who sounds like Kermit the Frog, but at least they've got no problem with her boobs.

I keep coming back to the insight of Abp Siller-Garcia: these people don't want to be unique, they want to be separate.

Christmas Masses And A Question

My regular correspondent e-mailed me a week ago wondering if the close proximity of Advent IV and Christmas could prove a problem for some OCSP communities, and this turned out to be prophetic:

Fr Kennedy was too ill last Sunday/Monday to offer mass at St Timothy, Ft Worth, so services for Advent IV and Christmas were cancelled. According to the bulletin of SMV, Arlington TX Fr Kennedy is the only priest on staff there besides the Pastor, so things must have been stretched at SMV too. St Timothy's has been without an ordained parish administrator since Fr Stainbrook was reassigned to St John Vianney, Cleburne in July, 2016. The major news items posted on the St Timothy's FB page are the final illnesses/funerals of long-time parishioners. The parish website has remained untouched since April 2017. Manpower is of course an issue, but Our Lady of Hope, Kansas City, where Ed Wills was ordained as a transitional deacon this summer to assist Fr Sly, did not even bother to post Christmas mass times this year. The FB page looks up to date only because the most recent post is pictures from Christmas 2016. There will apparently be many ordinations in the OCSP in 2018, but if we see that the new clergy are deployed as leaders of tiny communities-in-formation they have put together in random small towns, while the first generation of incoming parish groups quietly folds, I think the whole future of the enterprise will look very precarious. As you have commented before, clergy with the entrepreneurial/pastoral skills to build up a thriving parish from a handful of initial members---clergy like Fr Phillips---will always be few and far between. The core strength will always come from competent men who can maintain and build on established communities. If even these cannot be found, things do not look good.

Well, if it had been important to hold Advent IV and Christmas masses at St Timothy, couldn't available OCSP priests have been found in Texas? The four-hour drive from Houston would be tough but doable on all but minimal notice, and overnight stays with a parish family seem like a reasonable possibility. This raises serious questions, among those we've already seen, about the stability of the OCSP.

Here's a question I've been pondering. Ex-Anglican (and Anglican is very flexibly defined) priests who want to be ordained Catholic in the US have two options, the Pastoral Provision and the OCSP. The usual assignment process for the OCSP is for the candidate to take over tiny groups-in-formation without a stipend. In fact, some must take diocesan, though often non-pastoral, jobs to pay the bills. Why are we multiplying entities? Cut out the little Potemkin village groups, take the candidates in via the Pastoral Provision, and give them diocesan jobs, which they'd probably need anyhow?

If you think about it, the ex-Anglicans would probably wind up better occupied, with less time on their hands for mischief, more closely supervised, and have better formation while working closely with diocesan clergy.

A New Angle On The Oxford Movement

I got a very worthwhile book as a Christmas gift from our niece, Simon Jenkins, Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations. More than an enthusiast coffee-table book, Jenkins, a major figure in the historic preservation movement, has quite a bit to say about architecture and social context. He doesn't mention Tract 90, and Newman had almost nothing to say about railways, but Tract 90 appeared in 1841, just as the technological and commercial success of railways was initiating the Railway Mania.

Established historical analysis places the Oxford Movement in the context of the 1832 Reform Act, which granted civil rights to non-Anglicans. But the Reform Act itself occurred in a wider context, and the first successful English railway on the modern paradigm was the Liverpool and Manchester, which opened in 1830. More than expanded suffrage, railways in the first half of the century represented a much more direct threat to English cultural norms. Jenkins points out that the architecture of railway stations, the most direct interface people had with the new technology, had to represent something unthreatening and reassuring.

Thus railway station architecture tended to display historical eclecticism, deliberate archaism, and even escapism, for both commercial and political reasons. The Oxford Movement is a parallel tendency, a response to the industrial revolution, social upheaval, and the commercialization of society. Not only did stations have to draw in customers, but they had to be satisfactory to the local landowners, on whose lands they were often built, and whose properties the railways needed to cross.

Jenkins points out, in fact, that the unique style of 19th-century English railways, one of archaism and eclecticism, has proven exportable in the form of the enormously popular Thomas the Tank Engine and JK Rowling franchises. The Oxford movement has been similarly exportable -- but I think we need to recognize that it's a franchise, a stylistic product, in considerable measure an escapist fantasy.

Jenkins sees English railway stations certainly as an effective fantasy, one that can now contribute to renewed social cohesion -- but they're nonetheless a commercial product, and indeed a social construct, even a form of propaganda. (They're now owned by the government.) The UK railway system acted to reinforce social cohesion during two world wars. As did, of course, the Church of England, which found eclecticism and archaism suited its purpose for much of the same period.

One feature of Protestantism, at least the Lutheran-Reformed version, is that it proved from the start amenable to state control. Anglo-Catholicism is, let's face it, a version of state-controlled Protestantism that is not really compatible with Roman Catholicism. I don't think Cardinal Law recognized this, and I don't think Bp Lopes does, either.

In the end, though, it's a style, something that emulates the thing, not the thing itself. It's a means to an end, not the end itself.