We're All Called To Be Catholic, But

not everyone is called to be a priest. A visitor pointed me to a couple of articles, here and here, about Andrew Petiprin, who resigned his job as vicar general for the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee effective December 31, 2018, and became Catholic the following day.

This raises a number of questions for me. The first is how he could justify keeping his job as an Episcopalian if, as would normally be the case, he'd been pursuing reception as a Catholic for some non-trivial period of time. RCIA takes from one to two years. Even less formal sessions with a priest (like those that Newt Gingrich underwent to marry his third wife) don't happen overnight. This brings to mind the various military chaplains in whatever Protestant denomination who suddenly become Catholic under Bp Lopes, presumably so they don't miss a military paycheck. Isn't the priesthood supposed to be a sacrifice?

Quitting a Protestant clergy job to become Catholic the following day is only half the problem, though it's significant. In the secular world, if I work for Company A and it becomes apparent that I'm seriously talking with Company B about jumping ship to work for them, it's cause for immediate termination, in fact for good reason -- I may be in a position to bring confidential information over from A that could be a big help to B, for instance. In a religious context, it calls one's sincerity into question, if not the canonical issue of abandonment of communion.

But let's look at another issue. According to the Tennessean article,

Petiprin, raised Methodist and then nondenominational Christian, has a long-held affinity for the Catholic Church. Although he became an Anglican while in England in 2002, he contemplated Catholicism after being affected by the 2005 death of Pope John Paul II. But he prayed about it and still felt he was on the right path.

Petiprin became an Episcopal priest and served in Orlando, Florida, before moving to Nashville. In Tennessee, Petiprin said he met interesting local Catholics, came across influential reading materials, and the strife he felt regarding the Episcopal Church dissipated.

In other words, even being an Episcopalian for Petiprin was a relatively brief ride on the denominational carousel. For now, his story is that he'd sorta-kinda wanted to be Catholic all along. Well, great! But why was he so committed to Episcopalianism that he became a priest, and not just a priest, but a vicar general? I mean, I was raised Presbyterian, left the PCUS in college, and came to The Episcopal Church ten years later, all the time growing in my understanding of Christianity, such that after retirement, I became Catholic.

But this was a gradual but steady move, and I didn't detour into non-denominatonalism and such along the way. I'll never have to groom my story for a Catholic vocation director, and I think St Peter will understand that not only was I never called to the priesthood, but I never thought to exploit it for a career.

Petiprin, on the other hand, chose TEC as a career and became a vicar general. This is normally a career step just below bishop. Exactly what was behind his decision to leave a career where he might have had a real future? The writeup says he was a "conservative" -- but TEC has been moving left since the 1970s. Approving same-sex marriage would not have been a surprise, as indeed the ordination of women was not a surprise to the Pastoral Provision candidates in the 1980s or the ordination of gays to OCSP candidates after 2012.

For now, Petiprin's explanation is

"One of the great things that has happened to me over the last few months is, although I remain conservative on many of the questions that the Episcopal Church is facing, I have far less anger or bitterness about any of that than I used to have."

It sounds like he's keeping his options open and making sure he doesn't say anything that would turn off a vocation director in the future.

Petiprin still needs to figure out his next career move. He is considering teaching, writing and administrative work, but has not ruled out the priesthood in his new church. A path exists within the Catholic Church that allows married Episcopal priests to become Catholic priests.

"I’m open to discernment on that question, but for the present I am seeking other employment hopefully within the church somehow," Petiprin said.

Er, why not get a real job? Cardinal Ladaria, shut this thing down.

A Reaction To Stetson's Passing

A visitor who studies Opus Dei noted,

Has Stetson fallen out of favor with OD? No OD site has mentioned his death or funeral. Wikepedia is a weird place to get that kind of info.

Actually, my regular correspondent heard about this from an indirect source, and I went to Google to confirm it. The only mention was in Wikipedia, but the indirect source where my correspondent found it struck me as credible. So this certainly raises a worthwhile set of questions. A Google search today also brings up no further mention of his death. It's entirely possible that only the small group of now-Catholic clergy who'd previously worked with him as Anglicans felt his passing was worth noting, although I've been told that Fr Phillips hated Stetson, and the feeling was mutual.

Stetson, born in 1931, would have been 87 at the time of his passing. He would have reached 75 in 2006. According to Wikipedia, he was put in charge of the Catholic bookstore ("information center") in Washington in 2004, but left it in 2007 to continue to serve as secretary to the Pastoral Provision in Houston, where he remained until 2010. Meanwhile, Abp John Myers of Newark was made delegate for the Pastoral Provision in 2003, replacing Stetson's patron, Bernard Law, who left the country. (We may assume that Law, once he got to Rome, focused his efforts on Anglicanorum coetibus.)

It appears that Stetson left his position as secretary, what must have been a de facto retirement, before Bp Kevin Vann replaced Myers as delegate in 2011. At the same time, Stetson moved to Los Angeles. The Wikipedia account, almost certainly written by Stetson himself, makes no mention of a main reason for the move, which would have been to supervise the reception of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood Anglican parish into the to-be-erected North American ordinariate in early 2012. Abp Gómez also was installed in Los Angeles in 2011, and Stetson has sometimes been called a confidant of Gómez.

On one hand, finally receiving St Mary of the Angels into the OCSP would have been a key focus for Bernard Law, who had dealt extensively with its then-rector, Fr Jack Barker, in the late 1970s, and he would have seen it as a major piece of unfinished business in the context of Anglicanorum coetibus. But Stetson, 80 years old by the time this project began and effectively retired from any Opus Dei position (even that of bookstore manager) for several years, was probably not the best choice.

I wouldn't rule out that Stetson felt he didn't have enough to do and approached Law for some role in setting up the new ordinariate. Law may have given him something where he felt he couldn't do too much damage, and far enough away from Houston that he couldn't meddle with Steenson, but even there, Stetson managed to bungle things.

The visitor above asked another question:

I'd love someone to do research on Chicago. Did Stetson blackmail Bernardin to get that parish? There has to be something.

My money would be on Law. Law was just as liberal as Bernardin -- something both the visitor here who knew him has pointed out, as well as Philip Lawler in The Faithful Departed -- and I would guess that Law arranged the project for Stetson, who might already have been on shaky ground in Opus Dei. Law and Bernardin were close; no blackmail necessary. But others may have insights.

Since St Mary of the Angels never went into the Church, Stetson never had a chance to serve as "chaplain" to the parish during its transition, and in fact, although the original plan had been for every parish coming into the OCSP to have a Catholic priest serve as a temporary pastor while its Anglican rector waited to be ordained, as far as I'm aware, this almost never actually happened. But also, David Moyer, the ACA bishop over the parish, seems never to have been consulted by any Catholic authority for his insights, which I believe he had, and which I think were perceptive, over both personnel and physical plant.

Stetson, as far as I'm aware never a parish priest or a pastor, wouldn't have been a good choice to lead the parish in any case. From what anyone can gather, he and Jeffrey Steenson relied instead on Anthony Morello, a disgraced ex-TEC priest then in the ACA (he passed away in 2013), and Andrew Bartus, a fresh Nashotah House graduate who couldn't manage to get ordained as an Episcopalian, for whatever advice they had.

It's hard not to conclude that Stetson owed whatever career success he had to his patron Bernard Law, but in spite of that, his record in very secondary assignments appears to have been less than stellar.

Msgr William H Stetson

According to Wikipedia, thanks to a heads-up from my regular correspondent, Msgr William H Stetson passed away in the morning of January 3, 2019. Stetson was a major figure in the final failed push to get the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood Anglican parish into the Catholic Church. However, this effort had been under way since at least 1977 in various forms, and it's been the judgment of this blog that Stetson, who worked closely with Bernard Law since the time both were at Harvard, was a factor in the ultimate failure of this effort, although I believe it was ill-conceived from the start.

The only child of working-class parents in Greenfield, MA, Stetson went to Harvard, where he was prosperous enough to live at the upper-crust and reputedly gay Adams House and drove an apparently new Buick. He got to know Bernard Law, also an Adams House resident, and Law introduced him to Catholic circles in Cambridge. Stetson became an Opus Dei numerary while still a Harvard undergraduate, and he got in early with the establishment of the movement in the US.

From 1983 to 2010, he was the secretary to the delegate for the Pastoral Provision, who for most of that time was Bernard Law. For 17 years of that time, he was also vicar for Opus Dei in Chicago, where he seems to have earned the trust of Cardinal Bernardin, who gave Opus Dei the responsibility for renovating a Polish parish, St Mary of the Angels, in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Following that assignment, Stetson became Director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, another Opus Dei function. He was appointed to that job by Theodore McCarrick.

During the later phase of his career, rather clearly able to gain the ear of influential cardinals in AmChurch, he seems to have operated as a general fixer for the Pastoral Provision on Law's behalf, although it's worth pointing out that the Pastoral Provision nevertheless underperformed, to the extent that Law continued to press for a personal prelature for former Anglicans, broaching the idea in a formal proposal to Cardinal Ratzinger in a 1993 meeting.

His appointment as director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington is also something of a puzzle. As best I can tell, this is basically a bookstore with a chapel attached and a small paid staff. Law's successors as director haven't been monsignors. That Stetson would fall from secretary to the delegate for the Pastoral Provision and Opus Dei vicar in Chicago to bookstore manager is a puzzle and may reflect an understanding within Opus Dei of his actual abilities, especially after his patron Law's departure from the US.

My own exposure to him during 2011-12 and the runup to the erection of the North American ordinariate is that he erred profoundly in his assessments of the Anglican clergy at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood, and Jeffrey Steenson also erred, as far as I can see, in accepting those assessments. But as far as I can see, Stetson had little or no experience in actually running a parish in any denomination; he was always above that sort of thing in the upper levels of Opus Dei.

My perspective now, after almost six years as a Catholic, is that David Moyer, who did have experience with Anglicanism, running a parish, and serving as a bishop, had a much better sense of what it would take to make the St Mary of the Angels parish Catholic, and my impression from the remarks he made during his episcopal visit in early 2011 was that the place was a disappointment and would probably need to be extensively rebuilt or expanded to be a true Catholic parish.

I think he had it right. I'm not sure what universe either Bernard Law or William Stetson ever thought he was operating in. But I think this also says something about the upper levels of AmChurch in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

Freelancing And Grandstanding

Several weeks ago, I subscribed to the YouTube channel of Fr Mark Goring, CC. I'm interested in Catholic new media, and in his case I subscribed because I wanted to learn more about the Charismatic movement in the Church. When the business about McCarrick blew up, he had a lot to say, though there wasn't much new, and I wondered how much of it was prudent.

Then he started, or tried to start, a movement. I think he called it something like the Legions of St Joseph, and the point was that they'd take up a particular issue related to the Second Crisis, and they'd commit to making phone calls and sending e-mails to designated Church organs in protest at whatever. His first effort was aimed at the Archdiocese of Washington in an attempt to discourage Cardinal Wuerl from appearing at an event. He commented earlier in the week that the Archdiocese of Washington wasn't happy with him.

I'd point to his videos about all this, but everything's been taken down. Yesterday he did put up a video saying he'd been ordered by his superiors to "cease and desist". He apologized for making their lives more difficult. Well, I guess everyone learns about this kind of thing sooner or later, and watching the situation develop, I wondered how soon life would catch up with him. It caught up right about when I figured it would. You don't get to be my age without learning something, I guess.

I note that Bp Barron and Fr Schmitz said their say and then shut up. Indeed, Abp Gómez and Cardinal DiNardo have themselves been pretty quiet. The exception seems to be Cardinal O'Malley, who just before Christmas referred Cardinal Dolan to the papal nuncio for covering up an abuse case in New York. According to Michael Voris,

What impact this will have on the U.S. bishops upcoming week-long retreat of prayer and reflection regarding their failures in the arena of sex abuse and the resulting decades of cover-up is uncertain, but it seems as though this latest bombshell will at the very least make some encounters among various bishops uncomfortable.

Nearly the entire body of U.S. bishops will be gathering at Mundelein Seminary near Chicago starting next week, and this seems like news that will cause quite the commotion.

O'Malley, who is president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, seems to have fallen out of favor, at least to a degree, with Rome and Pope Francis, perhaps relating back to his revelations regarding the involvement of multiple Chilean bishops in homosexual sex abuse and cover-up and his own criticism of the Holy Father's mishandling of the case of Bp. Juan Barros.

Well, if you're Cardinal O'Malley, you can maybe get away with it. Maybe. But if there's no clear leadership, then you're going to get every Tom, Dick, and Harry freelancing and grandstanding, and in the case of Taylor Marshall, putting out stuff that's poorly presented, or in the case of Fr Goring, counterproductive.

Let's hope clear leadership and a coherent, effective strategy comes out of the Mundelein session in the coming week.

More On James Grein

I mentioned the Taylor Marshall interview of James Grein in yesterday's post. I would say that the interpretation in other Catholic media is an indication of how poorly Marshall's interview was conducted: I listened to the Grein interview for several minutes without learning exactly what McCarrick's offense was. Life Site News had the patience to work through the preening, shuckin' and jivin' from Marshall and his friend to get to Grein's point:

Because the initial case against McCarrick seems to be crumbling, Grein’s sworn testimony last week to Church authorities conducting the Vatican’s investigation into McCarrick’s long history of sexual predation may soon become the cornerstone –– and the last hope –– for any canonical action to be taken by the Holy See against McCarrick.

Though canon law may be lenient on McCarrick for his despicable sexual abuse of the altar boy in the sacristy of a St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Grein’s abuse occurred during confession, which canon law views as a capital crime.

Grein explained that when he was a young boy, McCarrick, who was a close friend of his parents, brought him to a third floor bedroom in the Grein family’s house to hear his confession, far away from the others who were gathered on the main floor.

McCarrick told Grein he wanted to “hear my sins of the mind and body.”

“And as he blesses me, he puts his right hand on my right shoulder and starts to bless me with Holy Water down my body,” recounted Grein, “and then he massages my genitals, and he kisses me there.”

Because the sexual abuse began when Grein was just 11 years old, this is clearly a case of abuse of a minor that cannot be excused as consensual sex by higher ups in Vatican City seeking to protect the now-disgraced former cardinal.

Just this morning I ran across St Bernardino of Siena, who said,

No sin has greater power over the soul than the one of cursed sodomy, which was always detested by all those who lived according to God's law. ...

Such passion for untenable practices borders on madness. This vice disturbs the intellect, unbalances an elevated and generous state of soul, drags lofty thoughts down to base ones, makes men pusillanimous and irascible, obstinate and hardened, servilely soft and incapable of anything.

Furthermore, the will, agitated by the insatiable drive for pleasure, no longer follows reason but rather the tumult of the passions.

I like his stress on the influence of sin over reason.

What Is It With Taylor Marshall?

Around the time I expanded the scope of this blog, I put Taylor Marshall's site on my blogroll. Unfortunately, I'm leaning toward taking it off. My problem is that, in contrast to Church Militant, Ascension Presents, Bp Barron, and others, it's simply not a professional effort. The discussions appear not to be scripted, and they're halting and desultory.

Beyond that, Marshall usually appears with interlocutors of one or another sort, and I'm often not sure what the point of these guys is. One looks for all the world like Frank Zappa. The one today looks, I gotta say it, like Oscar Wilde, the same luxuriant hair, bedroom gaze, and rosebud lips. I'm not sure what his name is, and that's part of the problem.

He interviews James Grein, a McCarrick victim/survivor. This is sad, because Grein isn't well-spoken, and his story is halting and disorganized. This drives me away; I'm not sure what it does to other viewers.

Wouldn't it be much easier, at least on the reader/viewer, to give an introduction to who Grein is, exactly how he encountered McCarrick, under what circumstances and when, and what his outcome was? The poor guy is so poorly spoken that I've got to wonder if his encounter left him permanently damaged in some way. Instead, we've got the same annoying experience as having to follow a stutterer's narrative, but without explanation as to why we should.

This is why YouTubers need a script. Marshall hasn't gotten that message. He seems happy just to have his face out there, an ego-tripper like, I fear, many in the current crop of ex-Anglicans. I imagine that sometime in coming days there'll be a last-straw event, and I'll take his name off my blogroll.

Serious Catholics concerned about the crisis in the Church deserve better. Maybe I'll replace him with Fr Goring.

The Incoherence of Jordan Peterson

Even Dean Wormer had it right:

Indeed, I say this as an alumnus of the institution that served as a model for Faber College, and who as an undergraduate received similar advice from the model for Dean Wormer. In fact, such was my undergraduate experience that for a year or two, I would have actively disagreed with the dean and insisted that fat, drunk, and stupid was the best plan of life.

And if you're rich, you can get away with it. That was the actual lesson we were taught, and even Dean Wormer was swimming against the tide. Nelson Rockefeller was that institution's chief benefactor, after all.

Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life don't differ essentially from Dean Wormer's advice. The first ones are representative:

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you

Let me say from the start that this is good advice, as indeed Dean Wormer's exhortation is just as good. The problem is where it comes from. Peterson's philosophy is hard to distinguish from natural law, which is traditionally "the use of reason to analyze human nature to deduce binding rules of moral behavior from nature's or God's creation of reality and mankind". But there's conventional wisdom, even the stuff Aunt Margaret or Dean Wormer can get right, and the authentic workings of reason.

The question is where Peterson finds "nature" or "human nature". Although Peterson is now treated as something of a pariah in the academic establishment, he is nevertheless a tenured full professor of psychology at the University of Toronto after teaching and also gaining tenure at Harvard. There is nothing radical about this guy.

Peterson's view of "nature" is pretty plainly scientific materialism. While a debate, or informal exchange of some sort, with Bp Barron would be fun and entertaining, the one I'd like to see would be with Prof Feser. That one's much less likely. From Peterson's point of view, "human nature" is a vaguely Jungian entity derived from evolution. Mythic archetypes have emerged in human nature as a response to natural selection. The myth of the hero evolved because heroes were a useful behavioral pattern that protected humans from predators or other less-evolved humanoids -- indeed, even psychopathic homo sapiens.

I think if I were going to take a path to debating Peterson from a Thomistic perspective, I'd ask what the mythic archetypes actually are. The best answers we can give would be that evidence for them is contained in ancient manuscripts -- but they're only secondary sources. You can point to Gilgamesh or the Ramayana or Homer, but the best academic opinion is that they come from pre-literate oral tradition, which leaves uncertainty about their origin. And their actual interpretation is highly subjective. The 20th-century scholarship on myth from Frazer or Eliade or Campbell is fraught with academic fraud.

But we can go a bit farther and say, with Prof Feser, that the thought processes that somehow result from mythic archetypes are immaterial. Whatever else you try to do, you aren't going to get immaterial processes of mind from a material process of natural selection. Material circumstances can create habits, which without reason and will to supervise them can have bad results, but the reason and will that supervise them are immaterial. But the reason and will can also develop habits of virtue.

So if I were debating Peterson, I would probably start by asserting that mythic archetypes are immaterial and at best unprovable, but as a pragmatic approach, we can be safe in assuming they don't exist. They aren't a basis for natural law. So where does natural law actually come from? Not from Dean Wormer, to be sure. I'd probably send Peterson back to Aquinas.