I Post The News So They Don't Have To

A visitor very kindly sent what appears to be an authoritative account of the current membership of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society Board of Directors. As I've noted, although there have been sporadic but partial accounts of the membership on the society's blog, there is no publicly accessible source where people can learn this. Here's the list:

The present Board members of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society are:

Deborah Gyapong, President
Clara Chung, Vice-President
Joseph G. Blake, Treasurer
Christopher Mahon, Secretary

Fr. Eric Bergman
C. David Burt
Hans-Jurgen Feulner
Fr. Bernard Sixtus
Peter Jesserer Smith

William Tighe

At the September 13 AGM of the ACS Deborah Gyapong will be stepping down as President, but remaining a Board member and Joe Blake (who more than anybody else should be considered the father and founder of the original "Anglican Use Society") will be retiring both as Treasurer and from the Board.

David Murphy resigned as president early in September 2017, and was succeeded as acting president by Mrs. Gyapong, who was elected president at the AGM later that month. David Murphy resigned from the Board itself in February 2019 along with the Australian Fr. Stephen Hill.

I would be interested to see the information ordinary society members receive regarding board nominations and elections. While organizations like this, which have extremely limited appeal, are likely to be run by a closed clique, it would be interesting to see if there's any opportunity for any outsider=members with good ideas on how to improve things to get themselves on the ballot and express their point of view.

There may well not be anyone out there with the interest or fortitude to do something like this. However, if there is, I'd be happy to give them a platform here. I would guess that they'd reach a bigger audience here than on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog.

The Empire Strikes Back

As I've reported here, Los Angeles County has been unable to secure a temporary restraining order against Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, CA to stop it from holding indoor services that include singing, but without masks or social distancing. On Sunday, the county public works department sent the church a letter giving notice that it was terminating the month-to-month lease of county land for part of the church parking lot, effective October 1.

The best discussion of the story is at The Federalist. Another story with additional detail is here.

There are likely to be further legal developments. The church's counsel, Jenna Ellis, released a statement:

“Los Angeles County is retaliating against Grace Community Church for simply exercising their constitutionally protected right to hold church and challenging an unreasonable, unlawful health order,” Ellis said.

“The Church has peacefully held this lease for 45 years and the only reason the County is attempting eviction is because John MacArthur stood up to their unconstitutional power grab. This is harassment, abusive, and unconscionable,” Ellis added.

As of this morning, the Thomas More Society, which is representing the church, has no statement on its website. I would guess that the church and its counsel will pursue some type of legal redress, but they aren't telegraphing their strategy. As a legal amateur, it seems to me that one avenue would be the doctrine of estoppel. On one hand, although the rental agreement is month-to-month, the church has relied for 45 years on the continuation of this agreement.

In addition,

Collateral estoppel, sometimes known as estoppel by judgment, prevents the re-argument of a factual or legal issue that has already been determined by a valid judgment in a prior case involving the same parties.

It appears that the church's counsel may attempt to argue that the county is trying to gain a result by terminating a contract that they could not obtain in court -- and in doing so, they're violating the church's constitutional rights. But we'll have to see how this develops.

In the case of North Valley Baptist Church in Santa Clara, CA, Pastor Jack Trieber says in this YouTube broadcast that, although the country health department fines the church $5,000 for each service held indoors with singing, the church has the financial resources simply to pay these fines and continue holding the services. This, of course, is completely in the spirit of Dr King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail".

This story explains that $5,000 per service is the maximum penalty the county health department can impose, which is leaving the county in a difficult situation. According to the story, the county is investigating how it may be able to enforce its order now that the maximum penalty isn't working.

However, the measures at the county level in California are taking place in the context of steadily improving COVID statistics. Beyond that, the US Center for Disease Control has been revising its published statistics to respond to long-expressed concerns that definitions of COVID conditions wildly inflate the numbers.

For instance, the CDC updated its website has to show that only 6% of all coronavirus deaths were completely due to the coronavirus alone. This gives a total of 9,210 deaths, not the nearly 200,000 widely cited.

This information from a recognized government source is likely to be used in further legal proceedings that argue, in part, that restrictions on worship have not been tailored to the actual risk.

Remarks by our clergy during yesterday's mass, though, suggest there's an understanding that county authorities intend to continue these restrictions indefinitely. As a result, the legal cases being brought by the Evangelical parishes in California will, at least we hope, bring about benefit for all churches.

More Information On The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society Board

My regular correspondent sent me a link to a post on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog from 2018 covering its annual general meeting, which lists other board members as of that time.

At the AGM, we affirmed the re-election of three Board members: David Murphy who is based in Germany but belongs to the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham; Hans-Jurgen Feulner, a liturgical scholar from Austria for participated on the international commission that developed Divine Worship: the Misssal; and Fr. Stephen Hill, a priest from Australia and the Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross.

. . . After the AGM, the Board of Directors met, and this year seven of us where there in person. Here is our secretary Christopher Mahon from Toronto, Ontario, and Clara Chung our Vice President from Orange County, California. Beyond them is our treasurer Joe Blake and our editor of Shared Treasure, David Burt.

Here I am holding forth on something, with Bill Tighe, a historian from Mullenburg [sic] College in Allentown Pennsylvania.

Also present were Fr. Eric Bergman, rector of St. Thomas More, our chaplain and our host.

The entry gives seven members there in person, wahrscheinlich aber nicht der Herr Doktor Professor aus Wien, the scholar of English liturgy. We don't know how many others besides the seven are also on the board.

Nevertheless, from my personal experience, if you mention Anglicanorum coetibus to a diocesan priest, the result will be only a quizzical expression.

My regular correspondent reflects on the predicament of David Murphy, the board member from Germany, who although he was reelected in 2018, seems to have faded into obscurity:

Poor Mr Murphy. He did yeoperson’s service gathering news and curating comments on the Ordinariate Expats blog. He had a big vision for the role of the Anglican Use Society as it then was. Contrast with the current reality is marked. He seems to have dropped out of view. Fr Ernie Davis left the OCSP to be reincardinated in the Diocese of Kansas City, where he is a parish pastor.

It's worth pointing out that the Ordinariate Expats blog continues to be an important source for hard information on the history of groups, parishes, and personnel in the North American ordinariate, even though it's no longer maintained. This was the work of one man, which the present committee has been unable to replicate.

Reminds me of a situation long ago in my work history when I was working as a technical writer. However, the company had to load some trucks back in the warehouse, but the truck loaders were all out sick or something. So my boss in the technical writing department lent me to the warehouse to load trucks for the day. At the end of the day, the warehouse supervisor scratched his head and said, "I don't understand it. I normally have three guys to load trucks here. You did as much in one day as three guys normally do."

I don't think I needed to explain that three guys will spend the day smokin' and jokin', where one just does the work without a lot of BS. Not my problem, I went back to the tech department.

Sounds like the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society has something like the same problem. Mullenburg Coillege indeed.

"I Don't Know If The Average Parishioner Even Knows Of Its Existence."

A visitor commented,

As some of your visitors have commented, a lack of communication seems to be prevalent in the Ordinariate. An organization such as The Anglican Coetibus Society could help, but it seems to be a closed society. I don't know if the average parishioner knows of its existence. Has it ever been referenced in parish bulletins, or links from parish websites?

My regular correspondent remarked just yesterday,

It is interesting to compare the website of the Friends of the Ordinariate, the UK version of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society to what the AC Society seems able to produce. The contrast is immediately obvious, in layout and content.

Not to say that the content, on close reading, is uniformly stimulating, but the overall impression is one of professionalism and seriousness.

So I guess the first question I would have is what, if anything, someone looking for information on the North American ordinariate would gain from going to the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society website.

The first thing that strikes me is that its theme and objectives seem to be somehow off kilter. At the sorta-kinda top of the page is DEDICATED TO PROMOTING THE ANGLICAN TRADITION & COMMON IDENTITY WITHIN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.. But what is the "Anglican Tradition"? High church, broad church, low church, Anglo-Catholic, or all of the above? It's so vague, it can go on to embrace Wind in the Willows. Peter Pan, or Upstairs, Downsairs -- a Disneyfied, Masterpiece Theater style of maybe religious endorsement. The problem I see is that this separates style from anything like doctrine, which I suppose is good Episcopalianism if nothing else.

By the same token, what is "common identity"? Catholics are Christian, and many Christian denominations acknowledge a common Christian identity. (I do note recently that while moderate Evangelicals acknowledge that Catholics are Christian, radicals like Pastor John MacArthur do not.) But this does say that Catholics and most Protestants acknowledge a common Christian identity, which means that for all intents and purposes, saying the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society promotes "common identity" is nothing more than a bromide.

I'm not at all sure who is currently on the Society's Board of Directors. A web search brings up only two entries from 2015 on the Ordinariate Expats blog, here and here. As of those 2015 entries, the board was comprised of Fr. Eric Bergman. Fr. Ernie Davis, Fr. Allan Hawkins, Dr. William J. Tighe, Ms. Deborah Gyapong, Herr Doktor Professor Hans-Jürgen Feulner, Mr. David Murphy, and Ms. Antonia Lynn.

Other references indicate that Mr Shane Schaetzel was on the board at some subsequent date, but has now left it. I can't find any listing of board members on the Society's website. Nor can I find it on the weekly news page (which, by the way, between the tiny print and the creamed-spinach background for many items is unreadable). I would surmise that at least some of the people listed in the 2015 blog posts are surprised that they were ever members of such a board.

So oddly, as I so often find myself, I'm again in a position of being the de facto news coordinator for the North American ordinariate, although I'm not a member, and my actual purpose throughout this project has been to caution Catholics that they have far better resources available to them locally within the novus ordo Church than they may think they can find on a distant website.

But in that spirit, if someone can provide a current list of board members for the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society -- and if perhaps a board member can serve as a central contact point for constructive feedback on how that body can radically improve its service to the Church, which is currently self-congratulatory but completely inadequate -- I'll be happy to publish this information here.

I think it goes without saying that the current website redo, and especially the unreadable newsletter, do not serve the purpose. Again, if ordinariate members are willing to step up to the plate and actually perform a real service, I'll be most happy to take up other projects for my life and move on from this blog.

News On Houston Seminarians

The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society has posted brave words about wanting to be a source on ordinariate news, but frankly, Mrs Gyapong and Mr Jesserer Smith have always struck me as complacent and self-congratulatory people whose actual interest in researching news is at best tepid. Hey, if they change one day, I could give up this gig! My regular correspondent asked a perfectly reasonable question, who's still in the seminary pipeline with the summer round of new ordinations?

The report:

The picture above was used as part of the publicity for the ordinariate Seminarian Formation Fund second collection in June 2020. However, as we see here, most of the men in the publicity picture are not seminarians: the two men on the right were ordained to the priesthood in June and have taken up ministry positions; the three men in the centre are of course Bp Lopes, J Henry, and Fr Perkins, the V-G; and second from the left is Fr Kramer, the Vocations Director.

The Canadian seminarian is not in attendance. Of the four seminarians on the current “Our Seminarians” page, three are studying at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, which is up and running according to its Facebook page, and one is, or was, at St Philip’s Seminary in Toronto, although I see he is identified as being at the Pope Benedict XVI House of Formation, which is the residence owned by the ordinariate, not an educational institution. He apparently wasn’t in the neighbourhood when the publicity shot was taken, and indeed why would he come to Houston at the moment?

The bulletin of Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston is looking for volunteers to deliver Sunday dinner to the Benedict XVI House of Formation beginning this month, however, so someone must be in residence. I notice that Bp Lopes refers to eight seminarians in this article from 2018.

According to his mother’s blog (fourth happy face down) Luke McDonald will be living at the B16HF -- “right next door almost to Bp Lopes“ -- while studying at St Mary’s Seminary in Houston this academic year. He is not shown on the “Our Seminarians” page of the seminary website, but it does not appear to have been updated to the 20-21 school year as Frs Alejandro and Davis are still shown as 4th year Theology students. Seminarians arrived at St Mary’s a week ago and are in two week quarantine.

I'm still not clear on how many seminarians there are. If eight minus the two ordained this summer leaves six, and Mr McDonald adds one, that's seven. But of the nine men in the photo above from 2019, six are not seminarians as of summer 2020. So apparently three in the 2019 photo are in the program as of 2020, plus Mr McDonald, plus the Canadian seminarian, which leaves five. And that still leaves the question of how many are living in the House of Formation. Four?

UPDATE: My regular correspondent clarifies, "Luke McDonald IS the Canadian seminarian, so there are now four in total."

This could be a start for a thorough and informative followup by the professional journalists at the Ordinariate News. They could make my regular correspondent and me look like the rank amateurs we actually are. I don't have many hopes, though. But hey, if they take over the job, I could give up this gig!

The Personal Prelature Puzzle

My regular correspondent brought to my attention an issue that's arisen in an ordinariate discussion forum that bears on a point I raised in Tuesday's post:

Someone brought to the attention of the Anglican Ordinariate Forum Fscebook group (the public forum, not the informal one) that the Our Lady of the Atonement bulletin last week mentioned that Quinceañeras were held at the church [This is a Latin celebration, both a religious and a social event, of a girl's fifteenth birthday.]

This has led to a blizzard of comments—-96 to date—-some of them making the point that San Antonio is 60% Hispanic, and that there are significant numbers of Hispanic Episcopalians, or just “what’s it to you?”, but many others saying that an Ordinariate parish should be culturally “English” and that Mexicans with their celebrations derived from Aztec fertility rites have no place there.

At one point there was a Spanish language OCSP community of former Episcopalians in Pinecrest FL, which has since folded, but I believe that their former administrator, Fr Pedro Toledo, travels periodically to Incarnation, Orlando to offer Confession in Spanish. Cahenslyite deviation indeed.

It does underline that the Ordinariate is not even a unified concept among its own adherents.

I covered Cahenlyism most fully in this post s year ago. It was a proposal in the 1890s by Peter Cahensly, a prominent German Catholic layman, to have separate hierarchies in the American Church for each group of ethnic immigrants in the US. This was apparently intended mainly to avoid situations where German immigrant Catholics would have Irish priests and bishops in charge of their parishes.

As best I understand the history, this never rose to the level of a formal proposal, and it never resulted in a formal rejection by Leo XIII, but a consensus arose both in Rome and the US that things weren't going to be done that way. However, I don't believe this ever reached the point that it was formalized in canon law -- I hope more knowledgeable visitors can chime in here.

But that a Latin tradition should cause controversy if it's celebrated in an ordinariate parish shows that there is some notion that the Anglicanorum in the coetibus refers to people of English or Episcopalian cultural roots, or more broadly, as Fr Bartus explained to an adult forum that I attended, "white people". (I know Fr Bartus well enough to know that neither irony nor humor is part of the man's makeup.)

So we're left with the question: is Quinceañera or Día de Muertos appropriate in an ordinariate parish? My answer would be derived from Wittgenstein, in which the solution to the problem emerges from the disappearance of the problem. In a novus ordo parish, this would be up to, say, the worship committee, the Fil-Am council, or whichever other parish body was involved, in consultation with the pastor.

In a novus ordo parish, the result would probably be processions, flowers, and lots of food. In an ordinariate parish, apparently a certain level of snobbery and bitter debate, no flowers, no processions, no food.

But this gets to the Cahenslyite conundrum as well. In effect, Cahensly's proposal, never quite folly defined or elaborated, would still amount to a personal prelature for certain interest groups. And this leads to the question, well above my paygrade, of why the idea of a personal prelature emerged in the late 20th century, when Leo XIII implicitly rejected it about 1900.

The first personal prelature was Opus Dei. It appears that Bernard Law was involved in some way with it, since he had been involved with, and maintained contacts with, Opus Dei since his time as a Harvard student in the early days of the American movement. At roughly the same time that John Paul was reviewing this possibility for Opus Dei, Bernard Law was advocating a personal prelature for disgruntled Episcopalians.

Law, an extremely ambitious man whom I've heard intended to succeed John Paul II as pontiff had it not been that John Paul outlived Law's expectations, was an opportunist and may have hoped that an Anglican personal prelature could in some way leverage his rise in the Church.

We're left now, with a personal prelature for Anglicans belatedly established under Benedict, trying to address the question of what problem it's meant to solve. Is it meant to cater to a particular ethnicity ("white people", perhaps?) in a way that novus ordo doesn't? I would say that Leo XIII was correct in saying this idea isn't worthy of a formal answer.

Is a personal prelature needed to cater to a particular liturgy? Why would that be necessary? Latin masses have prospered far more than Divine Worship within novus ordo dioceses. So we're left with the puzzle of why this strange personal prelature is needed, beyond that it seemed like a good idea to Bernard Law.

If any of the ordinariates had a strong leader, or perhaps even a strong advocate in Rome, who could articulate reasons for its existence, it might make a difference. In North America, Jeffrey Steenson comes off as an opportunist and an incompetent administrator. Bp Lopes -- I wonder why Bp Barron has never, to my knowledge, mentioned Anglicanorum coetibus or the North American ordinariate as any sort of bright spot in the suffering Church.

I would guess Bp Lopes is known to his brother bishops, if at all, as the guy who broke his leg falling off a ladder in his residence. Says a lot about a personal prelature.

I would guess that Cardinal Law, although he may have thought the establishment of an Anglican personal prelature could in some way further his career, he wouldn't have wanted the job, and he wouldn't have done any better in it than the others.

So if there's a reason for it, we've yet so see an effective leader who can show us what it is.

More California Civil Disobedience Updates

I've noted previously the very poor reporting we've had on the legal issues surrounding the California churches that are holding services in violation of local health orders. In particular, the various decisions by the superior court, and a decision by the appeals court that appeared to "overturn" a superior court decision partially allowing Grace Community Church to hold indoor services, haven't been clearly explained.

A new post at the Thomas More Society website goes some distance toward clearing this up.

August 25, 2020, in California Superior Court, Judge Mitchell Beckloff issued a five-page opinion, County of Los Angeles et al. v. Grace Community Church et al., denying the County of Los Angeles’ renewed application for a temporary restraining order against the church and Pastor John MacArthur.

. . . the court held that the county’s attempt to obtain a restraining order did not meet statutory requirements and that the Court of Appeal’s order did not justify a new temporary restraining order; rather, it simply stayed Judge Chalfant’s August 14 order and gave the county permission to enforce its own health order.

I thought something like this would be the case. I went to the judge's opinion, which is on line here, and found a problem with the health department's ability to enforce its order, whether or not the appeals court gave it permission to do so:

The County health Order also requests "that the Sheriff and all chiefs of police in all cities located in the Los Angeles Public Health Jurisdiction ensure compliance with and enforcement of this Ordr."

This answers a question I've had all along: who enforces health department orders in California? It turns out it's the relevant sheriff or police department. But we've already seen that the Los Angeles police chief has told Pastor MacArthur that LAPD does not enforce health department orders and will not under any conceivable scenario move against Grace Church. (Note that the health department's own language "requests" sheriffs and police to enforce its orders.)

This is actually a problem throughout the state, as a number of county sheriffs have already announced they do not enforce health department orders, and, for instance, the Ventura County Sheriff has refused to make arrests or issue citations in the similar Godspeak Calvary Chapel case.

This brings us to a new civil disobedience case. I've seen remarks here and there from pastors that, although there are a few well-publicized cases, there are a good many other churches -- mostly Evangelical or Pentecostal -- that are quietly holding indoor Sunday services with singing and without social distance in violation of the governor's and local health department orders.

One of these, it now comes to light, is North Valley Baptist Church in Santa Clara, 350 miles north of Los Angeles in Santa Clara, which is in Silicon Valley.

North Valley Baptist Church in Santa Clara is being punished for holding worship services, even though churchgoers adhered to the social distancing guidelines. The house of worship was even served a citation for singing.

The county placed a four-page letter on the front door of the church, indicating that singing at church services was "unlawful."

"North Valley Baptist is failing to prevent those attending, performing and speaking at North Valley Baptist's services from singing," the letter reads. "This activity is unlawful. The county understands that singing is an intimate and meaningful component of religious worship."

"However, public health experts have also determined that singing together in close proximity and without face coverings transmits virus particles further in the air than breathing or speaking quietly. The county demands that North Valley Baptist immediately cease the activities listed above and fully comply with the Risk Reduction Order, the Gatherings Directive, the State July 13 Order, and the State guidance. Failure to do so will result in enforcement action by the county," the notice concludes.

The "cease and desist order' appears to be consistent with the similar order issued against Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena. The question in my mind in both cases is how this health department order is enforced, and the answer I seem to get from the court document quoted above is that it's enforced via a "request" to the local sheriff or police department. But what we're seeing is that law enforcement has been reluctant to get involved.

What I think is happening is that both the courts and law enforcement are uncomfortable with enforcing health department orders, which are not laws passed by legislative authority, and are at least putatively temporary.

What pastors -- including North Valley Pastor Jack Trieber -- have said is that they closed their worship services in March in good-faith compliance, at a time when it was put about that there would be millions of COVID deaths in the US. When these did not materialize, civil authorities nevertheless did not relax their orders, and six months later, we're seeing churches penalized for holding indoor services and singing, when all available evidence shows this is not spreading the disease.