Monday, August 31, 2015

Let's Revisit The Events Of 2011 And 2012 -- I

from what I've come to learn about being Catholic since then. The thing that stands out was that the designation of Msgr Steenson as US-Canadian Ordinary was kept a secret -- at least for those not in the loop -- until January 1, 2012. The record strongly suggests, of course, that Steenson's progress to Rome after 2007 under the aegis of Cardinal Law meant that Anglicanorum coetibus was already in the works, and Steenson's designation was long foreordained.

The huge problem in hindsight was that parishes proposing to come in from Anglican denominations -- which was the point of the whole thing -- needed a great deal more preparation than they received. Whoever was the shadowy figure in charge of the transition during 2011 appears to have approved the catechesis St Mary's received, which on balance was good, but many things were left unsaid. It was the case at St Mary's, but also clearly at other parishes like St Aidan's Des Moines, that there were good Anglican members who were in what the Catholic Church would call irregular marriage situations.

Nothing was said about this in any detail during the catechism -- it wasn't in the class materials, as far as I can remember -- and, other than an e-mail that went out to the parish in December 2011, nothing else was said. The e-mail basically said very briefly that if you're divorced from a living spouse and remarried, you'd better start working with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. (Wait a moment, shouldn't the Ordinariate be the authority here?)

However, every source I've seen suggests that the process of getting a declaration of nullity from a diocesan tribunal takes at least two years. Since serious announcement of the US-Canadian Ordinariate took place only during 2011, it should have been clear to someone that some members in any former Anglican parish, however sincere they may have been in their intent, were going to be in a situation where they could not be received as Catholics with the rest of the parish. Yet no plans were made for how to deal with this situation.

This appears to have been a major factor behind the decision of St Aidan's Des Moines not to enter the Ordinariate after all in spring 2012. Msgr Steenson traveled to that parish in some effort to clarify the situation, but oddly, even though he must have been aware since 2007 that something like this could be a factor, the most he could do was tell that parish that yeah, that was how things are. They'd already hired a priest who'd take them into the Ordinariate, but they backed out.

I don't think you can blame the Anglican priests who were involved with the process. They'd been working as Anglicans and had been providing pastoral care to Anglicans whose marriages were regarded as OK in that denomination. As far as I can tell, there are Catholic parish priests who do have experience with handling situations where Catholics may (for instance) be returning to the Church after some time away, during which a divorce and remarriage may have occurred. There appear to be viable if difficult pastoral strategies for handling such situations, awkward as they may be, and couples do in fact deal with them.

But, notwithstanding how likely such situations might arise, nothing was done to handle them (or even, apparently, mention them) in the runup to the US-Canadian Ordinariate -- except that Msgr Stetson, the St Mary's chaplain, took a very Anglican approach, if not a Catholic one, in saying he didn't "check passports at the communion rail".

The inception of the US-Canadian Ordinariate was a fiasco, which can be laid at the feet of completely inadequate planning by the authorities in charge. There are other areas where action might have been taken but wasn't.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Why Doesn't St Mary Of The Angels Just Become An Ordinariate Group And Meet At A Diocesan Parish?

A visitor e-mails,
I've been following your blog for some time, and was struck by the fact the St. Mary's group that wants to join the Ordinariate has been meeting in an apartment for 3 years. How come they appear to be waiting for the outcome of their court case to decide to enter the Ordinariate/become Catholic? 3 years seems an awfully long time to deny oneself the Eucharist/being in communion with the successor of St. Peter if one wants to convert to Catholicism. Why not just become an Ordinariate group and rent space in a classroom somewhere in the area?
For a while, I thought this was a viable option, but as I understand it, there are legal and practical obstacles, as well as what I believe is resistance in Houston to the idea.

Legally, the vestry must remain in existence in order to continue the legal case. If the parish were simply to become an Ordinariate group, it would cease to have a vestry. According to the parish bylaws, which constitute the legal document that gives the "Rector, Wardens, and Vestry" their corporate existence, the vestry and voting members of the parish must be Anglican. Should the parish ever enter the Ordinariate, which I think is less and less likely, the bylaws would need to be revised to reflect the change in property ownership and denominational affiliation of the parish.

The members of the vestry have a fiduciary responsibility to keep the parish in existence in its current legal form in order to pursue the case. The property is worth millions of dollars, and they have a moral and fiduciary responsibility not to walk away from it. I think they are making considerable personal sacrifice to do this. Other members of the parish and friends are supporting them, as well as maintaining fellowship and friendship. But the legal issue will probably remain for some time.

I've put the question to a former Anglican member of the parish clergy, who has since become Catholic and as far as I'm aware still intends to become an Ordinariate priest (but is apparently waiting indefinitely for a green light), why the Ordinariate does not recognize some type of group-in-formation that could, in fact, meet in some way at a diocesan facility. The direct answer I got was that any Ordinariate activities in California would be under the supervision of Andy Bartus, and Bartus does not envision such a thing ever happening in the case of St Mary of the Angels. Nothing new, Cardinals Manning and Mahony said the same thing, and I have more respect for the Cardinals.

The bottom line appears to be that some combination of inertia within the Ordinariate, visible in many other areas besides St Mary's, and internal politics appears to prevent any official recognition of a St Mary's group. That would also need to happen but is unlikely. I would have to say that this issue is as powerful as the legal issue as well, and it would be up to Houston to clarify the situation, which so far it has not done.

There's a third question, and that's whether the optimism of 2011-2012 concerning the erection of the US-Canadian Ordinariate has been borne out by events. It seems to me that the outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus has been a disappointment by just about any standard. There are six or eight successful parishes, which were in existence and successful under other jurisdictions before the US-Canadian Ordinariate was erected. The others among three dozen or so total are struggling.

One of my serious concerns is that all their minimal resources appear to be going into vestments, incense, and music, basically, to satisfy small, inward-directed cliques. Since they aren't in dioceses, they're exempt from diocesan appeals, which means they don't do much to make the world a better place, except to feed a sense of exclusivity among the members. I can't recommend that anyone be part of such a thing, and I'm not sure if many in the current St Mary's group, whom my wife and I love and respect, would wish to do so.

I believe they will prayerfully and maturely reflect on the courses open to them, but I very much doubt they will eventually go into the Ordinariate, if the Ordinariate in fact survives any significant length of time.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society

I spent much of my working career in the information technology field, doing things like computer security or disaster recovery planning that I couldn't have trained for in college because the fields didn't exist at the time. But one thing I noticed was that almost as soon as the fields came into existence, people started saying "Gee, what we need is a professional organization for computer disaster recovery planners", and the next thing you knew, there would be an Association of Professional Computer Disaster Recovery Planners or whatever.

While nobody in 1967 could have envisioned the need for the APCDRP and its Board of Directors, I sure knew the types who'd rise to the level of Board member even then -- self-promoters have existed at all times and in all places. The same, I fear, applies to the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society:

Over the summer, the Board of Directors has been having intense discussions about the mission of the Society and these discussions are continuing. The first fruits of our deliberations are now ready to be shared.
The pomposity is visible: they're ready to SHARE SOMETHING with us! Oh, boy, they've decided to change their name!

But I never accepted invitations to join the boards of organizations like the APCDRP or the like -- I had, frankly, too much work to do in actually planning how a company could recover its ATMs or billing or whatever from earthquakes, hurricanes, race riots, snipers, or whatever. That stuff was important. The stuff the board of the APCDRP did wasn't.

Here's why they'd throw me off the board of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society as soon as they'd discovered the mistake of putting me on it, assuming that somehow happened:

  • Over its life of 35 years, the "corporate reunion" movement, although it's always optimistically expected Anglican parishes to become Catholic in significant numbers, has never developed workable strategies for protecting those parishes from lawsuits by their former denominations, notwithstanding the fear of these is a serious impediment to the purpose of "corporate reunion".
  • By the same token, the movement has never developed a workable answer to the question of how to provide pastoral care to members of parishes who do not wish to become, or have obstacles to becoming, Catholic, notwithstanding this has been a common objection raised by clergy and members of the parishes' former denominations in their discernment process.
  • But even if the movement were to develop workable strategies to address these questions at this late date, the remaining number of potential parishes interested in Anglicanorum coetibus is probably insignificant, so much so that the effort of trying to do something like this now would be a waste of time and energy.
  • There do not appear to be serious guidelines on the actual financial requirements to maintain a group in the Ordinariates, much less any realistic assessment of the financial demands of taking over a church building. What are minimum viable sizes? What are minimum budgets? Indeed, why not provide example budgets? But again, the remaining/existing groups and parishes have probably learned this by experience, and there are so few remaining candidates that the effort would now be a waste of time.
  • What is the future of the "corporate reunion" movement? As a member of an Episcopal parish, I knew clergy who were serious enough to ask whether this or that outreach program was cost-effective, if nothing else in terms of clergy time to supervise it. I see no serious appraisal of the "corporate reunion" movement anywhere, much less among Board members, the most recent incumbents among whom would probably see a recommendation to disband the activity as a threat to their self-importance.
At basis, frankly, I've come to see both the "continuing Anglican" and "corporate reunion" movements as poor stewardship verging on the irresponsible.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

More Protestantism

Another of Frederick Kinsman's indictments of Anglicanism is what he calls "congregationalism", which of course is a synonym for Calvinism, the Reformed theology that underlies the Anglican settlement. I'm not sure if the Catholic authorities that have underwritten the "corporate reunion" movement, either in its Pastoral Provision or Ordinariate form, have ever understood Anglicanism from this perspective.

The whole point of either "corporate reunion" style has been to take in Anglican parishes as, in effect, intact congregations with their clergy. In fact, this has almost never worked out as envisioned, and St Mary of the Angels is probably one of the best examples of what can go wrong with the whole idea.

  • The decision by a congregation to become Catholic in a body is never unanimous. As a result, there is a great deal of bitterness and animosity, which aren't good for the souls of anyone involved.
  • There is no provision for the pastoral care of those who do not wish to become, or have obstacles to becoming, Catholic. Msgr William Stetson, a major figure in the movement as a close confidant of Cardinal Law, was reduced to saying in 2012 that he simply wouldn't "check passports at the communion rail", a violation of canon law if he were aware of actual exceptions. In over 30 years of the movement, it's been unable to provide any better solution.
  • Anglican denominations, either The Episcopal Church or "continuum", historically almost never yield up congregations without a bruising fight. Neither Anglican Use nor the US-Canadian Ordinariate have had any effective plan to deal with such contingencies.
  • It is an acknowledged property of Anglicanism that the "high church" faction, in effect the only market from which the "corporate reunion" movement seeks candidates, has always had elements of self-deception whereby adherents feel they're "Catholic enough", or indeed, better Catholics than diocesan Catholics. We see this expressed by Ordinariate figures like Fr Hunwicke now. This doesn't help relations with diocesan Catholics.
  • The whole idea of congregations breaking off from Anglican denominations, in practice often spectacularly unsuccessful, is essentially Protestant. I simply can't disagree with the question Cardinal Mahony raised with St Mary of the Angels when he became Archbishop and inherited that problem: if the parish rebelled against The Episcopal Church, what would stop it from rebelling against the Catholic Church?

Monday, August 24, 2015

Revisiting The Hunwicke Kerfuffle

Last week I mentioned in passing the controversy over the 2011-2012 delay in Fr John Hunwicke's ordination as a Catholic priest in the UK Ordinariate. Interestingly, some of the posts that originally referred to the delay have been deleted (for instance, not-here), presumably to keep a unified, positive spin on Ordinariates. A surviving contemporary reference to the delay can be found here.

However, a visitor has sent me links to a series of eight posts at Fr Hunwicke's blog from 2010, beginning here, in which he gets snarky about Apostolicae curae, the 1896 encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII declared Anglican orders null and void. It appears that in a series of posts between August 16 and 23 of this year entitled Ecce Sacerdos Magnus! he's taken up his issues with Apostolicae curae once more.

Naturally, I'm not qualified to discuss the theological fine points, although Apostolicae curae was current at the time Frederick Kinsman went through the process of reconsidering his own vocation. He certainly endorsed the idea that Anglican orders were invalid due to defect of intention. (I assume that if I go to confession without the intention of repenting my sins, that sacrament is invalid. If I accept ordination without acknowledging the proper ecclesiastical authority, isn't that sacrament also invalid?)

Kinsman also raises the problem with Anglicanism in which it substitutes private judgment. It's hard to avoid thinking that something like this is happening with Fr Hunwicke. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but as I said last week, whatever he's doing, he appears to be pushing the limits. As far as I can see, he was doing the same thing in 2010.

So, after some deliberation, he was ordained after about a year's delay. My own view is that Fr Hunwicke is an Anglo-Papalist of the Protestant sort and is acting in a very Protestant way. Although the "Protestantization of the Catholic Church" is a subject that frequently comes up in different contexts, I have some concern that the Ordinariates represent yet another way for this to happen.

Friday, August 21, 2015

More On Women's Ordination In The Church Of England

In response to yesterday's post, a visitor responds,
[J]ust about all the former Church of England clergy (and most of the laity) who comprise the English Ordinariate all came from the Forward-in-Faith/UK organization, which was formed early in 1993 in the aftermath of the unexpectedly successful November 1992 vote for woman priests ("unexpectedly successful," because proponents and opponents alike reckoned that it would not achieve the requisite two-thirds majority in favor in the House of Laity, but Archbishop Carey['s] rhapsodical discourse about how woman priests would transform the CofE and give it "power to evangelize" convinced - perhaps the better word is "moved" - a handful of dopey Evangelical synodsmen who had intended to oppose it to vote in favor of it). Its purpose from the beginning was to oppose WO, provide "a safe sacramental refuge with secure Holy Orders" for opponents, to secure a supply of like-minded bishops to serve their constituency ("Provincial Episcopal Visitors" or PEVs, popularly "flying bishops:" one, the Bishop of Beverly, in the Province of York; two, the bishops of Ebbsfleet and Richborough, in the Province of Canterbury; and the Bishop of Fulham, one of the assistant bishops [the English term is "suffragan bishops'] in the London diocese, acting in the same capacity within that diocese) & last (and mostly unstated) but not least to form a sufficiently cohesive and united constituency that when the secular pressure for woman bishops became irresistible, they could either obtain ironclad guarantees of their position within the Church of England, or could secure a group departure, perhaps even with property.

It didn't work out that way, of course, probably because about 25% of the active clerical and lay members of FiF did not agree with the leadership that "Rome is the answer:" a few were perhaps interested in a Continuing Anglican solution, a larger few in a "Western-Rite Orthodox" solution, and many more in somehow walling off themselves and their parishioners from any "taint" of women clergy. Even among the 75% who at FiF meetings were willing to applaud whenever speakers made pro-papal remarks, or roar out the "fight song" of "A Code of Practice WILL NOT DO!" (meaning they would not accept merely written guarantees of their position within the Church of England, but demanded a semi-separate church-within-the-Church-of-England with its own bishops), when push came to shove, and they were offered rather less than a code of practice, around half of them remained, or have remained to date, within the Church of England (some no doubt because of their same-sex-partnered status). Another reason, perhaps, was that FiF claimed to be an organization open to all sorts of anti-WO people in the Church of England, it never had more than a very few Evangelical/Protestant members: its whole tone and ethos was "spikey" through and through; and conservative English Anglican Evangelicals regard Anglo-Catholicism (whether "papalist" or not) with theological aversion, and have their own, rather small, anti-WO organization, "Reform."

My own overall impressions remain the same: there was discontent at various levels of intensity toward women's ordination in many Anglican denominations, but only in the US were there any significant defections into a "continuing" movement or, before 2009, any concrete provision for "corporate reunion" with Rome. However, I like the Frederick Kinsman perspective: Anglicanism is a Protestant denomination that has allowed a faction to maintain an illusion that they're Catholic. The issue of women's ordination was cause for disillusionment, but the response among the disillusioned faction in the Church of England was uncertain and feckless.

"Continuing Anglicanism" was an almost exclusively American phenomenon, and the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision was aimed exclusively until 2007 at laity and clergy of the US Episcopal Church. The discussion in the 1993 meeting between Clarence Pope, Jeffrey Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger, initiated by the US Cardinal Law, appears to have focused again on the US Episcopal Church, a faction of which Pope and Steenson specifically represented.

An unanswered question is when and under what circumstances the 1993 Law-Pope-Steenson proposal was specifically extended to cover Canada, the UK, and Australia under Anglicanorum coetibus.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

The Ordinariates Have Different Roots And Different Preoccupations -- II

A visitor responded to my last post with,
In reference to your closing sentence I am tempted to respond "What 'Ordinariate interest in the UK'"? Granted there has been a lot of interest among CofE clergy, but. . . only a minority lead groups. And most of the groups are barely active. . . . There are exceptions, of course, but mostly it has been, as you like to put it, a damp squib.
Trying to characterize the UK Ordinariate leads to two problems, the first the difficulty with the law of small numbers and the second the issue of defining "Anglo-Catholicism" or "Anglo-Papalism". The law of small numbers means that variability is more prevalent in small populations. In some thinking about the UK Ordinariate, for instance, I've been tempted to think of Fr John Hunwicke as somehow representative.

From a perspective both transcontinental and transoceanic, I've tended to see him as something like Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, eccentric and basically out of control, and a visitor confirms this impression -- but suggests that his colleagues regard him as an outlier. But given the law of small numbers, everyone in such a small population is an outlier.

In a current series of posts, he insists that some Anglican bishops, including "the Bishop Harry Carpenter who ordained me", irrespective of "the papal condemnation of Anglican Orders in Apostolicae curae", have valid Catholic orders.

Apparently he enjoys pushing the limits. Some US Ordinariate clergy, like Fr Bartus, do the same, though with a different style. It does appear that he is a member of an "English Missal" or "uniate liturgy" faction among UK Anglo-Papalists, something I've already noted here. This is the problem with the second issue, trying to define "Anglo-Catholcism" or "Anglo-Papalism".

Fr Hunwicke, other key figures in the "corporate reunion" movement like Mr Murphy, and Prof Feulner (who, a Bavarian teaching at a Viennese university, wrote the current version of the mass) all clearly feel that "Anglican Patrimony" is primarily liturgical, and the liturgy is what we see in the Ordinariate mass, notwithstanding its earliest drafts date only from 1905. The difficulty is that the laity in the UK Ordinariate have rejected it and have moved to Novus Ordo masses in diocesan parishes.

I've previously noted the remarks of Msgr Lopes of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the UK Ordinariate laity:

He added that it was ironic that many Anglo-Catholics who have joined the Ordinariate did not use Anglican prayer books as Anglicans but the Roman rite.

“We have many people in the Ordinariate who are unfamiliar with some of that wider tradition, the depth of tradition, in Prayer Book forms and Anglican Missal forms of worship. In a certain sense it’s an irony because here’s this wonderful liturgical patrimony and we have Ordinariate communities saying ‘wait a minute, that’s actually quite new’,” he said .

Mgr Lopes added that if an Ordinariate community simply uses the Roman Rite it becomes “indistinguishable.”

It seems to me that the US Ordinariate, small as it is, has at least the cohesiveness that stems from resistance to the 1976 moves in The Episcopal Church. With no equivalent focus against similar moves in the Church of England, it seems as though Anglicanorum coetibus created a market in the UK for a “product” (a community of clergy and laity) for which a market did not previously exist, and various adventitious elements, such as the “uniate liturgy” enthusiasts and other eccentrics like Fr Hunwicke, have seen an opportunity to fill it.

The problem is that, as a knowledgeable informant tells me, the laity isn’t listening to Msgr Lopes and has continued to stay with Novus Ordo, moving to diocesan parishes and making the UK Ordinariate structure irrelevant. Thus my informant says the UK Ordinariate is primarily a creature of the small numbers of clergy there, who mainly don’t have parishes and are often doing diocesan work, if anything.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

The Ordinariates Have Different Roots And Different Preoccupations -- I

Reading Fr Barker's Early History of the Anglican Use has helped me to clarify some of the puzzles I've had over the Ordinariates. It's plain from his first-hand account that the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision arose from the moves in the Episcopal Church's 1976 General Convention to ordain women and revise the Book of Common Prayer. The history of Anglican Use paralleled that of "continuing Anglicanism", including predictions of widespread acceptance followed by disappointing execution.

But there was never a parallel move in the Church of England to defect over the ordination of women. The Church of England's General Synod in 1987 voted to ordain women priests. However,

The Church of England took a decisive step towards women's ordination yesterday when the General Synod voted by 317 to 145 to prepare legislation for the reform.

The Bishop of London, Dr Graham Leonard, who had variously threatened to divide and to leave the Church if the synod voted for the measure, said later that he would, after all, do neither.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, who won a major tactical victory over the diehard traditionalists, had said in the debate that there had been 'premature panic' over the prospect of a schism.

'It is too early to be taking the tarpaulins off the lifeboats, and even signalling to other shipping,' he said.

That referred to Dr Leonard's declared intention to negotiate a 'special relationship' for dissident groups with Rome and other churches.

Dr Leonard smiled sadly at the archbishop's joke. Minutes after the vote Dr Leonard said he had no plans for negotiations with Rome or any other church . 'We shall now have to give thought to what to do. It will be a slow, exploratory process. I'll be talking with other Anglicans first,' he said.

Whatever the process may have been, if in fact there ever was one, there was never an equivalent set of defections to "continuing Anglicanism" at even the US rate from the Church of England. There were eventually only a minimal number of Traditional Anglican Communion parishes in the UK. Women were finally ordained as priests in the Church of England in 1994; the first woman bishop was not consecrated until 2015. There have never been equivalent moves of any size to form "continuing" denominations or other breakaways like the ACNA.

As we've seen here, Anglicanorum coetibus was drafted in 1993-94, apparently at the instigation of Cardinal Bernard Law, who had also been behind the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision. It appears to have been intended primarily as a way to bypass the unwillingness of US bishops like Cardinals Timothy Manning and Roger Mahony to accept Pastoral Provision parishes in their dioceses, and it appears to have been based on ideas mooted as early as 1980 to establish such a personal prelature.

The idea was clearly a holdover from post-1976 US dissidence from Episcopal Church actions, and in their 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Pope and then-Fr Steenson gave as reasons for proposing a personal prelature for dissident Episcopalians the ordination of women and the revision of the prayer book, neither of which had become equivalent issues in the Church of England.

So there was never an equivalent "continuing Anglican" or "corporate reunion" movement in the UK to serve as an equivalent recruiting ground for a personal prelature. The Guardian piece suggests that any idea of reconciliation with Rome from Dr Leonard was nothing but a bluff, which Dr Runcie successfully outmaneuvered. So whence arise the roots of Ordinariate interest in the UK?

Monday, August 17, 2015

What About The Current State Of The St Mary's Parish?

A visitor has asked me to bring things up to date on the current state of the people, the elected vestry, and Fr Kelley, expressing some frustration over my preoccupation with the Ordinariates!

The core parish and some friends continue to meet for Sunday mass in the apartment of an elected vestry member. As I understand it, there was a good group yesterday.

On Thursday, August 13, a bank robber hit the Citibank located on the property owned by the parish on the corner of Hillhurst. It was his third try at a robbery of a local bank within an hour, and oddly, the only one that was successful. (Apparently he went to the other two, offering a note saying he had a bomb, but neither took him seriously.) That, presumably, will be among the last whimpers of the bank's tenancy there.

The elected vestry promptly called LAPD and told them they were the owner of the property and gave permission for any necessary access. I don't know if Mrs Bush did the same, though I doubt if she had the presence of mind.

I don't believe the retrial has been specifically rescheduled on the court's calendar. The parish and Fr Kelley are fully aware of the task ahead of them when justice is finally done, but all appear to be in good spirits, and the group has been remarkably cohesive over the three-year period.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Let's Think Some More

about what we can know of the proposed merger of the Philadelphia Ordinariate groups. A commenter elsewhere makes the point
Perhaps disputes about how often the premises will have to be sprayed for termites are breaking out because of the paucity of other news to comment on. I would hold out the hope that a new issue of the OCSP Ordinariate Observer is due shortly, but that is never a sure thing. Garnering news from parish websites, bulletins, and Facebook pages requires the skills of Kremlin-watchers of old, the kind that scanned pictures of the May Day reviewing stand to note any changes in seating precedence.
Well, it is what it is. I've said that the reason the Philadelphia groups are important is simply that the Ordinariates are so small that nothing else is going on, and that in itself is important. But, like Edward G Robinson's claims manager Keyes, my little man keeps pestering me about this stuff.

When I itemized an annual nut for St Mary of the Angels at a little over $72,000 I forgot that, in trying to compare that parish to the ones in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia buildings must be heated in the winter, and their parking lots must be plowed after snowstorms. Via Google, I found an article in a Buffalo paper (unfortunately blocked) that puts the cost of heating Catholic parishes there at $30,000 to $60,000 each winter.

Buffalo is colder than Philadelphia, each building is different, and whether the heat is gas or oil are all factors -- but the average combined water and electricity bill for St Mary's, which would cover air conditioning in the summer (but also include lights year round), was $1200 per month or $14,400 per year in 2011. So winter costs of heat and snow removal in Philadelphia would be far greater than air conditioning costs in Los Angeles.

Why is this important? It seems to me that someone with any familiarity with running parishes must understand what the basic maintenance costs of older parish buildings actually are. An estimate of $72,000 in the US Northeast, I now recognize, is unrealistically lowball; the real cost in Philadelphia would probably be at least 50% more. Msgr Steenson, let's recall, was once Rector of the Good Shepherd Rosemont Episcopal parish from which the Strafford Newman group broke off. I would have to think he has some idea of how unrealistic it would be for a group with 56 members to take over an old Catholic parish building.

This brings us to the first question my little man is pestering me about: Whose idea was this in the first place? I don't think it came from Msgr Steenson: his leadership style is anything but vigorous; the man is practically invisible. Can't have been his idea. Fr Ousley? The tone in his newsletters verges on befuddled surprise. He avers that neither the Newman nor the St Michael's group have even met each other, and they would need to learn to work together. (Given the history of contention and litigiousness behind both groups, good luck.) One discerns a glimmer of realism behind Fr Ousley's statements, and he pretty clearly did not think this idea up himself.

So I think the idea of combining two Philadelphia Ordinariate groups in a redundant parish building came from the Philadelphia Archdiocese, and somehow the Archdiocese imagined that the two groups were larger and more prosperous than they actually are. In fact, I think someone in Philadelphia simply envisaged Ordinariate groups as roughly equivalent in size to diocesan parishes and decided that merging two was something the Archdiocese did all the time -- so someone in Philadelphia called someone in Houston, and the idea took off.

I can't imagine someone like Fr Hough III thinking very hard about anything, much less whether the idea was remotely workable. But beyond that, as a prebendary in what seems both a sedentary and collegial bunch, the last thing he'd want to do would be disabuse anyone in Philadelphia of the idea that the Ordinariate groups there were anything but prosperous, large, and growing. So he ran the idea past Jeff and told Philadelphia sure, we'll look it over, we'll put Ousley on the case. Like the centurion with the paralyzed servant, I'm taking my experience in a different field to impute how things work in ecclesiastical matters: this reminds me of corporate boondoggles that take off simply to create an impression of activity.

The best possible outcome for this would be for the Philadelphia Archdiocese to recognize fairly soon what they're really dealing with here and quietly drop the offer. It would be an embarrassment for Houston, but it would be the best possible outcome.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Visitors here know that I've tended to sympathize with the Cardinal Mahony view of the St Mary of the Angels parish and what it's said about either the Anglican Use or the Ordinariate flavors of the "corporate reunion" movement. I was reminded of one reason for this when I was running errands yesterday and drove past a Catholic parish in the San Fernando Valley.

Since before I became Catholic, I've tended to take a second look at Catholic church properties whenever I drive by. Often they're architecturally worthwhile, always well-maintained. Whatever they're named for, the sign always says CATHOLIC CHURCH. It's a brand, in other words. Somewhat like McDonald's, customers know they'll get a consistent experience there. The building will be clean and well-swept. The shrubbery will be trimmed, the lawn mowed.

This is an argument for the diocesan system. The bishop is local. Should a parish property not be well-maintained, the bishop will hear about it, and he'll see that the problem is fixed. More to the point, the parish priest has come through the corporate training system, in effect, starting with seminary and moving through subordinate jobs at parishes to learn how things are done, always within the Catholic way of doing things.

As I've given things more thought, I've come to think that Cardinal Mahony's stated reason for rejecting the St Mary's application for Anglican Use -- a characterization of the parish as constitutionally rebellious, accurate as it may have been, in my view -- was a pretext. It was hard enough to control the McDonald's franchise, in effect, without letting in random ex-mom and pop stores. Just changing the sign on the roof wasn't going to change the staff or the product. Cardinal Mahony had enough on his plate without that extra headache -- and I would guess that privately, most bishops would agree, then or now. Putting some new guy in Houston in charge of the extra stores is probably beside the point; the bishop, as regional manager, is the one who takes the heat if anything actually goes wrong.

The diocesan model, among other things, involves parishes that are large enough to sustain themselves. Our local diocesan parish, a medium-small by Catholic standards, has about 1500 families. Maintaining the building and trimming the shrubbery are among its priorities.

Archbishop of Philadelphia Chaput, for whatever reason (and it may be good, though I don't think Cardinal Mahony would understand it) has chosen to offer a potentially merged Ordinariate group its choice of redundant Catholic properties for its use, apparently free of cost. It's worth pointing out that the Diocese of Scranton sold the St Thomas More parish its building for $250,000. Nobody is doing anyone any favors by giving away things that have value for free. Mounted beggars spur their horses.

A visitor commented to me that Catholic parishioners are upset when their parish is shut down because its membership has declined to only hundreds of families, yet the Archdiocese is offering to give away buildings to an Ordinariate group with 56 members (families, of course, would be fewer). Of course, the buildings, as long as the Archdiocese owns them, must be heated and maintained at its expense, while the Ordinariate group will presumably relieve the diocese of that cost.

Except that these buildings were maintained based on plate and pledge from diocesan-sized parishes. When the parishes shrank to a size presumably larger than the largest Ordinariate parish, the Archdiocese saw the need to cut its losses. How can an Ordinariate parish of families in two digits maintain those buildings?

Nevertheless, let's say an Ordinariate group, St Swithin's of Bunbury, takes over one of the Philadelphia Archdiocese properties. Based on what I see here, which is completely consistent with what I know of human nature, some cost-cutting hero at St Swithin's is going to say, "Hey, we don't need to pay a gardener! Members of the parish can trim the shrubbery! And the ladies can volunteer to clean the toilets!"

The problem will be that the building or buildings will start to look terrible, visitors will find the toilets with rusty rings in the bowls and never return, but the sign will still say CATHOLIC CHURCH.

And the Archbishop won't be able to do much about it.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Are There Any Adults In The Room?

Out of a certain level of frustration, I joined the discussion over at Ordinariate News regarding the merger of the Philadelphia groups and the potential move to a new building. All we know, of course, is what Fr Ousley mentions in two monthly newsletters, but the take among the comments at Ordinariate News is simply not encouraging.

First, it seems as though Fr Ousley has things backward -- he's taking his groups house hunting, as far as I can tell without initially figuring out what they can afford. In the July newsletter, he raises the possibility of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Bridgeport, PA. He says, by the by,

The property has three buildings (church, school, rectory) and parking.
How on earth is a group of 56 people going to maintain church, school, and rectory buildings, occupied or not (not to mention periodically resurfacing the parking lot)? What are they going to do with the school? For that matter, what are they going to do with the rectory? What planet are these people from?

Someone finally pointed out in the comments at Ordinariate News

In the July newsletter Fr Ousley says that a discussion of the financial issues with the relevant parish committees will precede any decision about taking over either of these churches. He alludes to the experience of parishioners at St James and Good Shepherd, and how a church building for the combined groups would require a similar commitment, without the benefit of an endowment.
But if I go shopping for a car and stop by the Rolls-Royce dealer, aren't I wasting everyone's time if I haven't already realized that the insurance payment alone will be more than my paycheck? I'm not sure how worthwhile it might be for Fr Ousley even to get with various parishioners if none has had concrete experience with pledges, budgeting, or the realities of building maintenance. After all, the groups he's got are small breakaways from established and well-funded Episcopal parishes, and those parishes presumably kept their existing vestries as well as, most likely, the junior wardens and treasurers who knew how things really ran.

And Fr Ousley implies they're all in the brave new world of operating without an endowment. I get the impression he should have been talking seriously with grownups, whether in his groups or not, before he even raised the possibility of taking over a building.

None of this gives me a good feeling -- and the fact that nobody at Ordinariate News seems overbothered is troubling as well.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

The Merger Of The Philadelphia Ordinariate Groups

Ordinariate News has been covering the proposed merger and acquisition of a building by the Philadelphia area Ordinariate groups. As far as I can see, their situation is unique: no other US metropolitan area has two established Ordinariate groups, and of course, there are many with none at all. The conundrum appears to be which building they might acquire, of several available, that would be most convenient to all members of the two existing groups. (At least, this is the visible controversy.)

A check of directions on Google maps indicates that the two groups now meet at existing diocesan churches that are from 13 to 18 miles apart depending on the route chosen, or about 30 minutes driving time. I am assuming that this would be an indicator of maximum inconvenience for one set of members: at worst, if both groups merged and met in one existing venue, some would need to drive something like 20 miles or half an hour on a Sunday morning.

If they were to choose a site in between among several available, we might assume that the majority would need to drive less than that. Location really doesn't seem to be an issue -- I would guess that the vast majority of Ordinariate members drives farther than 20 miles to get to mass anywhere on the continent. It's probably an indication of how small the Ordinariate is that anyone would pay attention to the Philadelphia problem at all.

Not mentioned in the discussion on Ordinariate News is the question of numbers and money. The review of Ordinariate parishes published here earlier this year gives 31 members for the Newman group in Strafford and 25 for the St Michael the Archangel group. If we add the two together, we get 56 members in a single venue. Let's say that 56 members might be good for about $60,000 a year in plate and pledge, assuming an average of $20 per member per week. Naturally, I don't know what this actually comes to, and Strafford is thought to be an affluent area, but then, so's our part of Hollywood, and $20 seems about right, based on the numbers at St Mary of the Angels.

Is this group going to have to pay the diocese anything for the building? But even if the building is free, is it going to have to heat the place, clean the restrooms, keep the lights on and the water running, buy insurance, maintain the organ, kill the termites, and trim the shrubbery? And of course, pay an organist if not a priest. (Forget the new furnace, the paint, and the new roof for now.) None of this is going to happen on $60,000 a year. An itemization of expenses without paying a priest I did in a comment at Ordinariate News comes to over $72,000.

Are these groups filing into the different naves after mass and diligently asking "gee, do we want contemporary or traditional? I sort of like the other crucifix better, but this one has a side chapel. . ." anything more than lookie-loos?

Or in other words, is this just a feckless exercise, and is it a feckless exercise for Mr Murphy and his regular commenters to discuss this at all? Mr Murphy and other knowledgeable people may have good answers to my questions, but so far, I don't see anything like this addressed at his site.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Second Try? Third Try?

Fr Barker's Early History of the Anglican Use makes it clear that the "corporate reunion" movement sprang from the same Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen - Congress of St Louis source as the "continuing Anglican" movement. It separated fairly quickly after St Louis, when the Anglican Catholic Church made it clear that it intended to remain Protestant. Slightly less clear from Fr Barker's account is the consistent involvement of Cardinal Bernard Law in the idea of "corporate reunion", something that now and then has had others scratching their heads.

According to Fr Barker, Law's canonists drew up the original proposal for the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision in a 1980 Chicago meeting. Under this scheme, US Episcopal parishes would be received in dioceses and under the supervision of diocesan bishops. However, most Anglican Use parishes eventually began de novo, and very few proved viable, though most of the few that survived became quite successful.

But then we find Cardinal Law facilitating the 1993 meeting between Clarence Pope, Jeffrey Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger, into which Steenson appears to have carried an already-drafted proposal for an Anglican "personal prelature" along the lines of the Bishop of the Armed Forces. According to Fr Barker, this idea had already been mooted by Law's canonists in 1980 but dropped when the US Catholic bishops opposed the idea. The problem was that the original Anglican Use Pastoral Provision foundered spectacularly with the opposition of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. I think we must assume that other bishops were quietly applauding the resistance of Cardinals Manning and Mahony, who had the prestige to take the heat. (Mahony, a liberal, was very popular with the press, and the press generally took his side of the issue.)

I've got to conclude from the record we have that, with the "corporate reunion" movement a damp squib by the late 1980s, Law used an existing set of contacts with Episcopal Diocese of Forth Worth clergy to revive the earlier idea of taking Anglicans in as a "personal prelature", which would have the advantage of bypassing recalcitrant diocesan bishops. I would guess that he dusted off his canonists' mooted 1980 proposal and passed it on to Bp Pope and Fr Steenson, with the idea of raising it again with Ratzinger, where it might get a more favorable response.

The problem was that St John Paul had already issued his Pastoral Provision, already knew where Bernard Law stood, and likely had a good sense of how things eventually went over. When Ratzinger brought him the renewed "personal prelature" idea in 1993-4, he punted and told Ratzinger to go through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where everyone involved appears to have understood it would be voted down. So, rather than have it die on a vote, Ratzinger dropped it.

It's worth noting that not only did Cardinal Law receive Jeffrey Steenson as a Catholic in 2007, but he ordained him a transitional deacon in 2008. This was almost certainly because Law understood that, with Ratzinger succeeding to the Pontificate, Anglicanorum coetibus would in fact finally emerge whatever the CDF or the diocesan bishops thought, and Steenson would be Law's protégé for US-Canadian Ordinary once it was established that Clarence Pope was unstable and in poor health.

But the result of the "corporate reunion" movement, under whatever jurisdiction, has proved to be no better than that of the cognate "continuing Anglicanism". For that matter, a good many Ordinariate priests are not associated with Ordinariate groups and are, as a practical matter, doing diocesan work as school and hospital chaplains or fill-ins for diocesan masses and are de facto Anglican Use, not Ordinariate, priests. By 2014, with the designation of Bp Vann as Delegate for the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision, the cycle appears to be repeating itself.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Fr Barker's History -- III

Fr Barker's account hints that even as the basic form of Anglican Use was being worked out, the US Catholic bishops weren't completely on board with the idea. He notes their objection to a "personal prelature", which is easy to understand: it means priests and parishes in their territory that aren't under their control. It was a departure from the diocesan system that had been developed in the wake of the Council of Trent. What could possibly go wrong? There's also the basic problem, still noted on the Anglican Use website, that it can be seen as a potential back door to a general married priesthood.

The real problems began to manifest themselves as St Mary of the Angels applied to become an Anglican Use parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. There used to be several detailed accounts of what happened on the web, written by both Fr Barker and Charles Coulombe, but they have since been deleted. If anyone has kept copies or knows where they might still be found on the web, I would very much appreciate the information.

In general, based on my recollection of the on line accounts, there were two stages of failure in the process. The first stage was under Cardinal Timothy Manning:

It is well to note that the ecumenical relations committee [of the LA Archdiocese] was adamantly opposed to the erection of a pastoral provision parish. It has been subsequently demonstrated that this policy has perdured in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, for no parish of the pastoral provision has ever been erected for that area despite the fact that the group of laity there was the largest of any of those in the nation which had been received in other dioceses. It was in October 1984 that Bishop Ward, in behalf of cardinal Manning, reported to PDSAC clergy in Los Angeles that no parish of the pastoral provision would be allowed in the archdiocese and that both clergy and laity would have to be received into the Catholic Church on a strictly individual basis through their local latin rite parish.
Fr Barker continues in a footnote:
No reason was given by the Archdiocese for its negative decision after such a long period of time, but it has been suggested that ecumenical relations must figure prominently; in addition, the press had branded the clergy leaders as rebels, and the parishes had been involved in civil litigation with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles over real property, a lawsuit which the diocese ultimately lost and which may have been an embarrassment to Catholic officials.
Following Cardinal Manning's retirement in 1985, the negative decision was reiterated by his successor, Roger Mahony. Mahony based his rejection, as I recall accounts, more specifically on the characterization of the parish as rebellious. A former pariahioner e-mailed me:
I was there when Bishop Law attended St. Mary's [July 14—16, 1981] and believe that he was political along with several others, implying St. Mary's and St. Matthias would be part of the Pastoral Provision. . . . I also know that a TEC priest. . . and a Catholic priest, who I knew who were the ecumenical committee between the two had much to do to ruin St. Mary's chance to become Catholic. The TEC priest could not stand Fr. Barker.
However, the former parishioner notes another issue that hasn't been adequately taken into consideration elsewhere:
The parish split three ways, those in my opinion who loved the building wouldn't leave, some followed Fr. Trigg to the Orthodox and those who followed Fr. Barker to the Catholic Church.
The parish was apparently never unanimous in its desire to become Anglican Use, as it was not unanimous in its desire to join the US-Canadian Ordinariate. The problem was addressed during 2010-11 by none other than Anthony Morello, who asked at a synod what provision would be made for pastoral care of those who did not wish to become Catholic. This question has never been adequately addressed during any proposals for corporate reunion.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Fr Barker's History -- II

Fr Barker covers a great deal of additional territory subsequent to the 1977 Congress of St Louis in his Early History of the Anglican Use. In 1980, there was preliminary discussion of what form the provision for Anglicans would take:
Bishop Bernard Law invited Frs. Barker and Brown to meet with a canonist in Chicago to explore together the form of an Anglican "common identity" in the Catholic Church. In addition to the above, representatives of SSC and the Evangelical Catholic Mission (ECM) were also invited by Bishop Law. The three groups met with Bishop Law’s Canonist at the Hilton Hotel at O’Hare Airport. The Anglicans present favored the proposal on structure modeled on the Military Ordinariate, but the small number of parochial communities, the death of Cardinal Seper who had taken a personal interest in this cause, together with the reluctance on the part of the American Catholic hierarchy mitigated against such a possibility.
It's worth pointing out that the "structure modeled on the Military Ordinariate" was on the table from the start, and this was the option later discussed in the 1993 meeting, facilitated by now-Cardinal Law, of Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Fr Jeffrey Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger that resulted in Anglicanorum coetibus. In this context, it seems reasonable to conclude that Cardinal Law felt a second try at Anglican corporate reunion might be warranted, if the earlier Pastoral Provision had proved a disappointment.

There's another problem:

The conversations in Rome also made it clear that those seeking reunion needed to be clear about their legitimate patrimony; therefore a symposium of Anglican and Roman scholars was held at the University of Dallas in June of the same year. The features of an Anglican patrimony were the subject of that symposium.
It would be interesting to see the proceedings of the University of Dallas symposium; if anyone can make a copy available or point me to them on line, I would greatly appreciate it. Exactly what comprises an "Anglican patrimony" is a question I've addressed here, and frankly, the answers I've received are tentative and unsatisfactory. The question mainly comes down to liturgy (except that the actual purpose of the Anglican liturgy was to finesse differences via calculated ambiguity, as well as to allow for broad winks when inconvenient aspects were deliberately ignored!).

Regarding liturgy, Fr Barker says,

The delegates at [an October 1981 Dallas, Texas] conference agreed on the pastoral necessity of maintaining a pastoral provision liturgy which allowed for traditional as well as [modern] English. . . . Eventually the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship authorized the Book of Divine Worship (BDW) for interim usage in 1984, with final approval on 20 February 1987. This document allowed elements of the older Prayer Book of 1928, but the Eucharistic liturgy was taken only from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer with the use of the Roman Eucharistic Canons and the ancient Sarum Canon (with the modern English "Words of Institution" from the Novus Ordo Missae inserted).
Clearly the Pastoral Provision liturgy was aimed at a US audience, based on the Episcopal prayer books. It's puzzling that the Ordinariate liturgy has so far rejected the idea of contemporary English and relied primarily on ersatz archaisms in a "uniate" liturgy promoted by elements in the Church of England. However, this liturgy does not appear to be popular in either the UK or the US, and particularly in the UK appears to be a cause of the underperformance of the Ordinariate there.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Fr Barker's History -- I

As I'd requested, a visitor pointed me (many thanks!) to Fr Jack Barker's Early History of the Anglican Use. This turns out to be a very useful complement to Douglas Bess's Divided We Stand, since it gives a different perspective on the events surrounding the 1977 Congress of St Louis and in fact fills in several gaps. On the other hand, I think the history also provides an insight into what I think is the miscalculation that has led to the disappointing underperformance of both the Pastoral Provision and the Anglican Ordinariates.

Fr Barker introduces the issue by saying,

[I]t should be noted that Anglicanism has varieties of theological persuasions from liberal to conservative generally tolerated so long as unity of worship is maintained. The Elizabethan settlement had resulted in a Church that very much lived lex orandi lex credendi. Without the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church the commonality of worship through the use of various Books of Common Prayer became the earmark of unity in the various Anglican Churches throughout the world, in the face of what would otherwise have been certain disunity.
However, Catholic commentators from Frederick Kinsman to Richard John Neuhaus have pointed out that the prayer books provide only an appearance of unity, not just from calculated ambiguity in wording, but their effect is vitiated by a deliberate policy of looking the other way at heterodox practices. In fact, the heterodoxy that had been tolerated for about a century before 1977 included Tridentine vestments and Latin liturgy in Anglican services. As Kinsman has pointed out, Anglicanism has calculatedly allowed a faction to fancy itself Catholic.

Fr Barker continues,

It had always been the hope of catholic minded Anglicans that a full scale corporate reunion or intercommunion could ultimately take place between the Episcopal Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
But many of those "catholic minded Anglicans" were the same ones that Kinsman recognized were allowed to fancy themselves "Catholic" as they were. This leads to the first major problem that Fr Barker describes. There was never unity of purpose among the High Church Episcopal dissidents.
Many other groups who had varying degrees of dissatisfaction with the Episcopal Church were active at the same time. The umbrella organization for them was the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen (FCC). The Diocese of the Holy Trinity joined the FCC and attended its September 1977 meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. This meeting in St. Louis produced a loose amalgamation of several groups into the Anglican Catholic Church in North America (ACNA), and this was destined to become a new "Anglican" church in the United States and Canada Some of the members of the Diocese of the Holy Trinity identified with the aims of the FCC as it moved toward founding the ACNA. Canon DuBois and the Anglicans United (successor to Episcopalians United) did not. Those in the Diocese of the Holy Trinity who agreed with the aims of ACNA kept the name Diocese of the Holy Trinity and remained with them Those who desired reunion with Rome then formed the Pro-Diocese of St. Augustine of Canterbury (PDSAC) to act as the "corpus" for transitional jurisdiction to full unity with the Roman Catholic Church.
Note history repeating itself in the Patrimony of the Primate, with about the same result. In 1977, two delegates from the PDSAC, one of whom was Fr Barker, traveled to Rome to present
a proposal for consideration of what later became the Pastoral Provision, i.e. the possibility of Episcopalians returning to the Catholic Church while retaining something of their Anglican heritage.
The proposal was very favorably received by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However,
Before leaving Rome, confidential letters from the delegation were mailed to Bishop Albert Chambers, the retired Episcopal bishop of Springfield, Illinois, and Fr. James Mote, bishop-elect for the Diocese of the Holy Trinity. Bishop Chambers was scheduled to be the chief consecrator at the ordination to the episcopate of four Episcopalian priests, including Father Mote, which would inaugurate the new Anglican Catholic Church in America as planned by the FCC. In those letters both were advised of the results of the Rome meetings and that Rome would see those planned ordinations as a serious obstacle to reunion.

Two weeks after returning from Rome, the delegates spoke at a joint synod of the priests of the Anglican Dioceses of the Holy Trinity and Christ the King, on December 15, 1977. Bishop Chambers presided at this meeting and allowed less than ten minutes for the report on the meetings held in England and Rome. It seemed apparent to all present that the bishop was not interested. For example he said: "Your people don’t want to be Roman Catholics." This sentiment was echoed by bishops-elect Mote (of Denver) and Morse (of Oakland). Bishop Chambers continued to plan for the consecrations to take place in January 1978.

The problems that have dogged St Mary of the Angels and the "continuing Anglican" movement were present from the start. My understanding, by the way, is that Louis Falk did not attend the 1977 Congress of St Louis, was not involved in the consecrations of Mote and the other bishops, and did not make any move to join the ACC until the following year. Yet the pattern of willful duplicity that we saw in later events like the 1991 Deerfield Beach consecrations and the formation of the Traditional Anglican Communion had already been established at the start. But all things considered, Bishop Chambers was right: there never has been a significant movement, even among disaffected Anglicans, to become Catholic in a body.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The Puzzle Of Fr Vaughn Treco

As I've posted here before, one of my favorite scenes in all cinema (you can find it here) is in Double Indemnity, where Keyes, the claims manager played by Edward G Robinson, talks about his "little man" who pesters him about phonies. Although "phony" is too strong a word for this particular situation, it's nevertheless a puzzle. I would post this puzzlement as a comment to this post at Ordinariate News, but I find that Mr Murphy becomes increasingly testy at comments from visitors whose views don't conform to his happy-face interpretation of Ordinariate events, so I'll post it here.

Fr Treco was ordained in May to considerable fanfare as a priest in the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, and by the timeline given, this was on a definite fast track. According to that timeline, the process began only in June 2014, when Auxiliary Bishop Andrew Cozzens of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis discussed ordaining Fr Treco with Msgr Steenson. However, in Fr Treco's autobiographical thumbnail, he says, "[F]rom September 2005 to May 2008, I did further graduate theological study in preparation for ordination as a Catholic priest." In his LinkedIn profile, he says it was "[a}t the direction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith", in the Archdiocese of Nassau, Bahamas.

This statement and other biographical information indicate that he was received into the Catholic Church in 2000 and worked in various lay ministries in Catholic parishes after that time. However, his LinkedIn profile and remarks elsewhere suggest that throughout this time, up to now, he has had a day job as a field technician for various high-tech companies.

Since Fr Treco was, and continues to be, married, the only available route for Catholic ordination of married men in the US prior to the erection of the US-Canadian Ordinariate in 2012 was the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision of Pope St John Paul II, which provides a process for married former Episcopal clergymen in the United States to petition for ordination as diocesan Catholic priests. However, although the Pastoral Provision was expanded to priests in "continuing" denominations in 2007, the Charismatic Episcopal Church, in which Fr Treco had previously been ordained, was specifically excluded. In addition, the Archdiocese of Nassau is not in the US, and the Pastoral Provision applies only to US priests. (Exactly under what auspices Fr Treco conducted the seminary studies he references is not clear, since I'm told that the Archdiocese of Nassau does not have a seminary.)

From 2006 to 2010, he maintained a blog called Priest-2-Be whose title clearly indicates that he expected to be ordained a Catholic priest, although this was in part before Anglicanorum coetibus and entirely before 2012. Since he wasn't eligible for the Pastoral Provision, it's not clear how he expected to be ordained as a married man during this period -- although he appears to have undertaken seminary studies with some type of assurance that this would happen. It's a puzzle.

There is a long-standing relationship between the Archdiocese of Nassau and the Benedictine Monks of St. John’s Abbey, Minnesota, in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Br John-Bede Pauley, a Benedictine monk at St John's Abbey, Collegeville, MN, has been the administrator of the Society of St Bede the Venerable Ordinariate group in St Louis Park, MN. All I can conclude is that Bishop Cozzens initiated the process of Fr Treco's fast-track ordination based on this relationship.

In addition, the timeline suggests that Fr Treco has numerous diocesan duties, while as chaplain of the Society of St Bede the Venerable, he says the Ordinariate mass only on one Sunday a month. In other words, his ordination as an Ordinariate priest appears to have been part of a back-channel deal that allowed the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis to get around the restrictions of the Pastoral Provision and use Fr Treco primarily as a diocesan priest. I'm told that the Society of St Bede the Venerable has about five members.

Overall, the process of ordination for candidates in the Ordinariates seems to be much slower, and many larger groups continue without priests. It's a puzzle.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Further Parish History

A source has provided much greater detail on the Jordan-Barker era at St Mary of the Angels, which I am providing as a narrative slightly edited from two e-mails:
Fr Jordan was one of Fr Dodd's last curates. Fr Dodd retired in [1951}. He was then "Rector Emeritus" and moved out to North Hollywood, but would return to St Mary's on occasion. Fr Beau Davis remembered meeting him one Sunday; Beau was then in his teens. [Beau] would come in from Ontario, the same home parish that Fr Jordan was from. Fr Dodd made some remark about that, with a twinkle in his eye. It was their only meeting. Davis looked upon Fr Jordan as a spiritual father from their first meeting, when Fr Jordan came to his home parish as a special speaker.

About 1960, aerial views of the neighborhood illustrate the acquisition & clearing of land for parking behind the church. Two houses (?) occupy the area of the present bank building. I have seen a record that parishioners purchased these homes, paid down the mortgages on them, at some point turned them over to, or donated them to the parish, leaving sums less than $10,000 to be paid off. (They might have been left as Bequests.)

Fr Jordan was in wide demand as a speaker in various Episcopal parishes, and at one time recorded a number of sermons or teachings on LP records. The remains of these were ill-treated by Fr Wilcox, warped beyond use, and discarded.

Fr James H. Jordan died suddenly of a heart attack early on February 17, 1971. His home at the time was a house (no longer extant) on Hillhurst. It may have been where the small shops are now, just south of the bank parking lot. He had lived there as Fr Dodd's Curate, & chose not to move when he was elected Rector. He did not appear for 7:30am Mass that day. Someone went to check on him & found him dead.

Fr Jordan's niece, Beth Cullom, of Georgia, on a visit to St Mary's one evening, gave the first large donation toward completion of the Tympanum, in his memory. It funded the gilding of the mandorla around the figure of our Lady, and the engagement of Enzo Selvaggi as designer of the mosaic.

Fr John (Jack) Barker was already his Curate, living somewhat farther from the church. The Vestry did not trust the PECUSA Diocese of Los Angeles's program for selecting clergy, so they (after some time) chose to elevate the Curate they knew, rather than an unknown prospect offered by an increasingly squirrelly PECUSA. I seem to think they made this decision within a few months, certainly before the end of that year.

Fr Barker was aware of the intent of PECUSA to dissolve St Mary's because it was a "hotbed" of resistance to the rising secularism & "progressive" (heretical) agenda. Fr Barker knew the property, & the Della Robbia [altarpiece] were valuable items. He had the piece moved inside, as a Memorial to Fr Jordan, completed by St Peter's Day, 1973. He then moved to have the church building declared a "Cultural - Historical Monument" of the City of Los Angeles. This was achieved by December, 1973, by formal action, which was then publicly enacted early in 1974. This would block the Diocese from selling the church for demolition.

Amendments to the Corporate [bylaws] were also made, to update them to accord with then recent changes to CA Law. (Such that if the Corporation were dissolved, it could only be sold to a non-profit.. etc.) When PECUSA finally voted to accept priestesses, at Minneapolis, 1976, the Parish was among the first in the USA to formally separate from PECUSA. This was formalized at the Annual General Meeting of the parish, January, 1977. Lawsuits ensued. At one point, observing PECUSA behavior elsewhere, to sneak into churches by night & change all the locks, & seal out the resistant clergy & congregations, St Mary's installed chainlink fencing around the building, with guard dogs day & night. (You can still see the holes in various places for that fencing.)

Fr Barker & several like-minded clergy appealed to, and visited Rome, seeking some kind of accommodation. He has published some sort of history of all this, which you should be able to find on line. It may have all the detail & dates you need. [I haven't been able to locate this; if someone can point me to it, I'll appreciate it -- jb]

in 1978, a clergy meeting in the undercroft, attended by Fr Christopher Phillips, I believe, made a formal petition to the Vatican for an Anglican Use allowing married clergy who were former PECUSAns. An RC Bishop was in attendance, and celebrated a Mass -- for those in RC Communion, -- at a temporary altar in the undercroft. This was at a time that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was actually in (secret) residence in Los Angeles, we now know, secreted here to preserve his life from Polish or Soviet government assassins. He went from Los Angeles to the Conclave that elected him Pope! (Not public knowledge.) The result of the Petition was eventually Pope John Paul II's "Pastoral Provision" (1980). [One just has to wonder whether, while in LA, he heard anything about the clergy meeting & Petition?]

Fr Phillips was, I understand, the first priest ordained under that provision, in San Antonio, TX.

At about this time, I'm told, a Vatican flag was on a standard near the Crucifix [As I understand it, the crucifix has subsequently been removed by the dissidents -- jb]. (There had been a door there to the stairs, but it was closed off at this time, or perhaps when the sanctuary was remodeled, in 1973.) The Parish won the case against PECUSA in 1981, at the appellate level. In 1984, PECUSA was forced by the Court to issue a Quit-Claim Deed to St Mary's. (This cleared the way for the bank to be erected on church property.)

Fr Barker was unmarried; the Pastoral Provision was not extended to him. The parish was for a time in a "Pro-Diocese of St Augustine (of Canterbury)" as some of the old Prayer Books and Hymnals testify by stamps inside them. It was anticipated that the "Pro-Diocese" would become RC, en bloc.

Eventually, this came to be seen as a fruitless hope. It was at this point that Fr Barker was "discharged." For several months, the parish had visiting clergy from various Anglican alphabet-soup groups. Eventually, the ACC supplied Fr Greg Wilcox, from La Verne, on a "temporary" basis.

Then the Vestry officially called him, ca. 1985/6. He accepted somewhat reluctantly, I'm told. He then got the parish to accept the ACC. Later he led the parish to revolt from ACC, leading to the second lawsuit, settled ca. 1994. {Details of this period appear in this post and the two posts after it.]

I'm enormously grateful for this information. It makes me more hopeful that something can be done to continue this tradition of spiritual commitment at the parish.

My informant indicates that he's put this together from memory, but feels it's as reliable as he can make it. If anyone has clarifications, corrections, or additions to this material, I will be most happy to add them to the record.

Regarding the Pro-Diocese of St Augustine of Canterbury, I found the following:

There is no such thing as a pro-diocese in the Catholic Church.

in the early 1980's, several congregations of former Episcopalians formed what was then called the pro-diocese of St. Augustine of Canterbury. One of these congregations was here in San Antonio and some of its members were individually received into the Catholic Church on the Feast of the Assumption in 1983. At the same time, a parish was erected under the title of Our Lady of the Atonement under the terms of a Pastoral Provision granted by the Holy See. There are several other such parishes in the United States, but they are parishes of the dioceses in which they are located. The pro-diocese no longer exists.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Condolences From A Former Parishioner

A former parishioner at St Mary of the Angels who sometimes sends his reflections writes:
Just read your last two posts, John. the parish has declined greatly from the plummy days of Fr. Jordan when I was a member. Remember, I was baptized and confirmed there as a teenager in the 50s. There was a thriving Sunday School, [and] adult school of religion on Sunday afternoons, before Evensong and Benediction in the evening. Daily Mass, Confessions on demand and scheduled on Saturday evenings. After Fr. Jordan's untimely death [update: in 1971], Fr. Barker took over and things started going south, from my recollection. I left the parish soon after and never looked back. I still think that Fr. Jordan might have taken the parish into a western rite Orthodox jurisdiction, [if] there had been one then. I never in all my years there heard him say anything favorable to the RCC as it existed then.
I checked the timeline on the Freedom for St Mary's site, but unfortunately, it gives no dates for Fr James Jordan's tenure. (The timeline on the Facebook page linked above says it was 1952-1971.) I asked my correspondent what was on the corner property before the bank building (which acquired its tenant in 1984), and he replied,
As I recall, two small apartment houses, I believe two story duplexes. At one time, Fr. Jordan moved out of the little house behind the church, which became class rooms, and moved into the apartment house facing Hillhurst. it was there he died from a heart attack.
It's worth noting that both Frs Jordan and Barker were Episcopal priests. My correspondent has said in the past that Fr Jordan seems to have flirted with becoming Orthodox and possibly taking the parish with him; he notes that Jordan would take groups to Orthodox services. This would have been well before the Affirmation of St Louis. Fr Barker, of course, eventually did more than flirt with Catholicism, but in consequence of his various moves was inhibited by The Episcopal Church on January 28, 1977, which was also before the Congress of St Louis, which took place on September 14-16 of that year.

My correspondent does not venerate Fr Barker as others seem to do; I take no position, since I don't know the man. I do note that other priests who have left The Episcopal Church out of dissatisfaction have resigned, rather than wait to be deposed, and under its current policies (which, however, it adjusts or not depending on what suits its purpose), the US-Canadian Ordinariate does not ordain priests who are under discipline in other jurisdictions.

This short trip down memory lane has brought me back to the time around 1977 when I first became aware of the St Mary of the Angels controversy on the five o'clock news. I believe Mrs Brandt was the spokesperson for the parish at the time, and when asked by the reporter what the parish's objections were to the Episcopal Church's ordination of women, she vehemently insisted that it destroyed "our catholicity". (She was speaking, so I don't know if the "c" was capital, but considering her subsequent positions, I'm assuming it's lower-case.)

The problems facing the parish are generational. Clearly they go back before 1977, and they probably started with Fr Dodd. I will be most eager to hear any other accounts of circumstances under Frs Jordan and Barker, as well as more specific dates for the rectorship of Fr Jordan.