The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: Leadership

Jeffrey Steenson, who was Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande from 2005 to 2007, was the third US Episcopal bishop to resign while in office in order to convert to Roman Catholicism. The first was Levi Silliman Ives, who was Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina from 1841 to 1852. The second was Frederick Joseph Kinsman, who was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919.

The differences between Steenson and his predecessors are remarkable, in part perhaps reflecting Steenson's character, but also showing how times have changed. Both Ives's and Kinsman's resignations and conversions were moderately important public events, and in consequence, both Ives and Kinsman published detailed apologias, Ives in The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism and Kinsman in Salve Mater. (Kinsman is highly underrated as a writer, and since the book is on line, it's worth the read.)

Both of those bishops addressed a general audience with an understanding of broad historical and theological context. Steenson, at least so far, has produced no equivalent. The closest is The Causes For My Becoming Catholic, an 11-page address delivered to a 2008 meeting of the Anglican Use Society, a highly specialized in-group that has since become the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, whose primary purpose is to cheerlead for the so-called Anglican Patrimony in the Catholic Church. That both of Steenson's predecessors felt the need to address their decisions to the general public, while Steenson has not, is an indication of how far the prestige of The Episcopal Church fell over the 20th century.

What puzzles me is that, although this presentation gives ostensibly Aristotelian reasons for his conversion, it is deeply dishonest. Steenson resigned as bishop in 2007. He was received into the Catholic Church in December of that year, but, in an ongoing p;rogression not referenced in his talk, he was ordained a Roman Catholic transitional deacon in Rome in December 2008 by Cardinal Bernard Law, and his ordination as a Catholic priest took place in February 2009. These must certainly have been assured at the time of his 2007 resignation as bishop.

Also unmentioned in the 2008 talk was a 1993 meeting that he attended, arranged by Cardinal Law, with the now-late Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, at that time Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss and draft a proposal for an Anglican personal prelature that had been supported by Cardinal Law since the late 1970s. Documents at that time indicate that Bp Pope was anxious to keep the meeting confidential, as it involved the appointment of Pope himself as ordinary of this prelature, with the presumption that Steenson would be a number-two.

Any premature release of such information could conceivably result in inhibition, trial, and deposition of both under Episcopalian canon law for abandonment of communion. Naturally, whether actual charges would be brought against either would have been an iffy proposition in The Episcopal Church, and conviction would have been even more so -- but Steenson, still just a rector at the time, would at least have had his career prospects thwarted.

As it was, Steenson advanced to become Canon to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, and then Bishop Coadjutor, and finally Bishop of that diocese in 2005. Had any word of the 1993 meeting leaked out, given the implied intent to leave The Episcopal Church to serve as a Catholic priest, there's no likelihood that he ever could have become an Episcopal bishop.

(It's notable that Steenson's successor as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande, Michael Vono, complained that Steenson had betrayed his vows as a bishop. But I'm told that Vono himself is Broad Church, which suggests that his own interpretation of vows is flexible, and by Broad Church standards, Steenson was behaving impeccably as a bishop. But this goes to why the Catholic Church would ever wish to play footsie with Protestants of any stripe.)

In addition, it appears that Cardinal Law from the late 1970s had maintained contacts, either directly or through intermediaries, with dissident Episcopal clergy with the aim of bringing them into an Anglican personal prelature should the opportunity arise, which it did with the election of Joseph Ratzinger as pontiff in 2005. Anglicanorum coetibus was essentially the document drafted by Steenson as a result of the 1993 meeting.

Steenson made absolutely no mention of any of this in his 2008 talk, instead basically blaming Aristotle and a perfunctory vote of some Episcopalian bishops long after 1993. Even after resigning as bishop, he continued to conceal the circumstances and arrangements behind the resignation, and indeed, given the timeline, his 2008 ordination as a married Catholic priest was in clear anticipation of the 2009 promulgation of Anglicanorum coetibus and his status as presumptive ordinary, announced in January 2012.

One remarkable feature of Steenson's brief tenure as ordinary -- he was replaced in 2015 by Bp Lopes -- is how little he accomplished. He is known chiefly for engineering a pit maneuver against David Moyer that prevented his ordination as a Catholic priest, as well as for provoking Fr Christopher Phillips into keeping the Our Lady of the Atonement parish out of the ordinarate until after the retirement of both. He was also a key factor in bungling the admission of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish into the ordinariate.

This is not a commendable record, but given the context of Steenson's career, it suggests that Steenson was adept at behind-the-scenes maneuver but not skilled at much else. But do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?

The bottom line is that there's no comparison between Steenson and either Ives or Kinsman, and I seriously doubt we'll ever get an honest account from Steenson of his actual conversion and career, before or after becoming Catholic. .