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. .

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: How Anglicans Really Are

I keep thinking back to Fr Lengenecker's 2018 Lenten mission at our parish, where he gave very insightful remarks on Anglicanism that were actually just a brief digression in a much more extensive talk. One point that he made was that, given the wide spectrum of Anglican belief, after his years of experience in the denomination, if he listened to an Anglican for some minutes, he could discern roughly where the speaker stood in relation to the diagram above, but this would still be with only about 90% certainty.

The odd thing for me is that, in my 30 years as an Episcopalian, nobody gave me anything like the explanation in the diagram above. In my confirmation class, there wasn't even mention of a high church-low church polarity -- it was just the XXXIX Articles were established so everyone could compromise, but they never even reviewed the Articles themselves, which are very Protestant. It didn't matter, because everyone compromised.

It was only after I became Catholic and began to look into the matter that I realized that Bp James Pike, who denied the Trinity from the pulpit and was surrounded by public scandal, was a perfectly good Anglican of the broad church persuasion, and there have been bishops like Pike before and since who've been sanctioned far less than bishops who opposed innovations like gay marriage, or sanctioned not at all. This was one of the main issues that led to Frederick Kinsman's resignation as Episcopal Bishop of Delaware in 1919. Pike, or John Spong, or Eugene Robinson, was noothing new.

The emergence of "continuing" Anglicanism in the 1970s can be seen now, I think, as part of the more general decline of main line Protestantism, which was already shrinking and no longer represented a bourgeois consensus. Far more Episcopalians, after all, simply quit coming to church, than the relatively small numbers who broke away into the dozens of tiny "continuing Anglican" denominations. And the numbers of continuers are now shrinking as cataclysmically as the numbers of Episcopalians.

The "continuers" can be placed (keeping Fr Longenecker's remarks in mind, with maybe 90% certainty) in the left part of the diagram above with the callout "new 'Anglican Orthodoxy', GAFCON". It's a combination of sorts, though a highly uneasy one, between low church dissidents like David Virtue and the largely defunct Anglo-Catholic blogs and websites, although the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society is aligned with this wing of the movement. Most of the "continuing" groups are low church, but the few relatively high church groups like the Anglican Church in America are also rapidly shrinking and have been forced to merge for survival.

This is the environment into which Benedict XVI promulgated Anglicanorum coetibus. He appears to have been influenced chiefly by Bernard Law, who had been encouraging a small group of dissident Episcopalians behind the scenes since the late 1970s with the prospect of a personal prelature for Anglicans who wished to enter the Catholic Church as a body. The problem was that Law seems not to have understood this group very clearly, and he seems not to have understood Anglicans in general -- if Anglicans see their own doctrines, such as the XXXIX Articles, only as a departure point for compromise, they won't adjust well to the Catholic Church.

And most in that Anglican dissident continuum are low church. David Virtue was violently unsupportive of Anglicanorum coetibus and held unsuccessful efforts to go into the ordinariate by parishes like St Mary of the Angels Hollywood up to ridicule.

So Cardinal Law never understood the potential market for his idea. But the problem goes beyond that, because the actual intake in the North American ordinariate has been people who continue to dissent in the name of "orthodoxy", and not all of them are former Anglicans. As a vistor puts it,

Such growth as there is in Ordinariate congregations comes almost entirely from “disaffected Catholics”—-the “TLM-lite” crowd I think you call them—-although they often keep a foot in both Ordinariate and TLM communities. It is not uncommon for the same diocesan parish to host both EF and DW masses. So for the most part it’s poaching, not evangelism. Hence the emphasis on maintaining the elusive “Anglican Patrimony,” despite the fact that in the ten years I have been following this story I can see it devolving into “Tex-Mex” or General Tso’s Chicken right before my eyes.

Of course, the diagram above suggests any "Anglican patrimony" that exists is hard to parse indeed, and the loudest voices in the ordinariate who insist on it seem to be those who've spent little or no time in Episcopalian or Anglican Church of Canada parishes.

There seems to be an emerging consensus among US Catholic bishops that figures like Fr Zuhlsdorf must be brought to heel, and Bp Barron has become increasingly critical of the pre-Conciliarist movement, although he's careful to separate it from those who simply attend Latin mass. One ordinariate priest has already been removed and is apparently in the process of laicization for being openly pre-Conciliarist, but I dom't think he was ever the only problem.

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: The Target Audience

In thinking over the past few months about why Anglicanorum coetibus failed, it occurs to me that nobody at the start of the project gave much thought to Anglicanism. This is puzzling, because there's been effective opinion within the Church all along that could have provided insight, most specifically by the former Episcopal Bishop of Delaware Frederick Kinsman. but other Catholic writers like Hilaire Belloc have offered similar opinions.

Even the former Church of England priest Fr Dwight Longenecker, now a Catholic pastor in South Carolina, noted in a 2018 Lenten mission at our California parish that Anglicanism "looks like" Catholicism, but it isn't. Figures like Bernard Law, Joseph Ratzinger, Jeffrey Steenson, and others who drafted Anglicanorum coetibus at the start seem to have been lulled by appearances. It's a little like the warning about the coral snake: red touch yellow, kill a fellow.

The Complementary Norms for Anglicanorum coetibus simply breeze past the question of Anglicans -- it simply assumes that large mumbers of Anglicans are eager to become Catholic. The constitution itself refers to "groups of Anglicans" who have petitioned "repeatedly and insistently" to join the Church, as though the sacraments of initiation had previoiusly been denied them. Article 5, §1 of the Norms simply says

The lay faithful originally of the Anglican tradition who wish to belong to the Ordinariate, after having made their Profession of Faith and received the Sacraments of Initiation, with due regard for Canon 845, are to be entered in the apposite register of the Ordinariate.

The Norms say little else about who is an Anglican, and more important, who Anglicans are. For starters, they're Protestants. It's worth noting that a key element of Protestant formation is that Protestantism arose because something was essentially wrong with the Catholic Church. I went through Presbyterian confirmation in my early teens and Episcopalian confirmation in my early 30s, and both had some version of that. For Anglicans, there's less insistence that the Christian faith went wrong with "accretions", but there's no question that Anglicans see themselves as a via media between extremes, of which Catholicism is clearly one.

This should have suggested to the drafters of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Norms that even candidates for confirmation who come from Anglican backgrounds would need greater attention to catechesis, but the assumption appears to have been that only some minimal touchup would be required. That so few actual Anglicans ever signed up for the North American ordinariate shows how badly the drafters understood the market. Recall that the original estimate given Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993 was 250,000 Episcopalians who would come in. The actual number, especially considering the number of non-Episcopalians who joined, is probably only in the low four digits.

At minimum, this suggests that the drafters badly underestimated the task of evangelization. Bp Barron, the USCCB's evangelization lead, sees riper fruit among "nones", people never reached by or affiliated with any Christian denomination, Catholic dropouts, and even New Atheists. Protestants of the traditional main line denominations are a cataclysmically shrinking group. "Non-denominational" Evangelicals are a different task. To a serious professional evangelizer like Bp Barron, it would appear that Episcopalians were never low-hanging fruit.

This accounts for the drafters' misunderanding of the target market, their assumption that Protestants of any stripe, whose spiritual identities are based on an inculcated notion that the Catholic Church is irrededemably corrupt in countless ways, would suddenly clamor for admission to that same Church whose demands in areas like sexuality, the sanctity of life, and ritual observance are regarded as unnecessary and even repugnant.

This accounts for their misunderstanding that Anglicans are Protestant, not just dreamy quasi-Catholic wannabes. That would be why there was so little uptake in the first place. But there's another misunderstanding of Anglicanism that reflects the problems within the body of the ordinariate faithful who did join, which I'll go into tomorrow.

I'm Going To Start A Series Of Posts On The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus

A visitor to my old blog sent me a cri de coeur on the situation at the cathedral of the North American Catholic ordinariate for former Anglicans, which I've published with comments at the old blog. It's been very good for me to become more detached from the ordinariate, of which I was never a member in any case, as I've steadily become more assimilated into the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church via a well-run parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Two things strike me. One is that my own experience of being Catholic has educated me in the meaning of this passage from the Vatican II constitution Lumen Gentium

Often the Church has also been called the building of God. The Lord Himself compared Himself to the stone which the builders rejected, but which was made into the cornerstone. On this foundation the Church is built by the apostles, and from it the Church receives durability and consolidation. This edifice has many names to describe it: the house of God in which dwells His family; the household of God in the Spirit; the dwelling place of God among men; and, especially, the holy temple. This Temple, symbolized in places of worship built out of stone, is praised by the Holy Fathers and, not without reason, is compared in the liturgy to the Holy City, the New Jerusalem. As living stones we here on earth are built into it.

It goes without saying that Protestant denominations do not recognize this in any but a figurative sense. It's also been hard for me to see members of the North American ordinariate projecting any real sense of this, nor any indication that Bp Lopes sees any responsibility to educate his flock about this.

And beyond that, his flock, having entered this new spiritual environment, seem still to be unhappy and disgruntled people -- the complaint in the link is just the most recent of the long succession of those I've received.

And perhaps related to this condition is the remarkable number of clergy scandals and removals the ordinariate has had, among well under a hundred priests, and in less than ten years.

This convinces me that even if there may still be detectable brain waves, the heart is dead. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I'll make a series of posts on it.

More On The Dalton School Kerfuffle

When I posted Sunday on rhw headmaster's resignation at the uber-elite Dalton School, I thought it would be an easy short post on a day when I'd be preoccupied with installing my new desktop. But then yesterday I heard that Megyn Kelly, of all people, had gone public with scolding the headmaster, and a few people had noticed, so I wondered what else was up.

Let's keep in mind that Kelly is still presumably rich following her settlements with Fox and NBC, and at least arguably still famous, though she's past her sell-by date. But she destroyed her career doing as the lizard people told her to do in 2016, trying to ambush Trump, so I'm not sure why she's hanging around. The elites don't like her, and she doesn't like them -- unless they continue to fawn over her, which they aren't doing.

It turns out that Kelly has had a running Twitter feud with New York elite schools and New York itself since last year. She pulled her kids out of the equally tony Collegiate and Spence Schools, for wokeness, but remember that she went on Bill Maher to talk about it. It ain't about the kids.

Then I found a long piece in Vanity Fair from last Thursday, only days before the Dalton head's resignation, which clearly indicates that the conflict had been brewing for some time. And it sounds more and more like a tempest in a teapot.

The public blowup came in December, splashed across the pages of the New York Post: A handful of teachers at the Dalton School, one of New York City’s elite Upper East Side private schools, had written an eight-page, 24-point thought-starter document that aimed to reimagine Dalton’s approach to diversity and inclusion, bringing it more in line with the progressive facade it has long worn.

But this was just at Dalton, which as the srory implies had somehow been lagging behind the woke trend. Megyn herself came out last fall, according to the Maher story linked above:

Kelly first announced this decision in November 2020, citing as the catalyst the school’s curriculum which had “gone off the deep end” in terms of its left-leaning ideology, though critics have highlighted Kelly’s controversial past as an indication that she may be overreacting or deflecting from more important issues. One highlight from Kelly’s career in controversy was defending blackface costumes on Halloween, which lead to her termination from NBC.

So this is starting to look more and more like an intramural controversy among people who appear to be in the elite but are deeply insecure about it. A key indicator that they've arrived, among this particular set, is their kids' expensive private schools. So they're basically playing ain't-it-awful among themselves over things like the price of beachfront estates in the Hamptons. With a lot less effort, they could do a little research and networking and simply find a good school outside that social orbit, but they'd have to drop the mental habit of relating everything in their lives to that social orbit.

And of course, if they sent their kids to some school that just focused on real education, they'd lose the chance of getting them into Harvard. Which for the kids' sake would be all to the good, but that's not who we're dealing with.

So in the Twitter thread in which Megyn scolded Dalton, someone followed up:

Knew this one was coming. He totally deserved it, but I wonder if the board was just upset at all the publicity.

I'm afraid the issue is less that the kids are having wokeness shoved down their throats because it's a bad thing than it's OK if the plebs's kids have it in plebs schools, but our kids don't deserve it, because they're special.

California's Approach To COVID

Above is a typical table of the type that can be found on the LA County Health Department website. It's updated daily. It appears that LA County's policies conform with California state policies. It's plain that LA County is carefully recording race, ethnicity, and poverty data on COVID cases. In general I would have questioned this before the current crisis, but what we see in just the death data is an indication of where the problems lie.

If you run vaccination clinics in poor Hispanic areas, you are going to do far more good with each shot there than in an affluenmt white area. That's all there is to it. So I quote from a recent LA County health department press release:

Testing results are available for nearly 6,272,000 individuals with 18% of people testing positive. Today's daily test positivity rate is 1%, the lowest test positivity rate since the beginning of the pandemic. The test positivity rate peaked over 20% in late-December during the surge.

Nearly 5,400,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to people across Los Angeles County. Of these, nearly 3,500,000 were first doses and more than 1,900,000 were second doses. As of April 9, 71% of L.A. County residents 65 and older received at least one dose of the vaccine. In total, 41% of the County’s population 16 and older have received at least one dose of vaccine.

Los Angeles County expanded the number of sites offering vaccination services across the county from 566 locations last week to 709 vaccinations sites across the county this week; 266 sites are in the hardest hit communities. Vaccination sites across the county had capacity to administer nearly 734,000 doses this week. This week, 323,470 total doses were allocated to Los Angeles County.

There's an emerging consensus that California's COVID statistics are the best in the US. I simply don't know if other states are following similar policies. It does seem to me that the CDC ought to have data eqwuivalent to LA County's or California's for every state, and it ought to be asking whether every state, especially those that are now problem outliers like Michigan, are handing vaccinations the same way.

Clearfly s "preferential option for the poor" is a good strategy for society in general here.

I spent the weekend getting and installing a new desktop, as my old one died. I'm back up and fully running.

Panic Dissipating?

An item in this morning's news caught my eye: the head of Manhattan's uber-elite Dalton School is resigning, apparently due to pressure from parents who objected to his woke agenda.

Keep in mind that the true indicator of social standing isn't whether you went to an Ivy, it's the private secondary school you attended. The parents of those students have money and influence. Wokeness so far has been a form of preemptive submissioin by media, university, and corporate elites. If Dalton parents are dropping the program, this is an acknowledgement that it isn't working out for those elites.

In January, an anonymous group of parents wrote a letter objecting to Dalton’s new guidelines.

“Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class,” the letter read, according to the NY Post.

“Wildly inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity-training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum,” the parents added in their letter.

By February, the school’s director of DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) Domonic Rollins stepped down “in pursuit of other opportunities.”

The big takeaway here is that this isn't your grandfather's PTA. Not only did they complain, but they had the juice to get people fired.