California Is Still A Puzzle

The map above shows California's COVID status as of April 27, just two days ago. Most counties are now in the "orange" tier, and this covers nearly 90% of the state population. "Orange" restrictions are still stricter than in many other states, but they do allow most indoor activities at 50% capacity.

What's remarkable is how quickly conditions have improved. The map at right is from just a month ago, March 30, with far fewer counties in the "orange" tier, most still "red" and three in "purple". Over the course of just a month, most of the state changed from "red" to "orange", with the three worst cases leaving "purple, while two more became "yellow". At this point, it appears that over the course of May, most of the state will move to "yellow", though this will still be more restrictive than other states like Florida or Arizona.

But here's the continuing puzzle. I've already noted that Los Angeles County in particular has been very aggressive in locating vaccination sites in the poorest areas, but from the second map above, it's been unique in this. Earlier this year, once vaccine became available, the county was very quick to move from "purple" through "red" to "orange", but other counties like Fresno, with many poor residents but apparently not quite as aggressive, nevertheless followed LA County from "purple" to "orange", lagging by only weeks.

The fact is that, as the maps show, there have been no stubborn problem areas anywhere in the state. All the counties have been improving and making progress from tier to tier within weeks of each other. The maps are just snapshots.

LA County health department press releases, while carefully worded, have begun to indicate that even with aggressive efforts to make vaccine available in the poorest areas, uptake there hasn't been as expected.

The pandemic also disproportionately affected Non-White populations in the County. The impact on Pacific Islanders was particularly severe, with nearly 6 times as high a hospitalization rate as among White residents, and more than 3 times as high a death rate. Although Latino/Latinx residents were hospitalized at only 2.9 times as high a rate as White residents, they died from their infections at 3 times as high a rate. Black/African American (1.7), American Indian/Alaskan Native (1.6), and Asian (1.3) residents also died of COVID-19 at rates higher than those of White residents.

And,

The County has now vaccinated about half of Asian, White, and American Indian/Alaska Native residents in L.A. County and have also made some important gains in vaccinating multiracial community members, where vaccinations increased from 11% to 37% with one dose. In Latinx residents, the vaccinated proportion of the population increased more than fourfold of what it was two months ago, and in Black residents, the proportion increased more than threefold.

Despite all efforts, the impact has still been most severe on Latins. This is probably why the counties in the San Joaquin Valley have been slower (though by a matter of only weeks) to move from "red" to "orange", as they have a high proportion of poor agricultural workers, who are mostly Latin. In turn, the reason for this is that Latins are the group most likely not to have their immigration status in order, and vaccination does require that one register. Best not to do anything that could bring attention to themselves, clearly.

But then, with a certain substantial part of the population, which is the poorest and sickest, resisting vaccination, why is California otherwise doing so well, the best in the US and up there with the best in the world? I've got to think that, since all US states have received vaccines in the same proportion, and California counties have all been improving individually and apparently doing better than many US states, other factors besides just vaccines are involved.

But I don't think it's lockdowns. The most severe lockdowns in the country had no effect on the late 2020 surge in California. There must be another factor besides vaccines.

Panic Dissipating?

There's been a stir about yesterday's updated CDC mask guidelines, but I think the takeaway is that they're largely semantic and at this point, without tattoos on people's foreheads showing their vaccine status, completely unenforceable, even by the most zealous Karens. With the chart above in mind, let's say an unvaccinated person decides to eat at an outdoor restaurant without a mask. Since there's no requirement that he wear a lanyard with his vaccine slip in a clear plastic holder, there's no way anyone can check if he's fully vaccinated or not and thus permitted to go maskless.

Even it a Karen has her suspicions, if she confronts him in a huff, the unvax can simply huff back at her to mind her own business, and the other patrons more likely than not will shout her down as well. But the relaxation overall is pretty pusillanimous, and it's actually based on nothing new. At least in LA County, it was always OK to go jogging or bike riding without a mask. Beyond that, Dr Fauci has in effect been acknowledging that this whole mask thing has never been common sense, even when he said it was:

The CDC guidelines allow people who have been fully vaccinated (defined as being at least two weeks removed from their last shot) to do things such as walk, bike or eat at an outdoor restaurant without masks. Pretty much everything except congregating in large groups of strangers is considered safe, and even then, a mask should protect you, according to the guidelines.

“You can do so many of the things that are common-sense things,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told WTOP.

But depending on the state they lived in, people could do all these things without the shot, and still can, with infection statistics generally better than in states where they couldn't. And for Dr Fauci, common sense is how he feels at the moment anyhow. Last January, he was saying it was common sense to wear not one mask, but two:

During an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s TODAY earlier this week, he was asked for his thoughts on if wearing two masks would make a difference.

“It likely does because this is a physical covering to prevent droplets and virus to get in,” Dr. Fauci told Guthrie. “So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective. That’s the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95.”

So by January's standards, if you're vaccinated, you're obviously still safer if you wear a mask, so why not keep wearing one? Indeed, why not keep wearing two? It's pretty clearly a case of what will keep Fauci on the Sunday talks, which I think this sequence shows. He knows what he can get away with, even with Savannah Guthrie.

But there are other signs that the mood is improving. After the Chauvin verdict, despite several new well-publicized officer involved shootings, the riots haven't resumed -- and there was some justified fear that the riots would resume whatever the verdict. And the precipitous decline in Oscar viewership shows the public is increasingly tired of woke. This has been carrying over to big-league sports as well.

We aren't dealing witbh epidemiological issues here. The COVID crisis was never the Black Death nor ebola, neither polio nor yellow fever. With an estimate of 5 million deaths worldwide that I saw recently, it's about 10% the size of the 1918 Spanish flu, with an estimate of 50 million. But short of vaccine, public health efforts to curb COVID via masks and lockowns have been feckless, and we're seeing little insight so far into how the disease actually spread.

The problem has been one of moral panic, not public health.

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: The Record

The North American ordinariate began its life with several major disappointments, and it's never really recovered. It's now in a situation where the first generation of priests who came in with early groups has reached retirement age, but, as in the case of Fr Ousley, their replacements don't have equivalent background or experience. My regular correspondent from the old blog outlines the record as the ordinariate approaches ten years of age:

We have frequently discussed the conspicuous failures among the Ordinariate communities: the small, struggling “continuing” groups which became small, struggling Catholic groups, the groups gathered as ordination opportunities for clergy who have subsequently retired or moved on to local diocesan posts or otherwise departed from the scene. But the apparently successful communities also reveal grave weaknesses.

In ten years only eleven groups have achieved full parish status. Four of those were inherited from the Pastoral Provision, so in fact only seven groups have achieved this goal under the provisions of Anglicanorum coetibus. And the parochial status of one of them—-St Luke, Ft Washington—-is somewhat problematic as it shares a building and a pastor with the local diocese, suggesting that it is not actually a self-sustaining congregation.

You have reported on the problems of St Barnabas, Omaha, now awaiting the arrival of its third pastor since joining the Ordinariate in 2013. Fr Bengry seems to be holding it together on his own at St John the Evangelist, Calgary, but that situation, including its odd financing, is a ticking time bomb. We hear little about Incarnation, Orlando and Mt Calvary, Baltimore, but we will assume that their situation is stable.

Christ the King, Towson seems to be relatively thriving; my only concern is that it seems to be unduly centred on the Meeks family. Liturgically and musically it resembles a typical OF parish, with lengthy sermons by Fr Meeks which have been faithfully posted every Sunday on YouTube for the last decade.

Like the much smaller St Timothy, Sykesville whose live-stream video drew wails of horror when it was posted on Ordinariate-themed FB pages a few months ago, CTK is a liturgical outlier whose members would find little to attract them at a typical OCSP mass.

So, this is all there is to show, and it’s not much.

All the ordinariate parishes are at best marginal. What's struck me about my experience of the diocesan Church is how much it contradicts the traditionalist stereotypes of gay clergy, happy-clappy liturgy, and declining interest. Cardinal Mahony and the St John's Seminary in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles have been consistent targets of traditionalists, but the senior priests we've encountered who've been products of the seminary and ordained by Mahony are impressive men who set inspirational examples, and the younger priests who've followed them are just as good -- a number have passed through our parish, and they're pretty exceptional.

Why woukld people who've voluntarily become Catholic, presumably with no emotional or family ties to declining parishes, want nevertheless to isolate themselves in a ghetto of retro mediocrity? The only upside to this seems to be how few people wish to do it.

More COVID Contrasts

It's starting to look like vaccines, no matter how indifferently distributed, are the magic bullet that will solve COVID. But so far, governments to one degree or another are becoming disappointed that this is the case. I saw reports of a mass demonstration in London last Saturday:

Videos posted to social media showed streets jammed with mostly maskless protestors. One marcher carried a sign reading “They did not isolate a virus. They isolated you.” Others said “No to vaccine passports” and “Lockdowns kill”.

Some reports put the crowd size at 10,000.

Lockdown measures have already started to lift in the UK with restaurants and pubs given the greenlight for outdoor eating and drinking on April 12. Gyms and hair salons were also permitted to open and further restrictions are set to be lifted May 17 at the earliest.

Curious, I went to see the UK's COVID chart. To my surprise, it looks a great deal like California's, which is the best in the US. But California continues to have fairly stringent controls, which themselves contrast to many US states, where controls of any sort, including mask mandates, have been lifted entirely. Even so, in California, most counties have reached the "orange" tier, which allows things like 50% indoor dining and outdoor drinking in bars. Depending on the county, these have been in effect for weeks.

And this is in one of the strictest US COVID regimes. In Texas, the lockdown is yeasterday's issue. So far, COVID passports haven't been raised as a serious option in the US. UK media seems stumped that citizens, like Oliver Twist, seem to be asking for more. How ungrateful they are for what the government has already granted them!

But even in the US, Dr Fauci has been slow-walking relaxations that even he acknowledges are common sense:

Face masks have taken an increasingly central role in debate lately as many have questioned the continued and widespread use of masks even as vaccinations continue to soar nationwide. A Georgia mother went viral this week after she sounded off on her local school board continuing its mask mandate through next year.

. . . "What I believe you’re going to be hearing, what the country is going to be hearing soon, is updated guidelines from the CDC," Fauci told ABC News' "This Week." "The CDC is a science-based organization. They don’t want to make any guidelines unless they look at the data and the data backs it up."

"But when you look around at the common sense situation, the risk is really low, especially if you’re vaccinated," he said.

I can only be happy that the US political culture is driving reopenings much more forcefully than in most of the world.

The Failure Of Anglicanorum Coetibus: The Model

Anglicanorum coetibus and the complementary norms themselves aren't specific about how the groups that enter the Catholic Church as bodies of former Anglicans are organized, but explanations at the time of the constitution's promulgation generally assumed they were existing Anglican parishes that wouid enter with their Anglican clergy. This is at least implied in the constitution itself:

§4 The Ordinariate is composed of lay faithful, clerics and members of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, originally belonging to the Anglican Communion and now in full communion with the Catholic Church, or those who receive the Sacraments of Initiation within the jurisdiction of the Ordinariate.

Early publicity focused on parishes that would enter, not only as continuing corporate entities, but with property and endowments as well as their clergy and people. Very few did this, and the attempt of the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish, which did have significant property and endowment, was a spectacuilar failure driven in large part by the complacency of Steenson and the people around him.

But this and other failures in the early months of the North American ordinariate led almost immediately to departures from the model. A visitor who often contributed to the old blog points out this difficulty:

Fr Ousley, the Pastor of St John the Baptist, Bridgeport, PA, is retiring in June, at 70. He went to Yale and Nashotah House, and has a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. He served as a TEC clergyman for twenty years, and in the ACA for a further fourteen. He led 25 members of his ACA congregation into the Ordinariate. and later merged the group with the John Henry Newman Fellowship led by David Moyer after it became clear that the latter would not be proceeding to ordination.

The combined group later bought a surplus church and rectory from the local diocese (they had plenty to choose from) and has been raised to the status of a full parish in the OCSP. They have undertaken a number of repairs and improvements to the property. I give this history in detail because it presumably represents what was envisioned as the Ordinariate template: an established formerly “Anglican” clergyman and his congregation with the resources to maintain a church and a full program of parish life. But this ideal has remained elusive.

Most of the former clergy coming forward for ordination in the Ordinariate served as “Anglican” clergy only briefly, or not at all and they bring no former parishioners. Some became Catholic years ago but did not previously pursue ordination, or at least did not pursue it successfully. A few have gathered a “Pre-Ordinariate” group, but this model, once the norm, is now uncommon.

The announced replacement for Fr Ousley is Fr William Cantrell. He is about ten years younger than Fr Ousley and was ordained for the OCSP in December 2013 after 24 years as a TEC military chaplain. He has never served with an Ordinariate community even in an assistant capacity but has continued his work as a chaplain in a VA hospital. This choice suggests to me that Bp Lopes had some staffing issues: St John the Baptist, Bridgeport is a full-time job but cannot provide a full-time stipend. Relevant pastoral/managerial experience is in short supply.

The early anticipation was that there would be two Philadelphia-area parishes, one formed around David Moyer and the other around Fr Ousley. Within weeks, this prospect proved unworkable, with the two groups proving far smaller than expected, with neither bringing in property. The result has been a single marginal parish whose ability to maintain or improve its aging and obsolete property is in fact far from assured.

Even among the handful of parishes that came in under the original model, with property, endowment, and clergy, leaving aside the former Pastoral Provision parishes for the time being, none has visibly prospered, while some, like St Barnabas Omaha, have suffered from mismanagement despite repeated changes in clergy.

But in fact, there have been few new communities of any sort, and few talented clergy to lead them. And even for those, there are few billets available to pay a full stipend, which compounds the problem, since the ordinariate clearly isn't seen as a rewarding career by potential new candidates. Instead, it's a last-chance career option for men who haven't succeeded in Protestant careers. Learning to code is in fact probably a better choice for such people.

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.