Let's Revisit An Old Story

The photo above is of the avuncular Dr Francis Collins, former director of the US National Institutes of Health, who also happens to be a prominent Evangelical who has periodically argued that "rigorous science" poses no conflict with religious belief. But I suppose that depends on what the meanings of "rigorous science" and "religious belief" are -- and they certainly haven't stood in the way of Dr Collins getting the prestigious Templeton Award, notwithstanding his direct subordinate Dr Fauci has constantly insisted that the anti-religious COVID lockdown policies involving church closures are based on "science".

In the context of the recent revelation that Dr Fauci in February 2020 commissioned an academic study that he then cited to refute the lab-leak theory of COVID's origin, it's worth revisiting a story that I first covered here last August, wherein Collins effectively ordered his subordinate Fauci and a colleague to stir up an equivalent academic takedown of another strain of COVID dissent:

The memo first came to light due to a freedom-of-information action by a public interest group in December 2021. At the time, informed medical opinion said,

This week, emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed what I see as worrisome communication between Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that Covid-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.

. . . Collins appeared on television this week to confirm that the email was authentic, and that he stood by the message. At the time, he believed the Great Barrington Declaration idea of focused protection would result in more deaths than the alternative view of one-size-fits all restrictions. Collins also confirmed that he believed the three authors of the declaration were “fringe” scientists.

. . . What concerns me about the NIH director’s email and his interview on television is that he appeared unwilling to have this dialogue. Collins’s day job does not make him arbiter of scientific truth, the Pope for all scientists. On questions of unprecedented pandemic policy, he is surely entitled to his opinion — as we all are — but his is just one opinion of many.

. . . Collins’s response to a memo signed by thousands of scientists should not have been to call for an immediate and devastating take down, but to use his pulpit as NIH director to hold a series of public discussions and dialogues.

I think the memo, and the overall tone of Collins's response to the problem, is a good indication of Collins's actual management style, which seems to have been anything but avuncular. He was saying, in tones that I well recall from my days as an Ivy Leaguer, that there had better be a quick and devastating public takedown of these guys, if Fauci knew what was good for him. In other words, Fauci had better get on it and find a presigious stooge in a lab coat to write it, stat. (I would also suggest that the implication there included the availability of generous NIH money to pay the prestigious stooge.)

I strongly suspect that Fauci's commissioning of the February 2020 study that discounted the lab-leak theory had the precise same origin -- he was following orders from Collins, both to sponsor the study and to use it to support the NIH agenda.

What we're beginning to see as the Morning After phase of the COVID panic continues to unfold is that there was an inner circle that didn't just influence public opinion but micromanaged it.

[I]n the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a "Trump talking point," according to a well-placed CNN insider.

"People are slowly waking up from the fog," the insider told Fox News Digital. "It is kind of crazy that we didn't chase it harder."

But what was Collins/Fauci's problem with the lab-leak theory? As House Judiciary Chairman Jordan put it,

"Why was Dr. Fauci so consumed with making sure the narrative wasn't about the lab?" the Ohio Republican told Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures" host Maria Bartiromo. "I think it's because they were doing gain of function research there, he didn't want that out, and that was the narrative that everyone on the left bought into."

I think the path to an answer lies in questions that have been around since at least December 2021:

The National Institutes of Health allowed a U.S. nonprofit it funds to police its own controversial research on bat coronaviruses in China, raising new concerns about insufficient oversight at the agency.

. . . In December 2017, the funding for some gain-of-function research was resumed under carefully constructed guidelines for “Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight,” or P3CO — but the language suggested by Daszak helped the group evade this oversight as well. In July 2018, NIAID program officers decided that the experiments on humanized mice — which had been conducted a few months earlier — would get a pass from these restrictions as long as EcoHealth Alliance immediately notified appropriate agency officials according to the circumstances that the group had laid out.

. . . In a written response to questions submitted in September and October, an NIH spokesperson told The Intercept that the rule that was supposed to trigger a stop to the research was added “out of an abundance of caution.” Similarly, in a letter sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform last month, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak called the rule “an additional layer of oversight,” implying that the agency had devised the rule itself. But the notes reviewed by The Intercept show that the language was inserted at Daszak’s suggestion and that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance worked together to evade additional oversight.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the circumstances that led to what's looking more and more like the origins of the pandemic were exceptional, a violation of existing NIH policy, and the result of some sort of deal at the policymaking level, which is to say, at the level of Dr Francis Collins. What were the incentives for the deal? Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance got money. What did Dr Collins get? I'll bet it was something, and it wasn't something Dr Collins, prominent Evangelical, wanted to be made public.

Templeton Award indeed.

Looks Like We Just Got A New Overton Window

One intriguing indicator that we've reached the Morning After phase of the COVID moral panic is how the Overton Window, the permissible range of opinion on public issues, has changed almost instantly over roughly the past week. At the peak of the panic, the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak in China wasn't just a minority view, it was a pariah view associated with racists and conspiracy theorists. But as of this past Saturday,

FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News' Bret Baier this week that COVID-19 "most likely" came from a Chinese lab.

. . . The Energy Department, which had been undecided on the origin of the pandemic, concluded that the coronavirus most likely spread due to a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and "key members of Congress."

. . . Beyond the FBI and Energy Department, the National Intelligence Council and four other unnamed agencies assess at "low confidence" that the COVID-19 pandemic originated due to natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the Journal.

The CIA and another unnamed agency are reportedly still undecided.

At the same time, we might also conclude that respectable opinion is beginning to entertain the idea that the panic was manufactured by public health officials who were fully aware of what they were doing. Recent revelations suggest that this was the case in both the US and the UK. In the UK,

Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “squeeze the pants off” the public and ensure they comply with lockdown, leaked news from The Telegraph has revealed.

. . . Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/guilt factor” was “vital” to “boost messaging” during the third national lockdown in January 2021.

The previous month, Matt Hancock, then Health Secretary, appeared in a message to suggest that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would help prepare the ground for the looming lockdown by scaring people to comply.

In almost so many words, these officials agreed that the way to influence the public was to incite panic. In the US, Dr Fauci commissioned an academic paper using his power to approve research funding and then used the paper he'd commissioned to support his official line on the lab leak theory:

New emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.

What's changed? Matt Hancock was UK health minister, apparently equivalent to Dr Fauci in his influence, from 2018 to 2021. He had a role in starting the panic, but he left office well before the panic began to subside in mid-2022. On the other hand, Dr Fauci didn't retire from all his public roles until the end of 2022, while his boss, Francis Collins, retired as director of the US National Institutes of Health at the end of 2021. Both Fauci and Collins appear to have been in full agreement on how to handle issues like the lab leak theory, and records have already shown that together, they closely coordinated the COVID strategies of the public health estabilshment.

It's likely that the Overton Window shifted so quickly in the US, if not in the UK, due to the narrow Republican win in the 2022 midterms, though the retirements of both Fauci and Collins, as well as the difficulty Dr Rochelle Walensky had in establishing a credible public profile, also enabled the shift. Thus we have a Republican House leader stating flat out opinions that only weeks before would have been unacceptable:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said Sunday he wants to get to the bottom of one "fundamental question" concerning the ongoing investigation into the origins of the COVID-19: pandemic: Why was Dr. Anthony Fauci trying to hide the narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from China's Wuhan Institution of Virology?

. . . "With this virus, they have told us all kinds of things that turned out to be false," said Jordan. "They told us it didn't come from a lab, now it looks like it sure did because the Department of Energy, FBI, everyone says it came from a lab. They said it wasn't gain-of-function research, but it sure looks like it was. They said it wasn't our tax dollars used at that Wuhan Institute of Virology, yes, they were. Then they told us the vaccinated couldn't get it, couldn't transmit it, there was no such thing as natural immunity, so time and time again they told us things that were not accurate."

In June 2021, Forbes reported,

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci said Wednesday. “All of the things I have spoken about, consistently, from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people.”

Fauci is no stranger to criticism. The nation’s leading infectious disease official was a frequent target of former President Donald Trump, who called Fauci “a disaster” and floated the idea of firing him. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump told reporters in October.

Indeed, Fauci said at the time the idea of firing him and putting him in jail was "totally preposterous".

WATCH: Dr. Anthony Fauci says growing Republican attacks on him are "painfully ridiculous." #MTPDaily

Dr. Fauci: "People want to fire me or put me in jail for what I've done. Mainly, follow the science. ... It's preposterous. Totally preposterous." pic.twitter.com/Koq10aIajF

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 9, 2021

But times are changing. As Ed Morrissey wrote in the Hot Air link I cited yesterday,

[T]he conclusion that COVID-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology sets up an accountability tree that threatened those in power during the pandemic. NIH chief Francis Collins reversed the previous ban on gain-of-function (GOF) research on pathogens over the prophetic warnings against it from the Cambridge Working Group. That decision by Collins in December 2017 allowed funding to flow through the NIH and NIAID headed by Anthony Fauci to groups like the Eco Health Alliance, which funded the Wuhan lab — even while the State Department warned the next year that their Level 4 biosafety practices were “sloppy,” and also predicted disaster as the Cambridge Working Group had in 2014.

. . . [T]he people who made those choices avoided accountability for them, and were protected by news organizations, social-media platforms, and the government’s law enforcement and scientific bureaus by suppressing any questions about it.

What's interesting is that we aren't looking at new facts at all. Much of the information on the Wuhan lab has been available since before the COVID panic began. The question is how and why relevant information was suppressed and public panic was stoked -- and questions on whether people should have been fired, and whether people should still be sent to jail, are a lot less preposterous.

On the other hand, if Trump was saying in October 2022 that he should have fired Fauci, it's worth asking him again why he didn't.

Cat Prohibitionism And The COVID Moral Panic

As I reflected on yesterday's post about the deliberations in the UK over rounding up everyone's pet cat, it suddenly occurred to me that cat prohibitionism isn't a new phenomenon. There's been a long-term movement in the UK that insists that pet cats kill songbirds, which is thought to be something that must be curbed if not halted entirely, but more recently, a body of literature has grown in the US that insists that pet cats are an environmental hazard. At the link,

Free-ranging domestic cats Felis catus, from owned pets to feral cats, impact biodiversity through predation, fear effects, competition, disease and hybridization. Scientific knowledge regarding these impacts has recently increased, making it timely to assess the role of nature conservation legislation in this connection.

. . . Many national authorities around the world are currently required, under international law, to adopt and implement policies aimed at preventing, reducing or eliminating the biodiversity impacts of free-ranging domestic cats, in particular by (a) removing feral and other unowned cats from the landscape to the greatest extent possible and (b) restricting the outdoor access of owned cats.

Factors that can influence or impair the application of these obligations include considerations of feasibility, scientific uncertainty, the interests of cat owners and the (perceived) interests of domestic cats themselves. Even if such factors may to some extent explain why many authorities have hitherto failed to take effective action to address the threats posed by free-ranging domestic cats, from a legal perspective these factors provide little ground for justifying non-compliance with international wildlife law.

Although this particular link dates from February 2020, just as the COVID panic was starting, this link from 2015 says,

Free-ranging domestic cats are an environmental disaster. They may be the most destructive invasive species, the “single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals” according to a study (pdf) co-authored by scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These authors found that domestic cats annually kill from 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals in the U.S.

For radical environmentalists, a world without domestic cats would be a big improvement, the only obstacle to which would be legions of cat ladies that would make an effective solution unfeasible, at least in the short term. But enlightened public policy, just as it can eliminate environmental hazards like SUVs and gas stoves, requires only deliberation and fortitude in its implementation.

Yesterday we saw the testimony of Lord Bethell, a former deputy health minister in Her Majesty's government, that it was at least briefly considered that all pet cats in the UK be rounded up, ostensibly because they might carry COVID, but it's hard to avoid thinking that, COVID or not, it would be a good idea just because. After all, feral cats are an invasive species, but the problem isn't just feral cats, because not all pet cats are indoors-only, not all pet cats are spayed or neutered, and pet cats can create feral cats just like that. So round up all the cats. Check with your local animal control office for the day you must turn yours in, or we'll come for her. Past that date, harboring a cat wird schwer bestraft.

The problem is that cats aren't the only species that thrives around humans, and not just pets. Raccoons. rats, and possums thrive on human trash, as do crows and ravens in suburban areas. Lots of bird species eat seeds and fruit from lawns, gardens, and fields. Mice live in barns. And from a radical environmentalist standpoint, humans themselves are an invasive species. and even if we can't exterminate them all, the theory is that the planet has already far exceeded its capacity. An effective solution to that problem is unfeasible in the short term.

But hey, getting rid of all the cats is a good start. If the authorities can stir up a good panic, the short-term feasibility barrier might be overcome. After all, even the cat ladies are huddled in their homes in fear of the virus, right? This Ed Morrissey piece at Hot Air is a pretty good status check on the current phase of the morning after phase of the COVID moral panic, and it concludes,

The government and the media establishment weren’t interested in science. They were interested in compliance. And they imposed on us exactly what Thompson correctly identifies as an anti-science regime in which priors are never re-evaluated, conclusions never questioned, and the higher functionaries are protected from any criticism or dissent. That isn’t science; it’s a religious cult with white lab coats. And all of these institutions that are supposed to serve the people turned into its enforcement arm instead, a mass of corruption that the media still won’t address.

In some ways, the whole COVID episode was an experiment in feasibility. It sounds as though in the UK, certain feasibilities were entertained that might piggyback on the manufactured COVID crisis, but at least for now, however close the call may have been, they were quietly dropped. I very much doubt that the people who wanted those things done will drop them for good, though.

It Could Have Been A Lot Worse

Via Instapundit,

THIS ERA WILL BE LOOKED BACK ON AS ONE OF MASS HYSTERIA AND OFFICIAL INCOMPETENCE: The U.K. Briefly Considered Killing All Pet Cats Early in the Pandemic.

To be fair, that’s only because it was an era of mass hysteria and official incompetence.

Plus: “The revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight.” Meh. Most of them would have gone along. Many would have bragged about their compliance and shamed those who resisted.

The link is to a story in TIME:

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease.

Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.

. . . Bethell added in the Channel 4 News interview that there was a moment where evidence suggested there was merit in taking the extraordinary measure but it was investigated and ultimately dismissed.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, animals do not appear to play a significant role in spreading COVID-19 to humans, but cases of animals have been documented and most of them were “infected after contact with people with COVID-19.”

I posted not long ago about the hospital ships sent to New York and Los Angeles that, with the field hospitals that were sent as well, remained mostly empty and unused for weeks until they were quietly recalled. I noted that this was during the early days of the panic, stoked by the Imperial College London model of COVID spread that was almost immediately discredited -- but it nevertheless served as the justification for continued lockdowns, closure of houses of worship, shutdown of businesses, schools, playgrounds, beaches, and the rest, for which the talking heads are only now reluctantly and tardily acknowledging there was never medical justification.

Thus it would have been only a very small step for Dr Fauci to have convinced President Trump that indeed, all cats would need to be euthanized, and Drs Fauci, Birks, and assorted other stooges in lab coats would have stood in a line at his shoulder nodding their heads in agreement. Then for all I know, the cat owners would have complained that dogs weren't included in the extermination order, and after days of public kerfuffle, dogs would have had to be rounded up as well, with Dr Fauci insisting we follow the science.

And Trump would have been on board.

This is one reason I'm skeptical of a Trump reboot. He was the one responsible for ordering the hospital ships and endorsing the national lockdowns, and he didn't utter a peep when "15 days to slow the spread" lasted for months. Someone at some point needs to ask him what he should have done in hindsight, and there's no question that even without the benefit of hindsight, Gov DeSantis maintained a much saner public policy perspective as events unrolled. Trump let himself be bullied by Fauci and Birx, two unlikely figures, and my instinct is that this severely diminished his stature in advance of the 2020 election.

Why Are The Biden Lawyers Squirrely?

One thing nobody's covered lately is the strange tendency of Biden lawyers no longer to be Biden lawyers. I've already noted here that Patrick Moore, a former Obama White House counsel who appears to have been the key individual tasked with cleaning out President Biden's Penn Biden Center office and who had quietly notified the Justice Department of the classified documents, was no longer representing Joe Biden following the January 9 revelation of the find. Via that link, his first day at a new job with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office was January 18.

More recently, one of Hunter Biden's high-powered defense attorneys, Joshua Levy, has just as quietly withdrawn from that case.

Levy has removed himself from the case, reportedly due to infighting within Hunter’s legal team and specifically with Abbe Lowell, who was hired in December to defend Hunter and the Biden family from nine congressional probes, including money laundering and wire fraud.

. . . Levy was reportedly discontented with Lowell’s legal strategies and feared that his tactics could flop. In February, Lowell was a part of the effort to send Rudy Giuliani, Tony Bobulinski, and 12 others “litigation hold” letters to preserve “Laptop from Hell” records, a move seen by some critics as a public relations tactic to change the troubling narrative for the Biden family.

The link quotes the New York Times on the chronology of Levy's engagement and details the conflicts within the legal team:

President Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, had recommended Mr. Levy for the job. But Mr. Levy had clashed with Kevin Morris, a lawyer and close adviser to Hunter Biden who has lent him money to pay his back taxes and some other bills, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Mr. Morris and Hunter Biden brought on Mr. Lowell late last year, prompting Mr. Levy’s departure.

In previous posts here, I've listed Levy and Lowell as part of Hunter's legal team, as well as Chris Clark and Keven Morris. With Levy out, that leaves Lowell, Clark, and Morris, but some of the stories I've seen suggest that Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, who appears to be a friend of Hunter as well as a financial angel, is calling the shots. But Morris is an entertainment lawyer, not a criminal defense attorney who specializes in issues like taxes and money laundering, which were Levy's skill set. Clark has been representing Hunter in his tax case with the Delaware US Attorney, but a major problem is the commingling of Biden family funds that's likely to metastasize and affect Joe and his brother Jim, if not other members of the Biden family.

Down the road, it's hard not to be suspicious that Joe continues to rely on Hunter as a key confidant, but the problem is that Hunter is an addict who's been in and out of rehab for more than a decade, and if nothing else, his judgment, especially over his own case and the family's legal exposure, is likely to be seriously impaired. And his case will always be closely linked with Joe's and the rest of the family.

This also leaves aside the separate issue of the doubts within the FBI about what led up to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

According to the Washington Post, the raid took place only after months of debate between the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice. The FBI argued that a request for a full search of the property would have sufficed, according to two senior officials from the bureau.

. . . Most of this we knew already, but not the infighting at the DoJ. So what does this leak to the Washington Post tell us? First off, it probably signals that prosecutors didn’t end up with a usable case even after the raid. Success incentivizes unity; failure incentivizes blame games. The FBI’s two “senior officials” want everyone to know it wasn’t their idea, which wouldn’t be necessary unless the raid and the prosecution has flopped.

I've posted here on what seems to be a new "deep throat" phenomenon whereby unnamed FBI officials brief the Washington Post on chicanery at the White House, just as they did 50 years ago. All I can think is this is a continuation of what we've been seeing since the middle of January, while Biden attorneys are quietly heading for the exits. Meanwhile, the reporters are still working from home.

I'm Not Sure If We're Looking At The Same Church

I note another blog post from Fr Longenecker today, Quo Vadis Traditionalists?, in which he discusses options that might be open to traditionalists who may be frustrated by recent restrictions on the Latin mass. On one hand, I'm not sure of his definition of "traditionalist", and in that light, he's been clear to say he isn't one, which separates him from someone like Fr Zuhlsdorf. But Bp Barron also calls himself a "traditionalist" if by "tradition" one means "adherence to the Church's ecumenical councils, incluiding the Second Vatican Council".

Fr Longenecker proposes avenues for Catholics who disagree with restrictions on the Latin mass:

[W]hat will be the response of those Catholics who are devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass given Rome’s latest round of restrictions? Several things: Some will migrate to the SSPX. Others will seek out other forms of reverent, traditional Catholic worship– an Ordinariate parish, a Byzantine parish or a Novus Ordo that is celebrated in a traditional manner. Others, who are more hard line, will practice subversive obedience. “We can’t have the Latin Mass in the parish church? OK. We’ll move it to the parish fellowship hall, the gym or the Rectory chapel. In fact, what we’re doing is raising the money to build a Latin Mass chapel on the church campus. We’ll worship there instead of the parish church.”

He puts this in a somewhat peculiar context:

What complicates this problem even further–and something which the Englishman [Cardinal] Roche doesn’t seem to understand at all is the entrepreneurial spirit of American conservative Catholicism.

Having been a close observer of the first ten years of an "entrepreneurial" option among those he lists, the North American ordinariate, I've got to say that the reality on the ground isn't what Fr Longenecker suggests it might be. He suggests conservative Catholics might raise money for their own projects, and indeed, that's what we've seen over and over in the ordinariate, with results that have been at best disappointing, but also in some cases like the St Barnabas Omaha ordinariate parish, flagrantly mismanaged. There, its pastor was removed for out-of-control spending that resulted in the need to sell off parish property, but a new administrator has since been faced with continuing divisive issues within the parish. As a visitor put it to me in an e-mail,

To me, those who give their typical diocesan parish a failing grade and then try to get an Ordinariate parish going are like parents who give up on the local school system and try to get a charter school going, or a private alternative . This may benefit the small number who attend, but does nothing to improve local education generally. Perhaps the issue of personal responsibility in the area of education s a political one, but in the case of the Church I think it is moral. Establishing a little enclave of "people like us" is the exact opposite of evangelisation. The financial saga of St Barnabas, Omaha is a depressing example of how “privatisation” is fundamentally the wrong approach, IMHO.

Beyond that, I've got to say that in my case, a thwarted attempt to enter the Church via a parish that failed to join the ordinariate forced me, kicking and screaming, to discover how reverent and worthwhile a diocesan parish can be. What's continued to fascinate me is that the St John's Seminary of the Los Angeles archdiocese, which has been a conspicuous target of conservative agitators who don't live here, continues to provide a steady supply of remarkable priests. Some of them rotate through our parish, either as residents while in seminary or associates after ordination, and then go on to other parishes throughout the archdiocese. What strikes me is that these priests set an example that makes me think the Catholic priesthood has actually become a viable career option for capable, healthy men seeking a worthwhile use of their talents.

Their standard of education, communication, pastoral leadeership, and management style is uniformly high. It's also plain that the level of support and the level of expectation from the archdiocese are both just as high. Our parish programs also involve parishioners from other parishes in the area, and the sense I have is that the level of pastoral care isn't unique to our own parish. Nobody I've gotten to know is disgruntled, and certainly not to the point that anyone is proposing a campaign to build aomething like a Latin mass chapel.

Fr Longenecker deosn't mention what I think are two much more significant "entrepreneurial" phenomena, Ascension Presents and Bp Barron's Word on Fire. Ascension has sponsored two widely available series on YouTube and elsewhere, Bible in a Year and now Catechism in a Year. I'm following the Catechism in a Year, which at the moment has about 110,000 subscribers on YouTube. This is the 1992 St John Paul II Catechism, which is explicitly based on the Second Council.

Word on Fire is, among other things, a high-quality publishing outlet; last year it published an edition of the Second Council documents with commentary by Bp Barron. I bought this and read it. I can only agree with Bp Barron that if people have a problem with the Council, they at least ought to read its documents and commentary. But Word on Fire publishes a great deal else.

One big point I'm taking away from the Catechism in a Year is that salvation is corporate and takes place in the context of the Church. I'm not at all sure that it solves anything to suggest that people set up little enclaves of the like-minded, especially when the US Church is currently displaying remarkable energy. I'm back to the question I used to ask on my old blog, "What problem are we trying to solve?" What problem, for instance, is the North American ordinariate trying to solve if it's attracted so few disaffected Episcopalians after ten years? After all, even Fr Longenecker acknowledges that the point of ordinariates was to allow Anglicsns to preserve their traditions and liturgy in a Catholic context, but now he's suggesting they're actually for disgruntled Catholics.

And of course, we've got to acknowledge that fairly soon after its founding, the US ordinariate extended its target market to Methodists and AME. Isn't it worth asking why this was done and why, in light of a Methodist schism even bigger than the "continuing" movement for Episcopalians, not a single Methodist parish has shown an interest? Instead, the ordinariate is being proposed as a boutique option for Catholics to practice what Fr Longenecker recommends as “subversive obedience”. I'm scratching my head.

Anglicanorum Coetibus And Conservative Wishful Thinking

I've already posted here about the schism dividing the United Methodist Church over same-sex marriage and the fact that Methodists are already fully eligible to enter the Roman Catholic Church as intact parishes with their clergy under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus. This is, at least in theory, an option available to the thousands of UMC parishes that are investigating disaffiliation and joining a more conservative denomination. However, I concluded in that post that this isn't what William James would call a "living option":

[L]et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

For whatever reason, we must conclude that for United Methodists, 7.6 million in 20l0 in the US, a number closely approaching zero has elected to enter the Roman Catholic Church via Anglicanorum coetibus even as individuals since the erection of the North American ordinariate in 2012. As far as anyone is aware, no United Methodist parish has ever attempted to join, or even inquired about joining, the North American ordinariate. Thus in William James's terms, we must come to the conclusion that for any UMC parish determined to disaffiliate, although it is canonically and legally possible, the option "continue as a corporate body affiliated with the UMC or affiliate with the Roman Catholic Church via the North American ordinariate" is not living -- neither is it forced, and neither is it momentous.

This, of course, does not cover the entirely separate option of individual United Methodists, or for that matter baptized Protestants of any other denomination, to enter the Roman Catholic Church via RCIA or other catechetical process -- and many thousands do this each year. For all of them, this is a living option. It's just the ordinariate option that isn't living.

I may be completely unique among commentators in having made the observation that it's even possible for a UMC parish to elect to join an ordinariate. I'm not aware, for instance, of any wave of anticipation at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society that any UMC parish will elect to do this, much less dozens or hundreds. And I'm not aware of anyone asking why this might not be the case. (I'll leave any attempt to answer that myself for another post.)

What does intrigue me is a blog post by Fr Dwight Longenecker, Will the Church of England Split? Fr Longenecker is a Roman Catholic priest, married with a family, who was raised a devout Evangelical but was attracted to Anglicanism, went to seminary in Oxford, and was ordained and served as a priest in the Church of England in the UK. He left the CofE in the wake of its decision to ordain women in 1994. At that time, the Roman Catholic Church created a provision for ordination of married former CofE priests, but its implementation was uneven, and Fr Longenecker's ordination was stalled until the US Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina was able to ordain him via an obscure provision dating from Pius XII and return him to the US as a married priest in his jurisdiction.

Thus Fr Longenercker is in a situation completely outside either the Pastoral Provision or the ordinariates, a married former Anglican Catholic priest who serves in an ordinary diocesan parish. My impression is that although he is somewhat conservative theologically, he isn't closely aligned with traditionalists, though he often expresses sympathy for them. But it seems to me that, as a former priest in the Church of England, his views on a potential split there are naive:

[T]he answer to those in the Church of England who are troubled is close at hand. The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham was established to help Anglicans who treasure their traditions and patrimony to retain their customs and culture while also being re-united into full communion with the Catholic Church. I had mentioned that it was mostly the Evangelicals in the Church of England who were upset. Would Evangelicals be welcome in the Ordinariate or is it only for disaffected Anglo-Catholics? You must ask those who are already in the Ordinariate, but in my opinion there is no reason why good, orthodox Evangelicals should not be able to find a home in the Ordinariate and bring into the Ordinariate the strengths of their own Evangelical-Anglican heritage. No doubt they would have to make some adjustments to some of their theological opinions, but that could be a strong growing point and their Evangelical zeal, their entrepreneurial spirit and their love of Scripture and emphasis on personal conversion would all help to strengthen–not weaken the Ordinariate.

. . . Membership of the Ordinariate solves the problem of Anglican fissiparousness not through further division, but by unity with Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Catholics are supposed to be talking at this time about “enlarging the tent” of the church. The Anglican Ordinariate does just that.

In part, his view is understandable, becahse he's not just a former Anglican, but he's also a former Evangelical, but his own road to Catholicism, via Oxford and Anglo-Catholicism, was idiosyncratic. People who haven't traveled that particular path, which involved the need to resolve not one but several spiritual options in sequence that were living, forced, and momentous, will see a single option, "remain a low-church Anglican despite my discomfort, or become a newbie Catholic despite my even greater discomfort", as neither living, forced, nor momentous.

The actual state of the ordinariates as they currently exist isn't an encouraging factor, either. In general, conservatives tend to see the ordinariates as a good idea for everyone else, just like conservatives often see military service as a good thing for people in general, just not for themselves. Clearly Fr Longenecker never seriously considered reincardination into the North American ordinariate for himself, for instance; there were never, and still aren't, realistic full-time career opportunites in his part of the country (and indeed nearly anywhere else).

Despite a couple of well-publcized conversions of Church of England bishops to Catholicism and joining the UK ordinariate after retirement, no ordinariate parishes there own any property, and at best, membership numbers are stagnant. Someone -- significantly, no one currently active in the UK ordinariate -- is available to undertake the task Fr Lengenecker proposes of evangelizing low-church Anglicans and overcoming their instinctive distrust of Catholicism, when the predominant strain within all the ordinariates tends toward a somewhat dilettantish boutique Anglican Papalism.

Unfortunately, to comment on Fr Longenecker'ss blog, you have to be a registered financial donor, and our charitable budget is dominated by the need to support causes much closer to home. Otherwise, I wish I could have engaged Fr Longenecker more closely in this discussion by commenting directly on his blog. If anyone is in a position to make Fr Longenecker aware of this post, I'd welcome the opportunity to hear his views.