I read this in John Bruce’s blog:
Abp Hewpworth will visit and celebrate mass at St Mary of the Angels at 7:00 PM Epiphany Day, Friday, January 6, 2017, not Epiphany Sunday as I had previously posted. (I assumed!!) Anyone for whom this is convenient is, of course, invited. I will attend and try to get a photo, though probably not outside the church.
Unless Rome has secretly made him Titular Archbishop of Titipu sometime in the last couple of years, what surprises me is not that he is visiting a priest who wants him as his bishop. What is incoherent is that the event is being encouraged by a Roman Catholic convert and apologist who is more or less opposed to the Ordinariates on the pretext of their not being Catholic enough!
If he is not a Roman Catholic Titular Archbishop, I am wondering what he is Archbishop of. Not the TAC, because their man is Archbishop Shane Jantzen. I have not heard of a an alternative TAC being founded to replace the old one, even less of the elusive Patrimony of the Primate.
The mind boggles. Perhaps we will read soon about my crankiness. It takes all sorts – or There’s now’t so queer as folk, as we say in my part of the world.
PS. I hesitated about posting on this subject, but I saw my statistics were a little on the low side. This one should add a little pizzaz!
The Blue Flower 
There are many Pooh-bahs out there, father. Frauds with grandiose titles, and claims to bogus sees (in partibus), and preying on the vulnerable, gullible and elderly. I am supremely confident that they’re all damned to hell.
You can assume that I wrote my comments tongue-in-cheek. People say what they want, and time is always the judge – and the man with the big comic executioner’s axe and the “little list” of those who won’t be missed. Please note that I am not accusing +Hepworth of claiming to be anything, merely satirising the little posting about his visiting a church in the USA. I don’t know about those people going to hell – rather than waking up to the reality when the dream has evaporated. I don’t think it will come to anything other than a little group seeking legitimacy from outside itself.
Sadly, the dream doesn’t evaporate for some, father. I can well imagine some “fighting the good fight” till they breathe their last, forgotten by relatives and shunned by former friends who tried to talk them out of it.
It’s an interesting question, isn’t it. Do these people tell lies deliberately, or are they just deceived by subconscious psychological yearnings? Most of the “ordained” ones, who actually turn out to comprise the clergy and laity of these sects, appear to be drop-outs, renegades, failures and other undesirables who either couldn’t pass the psychology examinations of the mainstream seminaries, or were kicked out for some misdemeanor, or renounced respectability to live the “clerical” life with baggage, or a few skeletons tucked away that they’d rather not came to light. There might be a…I was going to say handful but that’s really the sum total of the wretched lot. There might be one, perhaps two, of such people who are in good faith; a latter day Lotho Sackville-Baggins deep in, but not at the bottom, of the lies but I’m afraid I have no tolerance for even them.
In the unlikely event that one of them is reading this, in charity I would advise him (or her) to just give up playing at religion.
The dream evaporated for me and I joined the TAC, and then the ACC when I was”orphaned” as a priest.
I can’t get a handle on Archbishop Hepworth’s problem. It might be something like narcissistic personality disorder, but that would have to be properly and scientifically studied by a professional. I am at a loss to understand.
It’s a good question. What do the psychology examinations of the mainstream seminaries need to screen out? Certainly the range of personality disorders and probably Aspergers too. A priesthood modelled on corporate management is easy to control, but I would not want to go to their churches as a layman! You can also stipulate that the Church should have such a “corporate” priesthood and stay away from the Church yourself. Then why bother with the Church at all?
I have noticed a couple of American bishops who attracted my sympathy though their humble attitude. I see no evidence of their doing anything other than live as laymen, academics but with nothing clerical about them. I have no contact with the “vagantes” in France: Gallicans, Liberal Catholics, etc. They just don’t attract me. There is the Celtic Orthodox Church in Brittany where the bishop and priests live a genuinely monastic life. I must visit them one day, since I want to go and live in Brittany.
I see it less dramatically than you do, but I am quite jaded and have “read the book, seen the film and been there”.
The question of legitimacy is an interesting one too. It seems strange that these people have renounced the mainstream churches, for whatever reason you like: Babylon the Great, the general apostasy, liturgical reforms, Bible-in-basic-English, &c, &c. And yet they still rely, desperately it must be said, on the mainstream churches for a sense of belonging. Whether that is to do with sheer numbers or the fact that these small sects cannot boast of a decent theologian or liturgist, who knows. But it does betray, rather like Anglo-Papalists, a kind of dissonence.
This is why, a long time ago, I mentioned two Americans who saw through the charade. Their names are John Plummer and John Treat who was once a Cistercian monk in simple vows. They are both on Facebook, have bought houses and achieved academically and get on with life. They probably celebrate Mass, like I do, and have a routine for their prayers and Office. But there are no titles or trappings. I have a lot of esteem for these two gentlemen.
In a certain way, the trappings have been exchanged by the studies these two men have done and the books they have written. They have been an inspiration to me. Another inspiration for me has been Fr Charles de Foucauld, the “hard bastard” from the French Army who converted to Christianity and no monastic life, even with the Trappists, was tough enough for him. He went to the Algerian desert and set up his hermitage, and did not make one single convert among the Muslims. Finally he was shot by jihadists in 1916. What a waste of a life! But not for God…
It’s a sad story. +Hepworth was the rather obscure bishop of a small but vibrant body of traditionalist Anglicans in Australia with real congregations of real people in various parts of that country. Almost by accident he became primate of TAC (it was a peculiar mixture of circumstances and canons not adequate to deal with them) and almost immediately began to claim authority beyond what the job really entailed. Now, after all the confusion engendered by the Ordinariates and by misunderstanding of what they actually were intended to be, he finds himself an archbishop without a church (unconnected with, but very much like the kind of unattached bishops to which Patrick refers) with some kind of shady unofficial oversight of one church on an altogether different continent. Meanwhile that church (St. Mary of the Angels in Hollywood), once Episcopal, then ACC, and then ACA, after a series of angry conflicts and lawsuits, finds itself adrift, without official connection to any bishop, and being angrily defended by a Roman Catholic layman whose outlook would seem to be logically inconsistent with the parish’s very existence. Sad story: isolated parish, isolated bishop, blogger who has rejected both, and a history of anarchic wrangling. Tears seem the most appropriate response.
Aahhh, But lest anyone forgets :
St Mary’s purportedly has some money left.
Go figure …………