Monday ISM Net Round Up

This week the news of the Independent Sacramental Movement is quite varied.

In my regular reads:

Let me lead off with Finding Grace in Ordinary Time’s post on Silence and Honoring the Mystery in Our Lives, an Augustinian’s very Benedictine reminder to all of us who presume to write about spirituality.

At Rumney Marsh Ruminations, Bishop David seconds the sentiment in ‘Tis the Season.

Bože! engages in a dialogue in An Interesting Consideration of Independent Catholicism.

On the left-hand side of the house, the approaching US election and the 50^th anniversary of Vatican II created all kinds of news. 

Queering the Church gives us QueerTheology, Spirituality: An “Old Catholic” Perspective.

The Washington Post discovers Roman Catholic Women Priests, a group whose choice of name remains controversial to many in the Independent Sacramental Movement since it seems to place Old Catholic orders, which have been conferred on women for 75 years, in the position of serving as a vehicle for internal Roman Catholic advocacy.

In a sign of how the ISM has entered the cultural mainstream, The Huffington Post published An Open Letter From the Heart on Marriage Equality by The Rev. Daniel C. Storrs, an ISM priest who blogs at The Body is Many.

Finally, I ran across the blog Priesty and The Witch, which I had entirely missed, via an entry in which co-author Priesty tells of his journey to the ISM, a story which may sound familiar to many of you.

On the more traditional side of things:

Archbishop Jerome Lloyd’s latest pastoral letter argues that the problems of conciliarism set in at Vatican I and we should remember our debt to Archbishop Mathew.

Several blogs carried news of a new Society of St. Pius X of the Strict Observance, which history tells us will likely become one more source of orders for the ISM in ways its founders never imagined.  There was also news of the SSPX's Bishop Williamson, a man who can hold his own with the most colorful vagantes of a century ago.

 And, from the Old Catholic way-back machine:

The Principality of San Luigi offers profiles of the founder of the Order of Antioch, Archbishop Frederick Ebenezer John Lloyd and of The Rev’d James Yorke Batley.

At the same site, there is a notice of a new book on Joseph-René Vilatte.

Finally, Independent Catholic Church offers some vintage photos and video from Brazil on Dom Salomão Ferraz, who was consecrated by Carlos Duarte Costa but participated in Vatican II after returning to the Roman Catholic Church.  (I still haven’t seen a good third-party historical source explaining this.)

I am fairly confident there is something in this news mix for everyone.

Monday ISM Net Round Up

It was a busy week in the news.

From my regular reads, we have:

The Vagrant Vicar takes on Baptists in Disguise and Apostolic Succession.
 
At Priestcraft, A word from Dorothy Maclean
 
At Bože!, Icon Sketching.
 
At Carissimi, some background on The Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

Around the wider internet, I ran across:

A piece from Ohio.com about the new presiding bishop of the American Catholic Church.
 
A sermon on this Sunday’s readings from St. Christopher’s Old Catholic Church.
 
At Anarchist Reverend, a piece about Catholicism and Anarchy from an Old Catholic point of view.
 
A piece from Catholic Culture about the possible expulsion of Bishop Williamson from the SSPX.  (I add this because I have a pool with some friends on how long it will be before “Williamson” starts turning up with the names Thuc, Milingo, and Duarte Costa in lists of ISM succession.)

Finally, a reminder about the dangers of getting too high on one’s high horse about the failings of the Roman Catholic Church:

Phony Baloney Catholic Bishop, Gets 330 Years

Independent Sacramental Movement Family Reunion 2013

Joseph René Vilatte.

Yesterday tentative dates were announced for an Independent Sacramental Movement Family Reunion, which dovetails nicely with the post from a couple weeks ago on finding fellowship in the ISM. 

Some of us from fairly diverse corners of the movement gave the idea of creating some unstructured space to get to know one another a test run over my ordination weekend and found we liked it.  John Plummer, known to many of you as the popularizer of the term ISM, suggested that we try it on a bigger scale.

You'll find full information on an invitation page on Facebook. 

You might think of the proposed weekend as being closer to Burning Man than to a church convention.  There will be no central organization or official events.  People are invited to come to Asheville, North Carolina over the July 4 weekend and organize worship, social time, and interest groups either before hand or on the spur of the moment.  The purpose is simply to strengthen the bonds of fellowship, not to conduct business or make grand proposals.

Here's a bit more information from the Facebook page:

Where:  Asheville, North Carolina
When: Friday, July 5, - Monday, July 8, 2013 -- Or thereabouts. Come and go as you wish!


* The Independent Sacramental Movement (or Independent Catholicism, Old Catholicism, Autocephalous/Non-canonical Orthodoxy, Free Sacramentalism, Alternative Anglicanism, the world of the Wandering Bishops, etc.) is a big, complicated, and sometimes dysfunctional family – and we love it! Despite our considerable differences, we are related to each other, sharing a history and a devotion to sacramental practice. Some of us thought it would be fun to vacation in the same place with the intent of hanging out together. The best opportunities for support and collaboration often arise from friendship, regardless of jurisdictional membership or theology.

Evangelism: Looking out the Window Versus in the Mirror

And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."

-Matthew 9:35-8

It’s a truism in business that your best new customers are your old customers—that it is easier to capture existing consumers in a particular niche than to entice new people into a particular market.  It is why we see so much business news on market share.

We may have taken this a bit too much to heart in the Independent Sacramental Movement.  We often become so focused on building our share in the existing market, that we may overlook the majority of people around us who are waiting for the good news.  We focus so intently upon how to improve our share of progressive former Roman Catholics, Continuing Anglicans, Western Orthodox, or a particular group marginalized in the religious mainstream—all-too-often a group to which we ourselves also belong--that we forget there’s a big world of people out there who have never experienced a relationship with Jesus Christ or the grace of the sacraments.  We often become so inwardly focused that we more closely resemble archaic hobbyists than we do representatives of a kingdom that is not of this world.  This also leads to the ugliness of recruiting clergy and laity from other bodies whose only fault is that they are not our own group.  At its worst, this comes to look about as dignified as Scottish clans conducting cattle raids, minus the blue body paint. 

We often pay a disproportionate amount of attention to those within the fold and too little to those outside of it.  We worry that there is some new cleric or community down the road that will be a threat to our own group or some group halfway across the continent that is too similar to our own.  However, if we look beyond those who are already inside the fold and stretch ourselves beyond the assumptions of a fixed sum game, things may begin to look quite different.

Sarabites, Schisms, and Finding Fellowship in the ISM

The third and worst kind of monks is that of the Sarabites, who have not been tried under any Rule nor schooled by an experienced master, as gold is proved in the furnace, but soft as is lead and still in their works cleaving to the world, are known to lie to God by their tonsure. These in twos or threes, or more frequently singly, are shut up, without a shepherd; not in our Lord's fold, but in their own. The pleasure of carrying out their particular desires is their law, and whatever they dream of or choose this they call holy; but what they like not, that they account unlawful.

These words from the prologue of the Rule of St. Benedict might serve as a compendium of the charges and dismissals most often laid against those of us who are members of the ISM, sometimes with justice, sometimes from guilt by association, and, most often, with no more justice than they can be laid against the members of any other religious body.

A plethora of preening prelates.

Though the days of solo operators with grand titles and grander aspirations are fading, a certain ambivalence about authority and accountability remains.  Many of us have had unpleasant experiences of the exercise of authority.  Some look for greater formal union to bring order out of chaos and do their best to distance themselves from colorful figures past and present.  Others look to the example of Christian Anarchism and advocate radical autonomy.

Whatever the approach, accountability remains a problem.  To whom are we accountable beyond ourselves or our small communities, not only in terms of doctrine, but in discipline and basic decency?

As I began to think about public ministry, one of my consecrators jokingly asked whether it wouldn’t be wise to make it clear that Facebook binds me in the bonds of charity and gossip with a number of other bishops and actually I think there is something to that.  When asked about the latest scheme of union, one of my other consecrators, with whom I speak at least once a week, is fond of saying, “Why don’t we all just get together and pray and get to know each other and see what happens?”  (He’s a far smarter fellow than I let on that he is.) 

Mass Media: Using Social Media to Pray

St. Isidore of Seville, Patron Saint of the Internet.

In a movement where bodies are often small and dispersed, technology often comes to the fore in bridging distances and building partnerships.  There are numerous blogs and Facebook groups in addition to pan-ISM directory sites such as the Independent Sacramental Movement Database. There are numerous Flickr galleries and YouTube videos showing off our communities.  (We have probably all heard the joke that no ISM ordination is valid until pictures of it are posted on the internet.)

All of these are important, but I’ve wondered for some time how we can use technology as a resource for prayer and building community, as a way not only to talk about how we should pray or to show pictures of our communities in worship—not that we don’t all love seeing those—but to use social media to support and create worshipping communities.

The two best examples I’ve found come, somewhat ironically, from the more traditional end of the worship spectrum.

The first is the streaming mass from Msgr Jerome Lloyd, OSJV on UStream.  Here the viewer, will find a traditional Mass with sermon streamed daily.  For those cut off from physical community, this apostolate is a godsend. 

The second ministry I recommend is without video, but is a bit more interactive.  Fr. Michael Shirk of the Independent Catholic Christian Church coordinates that body’s Divine Infant King Apostolate for Traditional Liturgy.  Every Tuesday at 10:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, this body offers Vespers and Compline via conference call according to the Sarum Use.  A Yahoo group offers updates on service times as well as a documents section where the liturgies can be downloaded in a handy booklet format.

If you have any other examples of how people in the ISM are using technology to foster prayer and build community, drop me a line at saintrafes@gmail.com.

St. Alphonsus Liguori: A Model for the Independent Sacramental Movement?

Today is the feast of St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, bishop, doctor, confessor, founder of the Redemptorists, hammer of rigorists, and dispenser of practical spiritual advice. I owe my appreciation of this great saint to one of my dear friends and much of what I have to say here are probably things I've heard him say with a couple of bits thrown in from my time in the monastery.

The Independent Sacramental Movement tends to take a cautious approach toward the saints who come after Trent, especially the theologians, and perhaps rightly so.  It is reasonable to assume that a saint who fought for the rights of the Holy See against more Gallican visions of the church might take a rather dim view of what we do and St. Alphonsus was also an unrelenting foe of the Jansenism, which, directly or otherwise, provided many of us with our orders.  Even so, the life of St. Alphonsus provides much that is useful for those attempting to be the church in a new way.

St. Alphonsus lived most of his life against the backdrop of 18th Century Naples, which was as rough a place as there was to be found in Europe at the time. The clergy were known for their laxity and the people for their greater laxity. In response to this general climate, an extreme form of rigorism found a large following among many of the clergy and pious laity, a situation not dissimilar from some contemporary trends in the American religious landscape.

The ISM and the Future Beyond Inclusion

Where does it all go from here?

This is the third of three pieces on the Independent Sacramental Movement, Inclusion, and the future.  Part I, Saltwater or Sanctification, ran on last Wednesday and Part II, Towards a Taxonomy of the ISM ran last Friday.

Having other, larger, better-resourced religious bodies accepting the ordination of the divorced, women, LGBT people, and members of other marginalized groups creates a particular crisis for the ISM.  Independent sacramental bodies have always drawn heavily from these groups, who now have a variety of choices among churches and denominations that, in some cases, are actively recruiting them.  In a world where Presbyterians now ordain LGBT candidates and the Episcopal Church has become increasingly open to the ministry of transgendered people, what is the distinctive purpose of the ISM beyond ministry to the marginalized?

The ISM in the US has historically had a hard time attracting lay people, since the impediments to lay membership in any religious body are significantly fewer than those for candidates for holy orders. The ISM was always heavily peopled by those who found what they believed to be their calling to holy orders denied elsewhere.  To point out the elephant in the room, it is true that a number of these were unstable or even unscrupulous individuals, who saddled the movement with a legacy of scandal and derision.  That’s hardly everyone or even anything approaching a plurality, but that legacy rests uneasily among us to this day.

So what is the purpose of the ISM other than granting orders to those denied them elsewhere and how will different segments of the movement try to face the future?  There seem to be a variety of responses, three of which I find to be worth examining in some detail from among the five types of groups I sketched out in Friday's Towards a Taxonomy of the Independent Sacramental Movement.

Towards a Taxonomy of the Independent Sacramental Movement

The Bishops of what would become the Liberal Catholic Church.

As someone who has watched the Independent Sacramental Movement off and on for two decades, it seems that developments of the last several years have fundamentally changed the movement.  What we see emerging is very different than the world which was as much created as described by Peter Anson in his book, Bishops at Large, whose fiftieth anniversary of publication will come next year.

Anson, a gifted writer with an acid tongue, introduced the wider public to the episcopus vagans with his colorful accounts of those in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries who sought to found churches with valid orders in the apostolic succession.  Anson painted, sometimes accurately and sometimes theatrically, a picture of a demimonde inhabited by prelates with strange titles given to schism and ever-shifting alliances.  Whatever the truth of that picture, the image of the vagante was set in the wider culture as one who called himself a patriarch, had his cathedral in a spare bedroom, and whose only followers were his ordinands, who would, no doubt, soon be bishops, archbishops, and metropolitans in their own right and rite.

In what has probably been the most important and widely-read book on the topic since Anson, John Plummer gave us a picture of a world much changed in his 2005 book, The Many Paths of the IndependentSacramental Movement, which took a much more sympathetic and systematic approach to describing the descendants of those ordained by Anson’s bishops as well as new movements that have emerged in the intervening years.  Looking over the internet in the seven years since Plummer’s book, several distinct families seem to be coalescing within the ISM, though, given the nature of the beast, many groups bridge or defy these categories.

Saltwater or Sanctification: Inclusion, Relevance, and the Good News

When I was in cause marketing, we used to talk about the difference between emphasizing features and emphasizing benefits in explaining a new program or initiative.  If I applied this analogy to selling a car, saying, “This car has antilock brakes, side-curtain airbags, and the latest collision sensors,” I would be selling features.  Saying “This is the safest car we have for taking your kids to school,” would be selling benefits. 

Too often I think that those of us in the Independent Sacramental Movement (ISM) try to sell our churches’ carefully thought-out features when people actually want to know about basic benefits.  When someone walks through the door, we say, “The ordination process is open to women and LGBT people; we support the Millennium Development Goals; and we practice open table communion” when it might be more effective to say, “Welcome!  We’re so glad you’re here today.”

This brings me to a second dichotomy: the important difference between necessary and sufficient conditions.  A “necessary” condition is one which is required for something to happen.  Electricity is necessary to light an incandescent bulb.  A “sufficient” condition is one which in and of itself brings a thing about.  For the electricity to light the bulb, one still needs wires, a filament, and other things.  Inclusion to my mind is a necessary condition to be the Body of Christ, but it is not sufficient.  There has to be more.  People are coming looking for something in particular.  Certainly, they want a place where they are welcome, as they do in a restaurant, gym, or school, but, as with those other establishments, the person who comes through the door is looking to have a certain need met, even though they might not be quite certain what it is.

What is this need?  Clearly, I’m skeptical that it is inclusion or political relevance.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to spend most of my working life as a human rights advocate.  I protest and politick at the drop of a hat, but it’s not what I go to church for.  On the contrary, I would say that it is the faith nurtured in the church that strengthens my commitment to peace and justice.  Passionate as I am about my faith, church is not at the top of the list of places I would go to try to accomplish something concrete in the 21^st century.