(Archbishop Runcie in silver blue mitre and Bishop Leonard in gold mitre at the Royal Wedding in 1981. In time I would meet both of them.)
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IF someone were writing a doctoral dissertation on Anglican traditionalists of the late twentieth century and their exodus to Rome, I suppose he or she might wonder why I make the "resignation" of Graham Leonard from the Church of England the decisive point.
He was a man of prudence in the full sense of the word, and must have seen clearly the temporizing and self-excusing tendency of the traditionalist forces within the American church. I was in the room (nave of the Church of the Good Shepherd Rosemont) when a meeting was convened at the end of a theological conference, with Leonard as chairman following Robert's Rules—a meeting apparently planned with the goal of setting up a separate traditionalist province. Apparently. Of those who attended and are still alive and remember this occasion, probably none of them wants it remembered and none of them would give a verifiable report on who arranged the meeting and what outcome was really intended. (I recall sitting next to a lady named Peggy Heath, who seemed to be at the center of many traditionalist intrigues, but she died in 2003 and cannot testify.) Leonard saw immediately that there was no consensus and no will to undertake meaningful action, and he quickly ended the meeting.
He was a man of prudence in the full sense of the word, and must have seen clearly the temporizing and self-excusing tendency of the traditionalist forces within the American church. I was in the room (nave of the Church of the Good Shepherd Rosemont) when a meeting was convened at the end of a theological conference, with Leonard as chairman following Robert's Rules—a meeting apparently planned with the goal of setting up a separate traditionalist province. Apparently. Of those who attended and are still alive and remember this occasion, probably none of them wants it remembered and none of them would give a verifiable report on who arranged the meeting and what outcome was really intended. (I recall sitting next to a lady named Peggy Heath, who seemed to be at the center of many traditionalist intrigues, but she died in 2003 and cannot testify.) Leonard saw immediately that there was no consensus and no will to undertake meaningful action, and he quickly ended the meeting.
(CHANCEL of the Parish of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, Pennsylvania, where Bishop Leonard chaired the meeting in 1987.)
This was, I believe, in May 1987, after Leonard flew into the Diocese of Oklahoma to administer confirmation at a "dissident parish" that the Evangelical & Catholic Mission caucus of bishops wouldn't touch. That was in October 1986. The ECM bishops were embarrassed by his action. But he kept trying to corral this flock of geese anyway, and appeared as guest of honor at the Fort Worth Synod in June 1989, when the ECM rechristened itself the "Episcopal Synod of America" and tried to give the impression that the new entity was a separate jurisdiction within the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. (ECUSA). "Tried to give the impression," I say, while denying that any concrete action had been taken. Of course none had been taken. But they wanted you to think that it had, and even if it was nothing, that someday this nothing would turn into something. Such was life under the traditionalist bishops, and under the rectors being groomed to succeed them as bishops, who were always involved in ultimately fruitless negotiations with ECUSA officials.
(The Fort Worth Synod, 1989)Every time Leonard came to America, he was giving the traditionalists in ECUSA another chance.
As Bishop of London and third-ranking prelate in the C of E, he was the natural leader of the traditionalist movement throughout the Anglican communion, insofar as it was a movement, and insofar as it was capable of being led. The C of E was the mother church and figuratively the mother ship. When the C of E implemented female ordination in stages, starting with legalization by the Church's Synod in November 1992 (39 to 13 in the House of Bishops, 176 to 74 in the House of Clergy, and 169 to 82 in the House of Laity), proceeding through the ordination of "transitional" female deacons in 1993 and finally to the priestly ordination of these deacons in March 1994... the mother ship had sunk. It was time to leave. Communion was broken. The record of traditionalist bishops and lower clergy remaining in ECUSA after that date in word and deed—ineffectiveness, compromise, the continual raising of false expectations, and their general tergiversation—proves the point.
It's reported that Leonard was conditionally reordained in Cardinal Hume's personal chapel in April 1994. (The pretext for the sub conditione was the involvement of an Old Catholic bishop in his consecration in 1964.) He had already retired as Bishop of London in 1991. Inasmuch as he believed in the validity of his previous ministry as an Anglican, he apparently never made a formal renunciation or resignation of that ministry. His transition to Catholicism consisted of a formal submission to the Holy See. In any event, he already knew where he was going in December 1992.
By Easter 1993 it was clear to me where I was going.
(Parish of All Saints Ashmont, Boston, where I was in 1993 at Easter. This Ralph Adams Cram edifice is equipped with Stations of the Cross, but only ten of them. Evidently the other four could not be justified from scriptural grounds. I hold no fondness for the memory of these Anglo-Catholic "shrine parishes," and I would warn the recovering Anglican against returning to the scenes of his addiction.)