The Twelve Steps for Recovering Anglicans were written in Lent 1994 and had a small private circulation at that time. They are a fiction, inasmuch as no organization called Anglicans Anonymous exists. They are a parody of the Alcoholics Anonymous "12 Steps" and were intended to tell the story of Catholic ex-Anglicans in a less-than-serious way, using the quasi-evangelical and quasi-therapeutic language of AA (and I don't mean to find fault with that language, inasmuch as it works for AA). When the piece was done, it seemed more serious than I had intended.

The traditionalist Anglican diaspora has continued to flow in at least three directions: (1) "continuing churches" (i.e., schismatic and therefore discontinuous); (2) Eastern Orthodoxy; and of course (3) Roman Catholicism, especially under a program that used to be called the "pastoral provision." Ultimately I am only telling my story in terms of my exodus to Catholicism. (Every Anglican is ultimately on his own. The A in Anglican is for Autonomy—which usually leads to Autocephaly.)

Let me explain for non-Anglican readers the array of church organizations mentioned here.

The Episcopal Synod of America (ex "Evangelical and Catholic Mission," now "Forward in Faith") was at its core a tiny group of diocesan bishops (plus a larger group of retired bishops) promising pastoral care to persons inside and outside of their dioceses resisting female ordination; these bishops were antagonistic towards liturgical traditionalists.

The Prayer Book Society (ex "Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer" was primarily a lobby to General Convention advocating the right to continue the use of un-renewed Anglican liturgies; many of its supporters were indifferent to the ordination issue.

The "national church" was a curious bureaucracy superintending an ecclesial polity whose form parodied that of the United States' federal government. It was headquartered at 815 Second Avenue, New York City, and was funded (more or less) by the vast endowment of Trinity Church on Wall Street. The "primate" of the Episcopal Church, called the "Presiding Bishop," was the figurehead of this "national church," and had a penthouse atop the 815 building. But he had no diocese and hence was, in a sense, an episcopus vagans.

Non-Anglican readers need to know that "scripture, tradition, and reason" have been taken as the three unified and unifying supports of Anglican teaching—however these terms are defined, and even the definition of "scripture" is up for grabs. Here one must cite Richard Hooker (1554-1600) as the historic Doctor of Anglicanism. And here is the doctrinal root of the triangulation pathology: always two against a third.
Readers also need to know that the Prayer Book is the standard liturgical text used by the Episcopal Church. The same text, more or less, was used for four centuries until subjected to deforming revisions in 1976. They should further know that "High Church" or catholic-minded Anglicans have maintained the claim of a continuous apostolic succession in the episcopate and priesthood. Leo XIII formally rejected this claim in 1896, and the rejection remains in force and has recently been reasserted.

The seminary mentioned is Nashotah House, which was founded in Wisconsin in 1842 as a quasi-monastic mission to the Indians, and which later issued an honorary doctorate to the Orthodox Saint Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, only to revoke it. The seminary had always been an "Anglo-Catholic" enclave, and in the late 1980's the E.S.A. bishops were waging partisan battle to regain control of it. The atmosphere of controversy replicated that of earlier eras of Anglo-Catholic controversy, especially the one leading up to the 1908 departures, well described in a book by Edward Hawks, William McGarvey and the Open Pulpit: An Intimate History of a Celibate Movement in the Episcopal Church and of its Collapse, 1870-1908, published in 1935. (The author was one of two Nashotah professors who enjoyed remarkable international careers in the Catholic Church after their departure from the Episcopal Church and were elevated to the rank of monsignor. The other professor was F. Scott Fitzgerald's friend Sigourney Fay.) Cycles of addictive behavior persist in part because the addict has no awareness of his own history.

Of late, and long since the time of my experience with this Protestant denomination, a few traditionalist Episcopalian bishops have undertaken a grand scheme to withdraw their dioceses from the Episcopal Church. As far as I can see, this project has only resulted in massive litigation—in a Protestant denomination that was already the most litigious of them all. And it only took them about thirty years, counting back to 1976, the year that female ordination was legalized and the traditional liturgy was scrapped.

I must add that the moral issue of homosexuality remains a curious fixation in Anglican controversies, as though the consecration of openly homosexual bishops or "same sex marriage" constituted grounds for schism when there were already so many fundamentally ecclesiological issues at stake. And so homosexual identity appears below in my list of the axes of Anglican triangulation.

I've revised the text very slightly for clarity. My phraseology of "abusers" and "victims" is in keeping with the therapeutic cast of the original 12 Steps. One could just as well think in terms of Hobbes' definition of the "state of nature": the perpetual war of all against all. "Triangulation" means that there is no stability in any configuration of the parties to the controversies; each party is always reaching out to one of the other parties to isolate the remaining party, and alliances are constantly shifting. The triangle never rests on one side for long. Episcopalian bishops have limited powers and can only run their dioceses via triangulation. In terms of the "drama triangle," he who pretends to be your rescuer today will be your abuser tomorrow, and then portray himself the day after as your victim—to the third party with whom he intends to collude against you.
Quotation marks proliferate because of the problematic nature of the language used by factions to identify themselves and to describe their own positions.

I make no claim for the ultimate importance of this late-twentieth-century episode in the history of sectarian controversy. Nevertheless the Episcopal Church was a good place for me to study the pathology of liberal/conservative identity wars.

............................................................. TJJ, January 2010

THE TWELVE STEPS for RECOVERING ANGLICANS

[ from Lent 1994 ]

1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction to Ecclesiastical Codependency—a perpetual triangulation (not merely a vicious circle) as though of two abusers against one victim:

Anglo-Catholic (traditionalist) vs.
Evangelical (scripturalist) vs.
Liberal (rationalist)

Anglo-Papalist Catholic (the "Romanizer") vs.
Prayer Book Catholic (the Thirty-Nine Articles diehard) vs.
Corporatist Liberal Catholic (the Organization Man)

Episcopal Synod of America (mostly clergy against women's ordination) vs.
Prayer Book Society (parishes for the old liturgy) vs.
General Convention and "National Church" bureaucracy

Seminary faculty and students vs.
Seminary administration vs.
Seminary trustees

The Bishop vs.
The Rector vs.
The Vestry

Out-of-the-closet homosexuals vs.
In-the-closet homosexuals vs.
Heterosexuals

Therefore we admitted that we were powerless over Anglicanism and the course of events

—within the Episcopal Church
—within the traditionalist organizations
—within the seminary
—within the parish

...powerless, that is, over our history, our past which was determining our present...

And that we were addicted to our own alienation from everything outside Anglicanism, as well as from every group inside it other than the one we identified with, and from the people on our own "side"...

And that our lives as Anglican aliens had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Not an institution, but God. Only if it was His will.

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church understands Him.

4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, regarding our participation in the vicious triangles.

5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to our confessors the exact nature of our wrongs: in particular, that we had misled ourselves and others into thinking

—that there was a future for "orthodox Anglicanism" within the Episcopal Church, or

—that the Episcopal Synod of America could break free of the Episcopal Church, or

—that Episcopal Synod of America bishops were looking out for us, or

—that our local liberal bishop was a gentleman and we could work with him, or

—that any of us would ever act in true solidarity with the rest on our "side," or

—that traditionalist organizations were not as intrinsically fraudulent as the Episcopal Church's own bureaucracy, or

—that it was possible to be orthodox within a heretical Church.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove our defects of character, our old Anglican habits:

—thinking that the scandal of our enemies today will lead to our vindication tomorrow

—thinking that the next crisis will be the decisive one

—forgetting everything that had ever happened to us and our institutions, including the fact that no Episcopalian crisis has ever settled anything

—believing, just like the Pelagian Existentialist liberals themselves, that we can make our own reality

—soothing our alienation by thinking we were too special to belong to any other religion or any other ecclesiastical party within our religion

—using Anglo-Catholicism as an excuse for evading the claims of the Catholic Church and the Papacy.

7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings, even at the cost of removing us from the Episcopal Church.

8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed by raising false expectations, and became willing to make amends.

9. We made direct amends, wherever possible, by counseling these persons to leave Anglicanism too, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. We continued to take personal inventory; and whenever we relapsed, whether by directly reinvolving ourselves in old quarrels or simply by remaining curious about ongoing struggles in the site of our former torments, we promptly admitted it and repented.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God as only the Holy Catholic Church knows Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us, and for the grace to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of cooperative grace moving us along these steps, we tried to carry this message to Anglicans, and to practice authentic Catholic principles in all our affairs.

A HISTORICAL POSTSCRIPT

(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.)

* * * * * * * *

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.

(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.)