Episcopalians in New Mexico have a problem on their hands. Their bishop, Jeffrey Steenson, pulled a disappearing act on them last weekend. Bishops don't usually do this, especially just before Christmas.
Having lived in New Mexico just before moving here, I have been following Bishop Steenson ever since he was elected in October 2004. A candidate from Fairfax, then-Truro rector Martyn Minns, was positioned to win the election when then-Canon Steenson's name was submitted. He won on the third ballot and Martyn Minns, who came in second, went on to become bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America — a break-away group — in 2006.
Bishop Steenson was obviously getting more and more disturbed by liberal trends in the Episcopal Church, as he unexpectedly announced in September that, after less than three years in the episcopate, he was becoming a Roman Catholic. 
"The reason for this decision is that my conscience is deeply troubled about where the Episcopal Church is heading, and this has become a crisis for me because of my ordination vow to uphold its doctrine, discipline, and worship," he wrote in a September letter to his diocese.
OK. In what's becoming an increasing embarrassment for the Episcopal Church, Bishop Steenson was one of four bishops to go Catholic in 2007 alone. Former Fort Worth Bishop Clarence Pope, Albany, N.Y., Bishop David Herzog and Southwest, Fla., Bishop John Lipscomb were the other three. But those men had left their positions before swimming the Tiber; Bishop Steenson was still a sitting bishop.
And in the letter, he promised "not to lose sight of my responsibility to help lay a good foundation for the transition that you must now lead." In the Episcopal Church, it takes up to two years to search for, elect and install a new bishop.
Instead, he walked out a bit early. At the beginning of this week, various Catholic web sites were announcing he had shown up at St. Mary Major in Rome for the official ceremony, presided over by the disgraced former Boston Cardinal Bernard Law.
Suddenly — whammo — his bishop's see in Albuquerque was vacant.
The folks left behind in the Diocese of the Rio Grande were in disarray, as he had not told them.
"Presumably he told our presiding bishop," his administrative assistant, Mary Jewell, told me. "We don't really know."
I called up to church headquarters in New York to find out what Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori knew of the sudden exit but no one there could tell me either. Bishop Steenson comes back next week to clean out his desk.
The diocesan standing committee is in charge of things now but affairs are in an uproar. Right now they are scrambling to find a bishop to preside over the many events happening around Christmas, some of them things only a bishop can do.
I can't help but thinking a few "what ifs." What if Jeffrey Steenson's name had not been submitted late in the game? What if Martyn Minns had won the election and moved to New Mexico? Without him, I doubt there would have been a CANA. Without the force of his personality, I even wonder if 11 Episcopal churches would have voted a year ago to leave the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, setting off the denomination's biggest property lawsuit ever.
Little decisions have big consequences, folks.
— Julia Duin, assistant national editor/religion, The Washington Times
Comments (4)
What a coward. Instead of resigning he just runs off and hides behind the robes of a disgraced Catholic. There are plenty of jerks on both sides of the arguments running through the Episcopal Church, but this bishop takes the cake. For him I say good riddance.
Posted by John Percer | December 8, 2007 3:15 PM
The item that interested me from this article is the movement towards the Catholic Church. Which makes sense with the connection of liturgy, but there is something else. There has been a trickle from evangelical circles towards the Roman Catholic Church as well. Dr. Francis Beckwith, the (at the time he crossed over) president of the Evangelical Theological Society, made the trek over recently. I see this movement somewhat as a response to postmodern, feeling-based theology. It is almost like a deep need to have a strict liturgy to keep one grounded in tradition as the "outside world" sways to and fro with the waves of personal opinion. In fact, on my blog I dissected a statement by Beckwith that I think underlies this trend:
"His decision to leave the Evangelical church did not happen because [he] had changed [his] mind about any particular point of theology or ecclesiology, it was more for the feeling that 'a man can no more guide his spiritual life by his own ideas than a child can raise himself on the strength of his native potential'."
The Roman Catholic Church offers an almost two-thousand-year unbroken history and tradition that acts like a Parent figure in its grandiose doctrine prescribed to their adherents via liturgical history. Something our society will swing back to after their experiment in post-modernism, just like the surge in Modernism via the new Atheists.
Comments from the Evangelical Right,
Papa Giorgio
Posted by Papa Giorgio | December 8, 2007 6:31 PM
With respect, I must disagree with your assertion that Bishop Minns was indispensable to the movement of eleven Episcopal congregations out of the Episcopal Church and into CANA.
That movement has many, many leaders and many, many supporters. Something of the sort was inevitable, given the strong evangelical presence in the diocese and the national church's increasing hostility to evangelical teaching.
Like his predecessor at Truro, John Howe, Bishop Minns was and is an exceptional preacher and an extraordinarily gifted teacher. Their influence at Truro and beyond helped to raise up a generation of intelligent, educated, capable, and committed Christians who are appalled at what the Episcopal Church in general and the Diocese of Virginia in particular have become. With or without Bishop Minns at Truro, they would have found it impossible to continue as members of that church and of that diocese.
Although I am far from certain what might have happened in Rio Grande had Bishop Minns been elected there, I rather suspect that it might be very much like what is happening in San Joaquin.
Posted by R M Bragg | December 9, 2007 3:20 AM
If Bishop Steenson had to deal with the likes of certain members of the Episcopal Informaton Network, as I have, it's no wonder he decided to cut-and-run! It was the smart thing to do.
Posted by Larry Trujillo | December 29, 2007 6:20 AM