William Monéy and the Reformed New Testament Church

William Monéy's tombstone, showing his octagonal San Gabriel house. 

William Monéy was the great-granddaddy of all California cult-leaders and mystic eccentrics. The founder of the first historical indigenous sect in California, as well as the author of the first book published in Los Angeles, the irascible, querulous Monéy argued and blustered his way into Golden State spiritual history as the original, quintessentially Californian religious crank.

What little we know of him comes mostly from his few surviving writings, as well as from the spotty reports of the mid-19^th century Los Angeles press, and the recollections of early Anglo-Californios who crossed paths with the singular religious prophet and self-taught frontier eccentric.

According to his own accounts, Monéy (he pronounced his surname Mo-NAY, in deference to Hispanic usage) was born into a working-class Edinburgh, Scotland family in 1807. “By a singular circumstance,” he said of his nativity, “I was born with four teeth and the likeness of a rainbow in my right eye,” as well as a veil on his brow. His father died a year later, and he was brought up by his mother as a precocious autodidact, studying natural history at the age of seven, and soon adding philosophy, law, medicine and theology to his youthful intellectual pursuits. Family poverty, however, forced him into the workplace, and at twelve he began an apprenticeship with a Glasgow-area paper manufacturer.

Monéy endured Glaswegian factory life for five years. But he ached to travel and study “the religions of the Jews, Gentiles and Christians,” and at 17 he embarked on a voyage to the New World, landing in New York in 1825. There, he heard the call to preach the Gospel while standing on a Manhattan street corner, and decided that the newly-independent Republic of Mexico cried out for his ministrations.

The Gospel that Monéy preached, in keeping with his background and with the tenor of the times, was an ultra-Protestant one. Centuries of anti-Catholic feeling in the United Kingdom (particularly in Monéy’s native Scotland), combined with fears of the increasing Catholic immigration to British and American shores, fed a rising tide of theological and political anti-Popery in the English-speaking world that no doubt deeply influenced the young evangelist. And Monéy’s destination, nominally-Catholic Mexico, was just beginning a struggle over the Church’s political influence that would bedevil the nation for over a century.

Monéy first migrated to Mexico City, where he opened a small paper factory. Then he shifted his operations to the town of Piquito, Sonora, where in 1835 he began a series of public debates with seven different Franciscan friars about the nature and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Like so many other would-be reformers before and since, Monéy argued that the Church had lost its direction over the last fifteen centuries, and that it needed to jettison its dogma, ritual and priestcraft, and return to the first-century Christian community’s simple evangelical approach and Bible-centered doctrines.

According to Monéy:

These and other learned propositions were discussed and rediscussed, constantly for five years, during which writing paper arose to such an enormous price that special enactments were made withdrawing the duties thereon. Time would not admit of detailing the shadow of what transpired during the session.

Suffice it to say that through the indomitable faith and energy of Mr. Monéy, his seven opponents were entirely overcome; one sickened early in the second year and was constrained to take a voyage by sea; two others died of hemorrhage of the lungs; one went crazy, two became converted and left the Council in the year 1838, and were found by Mr. Monéy to have entered into connubial bonds, and were in the enjoyment of perfect happiness. The other two strenuously held out up to the year 1840, when exhausted, sick and dismayed, the Council…’was broke up by offering me Monéy to give up my sword, the word of God, but [I] protested, saying God keep me from such treacherous men, and becoming a traitor to my God.”

After triumphantly driving the Franciscan padres to defeat, exile, insanity and death, Monéy traveled to the settlement of El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles ("The Town of the Queen of the Angels") in Mexican Alta California. Home to around 2,000 Mexicans, Americans and Europeans in 1840, the pueblo employed Monéy, apparently a skilled craftsman, to repair the plaza church for $126. Monéy also used his cartographic skills to draw up a map of a proposed land-grant for the wealthy Sepulveda family.

Monéy migrated between Los Angeles and Sonora throughout the 1840s. On one trip during the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, he and his Mexican wife Isabella were taken prisoner by General Stephen W. Kearny, who was leading a detachment of 100 United States dragoons to support the American California rebels. Monéy claimed that while he was in custody, Kearny’s Indian troops destroyed over 1,000 of his hand-drawn maps of the California territory, which John C. Fremont later estimated may have been the greatest collection of its kind in the United States, and worth as much as $250,000. The Scots-Mexican-Californian sage tried to sue the US Government for compensation, but was rebuffed.

By the time California had become American territory, Monéy had turned his attentions towards other fields. In the classic manner of the American frontier, the multi-talented Monéy settled in Los Angeles, and reinvented himself as a doctor and healer, albeit one unlettered by any known medical school. The self-taught physician would later claim that in this career he had treated over 5,000 patients, only four of whom died under his care. Monéy also said that he’d written two full-length medical books, complete with full-color illustrations, although apparently neither volume ever made it to print. Eventually, faced with more educated and sophisticated competitors, as well as a litany of complaints about his conduct during a smallpox epidemic, Monéy abandoned the medical profession.

The Scotsman then returned to his first intellectual love: Christian theology. In 1851, Monéy claimed, he had written a massive theological work while in New York City. Titled The Church of Rome Reformed, the book earned him $300 advance money from a prospective publisher that he used to buy fare back to Los Angeles. Like his medical works, the volume – if it ever existed outside of Monéy’s imagination – never appeared in print.

However, Monéy did manage to produce one tangible theological monograph: Reform of the New Testament Church/Reforma de la Iglesia del Nuevo Testamento. Published in 1854, the 22-page booklet was printed in parallel columns of both English and Spanish, and is believed to be the first English-language tome published in Los Angeles.  The book appeared under the auspices of the New Testament Church, whose council had chosen the author as Bishop, Deacon and Defender of the Faith, and had given him and his work “all dignified admiration.” Along with his youthful studies in theology and other academic disciplines, the Curriculum Vitae described in the volume also boasted the author’s expertise in such subjects as “Relation of cause and effect, “Philosophy of Sound in a Conch shell, peculiar habits of the Muskrat, and the component parts of Swain’s Vermifuge.”

In the work, Monéy claimed a lifetime of suffering in defense of sound Christian doctrine: “I have been turned out of doors. I have been stricken by men’s hands. I have suffered hunger, thirst, sickness, nakedness, imprisonment, [and] treated like a foolish man.” He expected further calumny from not just the Church of Rome, but also from the Eastern Orthodox and Protestant communions, saying, “I will not be astonished to hear from these denominations as soon as this work comes to light, because it will be against their own personal interest – that they will from the pulpits thunder against this work, according…their excommunications to all them that read this work, by the penalty of unpardonable pains of hell.” Monéy, however, reassured his readers that everything in the book was “the complete truth of eternity,” and solidly based in Biblical research and interpretation. A true Christian, he said, would have no argument with any of his points.

Essentially, Monéy reiterated and expanded the arguments he’d made in front of the Sonoran padres nearly twenty years’ earlier. Much in the style of Martin Luther, he made his case against Roman dogma, ritual and hierarchy in a series of fifty-two articles, set out as theses and antitheses that contrasted the Primitive Christian Church against the modern-day Church of Rome:

PRIMITIVE STATE

Article 1: The Primitive State of the Church of Rome in no where teaches us her infallibility

ACTUAL STATE

The Actual State of the Church of Rome decrees that she is infallible; the Pope, Council General and the rest of the clergymen claim this infallibility, and none of them has got [sic] this from God….

PRIMITIVE STATE

Article 41: The Primitive Church teacheth that there is not such a place as purgatory or limbo, because the Holy Scripture no where makes any mention of such places; such was invented in the 7^th century to serve as a mint to the priests.

ACTUAL STATE

But the actual Church of Rome teacheth in the creed of Pope Pius IV, Council of Trent, year 1564…that such doctrine of places should be taught to the faithfull [sic] where souls are relieved by the help of money and prayer; said council pronounces a curse on all them that say to the contrary.

PRIMITIVE STATE

Article 44: The Primitive Church teacheth from the New Testament, according to St. Paul to 2^d Timothy, chap. Iii, and to Titus, chap. I, that the ministers of the Gospel has [sic] authority to marry one wife, and if she dies he has the same authority to marry another.

ACTUAL STATE

But the actual Church of Rome…prohibited the clergymen the use of marriage…(But this is contrary to the Scriptures…To prohibit marriage is doctrine of the devil.)

Like much of what would later be called Christian Fundamentalist theology, many of Monéy’s arguments were hackneyed, poorly-reasoned, and clumsily written. Only a small number of copies of the book were printed, and today Reform of the New Testament Church is one of the rarest of all early-Californian tomes, with the two known copies in existence held by San Marino’s Huntington Library and UCLA’s Special Collections archives.

Monéy's controversial writings were featured in the early Los Angeles Star

Monéy’s book found few readers, but his diatribes still reached the ears of Los Angeles’ religious establishment, who traded sharp words with the Glaswegian gadfly in the mid-1850s Los Angeles press. Chief among Monéy’s critics was Los Angeles priest Fr. Anaclete Lestrade, who refused a public debate with the would-be theologian, remarking that Angelenos thought of him as nothing more than “a crazy old man.” The Bishops of San Gabriel and Monterey also weighed in against Monéy, with a follower of the latter warning him to “[d]iscontinue your struggles with a giant that can strangle you without exertion.”

Monéy also remonstrated passionately with the followers of another New World sectarian maverick: Joseph Smith. When he challenged Elder Parley P. Pratt, a California-based Mormon leader who had been part of Smith’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles, to a debate about polygamy, the Latter-Day Saint, much like Fr. Lestrade, responded that Monéy was “out of his head, or non sana menti”, and that his writings condemning plural marriage weren’t worth addressing in a public forum. Eventually The Star, the Los Angeles paper that had hosted most of these controversies, tired of Monéy’s endless tilting at ecclesiastical windmills, and banned the Californian contrarian from its pages.

In 1855, Monéy made his other great mark in California history when he founded the state’s first homegrown religious sect. He formally organized the Reformed New Testament Church in Los Angeles that October, naming one Ramon Corona as Bishop and claiming an appropriately-Biblical following of twelve (eight men, and four women) – a respectable flock in a town of fewer than 3,000 inhabitants. Monéy aimed to evangelize Southern California through the church, and stressed the Bible-centered, apologetics-oriented aspect of his ministry, saying, “Miracles are for the ignorant and barbarous, who cannot be enlightened by arguments.”

Los Angeles Plaza, around the time Monéy formed the Reformed New Testament Church

Yet Monéy was not immune to the lure of the supernatural and the sensational. According to one story, he once announced that as a test of his faith, he would volunteer to be buried alive, and, like Christ, would arise from the dead in three days. When a skeptic bet Monéy that he couldn’t do it, the evangelist procured a pine box, and had himself sealed inside it in front of a crowd of spectators. A grave was dug, the coffin was lowered into it, and dirt was shoveled onto the bier. When the reality of being buried alive hit Monéy, he panicked, kicking at the coffin and screaming wildly, “For the love of God, get me out!” Eventually he smashed open the coffin lid with his feet, and climbed out of the grave, to the great amusement of spectators who remarked that he didn’t have the faith to spend three minutes, let alone three days, buried in the good earth.

Around this time, Monéy wrote a 300-page follow-up to The Reform of the New Testament Church, but once again the lack of funds and interest prevented it from being published. However, in 1859, he managed to produce The Christian Church – Los Angeles’ first monthly periodical, which, like his book, appeared as an English-Spanish bilingual work. The few people who picked up the April 10, 1859 issue resisted his appeals to pay then a then-outrageous five dollars for a years’ worth of more Monéy jeremiads, and the monthly never published another number.

Still, the assorted failures and embarrassments didn’t slow Monéy one whit. While he pastored his small sect, the self-styled polymath also combined his cartographic talents and his vivid imagination to produce a bizarre geographic theory he called the “Discovery of the Ocean.” Monéy maintained that inside the Earth was a vast subterranean ocean, created by a hole in the North Pole that sucked in seawater. This interior ocean was dammed on all sides by fiery volcanic rock, which heated its waters, and then expelled the “Kuro Siwa” warm currents through another hole in the South Pole. To illustrate his theory, he created a complex drawing of the Earth’s hemispheres and the hidden sea within, and filed it with the Los Angeles county archives in 1872. Monéy never completely explained the reasoning behind his theory, although historian J.M. Guinn said that the eccentric cartographer claimed that the Earth’s fiery mantle had worn through most of the crust beneath San Francisco, and predicted that the wicked city would fall through it into a flaming caldera of lava.

By 1880, the septuagenarian Monéy had largely withdrawn from public life, settling in the town of San Gabriel just north of Los Angeles. On a three-acre parcel there he constructed a bizarre dwelling: two octagonal buildings of adobe and wood, linked by a gateway at the front of the property. Upon the gate were inscribed Greek, Latin and Hebrew slogans that promoted the value of learning, as well as ancient Assyrian cuneiform decorations. Behind the double gate lay Monéy’s oval-shaped main house and a small orchard. When San Gabriel’s public school burned to the ground, Monéy rented his home out to the district, which was soon dubbed “The Monéyan Institute” by locals.

Although he had amassed a vast collection of books, manuscripts, charts, and mounted animals, Monéy was virtually penniless. When California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft visited Monéy in 1880, the old eccentric offered to sell Bancroft a big chunk of his possessions for $1,000, and said he’d throw in his life story to sweeten the deal. Bancroft turned him down – a terrible decision in retrospect, since Monéy’s priceless collection of early Californiana vanished after his death.

The end came for Monéy in either 1881 or 1890 (accounts vary, and no death record exists for him). His passing was as colorful and enigmatic as his life; a contemporary report maintains that “the harmless old fanatic” died in one of the octagonal buildings “with an image of the Holy Virgin above his head, an articulated skeleton at his feet, and a well-worn copy of some Greek classic within reach of his hand.”

Although he died a pauper, Monéy was buried in the Mulock family plot, in San Gabriel Cemetery. According to the story, Monéy had treated young Dan Mulock when the boy had been gored by a wild boar, and in gratitude, the prominent family gave him a final resting place. Today Monéy’s grave sports the cemetery’s strangest tombstone: a black granite marker inscribed with a picture of his octagonal edifices, and a legend that would surely have pleased the frontier polymath:

WILLIAM MONÉY

BORN 1807 SCOTLAND

DECEASED CIRCA 1881 SAN GABRIEL

PHYSICIAN – THEOLOGIAN – PHILOSOPHER – WRITER – NATURALIST – HISTORIAN

ADVOCATE OF THE OCTAGONAL CONCEPT IN BUILDING DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION

Although Money’s life and writings intrigued early California historians, he has largely been forgotten today, save for the occasional mention of his doings in newspaper and magazine articles about famous Southland eccentrics. Still, he occupies a key place in Golden State cultural history, both for his pioneering literary efforts, and for the Reformed New Testament Church – the first of the countless homegrown sects that would mark California as the world’s capital of cultism and new religions.

Sources/Links:

Rasmussen, Cecilia. "To Catholics, Cultist Was Beyond Belief" Los Angeles Times, 6/27/2004.

Rice, William B. William Money: A Southern California Savant. Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1943,

Waldie, D.J. "Professor Money, God, and the First Book Published in Los Angeles (Maybe)." KCET Commentary/Where We Are, 7/28/2014.

The Mexican National Catholic Church

The Mexican National Catholic Church --
an indigenous "National Church" of the New World

If Laguna Beach’s St. Francis by the Sea represents the last vestige of Bishop Vilatte’s dream of an American Catholic Patriarchate, then a small house-church in the East Los Angeles barrio for many years seemed to be the final remnant of a much larger Mexican independent-Catholic movement.

While the French prelate struggled to build even a tiny following in the States, other non-Papal Catholic Bishops south of the border established for a time a sizable independent Catholic Church, with scores of active parishes and thousands of followers, as well as the blessings of the Mexican government. The story of how the so-called Mexican National Catholic Church arose from the nation’s often-chaotic political and religious scene, became a viable rival to the Roman Church, and then nearly faded from history, only to be revived in the 21^st-century American Southwest, is one of the most intriguing tales from the world of the independent bishops.

From the day Cortez and his conquistadores set foot on the continent, the people of “New Spain” had always had an ambivalent relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Although the passionate Iberian spiritual style had easily taken root in the New World, with European, Indian, African and mestizo peoples alike worshipping the bloody, suffering Hispanic Christ under the benevolent gaze of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Church itself had long been viewed by many as a symbol of Old World colonialism, and dominated by the Spanish Criollo establishment.

When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, this sentiment intensified. Over the next century, dissident Catholics, nationalists, Freemasons, and Protestants alike attempted to set up Mexican National Churches that were independent of Papal control, yet retained the liturgical and cultural usages of Hispanic Catholic Christianity. All of these efforts, including one by Vilatte himself around 1909, came to naught, and the Vatican retained a firm grip upon Mexican spiritual life.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910, however, brought a distinct reversal of fortunes for the Church of Rome. When dictator Porfirio Díaz was overthrown in 1911, the revolutionary government, which saw the Roman Catholic Church as a foreign-run institution that had helped keep Mexico largely poor, ignorant and passive, assumed the power to license and authorize all religious activity in the nation. Six years later, the Constitution of 1917 banned the taking of religious vows, or the teaching of Christian doctrines in schools. Over the next decade the government seized all religious properties across Mexico, and thousands of churches, cathedrals, monasteries and nunneries closed their doors.

Government troops execute a Roman Catholic priest during the Mexican Cristero War

Clerics as well were persecuted. Between 1924 and 1938 over 1,400 priests were expelled from Mexico, and hundreds more were imprisoned or executed. The 2,500-odd priests who remained at liberty disguised themselves and celebrated Mass in secret, while thousands of loyal Catholic peasants took up arms on their behalf against the government during the Cristero revolt of 1926-29.

Pro-Roman Catholic Mexican Cristero partisans.
Note the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the flag.

Faced with both a popular rebellion and a resilient Roman Church, President Plutarco Elias Calles sought to establish a Mexican National Church that would meld Hispanic devotional fervor with nationalistic sentiment. The proposed Church would be free from Vatican and other foreign influences, would celebrate its liturgy in Spanish, and would kowtow to the secular government’s wishes in all affairs temporal and spiritual.

One apostate priest, the elderly Jose Joaquin Perez y Budar, volunteered to take the helm of the nascent National Church. On October 17, 1926, “Supreme Primate” Carmel Henry Carfora, of the independent North American Old Roman Catholic Church, raised Perez to the episcopacy, along with fellow Mexican rebel clerics Antonio Benicio Lopez Sierra and Macario Lopez Valdes, in Chicago, Illinois.

With the support of both Calles and the Mexican government, newly-minted Bishop Perez established the Iglesia Ortodoxa Catolica Apostolica Mexicana. Known in English as the Mexican National Catholic Church, the new body featured Perez as Primate and Patriarch, while Lopez Sierra became his Coadjutor and Lopez Valdes assumed the bishopric of Zaragoza. Perez also consecrated four additional bishops to oversee the Church in Hidalgo, Veracruz, Puebla and elsewhere. Later, Carfora would consecrate four more MNCC prelates.

With the Roman Church forced underground, countless thousands of Mexican Catholics turned to the National Church to receive the sacraments and accept spiritual guidance. But there was no real unity among the schismatic bishops, and they found themselves at each other’s throats over Church doctrine and practices, as well as still fighting the Vatican for dominance in the hearts and minds of their flocks. The septuagenarian Patriarch was too old and frail to enforce discipline in his episcopal ranks, and he eventually gave up, reconciling himself to the Holy See before his death in 1931.

Perez’ successor was young Eduardo Davila-Garcia, who had been ordained a priest at the age of eighteen. A nationalist and a Freemason, Garcia was allegedly consecrated a bishop in May 1931, and held the self-titled position of Eduardo Primo, primer papa de Mexico until 1938, when he mysteriously disappeared. He was replaced by Joseph Petrus Ortiz, who in turn yielded his prelature to Armin Monte de Honor in 1958.

As the years passed, and the passions of the Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion gradually faded, relations between the Roman Church and the Mexican State thawed considerably. After the Vatican paid reparations for its losing role in the Revolution, the government invited the exiled Roman clergy to return to their old positions, and reoccupy all the vacant cathedrals and churches.

The Mexican National Catholic Church, with a mere 120 priests and parishes spread across fourteen Mexican states, found it difficult to compete with the re-legalized, resurgent Church of Rome. From 1940 onwards it steadily lost membership and influence, and also found itself on the receiving end of scorn as a living symbol of the Revolution’s anticlerical excesses. The final blow came in 1972 when the last major center of National Church activity – the Mexico City diocese – was absorbed into the Orthodox Church in America, with its Patriarch Jose Cortes y Olmas donning Eastern Christian vestments and assuming the title of Exarch.

Ironically enough, the Mexican National Catholic Church lived on not in Mexico itself, but in the land that had annexed so much of its old territory, and housed millions of its economic and political exiles. Although the Church had boasted a presence in the United States since 1929, when Carfora consecrated a Hieronymus Maria to head up a San Antonio, Texas-based diocese, the MNCC’s most solid stronghold in Yanqui territory was in Los Angeles.

Back in 1926, on a visit to relatives in Southern California, MNCC Bishop Macario Lopez y Valdes met Bishop Roberto T. Gonzalez, a former Church of the Nazarene pastor and the leader of El Hogar de la Verdad, a Spiritualist church that ministered to East Los Angeles’ Mexican-American community. Despite their ostensible theological differences, the two prelates became friends, and Lopez y Valdez consecrated Gonzalez to the episcopate, and appointed him to be the Bishop of the MNCC in East Los Angeles. After Gonzalez passed on in 1928, Lopez y Valdez consecrated his successor, Alberto Luis Rodriguez y Durand, as the Bishop Ordinary of Los Angeles, and Regionary Bishop of Alta California. As a result, El Hogar de la Verdad became The Old Catholic Orthodox Church of St. Augustine of the Mystical Body of Christ, and the center of MNCC activity in the American State.

Archbishop Emile Rodriguez y Fairfield --
 the Los Angeles-based, longtime Patriarch of  the MNCC 

Assisting Bishop Rodriguez y Durand with the parish was his younger brother, Emile Federico Rodriguez. A former Olympic athlete who had represented Mexico in the 1932 Games’ 1500-meter race, the younger Rodriguez was ordained to the priesthood in 1938 by his brother. He then migrated to Los Angeles, became an American citizen, found work as a physical-education instructor, and added “Fairfield” to his surname in 1953 as both a concession to his new home’s Anglo culture, and as a poetic tribute to his prowess on the track.

In 1955, Rodriguez y Fairfield received episcopal consecration from his ailing older brother, and took over as the head of the Church in California. For the next forty-odd years he shepherded an estimated 100 Mexican and Mexican-American parishioners out of his little house-church at 4011 East Brooklyn (now Cesar Chavez) Avenue in East Los Angeles. As the MNCC faded from view in Mexico itself, the Bishop and his mostly-Californian flock remained faithful to the vision of a Spanish-language, non-Eurocentric, nationalistic and independent Catholic Church.

When Bishop Jose Cortes y Olmos died in Mexico in 1983, Bishop Fairfield y Rodriguez became the last living Bishop of the MNCC, and was named its Archbishop and Primate. By this time the East Los Angeles prelate had become something of a celebrity in the world of independent Catholicism, and divided his time between the MNCC’s last parish, and the Old Roman Catholic Church/Canonical Old Roman Catholic Church, a mostly-Anglo independent body that he had assumed leadership of in 1982.

In the manner of so many other “Wandering Bishops”, Rodriguez y Fairfield also swapped apostolic pedigrees with his fellow prelates, receiving further consecrations from leaders of such bodies and passing his own lines of succession along to other would-be episcopates. The 77 year-old Bishop briefly made national headlines in 1990 when he and two other independent bishops raised married Roman Catholic priest George A. Stallings, Jr. to the episcopacy, and enabled the controversial cleric to found and head his own African-American Catholic Congregation as yet another ethnic/nationalist schism from the Holy See.

Perhaps Rodriguez y Fairfield’s most significant secondary consecration was from Bishop Francisco Pagtakhan of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Philippine Independent Catholic Church), a schismatic body with an anti-colonial and nationalistic history similar to the MNCC’s. The Mexican patriarch also established intercommunion between the MNCC and the considerably larger Filipino church, and brought into his orbit dissident Lutheran and Roman Catholic clerics who had affiliated with the PICC.

Bishop John Parnell, who revived the MNCC in Texas

When the aging Bishop Rodriguez y Fairfield finally passed on, the helm of the Mexican National Catholic Church fell to a most unusual, dynamic and – most significantly – non-Mexican man. Texan Anglo John Parnell, who had received episcopal consecration from Philippine Independent Catholic Church bishops, planted a fresh MNCC parish in his home town of Fort Worth, and set about turning the Church from an obscure remnant of Mexican Catholic history, into an active and vibrant spiritual force in East Texas’ Mexican-American community.

Calling his parish “Saint Augustine’s Catholic Church,” Bishop Parnell created a Catholic community that more resembled the frontier Spanish missions of pre-Alamo Tejas, than it did a contemporary Roman Catholic parish. An episode of the Texas Country Reporter news program showed Parnell and his parishioners tending livestock, tilling soil, repairing boots, and rolling cigars (which the Bishop explained were used as currency in pre-USA Texas) on the Church properties like something out of an Old West living-history panorama. When reporter Bob Phillips said that their no-frills lifestyle reminded him of the Amish, Parnell joked, “We’re like the Amish, except we’ll drink and fight and cuss!”

The altar at St. Augustine's MNCC, Fort Worth, TX

Humor aside, Bishop Parnell is serious about creating a Church and community that preserves the old ways of Spanish and Mexican Texas. Along with the farming and craft activities, Parnell runs the St. Augustine Catholic School out of the parish, which teaches dozens of trades and life-skills to impoverished young Fort Worth residents. And of course he supervises worship at the small local church, which carries on the MNCC’s traditions with its quaint Hispanic iconography, its distinctly Mexican-flavored liturgy of Spanish language and folk-music, and its proud independence from Rome.

As of this writing, the formula seems to be working. Not only has Bishop Parnell become something of a local media figure in Fort Worth, and networked extensively with other Independent Catholic bishops and churches, but he has planted a new MNCC mission in Los Angeles – the city where his predecessor Bishop Rodriguez y Fairfield tended the last spark of the once-fiery spiritual movement for so many years.

It may seem ironic that a Mexican-nationalist denomination was long preserved, and is being revived, in the land of its Northern rival. But as the cultural, economic and political boundaries between Mexico and the Southwestern United States blur ever more, there will be more intersection of the two nations’ distinct spiritual traditions. In the current Mexican National Catholic Church one can see both the history and culture of the deeply-Catholic yet fiercely-patriotic Hispanic world, and the proudly independent and entrepreneurial spirit of North American frontier individualism. Although Bishop Parnell and others acknowledge the MNCC as “a piece of living history,” it also points towards a future where the two countries’ spiritual and social ways are ever more entwined and melded.

Notes/Sources

www.mncc.net (The MNCC's official Web site)

"Members of the San Luigi Orders: Archbishop Emile Rodriguez y Fairfield". www.san-luigi.org

Pruter, Karl. The Old Catholic Sourcebook. New York: Garland, 1983.
Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religion - Eighth Edition. Detroit: Gale, 2009.

Ward, Gary et al, eds. Independent Bishops: An International Directory. Detroit: Apogee, 1990.

Texas Country Reporter, 7/9/2011. "Father John Parnell, St. Augustine Catholic Church" episode.

The "Wandering Bishops" and the American Catholic Church

St. Francis by the Sea American Catholic Church,
Laguna Beach, California

In Laguna Beach, California, just a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean, stands St. Francis by the Sea, a quaint, Moorish/Spanish-style church assembled from materials salvaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.  A chapel-sized building seating barely 60 worshippers, St. Francis nevertheless bills itself as a “cathedral,” since it is the home church of a Bishop – the Most Rev. Simon Eugene Talarczyk, patriarch of the American Catholic Church.

The American Catholic Church is one of the longest-lived of countless sects that broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, yet continued a “Catholic” form of church organization, worship, and theology.  Called variously “Old Catholicism,” “Autocephalous Catholicism,” or the “Independent Liturgical Movement,” this vast, yet largely obscure ecclesiastical underground is truly “Catholic” in the sense that its members follow a bewildering variety of theologies, liturgies, and styles.  The Independent Catholic movement encompasses everything from ultra-traditionalist sects who rigorously adhere to the Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II doctrines, to neo-Gnostic cults with lesbian bishops and homilies drawn from Buddhist or Wiccan sources.

One thing they all agree on, though, is the doctrine of apostolic succession.  This is the concept that Church authority is maintained through the consecration of bishops, in an unbroken chain of succession that can be traced back to the Apostles. According to this doctrine, although a bishop may be outside of the Roman Catholic Communion, or even “unorthodox” in teachings or practices, if he was consecrated in Holy Orders by a bishop with documented apostolic succession, he is a “valid” – if irregular – possessor of the episcopacy’s powers and privileges.  Some scholars believe the office of bishop predates those of priest and deacon, and that the earliest bishops served as semi-autonomous missionaries and “church planters” in Christianity’s first years.  Such prelates were called Episcopi vagantes – wandering bishops – and this term is still used today to describe such extra-canonical episcopates.

Although the Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Scandinavian Lutheran Churches have all claimed valid lines of apostolic succession, the Roman Catholic Church has traditionally asserted primacy here, since it derives its historical authority from St. Peter, and through its interpretation of Matthew 16:18-19, Christ Himself.  Yet the Roman apostolic flame, passed from generation to episcopal generation from Peter, has more than once been seized by Promethean priests and bishops who founded “Catholic” churches based on this traditional authority, with Roman liturgical and sacramental practices but without Papal leadership. 

Perhaps the best-known of these autocephalous groups is the so-called Old Catholic Church. These are a group of mostly European national churches that originated in a rebellion against Pope Pius IX’s First Vatican Council of 1870.  Vatican I, as it was later called, asserted two major dogmas: Papal infallibility in pronunciations on Christian doctrine; and the Immaculate Conception of Mary.  Both continue as official Church doctrines to this day.

Although most of the Church hierarchy and laity accepted the Council’s pronouncements, a small minority of priests, led by Ignaz von Doellinger, chaplain to King Ludwig of Bavaria, saw the dogmas as both unwanted innovations and heretical deviations from historical Catholic and Scriptural teachings.  They called their own council in Munich in 1871, and by the end of the year led 23 German and Austrian congregations out of the Papal communion. 

To validly confirm new members, ordain priests, and exist as a sovereign Church, the movement needed a bishop with proper apostolic succession.  With no rebel episcopates from Rome forthcoming, they turned to the See of Utrecht, a Dutch Catholic bishopric that had run into political trouble with the Vatican, and had been separated from Papal control for over a century.  The Bishop of Utrecht, who held a valid apostolic succession despite his see’s schismatic condition, not only raised the Munich group’s selected leader to the episcopate, but merged his own flock with the German-speaking rebels, perhaps feeling that there was no hope of ever reconciling with Rome. 

Procession of contemporary European Old Catholic bishops

The new group called itself the Old Catholic Church, after its self-perception of being orthodox traditionalists holding out against the innovations of Vatican I.  Eventually it would spread beyond Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, into much of Western and Central Europe.  The Church still exists today, numbering its followers in the tens of thousands, and resembling a sort of Continental version of the Anglican Church, with whom it shares communion.

Old Catholicism reached America in the form of one Joseph Rene Vilatte (1854-1929).  Vilatte was a French Catholic seminary dropout who, inspired and instructed by rebel priests Charles Chiniquy and Hyacinthe Loyson, set up an independent ministry among lapsed Catholic immigrants in Wisconsin.  Hearing of the Old Catholic movement, and seeking the Holy Orders he’d never gotten from Rome, Vilatte sought and received consecration as a deacon and priest from Bishop Herzog, the head of the Swiss Old Catholic Church in 1885. 

With no Old Catholic bishops in America, Vilatte worked under the supervision of the Protestant Episcopal Church, starting two missions with their sponsorship and leading a flock of about 500 Belgian and French-Canadian immigrants.  Since the European Old Catholic hierarchy was uneasy about his status as an Episcopalian underling, Vilatte began to think that America needed a missionary Old Catholic bishop to properly conduct its work, and that he was the man for the job.  As the Old Catholic Church grew closer to the Anglican Communion, however, they decided having an American jurisdiction would be poaching Episcopalian missionary territory, and the 1890 Old Catholic Congress in Cologne declined Vilatte’s request for a consecration.

But by now, the Franco-Canadian-American priest had his heart set on being a bishop, so he began to solicit apostolic orders from other sources.  When he contacted Russian Orthodox Archbishop Vladimir of the Aleutian Islands about the matter, word got back to Vilatte’s American superior, Episcopalian Bishop Charles C. Grafton.  Outraged by what he saw as the priest’s disobedience, Bishop Grafton suspended Vilatte’s ministry and financial support.

This didn’t stop Vilatte.  The would-be bishop went ahead and requested consecration from yet another Eastern Christian patriarch – Mar Julius I, Metropolitan of the Syro-Jacobite Church of Malabar, a South Asian church with about 5,000 followers that was in communion with the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch. Even though Bishop Grafton had personally warned the Ceylonese patriarch not to perform the ceremony, on May 29, 1892 Mar Julius consecrated Vilatte to the Catholic episcopacy, passing onto the Frenchman a valid apostolic succession that stretched back to the first-century Church of Antioch.

Joseph Rene Vilatte, North America's first
"Old Catholic" bishop

 The newly minted bishop returned to his small diocese, then composed of three Wisconsin churches.  Without monetary support from the Episcopal Church, Vilatte and his Old Catholic Church in America struggled to survive, and more than once the independent bishop approached local Roman Catholic authorities and attempted to unite his small flock with theirs.  Nothing came of the negotiations, and in 1898 Vilatte abandoned the Wisconsin work.  His churches were eventually reabsorbed into the Episcopal Church; one of them, the Church of the Precious Blood in Brussels, WI, still functions today.

Vilatte spent the rest of his life consecrating other bishops and ordaining priests, hoping to form an independent “American Catholic Church” from the top down.  Nearly all his efforts failed; the men he consecrated invariably split with him and started their own jurisdictions, most of which never achieved significant followings. These bishops would in turn consecrate others to the episcopacy, who would go on to ordain even more bishops, creating a vast and complex family tree of non-Papal prelates.  Many of today’s “Independent Catholic” bishops trace their own apostolic lineage to the so-called Vilatte succession.

As for Vilatte’s American Catholic Church, it survives today mainly as the corporate body controlling Laguna Beach’s St. Francis by the Sea Cathedral. The building was the creation of Percy Wise Clarkson, a New Zealand Anglican priest who split with Canterbury after quarreling over finances with his Californian Episcopalian superior. After Clarkson resigned his post, he accepted a 25x60 plot of land adjacent to the Laguna Beach Episcopal parish in lieu of settlement, and on it erected a 1,008 square-foot church made of materials salvaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. A trained architect, Clarkson named the edifice “St. Francis by the Sea,” and designated it a cathedral.

A cathedral needed a bishop, and Clarkson quickly followed suit. In 1933 he met Bishop Daniel Hinton, who had taken over the American Catholic Church from Frederick E.J. Lloyd, a former Episcopalian priest who had inherited Church leadership when Vilatte retired in 1920. Hinton both consecrated Clarkson to the episcopate, and handed over the ACC patriarchate to him.

Although a Kiwi by birth, and a representative of a European ecclesiastical movement, Bishop Clarkson put a distinctly Californian spin on his beach-resort ministry.  A member of the Theosophical Society, Clarkson supplemented his Christian teachings with musings on the “Masters’” messages and Hindu-inspired homilies, and decorated his “Cathedral” with diagrams of the Chakras and astrological symbols.  Despite – or perhaps because of – these idiosyncrasies, Bishop Clarkson and his church retained a modest following, and his Theosophical interests anticipated mainstream Christians’ explorations of Eastern mysticism by decades.

"Church of the New Age" -- distinctly unorthodox slogans adorn the Sanctuary at St. Francis by the Sea

In 1940, Clarkson turned over the American Catholic patriarchate to Lowell Paul Wadle.  Wadle, a Theosophist and a 32^nd degree Freemason, took the Church even further into occult and metaphysical territory.  He created and celebrated a version of the Catholic Mass that was divided into 32 sections: the first 22 corresponded to the Hebrew alphabet’s letters; the last ten symbolized the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life; and the total number reflected the initiatory degrees of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.  Wadle also designed a Church symbol that incorporated a Rose Cross, Pythagorean numerological glyphs, Kabbalistic symbols, and the five-pointed star commonly associated with ritual magic.  And he authored a peculiar little book, In the Light of the Orient, which drew on the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali to become a sort of crypto-Gnostic Catechism.

Bishop Wadle's In the Light of the Orient and Holy Liturgy.
Note the Rosicrucian/Kabbalistic cross-symbol on both books.

 No doubt Vilatte would have been horrified by such heretical doings, but the good Bishop had long since claimed his eternal reward.  Frustrated after his lifelong campaign to establish Old Catholicism in America produced a plethora of bishops but few active congregations, he submitted to the Roman Catholic Church, and ended his life at a Cistercian Abbey near Versailles in 1929.  Along with the little church in Laguna Beach, and the single (now-Episcopalian) parish in Wisconsin, his main legacy today consists of having been the fount for countless independent Catholic bishops’ claims to apostolic succession.  Vilatte has been canonized in several jurisdictions, and his July 1^st birthday appears as a Saint’s day on some liturgical calendars.

When Bishop Wadle died in 1965, leadership of the American Catholic Church and St. Francis by the Sea passed through the hands of several different independent-Catholic bishops. Finally around 1980 high-school teacher Simon Eugene Talarczyk, who had been raised to the episcopacy by three different ACC bishops in 1971, took the reins of the small jurisdiction.

A 1977 news photo of Bishop Talarczyk inside St. Francis by the Sea

While Bishop Talarczyk was no more successful than his predecessors in expanding the American Catholic Church’s membership or visibility, he did manage to make St. Francis by the Sea one of Laguna Beach’s best-known buildings. After a program of repair and renovation, the Guinness Book of World’s Records designated the glorified chapel as the “World’s Smallest Cathedral” in its 1984 edition. Another honor came in 1990, when the US Government placed the building on the National Register of Historic Places, largely because of its unique mix of “Mediterranean Revival, Romanesque, Gothic, Byzantine, and Craftsman” architectural styles.

The beach resort’s quaint mini-cathedral also became a favorite venue for wedding ceremonies, and brought the Church much-needed revenue from rental fees. To be sure, few of the countless couples who tied the knot under its roof, or their guests, were aware of the Church’s peculiar history, or took special note of its arcane interior decorations. What mattered was that, along with the romantic setting, St. Francis provided a “Catholic” environment and ceremony without the strictures and qualifications the Roman Catholic Church required of anyone seeking nuptials.

The altar at St. Francis by the Sea

Perhaps because so many of the couples who wedded under St. Francis’ roof were themselves disaffected or lapsed Roman Catholics, Bishop Talarczyk led the American Catholic Church back from the occultism and quasi-Eastern exoticism of Clarkson and Wadle, into relative Christian orthodoxy. Although the 32-part “Wadle Mass” was still celebrated at St. Francis, and St. Francis' esoteric appointments remained unmolested, Talarczyk always emphasized that the Church was Christian first and foremost, and preached standard Catholic themes during his homilies. Still, the ACC remained independent of Roman control, allowed its unpaid worker-priests to marry, and opened Communion to all attendees.

By 2010, St. Francis and its parent Church body were facing serious troubles. That year the octogenarian Bishop Talarczyk was showing increasing signs of senile dementia, forgetting the words of the liturgy and sometimes not turning up at all for Sunday Mass. Eventually his daughter Honorata Ann Lee took over his care, and the church doors were shuttered, allegedly at the request of her father, while she sorted out their affairs. St. Francis’ small but loyal flock was deprived of Masses for over a year, although weddings continued at the building.

For several months, two factions vied for control of the little cathedral, its service schedule, and the $1 million-plus in real estate and other assets under the ACC’s name. Under the authority of her father, Honorata Ann Lee supported American Catholic Church bishop Brian Delvaux of Lakewood’s Church of the Good Shepherd, as the new prelate of St. Francis. Meanwhile, a group of longtime parishioners voted in a board of directors to take over church management, and elected Orange resident Bishop Peter E. Hickman of the Ecumenical Catholic Church as patriarch. At one point both groups were holding separate Sunday Masses, with the Delvaux faction at St. Francis and the Hickman one in a rented space.

Recent photo of Bishop-Emeritus Talarcyzk

 By March 2012, the rift had begun to heal. For the first time in over a year Bishop Talarczyk appeared in the church during a Sunday Mass, apologized for the confusion and hard feelings of the recent months, and personally endorsed Bishop Delvaux as his successor. Although many legal issues still hadn’t been settled, it seemed as if the ruptured congregation was finally coming together under common leadership, and that St. Francis would be not just a landmark building and a popular wedding chapel, but an active worshipping community and a living remnant of Bishop Vilatte’s work so many years earlier.

Perhaps in boldly naming his independent jurisdiction The American Catholic Church, the rebel priest had guaranteed that it would survive somehow, somewhere in his adopted country. Despite its often-unorthodox past and the more recent political squabbles, one suspects that the French prelate would be proud of St. Francis Cathedral, and the sunny, seaside California town where his mission to establish a non-Papal Catholic Church finally set down permanent roots.

Notes/Sources

Msgr. Rene Vilatte: Community Organizer of Religion, 1854-1929, by Serge A. Theriault. (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2006)

Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions - Eighth Edition, edited by J. Gordon Melton. Detroit: Gale, 2009.

"Church's Followers Beget Unholy Mess," OCInsite.com, 3/2/2012.

"Church Elects Replacement Bishop," Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot, 2/16/2012

"Tiny Laguna church finds too many bishops," Orange County Register, 8/21/2013 (updated version)

In the Light of the Orient, by Joseph Paul Wadle. The Author, 1951.

The Holy Liturgy, Authorized for Use in the American Catholic Church. Laguna Beach, CA: American Catholic Church, 1942.