The Most. Revd. Thomas Orville Gore, OCR, SSC, DD, MD, has been appointed as Provincial of the South in the Apostolic Episcopal Church and will also serve as a Deputy to the Primate and Member of Metropolitan Synod. He has additionally been appointed as Exarch of the United States of America for the Catholicate of the West and as Titular Bishop of Acadia in that communion. His ecclesiastical designation will be Mar Thoma.

Mar Thoma is President of the Anglican Heritage Society, Inc., in Lubbock, Texas, which now becomes a chartered mission of the Apostolic Episcopal Church. He has close links with our church, having counted such prelates as the late Archbishops Paul Schultz and Charles White among his friends. He was ordained priest in the Episcopal Church in 1968 and was then ordained to the diaconate and priesthood sub conditione by the late Archbishop Francisco de Jesus  Pagtakhan, who was Missionary and Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Philippine Independent Catholic Church (IFI) in 1982. He was further ordained deacon and priest sub conditione by the late Archbishop Forest Barber of the PICC and the Apostolic Episcopal Church, and then received episcopal consecration from Archbishops Barber, Pagtakhan and Bayani Mercado of the PICC in 1986. Subsequently he was further consecrated sub conditione by the Obispo Maximo of the PICC, Macario Ga. His ministry has centred on the mission of the PICC in the United States, where he and the late Bishop Murray Farrell were the first American Aglipayan (named after Supreme Bishop Gregorio Aglipay, the co-founder of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente) bishops, for the PICC Anglican Rite Diocese of Texas, led by Archbishop Pagtakhan.

He is a graduate of Indiana University (BA, 1961) and Nashotah House Theological Seminary, where he earned his Master of Divinity degree in 1967. He then trained as a medical practitioner in Mexico, where he graduated MD from the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara in 1973 and received the Titulo of Medico Cirujano from the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico in 1978.

He has been in the private practice of Adult and Addiction Psychiatry in Lubbock since 1989. He is married to Deaconess Sharon, who is now part of the lay ministry of the AEC. He has four grown children. His son Thomas has recently been ordained deacon and also joins the ministry of the AEC.

We send Mar Thoma our best wishes and prayers as he begins this new chapter of his ministry with us.

The Catholicate of the West came into being as a union of the smaller sacramental churches in the United Kingdom in 1944 calling on the model of the nineteenth-century Catholic Apostolic Church (sometimes called “Irvingites”). It was initiated following the 1943 Council of London, which had been convened to discuss the response to the Syrian Orthodox Church repudiation of the Western successors of Prince-Abbot Joseph III of San Luigi. The Council concluded that the then-Syrian Patriarch should be deposed for schism and elected its own candidate in his place, who was designated as the Patriarch of Antioch of the Ancient Orthodox Catholic Church. The resulting movement, embracing the Ancient Orthodox Catholic Church and the Catholicate of the West, became the only indigenous representation of true Western Orthodoxy in Britain at that time.

The Catholicate under the leadership of Maran Mar Georgius (Hugh George de Willmott Newman) pursued a mission as an ecumenical federation of autonomous church bodies, achieving a wide international membership by the late 1940s. In 1950, it was incorporated in India. In 1953, Mar Georgius and several other members of clergy left the Catholicate, which continued to exist via its American representation. In 1977, the Catholicate was formally merged with the Apostolic Episcopal Church in an act registered before the Secretary of State of California, and in 2015, the Prince-Abbot of San Luigi became both the primate of the Apostolic Episcopal Church and Prince-Catholicos of the Catholicate of the West, having served as a bishop of the Apostolic Episcopal Church since 2008.

The Prince-Abbot of San Luigi (H.S.H. the Most Revd. Edmond John Kersey de Polanie-Patrikios) is the current Prince-Catholicos of the West, British Patriarch, and Patriarch of Caertroia and Malaga etc.; he is the sixth Catholicos and the seventh British Patriarch. Following the Syriac tradition of the Catholicate, his official designation as Catholicos is Maran Mar Joannes Edmundus.

Today, the Catholicate of the West is the federative ecumenical body under which the various churches and religious orders of the Abbey-Principality are organized. Full information is given at this page:
>>The Catholicate of the West

The Decree promulgated by the current Catholicos on this website sets out the formal history of the Catholicate of the West and its jurisdictional descent to its present position, and reproduces a number of key historical documents:
>>Catholicate of the West – Decree
Our jurisdiction asserts that it is the legitimate representative of the Catholicate of the West as it was established in 1944 on the basis of the facts recorded in the Decree.

In making a Notice addressing defamation and fraudulent imposture, our jurisdiction states its position based on these facts, holding that this is a matter of public concern and that where others make public statements about our communion we are fully entitled to respond to them and to defend our patrimony.

We have recently been informed of the baseless and fraudulent imposture of one Demetrius Brown, who has claimed on Facebook that he has acquired the “rights” to the Catholicate of the West. This claim is a lie. Inasmuch as a church such as the Catholicate of the West has “rights”, they have been owned by the Abbey-Principality of San Luigi since 2015 and the historical and legal basis for this assertion has been openly promulgated since that time. As ever, our jurisdiction makes no claims other than those which it can demonstrate to be valid.

We are informed that Brown is a Pentecostal bishop of an organization calling itself the “Orthodox Church of Christ” – a designation which is usually employed to describe the Eastern Orthodox Church. He is not and never has been a member of the Catholicate of the West and has no legitimate claim to authority over our communion. The Pentecostal Churches have nothing to do with the Catholicate of the West and as an Orthodox body the Catholicate does not recognize their sacraments as valid. The faith of the Catholicate is set out in the Glastonbury Confession (1952) which is a comprehensive statement of the beliefs of traditional Orthodoxy.

Brown wrote to our jurisdiction in July 2018 in a thinly-veiled bid to be appointed to office, “I was wondering if you had a Bishop here in America (South East)”, to which no reply was given. It would appear that, having not found his approach to us fruitful, Brown has now decided to make a wholly fraudulent claim to our patrimony, for which we have a responsibility that we take with the utmost seriousness and which we are honour bound to defend. Such an action must place his credibility as a Christian leader in doubt, but is sadly all too typical of the careless and mendacious attitude of some independent clergy of these days towards important matters such as valid jurisdiction and succession.

Shortly after the initial publication of this Notice, the Prince-Abbot of San Luigi as Catholicos of the West received a legal threat by email from Brown. This was made by one Mary Roman of Greenville, South Carolina, who asserts that she is “International Secretary” to “His Holiness Catholicos-Patriarch Demetrius I” (sic). The (misspelled) address given is that of a location that according to Google is the “No Limit Holy Temple”, whose appearance for a place of public worship is somewhat unprepossessing in our view:

This is also the registered address of a nonprofit corporation called the “Body of Christ Sanctified Church International” first filed in 2014, of which Brown is the agent.

The usual policy of our jurisdiction is to ignore legal threats that are not made by lawyers, although on occasion a purpose is served by their exposure to public scrutiny. This example shows that ignorance and aggression are no substitute for an actual knowledge and awareness of the law. It threatens that if we do not remove all information relating to the said Demetrius Brown that he will “immediately file a defamation lawsuit in the amount of 5 million dollars in the Eastern District of the United States Federal courts. We have taken pictures of your webpage and your comments as evidence of your guilt.”

In the first place, our jurisdiction does not make any statement in public without extensive prior investigation and without establishing that the facts put forward are truthful. We hold that what we have said is what we believe to be true, and we do not hold that anything we have said is defamatory. However, even if it were to be held to be defamatory, it would still be protected speech under the First Amendment.

In 2014 the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox that liability for a defamatory blog post involving a matter of public concern cannot be imposed without proof of fault and actual damages. Bloggers saying libelous things about private citizens concerning public matters can only be sued if they are negligent i.e., the plaintiff must prove the defendant’s negligence – the same standard that applies when news media are sued. The Court held that in defamation cases not the identity of the speaker, but rather the public-figure status of a plaintiff and the public importance of the statement at issue provide the First Amendment foundation.

This website is hosted by the blogging platform WordPress and the Notices page contains its blog posts, including this one. Our Notice constitutes comment on a matter of public concern.

The communication from Brown’s office continues in a similar unpleasant vein of threat that is entirely inappropriate for anyone claiming to represent a Christian organization. It requires us to “Immediately cease from using the registered name of Catholicate of the West in any and all publications and media. H.H. Mar Demetrius is OVER the Catholicate of the West and is the registered agent according to the United States of America and as it was passed from patriarch Owen, and patriarch McGuire.”

The “United States of America”, by which is assumed to mean the Federal government of the USA, does not record that Brown or anyone else is the “registered agent” for the Catholicate of the West. This claim is therefore false.

We also fail to see that Brown can be “OVER” our jurisdiction, for he is not and never has been a member of it, and treats its members with hostility and contempt. And we have no intention of surrendering anything to him. We could quote any number of Bible verses in support of our position, but the most appropriate quotation that comes to mind is in fact “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito”, which comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI. The motto means “do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it.” Alternatively, we could give the response of World War II US Army general Anthony McAuliffe when asked by the Germans to surrender, “NUTS!”

Moreover, the USA has clearly established the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state, such that the American courts will not interfere in disputes about matters of religious belief such as who is the rightful head of a church or its teachings. There is therefore nothing that is capable of litigation in the present matter.

The names of “patriarch Owen and patriarch McGuire” are unknown to the Catholicate of the West and it does not appear from any information available to us that these men were ever members or had anything else to do with our jurisdiction. The only Patriarch McGuire we are aware of was Patriarch George Alexander McGuire, who was a senior member of the San Luigi Orders and the first Patriarch of the African Orthodox Church. He died in 1934, a decade before the Catholicate of the West was founded in 1944. As for Owen, this may possibly refer to bishops Michael Owen of the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches or Owen Augustine of St Augustine American Catholic Church (who died in 2024), but neither of these bishops was ever a member of the Catholicate of the West or to our knowledge made any claims concerning it. It is also not clear that Brown holds any authority in the communions these bishops were associated with.

The present Catholicos has assiduously researched the history of the Catholicate for the past two decades. He also underwent a spiritual experience in which he received the commission to restore the Catholicate of the West. In our archive are all of the Catholicate’s major publications, many private documents, and a number of artefacts, all of which are extremely rare. In addition, we have met, worked with and interviewed a number of clergy and laity who were well acquainted with the first Catholicos, Mar Georgius, and who were able to speak of his presence, his work in ministry and his personal qualities.

Does Brown possess any such link to the Catholicate’s history? Has he too researched its origins, legal status and the clergy who have served it? Has he read its publications, and gone through its statement of faith, the Glastonbury Confession (1952) to establish his agreement with the propositions contained therein? We suspect the answer to these questions may well be in the negative.

We are well aware that in the course of the fragmented history of the Independent Catholic churches, splits in the various communions can lead to situations where there are multiple claimants to a given heritage or jurisdiction. In general, our policy is to live and let live on these matters. We do not, for example, pass comment regarding the 1982 California corporation “Old Catholic Church of North America (The Catholicate of the West)” of which Bishop Carlos Florido is president, nor did we do so on the similar California corporation that was maintained by the late Karla King, although both of these would make for an interesting chapter in parenthesis in the wider history of our jurisdiction. Our response in the form of Notices is reserved solely for those who make fraudulent public claims that constitute an attempted interference with our jurisdiction.

Brown makes much of the fact that our jurisdiction is relatively small. It is intentionally so, for it serves a specialist mission within the Church and is directed specifically at those who may be called to its particular charism. For our part, we are not impressed by numbers and do not seek to compete with other churches by establishing networks of parishes or duplicating the things they already do well. Our aim is to preserve our jurisdiction and its character for the benefit of those who find a home within it for whatever length of time. Even were it to become smaller than it is at present, that is no argument against its continuing existence or its legal status. As for Brown, where are the extensive church buildings and congregations of thousands of the “Orthodox Church of Christ”? We cannot even find a website for his denomination.

Following this, an associate of Brown placed a telephone call to one of our clergy, which was deflected by that clergyman’s wife. Any further unsolicited contact of this kind will be treated as harassment and reported to the Police.

To state our position clearly, Brown’s threats are unbefitting behaviour for any person claiming religious office. If he had a legitimate historical and jurisdictional claim to the Catholicate of the West, we would have been prepared to have discussed this with him. If he had wanted to join our jurisdiction and petitioned accordingly by providing full information and a clear statement of his background and intentions, including evidence of conformity to the faith and practices of the Catholicate and ordination in the valid Apostolic Succession, we again would certainly have granted him consideration and the courtesy of a reply.

But it appears that he believes that he can simply succeed against us through threats and intimidation, which are the tactics not of a bishop but of a street thug. In that belief he is gravely in error. We therefore refer him to the reply given in Arkell v. Pressdram (1971).