Ortega Maxey was born on February 22, 1902. By 1923, he was ordained a priest by Joseph Rene Vilatte of the American Catholic Church.[1] He would be consecrated as bishop 4 years later by William Montgomery Brown, before receiving several conditional consecrations after.[1]
During the 1930s, Maxey worked with an Episcopal parish, and by 1937 was left "bound and beaten" after he was "accosted by two men as he left a taxi to enter his apartment".[2] In 1937, he was also deposed as a deacon from the Episcopal Church in the United States.[3]
From 1944 to 1949, he would serve as president and pastor of the Ancient Christian Fellowship; and by 1946, the Ancient Christian Fellowship merged with the Apostolic Episcopal Church.[2] He would later resign from the Apostolic Episcopal Church and Catholicate of the West, being succeeded by Matthew Nicholas Nelson and Lowell Paul Wadle.[1]
In 1958, Maxey published Man Is a Sexual Being and by 1964, was given a 15-year jail term and $19,000 fine for distributing "an obscene book" by mail and common carrier.[2][4]
Maxey became a Unitarian Universalist in the 1950s and hosted gay-themed events at the First Universalist Church of Los Angeles.[2]
In 1970, he returned to the independent sacramental movement and founded the Catholic Christian Church.[1]
Maxey died on March 12, 1992 in Fresno, California.[5]