The 2013 St Mary's Annual Meeting

is on Sunday, February 3. Although the new priest-in-charge, Frederick Rivers, by implication invited me to it in his e-mail the other day, I definitely don't plan to attend. I'm still not sure if I've been excommunicated, anyhow, but even if I weren't, my wife and I anticipate being received into the local Catholic parish at Easter, which is just a couple of months away, and there's no sense getting re-involved at St Mary's when there's so little likelihood that it will ever wind up as a Catholic parish now.

Nor would I recommend that anyone attend that meeting. Just for starters, the two people who should definitely have been excommunicated in 2012 -- the ones who, egged on by Anthony Morello in full vestments, violently shoved their fellow parishioners out of the parish hall last July while yelling things like "I'm going to break your neck" -- are instead running the show. The new absentee priest-in-charge, 74 years old and clueless, is inevitably going to defer to them in all things.

And there's going to be plenty for him to defer about. Given all the excommunications over the past year, the closure of the parish to masses for five months, and the disregard for the parish bylaws the dissidents have already shown, there are going to be numerous potentially contentious issues:

• Exactly who has been excommunicated? The faithful parishioners are aware of nine, but are there more? How many? Who are they?
• As a result, who is now a member in good standing? The bylaws say they have to have attended regularly for a full year, but how does the five-month closure of the parish affect this?
• Based on that, what constitutes a quorum?
• And who is eligible to serve on the vestry? Most of those who were excommunicated were formerly on the vestry, with their terms ending in different years. Who will be elected to serve on which spot? And by the way, a member in good standing must also pledge to be eligible to serve on the vestry. Where are the pledge records?

That meeting is not going to accomplish anything good. My guess, actually, is that so few people will wish to attend that by any sane criterion, there won't be a quorum, but that won't stop the angry core from doing whatever they wish to do, and Rivers, the putative adult in charge, will simply defer to them.

"We need to stay away from that place," says my wife. "We can never go back there. That place is evil."