Friday, May 1, 2015

More On Receptions

Many thanks to the visitor who has been keeping me up to date on the information that's become available on 2015 receptions into US-Canadian Ordinariate parishes. For context, he has found a number of 66,000 baptized Christians received into the Catholic Church in the US during 2013. A number in the five figures at least sounds credible to me, as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, which has a capacity of 3000, was completely filled with candidates, catechumens, and sponsors when I attended the Rite of Election there in 2012. (My visitor's source has 1900 candidates and catechumens in Los Angeles in 2015, which corresponds to my 2012 observation.) He says,
Since the initial group reception Mrs Gyapong has posted pictures of two or three people who have been received into the Church in her [Ottawa] parish, on her Foolishness to the World blog. Three people were received at St Thomas More, Toronto in its first year, and "some" (fewer than three, I imagine) on the Sunday after Easter this year. The Calendar on the website for St John the Evangelist, Calgary indicates that new members will be received into the Church next Sunday.
He also refers me to a post at Ordinariate News from The Rev. Eric L. Bergman at St Thomas More, Scranton, PA:
At our parish’s Easter Vigil Mass at 8PM on April 4 I will baptize one, confirm three, and give First Holy Communion to four new parishioners who have been in formation since the fall. None of these people are former Anglicans but are, rather, people from the neighborhood who found St. Joseph Church because of its close proximity to their homes.

All of them came seeking to complete the Sacraments of Initiation, three of them having been baptized in the Catholic Church, at which point their formal formation in the Faith ceased. As you may recall, since 2013 such persons are part of our call to evangelize: Pope Francis decreed at that time that those Catholics who never completed the Sacraments of Initiation may become members of Ordinariate parishes if we catechize and initiate them.

But why should someone have to dig so hard to find this information? It is not contained anywhere in the US-Canadian Ordinariate news pages. Does anyone in Houston pay attention?