Friday, January 22, 2016

Discrepancies?

A visitor seems to be still reviewing the current state of groups and parishes in the US-Canadian Ordinariate. I know one new discrepancy has come to his attention, but I also began to think again about an old one: the received official numbers from Houston appeared again in the National Catholic Register last month:
The North-American ordinariate Bishop-elect Lopez [sic] will lead consists of 42 parishes with approximately 70 ordained priests and deacons serving Catholics with Anglican traditions in 30 states and Canadian provinces.
However, a count just now of the parishes and groups on the parish finder of the OCSP web site yields 38 -- except that the parish finder has been out of date for many months and still lists the two Philadelphia groups separately, when they are now a single St John the Baptist parish, so at best, the evidence we have suggests 37, except that a new group in suburban Houston may bring the total back to 38. I once sent the OCSP press flack a question asking which groups of the 42 were left off the parish finder, but I got the standard nothing in reply.

Beyond that, there's a new and different parish map elsewhere on the OCSP web site that, at minimum, shows a group in the Sacramento, CA area (or perhaps the Roseville-Auburn area to the northeast). Neither my visitor nor I has heard anything about such a group, and I'm wondering if it might represent some candidate group, possibly an ACA parish, that briefly considered joining the OCSP but never followed through.

But here's a question: it sounds like Bp-Elect Lopes is already putting together the visitation schedule for his announced airplane time for the coming year. If there are so many maybes or sorta-kindas -- 10%, after all -- how does he know where to go? I hate to say this, but if I were Lopes, I'd want a definite current list from Fr Hough III. Names, mass times and places, phones, e-mails. I'd expect that Fr Hough III be able to print this off his desktop in a matter or minutes, if not seconds.

Does such a list exist? I have a feeling not. So what does Hough III do all day?