Carl and Lois Davis

A visitor sent me a nugget of information for my last post that Carl and Lois Davis, whose names were on the endowed visiting professorship Steenson held at St Mary's Seminary, are parishioners at Our Lady of Walsingham. A bit slow on the uptake, I eventually realized that if they were able to endow a professorship, they probably appear elsewhere, and a web search could be profitable. Indeed they do, and indeed it has been. They are major supporters of the St Thomas University Center for Fatih and Culture:

Married for 57 years, the Davises became members of Our Lady of Walsingham in 2001. Lois has served on Our Lady of Walsingham’s Pastoral Council and been involved in several building programs there including the recent construction of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The Carl A Davis and Lois E Davis Foundation appears to be well-managed and very well rated. "With $70.5M in assets, the organization is one of the largest of its kind in the United States." Its IRS Form 990-F indicates that in 2011, it gave Our Lady of Walsingham about $2.2 million, and the still-gestating US-Canadian Ordinariate $25,000. A non-profit called the Walsingham Foundation has apparently received multimillion-dollar grants from the Carl and Lois Davis Foundation in recent years.

I'm assuming that the Davises are the major donors behind the Houston Chancery, and probably many other projects surrounding Our Lady of Walsingham and the US-Canadian Ordinariate. I strongly suspect that major changes to personnel, such as the sudden retirement of Steenson and his replacement by Bishop Lopes, would not occur without their consultation and approval. The removal of their names from Steenson's professorship would also indicate the Davises' involvement in Steenson's removal.

Exactly what happened, of course, we still don't know, although I suspect there was a last-straw event leading to a sudden change.