Star On "Hollywood Bl" For Fr Neal Dodd

Yesterday, May 26, marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Fr Neal Dodd, the founding pastor of St Mary of the Angels parish. From Fr Kelley,

A native of Iowa, he came to Hollywood in 1917, in response to what he perceived as a call from God. His parish ministry in Petaluma was highly successful, including one of the first church-sponsored Boy Scout troops in California. He left there, sensing that he was bidden to establish a church mission to the nascent movie industry here.

The church began on February 3, 1918, in a storefront on N. Vermont Avenue, but soon moved to a site on N. New Hampshire. By 1930, the new church was built on Finley Avenue.

Fr Dodd was a member of the Screen Actors Guild, and always played the part of a clergyman. Directors knew him as "One-Shot Dodd" -- he never needed to do a scene over again; he got it right the first time. Many will remember him as the Senate Chaplain in "Mr Smith Goes to Washington", with Jimmy Stewart, or the Priest in the Garden awaiting Claudette Colbert, in "It Happened One Night." His three-hundredth screen "wedding" featured Rosalind Russell as the bride. Altogether he had about 385 film roles. He also worked behind the scenes, as an advisor to the likes of Cecil B. De Mille, on both versions of "The Ten Commandments" -- black & white, and color.

It is likely that he originated the idea of the Motion Picture Relief Fund, to help out-of- work actors and actresses, then promoted the idea to Mary Pickford, Doug Fairbanks, Sr., and Charlie Chaplin, who raised the funds that Fr Dodd distributed.

A biography named him "A Candle Among the Stars." And there is a movement afoot to honor him in an appropriate way. The parish hopes to host a film festival featuring him in some of the movies in which he took roles.

An unofficial star to commemorate Fr Dodd was recently placed on the Finley Avenue sidewalk in front of the St Mary's parish.

A Couple Of Vocation Quick Hits

Some visitors have proposed what might seem to be a resolution to the problem of where celibate vocations will come from in the short-to-medium term in the Ordinariates: the Catholic Church will surely relax the discipline of a celibate priesthood overall, at which point this will resolve the whole question of vocations, in the Ordinariates and in the Latin rite as well.

I suppose this could happen. On the other hand, Fr Z has referred to priests who were persuaded to go in during the 1960s, when they were told that things would change any time now, so they could get married in a few years. The result, of course, wasn't good, for the priests or the Church. There was also the argument made during the sex abuse crisis, that allowing married priests would give them an outlet and keep them away from the altar servers. But the lack of conjugal sex doesn't cause pedophilia, and its availability doesn't cure it.

A bigger question to me is the great variability in the environments that produce traditional celibate vocations. Of two parishes we know, one has had only one vocation in 90 years, the other 70 in roughly the same period. A visitor tells me,

This may surprise you, but the Roman Catholic campus ministry at one educational institution in the Archdiocese of Boston has yielded more vocations to ordained ministry and religious life than all other campuses in the archdiocese combined over the past several years.

That campus probably is the one that you would least expect to be a font of vocations -- the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What made the difference is quite simple: emphasis on making a personal commitment of faith, and thereby yielding one's life in prayerful obedience to God. But this is what God calls all Christians to do.

The problem of vocations is clearly not monolithic. Some environments foster them, others don't. What problem are we trying to solve?

More Thoughts On Vocations

I was a Protestant, and for a while a very lapsed one, for 65 years. While it wasn't my doing, it does mean I never had two big advantages I could have had, a Catholic family and a Catholic education. I recognize that there is no guarantee that the family would not have been just as dysfunctional, and the education just as mediocre, as the ones I did have. On the other hand, I've often reflected on how a devout Catholic family might have raised me differently, and a rigorous Catholic education might have prepared me better for the challenges I encountered.

The atmosphere at our current parish, which has produced a good many vocations throughout its history, has brought me back to the question of how family and education foster vocations. A visitor pointed me to a USCCB survey of the 2015 class of ordinands to the priesthood. Over 90% came from Catholic families, mostly with both parents Catholic. Family members, as well as parish priests, typically fostered and encouraged their vocations. They commonly came from larger families, typically with 3,4, or 5 children. Over half had Catholic elementary educations, with about 45% attending a Catholic college.

It seems to me that boys and young men raised in families that have come into the Ordinariate are less likely to have these sorts of backgrounds. Anglican families are smaller; they'll be more likely to send their kids to Episcopal or public schools and secular prestige universities. There won't be a Catholic family background extending for generations. There won't be Catholic parish priests and religious to serve as inspirations and mentors. Currently, according to the USCCB survey, less than 10% of ordinands come from this sort of background.

In fact, the current cohort of Ordinariate priests are typically 65+, retired with a pension from the Anglican priesthood, and married. As parish priests, they aren't going to be worthwhile examples for the few boys and young men now in Ordinariate parishes. They became Catholic as a late-career strategic move, not as a sacrificial vocational choice made in transition to adulthood.

I don't see how this thing can succeed, frankly.

Bright Spot, Of Sorts

My regular correspondent raises the example of St Luke's, Washington DC:

This parish has struck me as one of the OCSP's success stories. I was not surprised that Msgr Steenson appointed the pastor, Fr Mark Lewis, as the first Vicar Forane in the US (although I was surprised that while Fr Lewis is Dean of the Eastern Deanery, there is no Western,Southern, or Northern Deanery, which strikes me as illogical). In any event, one of the sources of St Luke's strength, IMHO, is the fact that it chose to leave its previous church in Bladensburg, despite the willingness of their TEC diocese to rent them the building with an option to purchase. No doubt this was a wrench, but they traded the headaches of an aging building in a less central location for a suitable facility in downtown DC whose expenses they share with the much larger host congregation.

So I was somewhat dismayed to see in the February newsletter that the long-term goal is still to have a separate church building. Of course if the congregation grows to many hundreds and needs so many mass times and facilities for activities that sharing is no longer an option, that would be great news. But the more likely reality is that they have a hankering to join the many congregations of many denominations pouring all their energy into the support of a building for its own sake. Generally speaking denominations with a strong central authority, mainly Catholics and "official" Anglicans, are able to be fairly ruthless about closing marginal parishes. Where local congregations hold the power, there is more likelihood of magical thinking.

Financial prudence and realistic goals may be ingredients for a successful parish, but the LA archdiocese's associate director of vocations gave me a new perspective when he celebrated mass at our parish yesterday. (Since it was Trinity Sunday, with great good humor he introduced us to the term patripassianism. My kind of homily.) But in his remarks at the end of the mass, he noted that two men from the parish will be ordained to the priesthood next month, with three total in the past two years. The parish has produced something like 70 priests in its history. The parish we left last year has produced just one in 90 years.

Fr Ward implied as well that vocations come from generations of Catholic families. If there are ingredients that keep a parish from failing early in its formation, it seems to me that a big sign of a successful parish is vocations. I'm not seeing much in the way of vocations from any Ordinariate, when, considering the average age of current clergy, they will be urgently needed very soon.

"Not 'No,' But 'Hell, No!'"

This is the title of an article by Charles Coulombe, a Los Angeles Catholic writer, that appeared in the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, December 1999. I found it on the web (it was linked at The Anglo Catholic blog in 2011), but it had apparently been taken down by the time I started this blog. A visitor located it on the Wayback Machine and very kindly sent me a copy.

It's too long to reprint in full here, but the relevant passage is a quote from Cardinal Mahony's 1986 letter unequivocally rejecting the St Mary of the Angels application to become an Anglican Use parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese:

"I wish to acknowledge your letter of October 14, 1986," wrote Mahony, "with respect to your desire that St. Mary of the Angels Church community be received into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. The history of your parish community is not paralleled with any other similar Episcopal community which has been received into the Roman Catholic Church in our country. Your letter to His Eminence, Cardinal Bernard Law, does not reflect the long and very volatile public legal proceedings which you took against the Episcopal Diocese, a process which proceeded through both the Superior Court and the Appellate Court. This factor distinguishes your history from every other application of which I am aware. You indicate that your numbers continue to dwindle, and there is still division and divisiveness among the community. In addition, you seem to require that a major focus be upon the physical plant of St. Mary of the Angels community. All of these considerations compel me and my consultants to look negatively upon your interest in union with the Roman Catholic Church as an Anglican Use community. I am hopeful that this letter will help to crystallize once again the problems which have been so prevalent in the past efforts of your community to seek union with the Roman Catholic Church."

If anyone can now locate a copy of the October 14, 1986 letter from the parish to Cardinal Mahony, this would go a great length to complete the historical record.

From my point of view, the letter is remarkably perceptive about the parish and its difficulties. The references to "long and very volatile public legal proceedings", as well as continued "division and divisiveness among the community", have a very contemporary ring. In fact, the letter has given me some reason to reflect on how the troubles that began in 2011-12 relate to the parish's overall history.

The parish's "First Lawsuit" period of the late 1970s has always interested me, because it hit the local news around the time I was deciding to return to the Church as an Episcopalian. Mrs Brandt, as I recall, was then telegenic and was the parish spokesperson in the news segments -- she remained a long-term member until the 2012 troubles and was something of a doyenne among the dissidents. I remember her telling the 1970s interviewer that The Episcopal Church, in ordaining women priests, had taken away the parish's "Catholicity".

This caused me to ask the Episcopal priest who was conducting my confirmation class at a nearby parish what this was all about. His answer, which I've quoted here before, has stayed with me: "These are people who want to have the prestige of calling themselves Catholic without paying the real dues you have to pay actually to be Catholic." My subsequent experience at the parish itself has confirmed that there was a substantial group to whom this definitely applied.

On top of that, an observation in other local media was that the parish was "more an exclusive social club than a church", and Mrs Brandt, from a prominent and well-off California family, represented this side of the parish as well. One one hand, there was punctilious liturgical observance. On the other, anything more seriously related to the Roman cathechism was treated with a wink.

Garry South, a longtime member of the parish and a benefactor, is a political consultant who advises liberal Democrats exclusively, helping them to stress "women's health issues" in order to get elected. (Although Mr South appears to have sided with the pro-Ordinariate members in the 2011-12 votes, he does not appear to have returned to the parish since its restoration by Judge Strobel.)

With the perspective of Cardinal Mahony's letter, I think I have a better understanding of the deep divisions in the parish that led to the 2011-12 troubles, and they probably stem from Fr Kelley's arrival in 2007. Fr Kelley, an erudite, sincere, and conscientious priest, wasn't much interested in social prestige. The long-term parish stalwarts like Mrs Brandt, and the new wannabes like Mrs Bush who wished to emulate her, were poorly catechized -- these were the people who struggled with the Church calendar and promoted "Angelicanism" once they had control of the parish web site.

Fr Kelley, on the other hand, was concerned with Anglo-Catholic theology, adult education, and Bible study. He was disinclined to wink at the things the parish stalwarts had winked at. The formal catechesis the parish undertook on Sunday afternoons in the summer of 2011 in the runup to its attempt to join the US-Canadian Ordinariate probably did not help things one bit.

At this point, I think there may be grounds for optimism that the angry, snobbish, poorly catechized faction of the parish of which Cardinal Mahony seems to have been fully aware may finally have purged itself in the 2011-2015 troubles. On he other hand, the qualities of conscientiousness, erudition, fortitude, and faith that did not endear Fr Kelley to this faction also left him out in the cold with the ACA, and so far as well with the old-boy network in the US-Canadian Ordinariate.

The future of the parish is uncertain -- but then, so is the future of the Ordinariate.

What's A Diocesan Chancellor, Anyhow?

My correspondent writes,

I am trying to educate myself about the role of diocesan Chancellor. I had assumed that this position would necessarily be held by a lawyer, or at least a canon lawyer, who would advise the bishop and diocesan committees on any legal issues that might arise . But according to Wikipedia, and who are we to challenge that magisterium?, this position is more like a cross between an archivist and a notary. So it is not surprising that Bp Lopes' administrative assistant currently holds that position in the OCSP. However, this does not mean that the Ordinariate does not also require legal expertise.

I recall that when Divine Worship debuted clergy were initially told that copyright rules forbade the production of any sort of pew booklet with mass texts. Even a handout with the day's Scripture readings was forbidden; then it was decided that these could be made available---as long as people were prevented from taking them home! Now, as a new issue of [Ordinariate Observer] is in preparation, clergy have been asked to submit pictures, making sure that any pictures including minors are accompanied by signed permission forms from parents or guardians. These seem, in the light of the St Thomas More debacle, classic instances of straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel.

I did some searching on this myself and found this Wikipedia entry. Since most of us who come here are current or recovering Anglicans, it appears that we may have missed an important distinction: an Anglican chancellor is in fact an attorney, while a Catholic chancellor is more or less a notary who vouches for the authenticity of a bishop's actions and maintains the archive. A visitor has sent me this link to the description of a Chancellor's duties in the Catholic canons.

It appears that the two chancellors appointed by Msgr Steenson were attorneys, and that suggests he may have had the Anglican role in mind. Bp Lopes appears to have a Catholic view of the position. On the other hand, based on my correspondent's account, it does appear that the OCSP is lacking strong legal leadership at this point, which contributes to an overall impression that things are in disorder.

Churning In Office Of Chancellor

My regular correspondent noted that I seemed in recent posts to assume Fr Ken Wolfe is Chancellor of the US-Canadian Ordinariate:

Were you suggesting that Fr Wolfe is the Chancellor? He is in charge of Child and Youth Protection. Laurie Miller, the bishop's PA, is listed as the Chancellor. Msgr Steenson had appointed Fr Benedict Soule, O.P. to the position of Judicial Vicar but in fact, since he is not incardinated in the OCSP and could therefore not sit on the Governing Council this was not a workable appointment and he is now acting in an advisory capacity to Bp Lopes, who is handling the responsibilities of Judicial Vicar. So there is no legal expert on the OCSP staff.

However, as I noted in July 2015, the June 2015 Ordinariate Observer carried this announcement of Fr Wolfe's ordination:

At the ordination it was announced that Fr. Wolfe, an attorney, will serve as the Chancellor of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. He will work from Tucson with periodic trips to Houston.

Apparently the office of Judicial Vicar deals with canon law and is, or may be, separate from the office of Chancellor. But if Fr Wolfe is no longer Chancellor, I'm not sure if this was ever announced. Whatever the cause, it doesn't seem as though a competent person in Houston did any effective review of the St Thomas More plan to reopen the Guild Store.

And naturally, if personnel churning continually takes place, with responsibilities never clearly defined among staff, this is a failure of leadership. So far, this doesn't seem to be changing under Bp Lopes.

UPDATE: My correspondent replies,

The announcement of Fr Wolfe's appointment as Chancellor was in the previous edition of the OO, the "double issue" identified as Vol I 2&3 although it was actually 3&4. This is the issue you link to in the July 2015 post. In volume II no 1 linked to today's post we have the appointment of Fr Soule, working closely with Margaret Chalmers the "first Chancellor," but he is not explicitly identified as the new Chancellor. The issue also describes Fr Wolfe's responsibilities in the Safe Environment program. Looking at these issues, with their chaotic layout and multiplicity of fonts, (not to mention the misinformation, but that is less readily apparent), must be an embarrassment for the current administration. No wonder they are so hard to access from the OCSP site.

I'm not sure what's changed since Bp Lopes's appointment.

Diocese vs Ordinariate

Over the years, we've seen stories pop up here and there whereby a diocese comes into some sort of conflict with an Ordinariate (in particular, mostly, the US-Canadian one), and the diocese usually wins without much of a fight. Most recently, if my surmise is correct, the Diocese of Scranton prevailed over the St Thomas More Ordinariate parish in its (misguided) attempt to reopen a closed gift and church supply store. Not long ago, the Diocese of Rochester, at least according to what we've heard from the Ordinariate group there, refused to provide any support to Ordinariate clergy assigned to that group, for instance, by providing living quarters in a rectory.

I'm increasingly of the view that the diocesan bishops have a point. Now and then someone will argue that this or that bishop is against married clergy, or is a big liberal (Bishop of Rochester Matano, though, is pretty clearly moving that diocese back to the mainstream).

Noting the problems with the Scranton Ordinariate parish, a visitor suggested to me that one difficulty the Ordinariate faces is that it doesn't have the depth and experience in its headquarters staff that are much more typical in a diocese. My view, admittedly only partial, is that both of the US-Canadian Ordinariate's chancellors have been comically feckless and inept, in the most recent case either prevented entirely from giving the Scranton business plan a serious legal review, or unable to imagine a common legal problem like restrictive lease provisions.

Another visitor has noted that Ordinariate groups and parishes have been slow to implement the Virtus program, or simply haven't taken it seriously. As that visitor points out, when a Catholic scandal turns up on the local news, the guy who has to answer the questions is always going to be the local bishop, and it's not going to look good for him to try to say that parish is the responsibility of some obscure thing in Houston, not him. If I were a diocesan bishop, I'd worry, especially when we're beginning to see how little effective supervision US-Canadian parishes and groups actually receive.

There doesn't seem to be any financial supervision, either. Although the Ordinariate has required parishes and groups to use a standardized ParishSoft package, the implementation isn't going well. A visitor reports, "I gather that the ParishSoft software is so inaccurate, or has been so messed up by inexperienced users, that it has caused a major problem for Houston in trying to send receipts and thank yous to donors to the Bishop's Appeal. Almost all the data has had to be manually re-entered."

The finances of St Thomas More and St John the Evangelist, as we've seen, appear to be precarious. I can't imagine how things can be much different for the Bridgeport, PA parish, since equivalent small numbers are trying to heat and maintain similar old buildings. If vicars for communications or finance, or chancellors, are nonfeasant or incompetent, it might be possible for a diocese to reach down into its staff for a replacement. But the Ordinariates simply don't have a bench. This is proving to be a problem for the short and medium term.

Someone may say we need to give Bp Lopes time, he's new, but I'm not at all sure how much time the Ordinariates have.

Here's What I Think Happened To Derail The St Thomas More Gift Shop

Driven by curiosity on what actually happened to derail the St Thomas More gift store-coffee shop project at the Guild Building in Scranton, a visitor and I put our heads together and came up with this possible explanation. I would stress that this is informed speculation only, subject to correction if more information becomes available.

1. The Catholic Diocese of Scranton, faced with a need to cut costs, moved offices and facilities out of the Guild Building in Scranton, which it owned, and sold the building to Dr Evanish of Scranton, primarily for use as dental and medical offices on the second, third, and fourth floors.
2. One of the facilities it intended to close in selling the building was the Guild Store, located on the ground floor. This sold Catholic books, church supplies, and gifts. Although it had been popular in prior years, it had consistently lost money more recently due to increasing on line shopping.
3. I assume the Diocese's lawyers, adhering to normal professional practice, inserted wording in the sales contract preventing the buyer, Dr Evanish, from renting to any tenant that competed with any Diocesan business. For our purposes, this included the former Guild Store, which, although closed, previously sold Catholic items.
4. Although it doesn't appear to be very active, the Diocese did open an on line store selling items equivalent to what was sold in the former Guild Store. Dr Evanish presumably agreed in the sales contract not to lease to a tenant that would compete with this business.
5. Apparently not knowing about the restrictive wording in the sales contract, Dr Evanish worked with Fr Bergman to lease the ground floor space in the Guild Building to a new business, True Beauty Coffee and Gift Shop, which proposed specifically to revive the former Guild Store operated by the Diocese of Scranton.
6. Dr Evanish appears to have invested money to modify the ground floor space to accommodate this business on the expectation that True Beauty Coffee and Gift Shop would move in and begin to pay rent.
7. At some point the Diocese of Scranton learned of this plan and, recognizing that True Beauty Coffee and Gift Shop would specifically compete with its on line business established to replace the Guild Store, invoked the restrictive wording in the sales contract with Dr Evanish. This probably included a threat to sue.
8. Yeah, if this is what happened, True Beauty Coffee and Gift Shop is dead, dead, dead.

If I were Dr Evanish, I'd be pretty irked with my attorney, who should have been reviewing all the documents connected with this project and who somehow missed what must almost certainly have been restrictive wording in the sales contract. However, I think the Ordinariate's chancellor should have been looking this over as well and can also be held responsible. Bp Lopes should be chatting with Fr Wolfe.

A much bigger question, though, is why both Dr Evanish and Fr Bergman thought a retail business selling church supplies and gifts in a rust belt downtown store would succeed, when the same business had demonstrably failed in the same location.

Other Troubling News

My usual correspondent in these matters reports on the finances of St John the Evangelist Calgary:

The campaign to raise the down payment on the church property is now scheduled to end in December 2016. This would be five years after they were given five years to exercise an option to buy the building from the Anglican diocese, so I am not sure why the campaign was originally supposed to run to December 2017. But the new brochure requests that all pledges be paid up this year. In the meantime they have let their full-time assistant priest go, the rector and his family have moved out of the rectory (this could be for any number of reasons), and most significantly, to my mind, the parish no longer posts the weekly bulletins, which previously provided a look at attendance and givings. The former had plateaued at about 140; the latter was healthy, but by my calculations not enough to enable the parish to meet its budget of about $260,000 annually and also raise $165,000 for a down payment on its property. In fact, while the Anglican diocese is only charging them $1500 a month rent, they need a much larger down payment than the 10% minimum to keep mortgage payments from being many times that.

Questions That Won't Go Away

As I've said here before, like Edward G. Robinson's claIms manager Keyes in Double Indemnity, "I've got a little man". There are just too many questions that stay in my mind about the version of St Thomas More's finances that Fr Bergman gives in his explanations to the parish. Here are the two that trouble me most, and that ought to trouble Bp Lopes:

What is the precise problem at the Guild Building?

Here's the explanation in Fr Bergman's general appeal:

[F]or two years now the Parish has been on track to be the beneficiary of a significant new income stream: the re-opening – thanks to generous benefactors – of a Catholic bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Scranton whose projected income figures were very promising; all proceeds were to support our Parish and School. Sadly, through no fault whatsoever of our benefactors nor the Parish, the project has ground to an abrupt halt and is likely headed for the courts.

Here's the version in Fr Bergman's Pentecost parish newsletter:

For the last two years we believed that financial relief was going to come through the proceeds we would receive from our project downtown, namely the opening of a gift store and coffee shop in the old Guild Building. While we as a parish invested only what was required to have a business incorporated in the state of Pennsylvania, amounting to less than $2,500, our benefactors invested hundreds of thousands of dollars hoping to get u up and running at some point last year. They have now taken a bath, as the project is unfinished, the general contractor is off the job, and the space cannot be rented out to help pay down the mortgage.

The project is suspended indefinitely while legal matters wait to be sorted out. . .

Fr Bergrman's versions refer to vague problems involving the "benefactors" and the Guild Building. This led me to think there may have been overall problems with the acquisition of the building itself, which could have led to potential legal issues. The "benefactors" involved are the Evanish family, who purchased the building from the Catholic Diocese of Scranton in 2014 and proposed allowing the parish to use the ground floor for its bookstore. In vain I searched the web for any reference to issues arising from the purchase, or perhaps zoning or city planning problems arising from the purchase.

News articles relating to the sale indicate the Evanish family intended to use the upper floors for their dental practice, and Fr Bergman's versions allowed me to think problems with the building itself or its acquisition were what caused the Evanishes to "take a bath". However, Horizon Dental, the Evanish firm, is fully up and running in its Guild Building location at 400 Wyoming Avenue.

This leads me to think that the unspecified problem that threatens legal complications is related only to the modification of the ground-floor space for the bookstore. Whatever it is, all we know is it has come about "through no fault whatsoever" of the parish. So whose fault is it? It's worth pointing out that Fr Bergman is fond of avoiding blame in his public statements. Take his Christmas 2015 appeal for funds, which I covered here in this post.

Due to no fault of our own our parish was not billed for our property and liability insurance coverage in fiscal year 2014-2015.

This in turn leads to a contradiction in Fr Bergman's versions of whether the parish has reserves. In the Christmas 2015 appeal, he says

You may wonder why we did not put anything aside to meet unexpected expenses like the one we now face. The truth is, in nearly eleven years now, we have never put anything aside.

while in the May 2016 appeal he says,

Though for a while we have managed to expend and then rebuild our reserve, in recent months we have exhausted our reserve and have now reached a point at which our expenses consistently and significantly exceed our income.

So the parish has never had a reserve, or it did, but now it's gone. It's hard to avoid thinking Fr Bergman says whatever suits him at the time, and that's inappropriate for matters that are this serious. That bothers me. I've got a little man.

How much money are we actually talking about here?

All Fr Bergman tells us is that

We have stalled in our ability to send payments to the generous individuals who loaned us funds ($150,000+) for the renovation of our buildings.

Elsewhere, there are vague references to an income shortfall or thousands of dollars in unpaid bills, but there is no specific accounting. In his Pentecost letter, Fr Bergman says

the amount of money we send to the Ordinariate Chancery in Houston seems like a lot – we’ll send about $34,000 this year

It isn't clear if this amount represents the Cathedraticum, which would be 10% of parish income, or whether, as a visitor suggests, it might also include "the $12,000 the parish was asked to give to the Bishop's Appeal". If $34,000 represents the Cathedraticum alone, that would put its overall income at $340,000, a respectable amount for even a diocesan parish. This is probably not the case.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if Fr Bergman actually knows the parish's real income, given the overall lack of budgeting we see. If the contribution includes the Bishop's Appeal, this would be covered mainly by separate payments from parishioners and shouldn't be lumped in with the Cathedraticum. I would say that the $34,000 figure is largely a strategy to promise Houston this amount, providing some lucky gift or bequest turns up -- otherwise, it's completely empty and designed primarily to keep the heat off Fr Bergman for some period.

The lack of any actual enumeration of the parish's income shortfall, the lack of any enumeration of the parish's actual debts, and the lack of any strategy to correct the problem are all disturbing.

They should be disturbing to Bp Lopes. In the real world, an employee who got a company into a financial or potential legal hole like this would be, at minimum, put on some sort of leave while the legal and audit departments had a close look at what was happening. So far, I don't think Houston's response is adequate.

Puzzling History At St Thomas More Scranton

A visitor has sent me a series of links that give a somewhat clearer picture of the unrealistic planning at St Thomas More Scranton. Fr Bergman says in the Pentecost 2016 parish newsletter,

For the last two years we believed that financial relief was going to come through the proceeds we would receive from our project downtown, namely the opening of a gift store and coffee shop in the old Guild Building. . . . The project is suspended indefinitely while legal matters wait to be sorted out, so we will not be able to count on the steady stream of income we were anticipating, a reality that asserted itself gradually over the past four months. Our delay in informing you is due only to our sincere belief that the project would at last come through. Now that we know it won’t, we must formulate another plan for financial solvency and growth. The upshot is that all our projects, including our Parish School and Memorial Park, are on hold until we resolve our monthly operating income shortfall.

However, last September, the Ordinariate News site passed along an earlier Bergman newsletter in which he noted the completion of a handicapped access ramp:

Our carpenters, who also helped refurbish the Convent Chapel, outdid themselves in making it fit in with the décor of the church, but they experienced cost overruns in making it totally compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was my decision to delay its construction no longer, despite the fact we don’t have the money on hand to pay for it, because I thought it too important to put off. This decision has been vindicated at least in part by the number of people who have come to Mass since its construction who could not have worshiped with us otherwise. I’m truly amazed by how many. My hope, of course, is that the other part of my decision will be vindicated by contributions to make up for the $2,000 we still owe our kind carpenters, who have made our church so much more accessible.

This, however, now appears to be only one of a large number of unpaid bills, if the information in my last post is an indication.

I had been skeptical of the idea that a bookstore and coffee shop would generate large enough surplus income to sustain the parish, which we now know had been spending well beyond its means for several years. A 2014 parish newsletter, also passed along by Ordinariate News, says,

Many of you have heard that the Diocese of Scranton recently sold the Guild Building on Wyoming Avenue in downtown Scranton, which for decades housed the Guild Studios, the area’s only Catholic goods and book store.

However, my visitor points out that "The bookshop closed by the Diocese of Scranton which the parish planned to reopen had lost money for the previous five years, by the way. This was a major factor in the decision to sell the building." A news story notes this here. The newsletter announcing the sale of the building continues,

Therefore, over the course of many months we put together a plan to open a store and coffee shop in the first floor of the Guild Building that would offer many of the same products sold there before the Guild Studios closed in August of last year.

But if the same business using the same non-profit business model selling the same products had lost money for the past five years, how did Fr Bergman expect to make any money at all reopening the store? Much less

. . . restore our school building, pay teacher salaries, offer tuition assistance, and cover whatever other costs our parish may incur in running a Catholic school.

Beyond that, the circumstances we saw in my last post paint a picture that, notwithstanding uncertainties and delays, the parish had been spending wildly, incurring debt, and then stiffing both creditors and employees based on unrealistic projections of income that never appeared.

As far as I can see, the parish is in a considerable financial hole. Without a detailed accounting, it appears to owe creditors, contractors, and employees amounts that total well into six figures. It appears that the donors who expected to reopen the Guild Building have suffered additional losses that are at least equivalent. (A news story notes that the Evanishes had purchased the building for $1.3 million; Fr Bergman's statements imply they have lost this money.)

Given these uncertainties, I would be very uneasy to donate money to bail the parish out of this situation without very definite assurances that a sound financial plan was in place. Fr Bergman minimizes the problem, as far as I can see, if he doesn't misrepresent it outright, by referring only to a "monthly operating income shortfall". What about the six-figure hole they're already in? Frankly, I'd want to know why Fr Bergman would continue in his position -- I think it's past time for Houston to make a definite move if it wants the parish to continue in any form. Beyond that, this is likely to be a significant hit to the OCSP's reputation.

St Thomas More Scranton and Money

A link to an appeal from the St Thomas More parish arrived in my inbox in an e-mail entitled, "Fairly dire news from one of the bright lights of the OCSP". It outlines the problem:

• St. Thomas More Parish is not presently on a financially sustainable trajectory. Though for a while we have managed to expend and then rebuild our reserve, in recent months we have exhausted our reserve and have now reached a point at which our expenses consistently and significantly exceed our income.
• Payroll for our clergy and staff has been twice delayed, and we have several thousand dollars in outstanding bills.
• We have stalled in our ability to send payments to the generous individuals who loaned us funds ($150,000+) for the renovation of our buildings. And we are often forced to hold Cathedraticum payments to the Ordinariate for months at a time until, by God’s providence, a major gift gives us the ability to pay them all at once.

The letter then goes into some detail to discuss the causes of the problem. I'm on the other side of the country, I'm not familiar with the parish, and I can't pass judgment on how things reached this point. I do have some exposure to parish finance, and some matters in the discussion cause me concern.

• The purchase of our campus brought with it substantial new expenses for the congregation we did not have as renters, including utilities, maintenance, snow removal, and exorbitant property & liability insurance.
• Membership in the Ordinariate has brought the new responsibility of the Cathedraticum, the 10% of our income required for the support of our leadership structure in Houston; as well as the newly announced Bishop’s Appeal, whose balance the Parish fully intends to give in full should individual parishioner gifts not reach our goal.

Building utilities are a major expense, as are items that people may ignore when trying to scope financial issues out, like insurance, lawn care, and trash removal. In the snow belt, heating and snow removal probably double utility and maintenance expenses. If St Thomas More, a fairly well-established parish, is grappling with this problem, I've simply got to ask what the financial picture really is at St John the Baptist Bridgeport, PA.

The letter asks, "If we have been on this trajectory for a long time, why the eleventh hour notice?" Its answer:

As Fr. Bergman has communicated, for two years now the Parish has been on track to be the beneficiary of a significant new income stream: the re-opening – thanks to generous benefactors – of a Catholic bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Scranton whose projected income figures were very promising; all proceeds were to support our Parish and School. Sadly, through no fault whatsoever of our benefactors nor the Parish, the project has ground to an abrupt halt and is likely headed for the courts.

Frankly, I doubt if the idea of a Catholic bookstore and coffee shop in downtown Scranton (!) was ever realistic -- bookstores, Catholic or not, have never been, and certainly are not now, gold mines. Food operations require attentive, experienced management. Get real: a parish with membership in the hundreds is never going to be able to take over facilities that were necessarily abandoned by parishes with memberships in the thousands.

I'm glad to see that the parish has dropped the bookstore and the school from its planning. What I've been able to pick up from diocesan parishes is that schools require enrollments in the neighborhood of 200+ to be viable at all, and this isn't going to happen in a new Ordinariate parish. The time, energy, and optimism that went into planning for both the bookstore and the school were, the Scranton parish now seems to acknowledge, not well spent. This seems to have allowed the parish to disregard the financial messages it was actually receiving.

Prudence is one of the cardinal virtues. False optimism should not override it. Mr Murphy at the Ordinariate Expats site has said he deals in optimism, but in simply passing on blue-sky estimates, as he consistently has, from parishes like St Thomas More Scranton -- and likely St John the Baptist Bridgeport -- he is doing long-term damage to the prospect of the Ordinariates.

Apparently Marginal Ordinariate Groups -- V

My correspondent continues with some shorter updates:

St Benedict, Edmonton, AB. A group of perhaps half a dozen, currently served by a retired diocesan priest. When he goes, the group will fold. St Gregory, Mobile AL Fr Venuti remains in poor health and can no longer minister to this very small group, which has been worshipping in the rectory chapel of Fr Venuti's diocesan parish. A diocesan priest will now offer mass for them once a month St Anselm, Greenville, SC Good news is that Fr Chalmers was replaced when he left to take on a full-time appointment at a school in Birmingham. Not-so-good news is that Ordinariate activity is confined to a Wednesday evening mass at 6:30. Not a recipe for long-term success, IMHO.

Fr Chalmers's history at the Greenville parish is puzzling, as I've noted. Chalmers was ordained in 2012 with some fanfare as the second OCSP priest. His wife was replaced last year as the Ordinariate's Chancellor, while Chalmers himself took a position in Birmingham, AL as a Catholic school principal which, as far as I know, would not normally require an ordained priest -- and Chalmers's previous work history was in hospital administration. I suspect there's a story there.

Regarding my post yesterday, my correspondent notes the requirement that all Ordinariate groups purchase a standard accounting software package but adds,

If Houston was going to demand that groups acquire a standard program for enrollment and accounting it might have also considered sourcing a standard template for their websites so that every group would have at some minimum internet presence. Of course, Houston's own sorry start to getting on the web, and continuing underachievement in the whole area of information, tells us where their priorities lie, or at least lay.

Apparently Marginal Ordinariate Groups -- IV

My correspondent continues,

St James, St Augustine FL under the leadership of Fr Nicholas Marziani apparently continues to meet at 4:30 pm on Saturdays at St Benedict the Moor Catholic Church in St Augustine. Until October 2014 Fr Marziani maintained a fairly active webpage but it seems currently untended except for the monthly calendar which perhaps posts automatically. In his "Midweek Musing" of September 18, 2014 Fr Marziani reported proudly that there was a record number of worshippers that Saturday at St James'--21--but whether this was, as he hoped, the beginning of a "roll' or whether it was a high-water mark it is not possible to know. Fr Marziani's Facebook page seems to be lying fallow, and the St James community apparently never had one. There is nothing about St James in the bulletins of the host parish. Difficult to imagine that growth is taking place under these circumstances.

I'm beginning to see several characteristic patterns in the marginal groups that have priests assigned to them. The first is that there doesn't seem to be any consistent set of expectations, either from Houston or among peers, for what sort of publicity these groups should have. A web or social-media presence is clearly optional. The particular talents among individual priests for attracting members will naturally vary, but it's clear that no minimum level of effort seems to be expected, and we certainly don't see it.

This may be a result of the previous Houston management style, in which the main emphasis seems to have been membership in the "club", with no accompanying requirement for competence or performance. One hopes that Bp Lopes's style will change this.

Apparently Marginal Ordinariate Groups -- III

My regular correspondent reports:

Another group about which, like St James, St Augustine FL, all that can be known for sure is that it exists is Our Lady of Hope, Kansas City. The early history of this group is quite well-documented; it was a Pastoral Provision community led by Fr Ernie Davis, a former Episcopal priest who was also pastor of St Therese Little Flower Parish, where the group worshipped. After the Ordinariate was erected Fr Davis and twenty of his "Anglican Use" parishioners became members; the group moved to Our Lady of Sorrows and Fr Davis went into full-time hospital chaplaincy while continuing to say Sunday mass for the OLP group. When he still maintained his blog, in 2014, he mentioned that "on a good Sunday" the congregation numbered between 30 and 35.

On the OCSP website and in the bulletin of St Therese North, Kansas City, where he is the Associate Pastor, Fr Randy Sly is described as the "Administrator" of OLH. The OLH website shows Fr Ernie Davis as the "Pastor." My guess is that Fr Davis generally celebrates Sunday Mass, while Fr Sly handles administrative duties, perhaps with permission to use the resources of St Therese North, as the host parish of the OCSP group, Our Lady of Sorrows, seems to be a bare-bones operation. Perhaps Fr Davis has returned to the diocesan roster.

Fr Sly's duties would not seem to include maintaining the website, which has not had much done to it since its original set-up. The time of the Easter Vigil is still up on the "Welcome" page, and that is a comparatively recent entry. There are no photos, no bulletins, no events. The Facebook page (maintained by Fr Davis) got off to a much better start, but bogged down at Easter. And never included any posts about parish life beyond liturgical announcements. Except the tour to the UK which Fr Davis will be leading in the fall, which he has been promoting since last year. Now Easter was only six weeks ago, and there may be much going on at OLH which doesn't make it onto the web, but I am mystified by these apparently publicity-shy communities which seem to feel that new members will magically materialise, and current members will communicate telepathically.

It's worth pointing out that Fr Sly's former group, the Potomac Falls, VA group, St John Fisher, was allowed to fold when Fr Sly moved to Kansas City, MO for family reasons. The upshot of this move appears to be that one group has ceased entirely, while another appears to be moribund.

Further Concerns About Our Lady Of Good Counsel Jacksonville, NC

I'd intended to proceed with discussing the list of possibly marginal Ordinariate groups my correspondent sent me, but more information became available on the Our Lady of Good Counsel group in Jacksonville, NC that's brought me up short. I've already discussed the group's odd location in a shack-like building under a billboard, next to an Arby's.

Let me start out by saying everything here may turn out to be completely canonical, up-and-up, legal, and ethical, and Fr Waun may be doing great works for God's Kingdom. Nevertheless, some aspects of this group simply set off alarm bells, if for no other reason than to make me wonder how much actual supervision this and other groups have received under the former Houston regime. Appearances matter. And as my correspondent puts it, "when 'Local Catholic priest/church' makes the 6 o'clock news people don't inquire into his/its incardination."

The parish itself has a web site that seems conventional enough if you're just looking for a Catholic church, although its characterization as "New Contemporary Mass, Roman Catholic" suggests it might be more friendly to the flip-flop and halter-top crowd. However, another web site connected with Fr Waun, the Foster Enterprise Foundation, gives a different picture.

In fact, you have to drill down into the Pastoral Counseling and Psychotherapy page to discover that the same Fr Waun who celebrates a contemporary Catholic mass and hears confessions on Sundays is also equipped to "help guide you through any deep wounds that life may have inflicted", though as far as I can tell, not necessarily in the context of the prayers and sacraments.

The connection between Our Lady of Good Counsel and the Foster Enterprise Foundation is simply not clear. For instance, who owns the building on Lejeune Bl, Jacksonville? Is it the Ordinariate via the parish? Then presumably any business conducted out of the building would need the approval of the Ordinary, as far as I can see. Is the building owned by the Foster Enterprise Foundation, with the parish paying rent to Fr Waun? This raises other concerns over self-dealing.

The appearance that Fr Waun can serve as both a confessor and a therapist raises a great deal of concern. He approvingly quotes a Dr Pamela Cooper-White, who says

. . . Pastoral Psychotherapy is a “particular and distinct healing intervention” defined as “a mode of healing intervention (therapy) that is specifically grounded both in psychoanalytic theory and methods (psycho-) – that is, with a primary focus on unconscious mental and emotional processes – and held in a constructive, creation-affirming theology (pastoral).”

While I'm not a psychologist, I would say that psychoanalytic theory is based on what Tom Wolfe has called the "steam boiler" model of the psyche: urges and compulsions build up which, if not released, will cause an explosion; while the psychology behind the Catechism seems to me based on Tom Wolfe's "electrical circuit" model: habitual pathways develop with use. Avoid the near occasions of sin, or as Mel Brooks's psychiatrist put it in High Anxiety, "Don't do that!"

Which type of counseling does Fr Waun do? But isn't there a conflict of interest here, no matter which? As my correspondent puts it, "I can imagine a priest, concerned by something very serious in the confessional, urging a penitent to seek professional help, but the idea that he would push his card across the ledge and say 'Call my office,' seems to me a grave conflict of interest."

For that matter, the Foster Enterprise Foundation offers many other paths to salvation: you can retire in 5 to 10 years (e-mail Kevin. Who's Kevin?) You can enroll in the School of Rock, which identifies itself as an organ of both the Foster Enterprise Foundation and the Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church. (Really, is the idea of getting marginal youth interested in rock 'n roll careers such a good idea?)

It seems to me that both Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins have a great deal on their plates. However, someone needs to take a closer look at what's happening in Jacksonville, NC.

Apparently Marginal Ordinariate Groups -- II

My regular correspondent on these matters reports,

St James, St Augustine FL under the leadership of Fr Nicholas Marziani apparently continues to meet at 4:30 pm on Saturdays at St Benedict the Moor Catholic Church in St Augustine. Until October 2014 Fr Marziani maintained a fairly active webpage http://www.saintjameschurchsaintaugustine.org/ but it seems currently untended except for the monthly calendar which perhaps posts automatically. In his "Midweek Musing" of September 18, 2014 Fr Marziani reported proudly that there was a record number of worshippers that Saturday at St James'--21--but whether this was, as he hoped, the beginning of a "roll' or whether it was a high-water mark it is not possible to know. Fr Marziani's Facebook page seems to be lying fallow, and the St James community apparently never had one. There is nothing about St James in the bulletins of the host parish. Difficult to imagine that growth is taking place under these circumstances.

In unrelated news, a visitor reports that as of this morning, the Ordinariate's web site now lists Fr. Timothy Perkins as the vicar general. His name has also replaced that of Fr. Charles Hough III in the membership of the Ordinariate's governing council.

This sort of timely update is an encouraging sign.

Welcome, Fr Perkins, New Vicar General

An announcement on the St Mary the Virgin web site:

Dear Children of St. Mary,

With very mixed emotions, I announced at each Mass this Sunday [May 1] that I have received a new appointment. Effective May 1, 2016, I have been named Vicar General of our Ordinariate. Though I will continue to serve St. Mary the Virgin parish for the next few months, this responsibility will require relocation to Houston. We will be doing everything possible to make a smooth transition with the arrival of your new pastor, who will be named this summer.

We have accomplished wonderful things during our service together the past three years. I am confident in your faithfulness and loving support for your leadership in the days ahead. Change can be very difficult, but under the Lord’s guidance and in the strength of the Holy Spirit, it always brings exciting new opportunities. You are very dear to me, and I count the man who will succeed me as truly blessed.

In the meantime, please pray for me as I take on this challenging new position. Pray for all of us in the time of transition; and begin now to pray for your next pastor. “Great are the works of the Lord,” and I know that God will yet accomplish great things in and through the Catholic Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

Ever yours in Christ through Mary,
Fr. Timothy Perkins

It appears that Fr Hough III's retirement is immediate, although as of today, he's still listed as Vicar General on the OCSP staff page. Thanks to a visitor for the heads-up.

Clarification Over Fr Waun

A visitor who read yesterday's post e-mailed, "I get the implications, so please allow me to put some things into perspective from first-hand knowledge." I'll excerpt his further comments:

Fr. Bill Waun was a classmate of mine at Oral Roberts University. Most politically-correct liberals deny the bone fides of our alma mater, but ORU was a good school and it was affordable to those of us of lesser means. Furthermore, the ethos on campus was incredibly upbeat, something that so many of us needed at that vulnerable time in our young lives.

. . . . He was the somewhat rebellious son of a devout evangelical Christian father, who apparently knew the Bible as well as most pastors. In the ‘70s, when there were still many people who had memorized lengthy portions of the Holy Scriptures, that was certainly saying something.

After ORU, Bill went on to graduate studies at Princeton’s seminary and other respected schools that I can’t remember, and the list of his post-graduate academic qualifications is as long as my arm. Check with him on that. After a long hiatus, Bill and I met again in January 2000 at Yokosuka Naval Base on Tokyo Bay in Japan, where he was stationed, and was director of chaplain services.

. . . . The occasion for our meeting at Yokosuka was the invitation of my CEC bishop Richard Lipka to the disaffected remnant of the Nippon Seikokai (Anglican/Episcopal Church in Japan) to join forces with the CEC and to maintain the apostolic succession without the taint of sacerdotal meddling. The NSKK had just been screwed over —pardon my French — by the modernizing, secularizing cohorts who had won the “right” to ordain women to the presbytery, so anxious were they to keep up with the conventional Anglicanism of North America and Britain!

. . . . Bill was, by his own admission, “on the journey”, which meant that he was on his way up from evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. He had shared the stage with John Paul II for some ecumenical gathering in Rome, and was anxious to recover the ancient Faith for himself, from the midst of the ruins of Protestantism, which his erudition and his conscience had thoroughly repudiated.

From that point onward, I think that Bill went on to be promoted to Navy captain — the same rank as colonel in the other services — and I can only assume that he served with distinction until his retirement. Only Bill himself and God know how to fill in the blanks in my story here.

It appears that this humble mission that you display in the photograph is hard by Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps Base in North Carolina. Temper fi, and more power to Fr. Bill and his parish in their efforts to attract young marines and their families to the Catholic Faith.

I think the difficulty that my visitor had in the e-mail I shared yesterday was the basic problem that can be inferred from Bp Lopes's own remarks -- the Anglican spiritual patrimony manifests itself, at least as far as the Ordinariates are concerned, in the liturgy. It's hard to imagine how an Ordinariate group carries an identity as such if it isn't celebrating mass regularly using the BDW form.

In addition, I've got to take seriously recent posts by Fr Z that the Church will renew itself only with (among other things) reverent celebration of the Ordinary Form mass. If an Ordinariate group isn't celebrating the BDW mass and is doing the Ordinary Form mass in the conventional way with guitars and, potentially, other liturgical abuses, I'm just not sure what purpose is being served.

However, the information we have on Fr Waun and Our Lady of Good Counsel is at best second-hand and based on things like Google street view. If anyone can provide first-hand explanations of what's happening in Jacksonville, I'd be most interested to hear it.

Apparently Marginal Ordinariate Groups -- I

A visitor reports,

Bp Lopes is beginning his planned project to visit every OCSP community by travelling to some of the larger, better established groups, which is understandable. I'm sure he will gain insights which will be valuable to other groups looking to grow. However, at some point he will have to take a first-hand look at communities which have apparently failed to thrive.

Among those my visitor has found is Our Lady of Good Counsel, Jacksonville, NC. "Fr Waun was a CEC Navy chaplain who started a parish after his retirement, which was identified as Our Lady of Good Counsel Anglican Church at the time of their reception into the Catholic church. He also pursued further credentials as a psychotherapist. After his ordination as a Catholic priest he leads the congregation of Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church in a storefront church. I have sent you a picture. Information about mass times etc is contradictory, but the most up-to-date information (via threeguitarz) is that the service is OF, possibly with free guitar lessons taking place afterwards."

Here is the picture:

The church is the brown building in the center.

Steenson Eased Out Of Houston?

On the heels of recent speculation that Msgr Steenson has lost his endowed visiting professorship at St Thomas University Houston, a visitor now reports that his visit to give the Archbishop Ireland Memorial Lecture at the St Paul Seminary was also an opportunity for Msgr Steenson to firm up arrangements for his forthcoming appointment as Priest Scholar in Residence there for the 2016-17 academic year.

Parish Festival Saturday, May 21

I've received the following from the vestry:

The vestry adds, "We are hoping to see as many people as possible! Of special note is the mini concert at 1:00 pm, but there will also be historical tours and lots more. I would also welcome contributions to our Jumble Sale (aka rummage sale, but classier)."

This may be a good chance for those in the area who may be curious to stick their heads in and have a look.

Fr Kelley notes as well,

May 26 will mark Fifty Years since the passing of the beloved Father Isaac Neal Dodd, our Father Founder, "Hollywood's Padre" and "A Candle Among the Stars." He went home to the Lord in 1966. (Appropriately, that is Corpus Christi DAY, this year, though our 'big' celebration of it will be the Sunday after.)