The Ordinariate And The Elites

Recent events on both sides of the Atlantic have got me thinking about the status of elites, who appear to have been taken by surprise by the Brexit vote and the robustness of Mr Trump's appeal. (One observation I haven't seen is that Mr Trump, derided as "unpresidential", actually has a lot in common with Harry Truman, including his use of profane language and a tendency to chew out journalists.) Truman, of course, was not a member of the traditional elites, being a Baptist, at one point a failed businessman, and a product of big-city machine politics.

One social factor Douglas Bess almost overlooked in Divided We Stand is the alignment between traditional social elites in the US and the Democrat Party agenda as it developed after Kennedy. Episcopalians have traditionally been regarded as members of the elites -- but the sociopolitical outlook of the elites has increasingly focused on pansexualism, a bias against public expression of Christianity, and a tendency to romanticize the lumpenproletariat, which costs them nothing, since they're protected from it in gated communities and security buildings.

A good example of elitist Episcopalianism is the late Episcopal Bishop of New York Paul Moore Jr, a product of St Paul's School and Yale, civil rights crusader, antiwar activist, and despite fathering nine children, a closeted gay man. The overall problem with this as a pastoral strategy is that it's less and less important to be a Christian of any sort to be a member of the elites. The demand to get into Yale continues unabated, the demand to go church on Sundays not so much. Indeed, the clear direction of the Democrat-aligned elites is to favor public expression of Mohammedanism as a counterweight to any remaining tendency to witness Christianity in public.

Paul Moore Jr, though, is dead, and his Episcopal Church is on life support. It is no longer an effective strategy, if it ever was, to endorse Christianity by saying that all the right people do it.

The Catholic Church has only occasionally been caught up in this confusion. A tendency not to be elitist has been a principle consistent with its founding. Catholicism in the US has been associated with blue-collar communities and immigration. Alfred E Smith, the Democrat nominee for President in 1928, was a Catholic of the older populist style who had much in common with Truman, or perhaps indeed Mr Trump (who of course is not Catholic). Roosevelt, an old-money bow-tie Episcopalian, was an elitist of an entirely different sort.

Bishop Barron, whom I take to be an indicator of mainstream Catholic thinking, has sometimes taken note of these developments in US politics. Here, for instance, he almost goes so far as to say that a Catholic can contemplate being a Republican, though he presents Paul Ryan as perhaps the best example. Not all Republicans would endorse that assessment, and in light of unpredictable developments in 2016, it may be overtaken by events. I hope Bp Barron will revisit the example of Al Smith.

As Douglas Bess pointed out, The Episcopal Church took no notice of the "continuing" movement, which is also now on life support. The ACNA, while somewhat larger, isn't likely to reverse the trend of main-line Protestant decline, and its future beyond the present generation of leadership is uncertain. It's unlikely to be a successful strategy for any denomination to try to emulate Episcopalianism. As a result, it was probably a good move to put a real Catholic bishop in charge of the US-Canadian Ordinariate. This still leaves open the question of precisely what the Ordinariate is trying to accomplish over the long term separate from the strategies of the mainstream Church.

Parsing The Great Disappointment

My regular correspondent writes,

I have been visiting some web sites associated with the heady days in the run-up to the establishment of the Ordinariates. The Anglican Use in the Philippines, a site maintained by Ben Villejo, who was also a frequent commenter on the Anglo-Catholic blog, wound down from a blog with 68 posts in 2010 to 4 in 2014, when it stopped. A Facebook page is still well-maintained, but the last scheduled event was in the fall of 2014, so it would appear that the vision no longer includes a worshipping community.

Speaking of The Anglo-Catholic, Incarnation Catholic Church, Orlando is surprisingly low-profile considering that the once-formidable Christian Campbell is apparently still on the Parish Council. The website is attractive but contains only basic information, the Facebook page is dominated by announcements from the Knights of Columbus. There does not appear to be a newsletter (although you can ask to be put on an email list). Bp Lopes made a one day visit during Holy Week but nothing was made of this on the website and it was not mentioned on Facebook at all.

The Anglo-Catholic had a very large readership. What happened to all that energy? The challenges in a small and widely dispersed organization like the OCSP are obviously great, but I think that we see here, and many other places around the net, traces of enthusiasm and leadership that was not fostered and guided, and eventually died down, or redirected itself. Foolishness to the World now seems to resemble Mrs Gyapong's original personal blog, which was largely about politics and issues of conservative interest, religious and otherwise.

I think the loss of energy can be traced to several causes in the first half of 2012.

1. The designation of Msgr Steenson as Ordinary. This had been kept a deep secret until the first of the year, but it had clearly been in the works since before his resignation as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande in 2007. The blogosphere -- which is what we're talking about here -- had clearly favored either then-Bp David Moyer or Fr Christopher Phillips
2. The subsequent almost immediate denial of votum for ordination to David Moyer by Abp Chaput, thought to have been engineered by Steenson, and if this was true, for obvious reasons (see above)
3. The withdrawal of Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio from the process of joining the Ordinariate, revealed some years later to have been the consequence of Steenson's stated intent to force Fr Christopher Phillips into retirement -- for obvious reasons (see above)
4. The bungling of the acceptance of St Mary of the Angels into the Ordinariate between January and May of 2012. This resulted in two of the most promising candidate parishes staying out
5. The well-publicized allegation in August 2012 that the Ordinariate displayed favoritism in ordinations toward candidates from the Episcopal Diocese of Forth Worth, where Steenson had served before his promotion to bishop.

The overall impression to be gained from these developments was that the US-Canadian Ordinariate was dominated by careerists and members of an Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth-Nashotah House in-group. But in many ways, these developments were just a prelude to a greater and more pervasive disappointment -- as my correspondent puts it, the Ordinariate became "a small and widely dispersed organization", and it stayed that way.

My correspondent pointed out in a subsequent e-mail that "plum posts" were not in large supply (especially since Steenson's bungling had taken two of the plummiest out of the running). My corresponent continued, "As you say, there seem to be a fair number of disappointed former TEC/Anglican clergy out there who didn't even make it to ordination. Hard to believe, looking over the crop of successful applicants, that they represent any kind of 'best and brightest.'"

There were two classes of successful candidates: contemporaries and apparent cronies of Steenson from his days in Fort Worth, who were all approaching retirement "and/or had no expectation of ministering to an Ordinariate congregation", but who were often awarded prebendaries in Houston irrespective of ability. There was a second group of younger protégés, most prominently Charles Hough IV. As my correspondent put it, "Presumably Fr Hough IV's biggest asset was Fr Hough III", who was a member of the first class. This sort of nepotism seems to have disappeared from the Catholic Church when popes stopped making their "nephews" cardinals.

Looking at others, Andrew Bartus, Jon Chalmers, and David Wagner, on one hand we see resume references to Nashotah House or Yale Divinity School, but on the other, little sign that any has had a stellar career. This may reflect the overall limited prospects in the Ordinariate -- none apparently was able to secure more prestigious or better-paid assignments in Anglican/TEC dioceses before washing up in the Ordinariate (Bartus was fired from St Mary of the Angels after repeated personality clashes with both bishops and the rector). In South Carolina, Fr Chalmers had a day job in hospital administration and had few responsibilities as an OCSP priest, eventually leaving the OCSP in all but incardination. As my correspondent puts it, Fr Wagner's new assignment "places an apparently surplus OCSP priest on the payroll of another diocese".

Again, from my correspondent: "Let's hope that the implementation of a committee and regional interviews for prospective candidates makes the process more objective."

"More Priests Than People"

This was the subject line of an e-mail I received from a visitor yesterday. He continued,

I happened to attend mass at Notre Dame, Kerrville, TX this past Saturday and found that it was the last mass weekend for the long-time pastor there.

His replacement is an “on-loan” OCSP priest.

A lot of interesting stuff in the introduction, written by the man whom Fr. Wagner is replacing.

The point that clearly grabbed my visitor was this (emphasis mine):

Because the Archbishop wishes me to continue working on several formation teams (for priests, deacons, and laity) as well as serving at St. Peter Upon the Water, and because there are more priests than people in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, Archbishop Gustavo and Bishop Lopes have made an agreement to bring Father David Wagner and his family to Notre Dame Catholic Church and School.

This brings up what I would call the true supply-side issue in the Anglican and Ordinariate priesthoods. Yesterday's post contained some remarks on a Facebook page that, frankly, get this issue completely wrong:

Many Protestants, especially those of liturgical denominations, have felt abandoned by certain factions within their denomination's leadership that hav pursued a variety of controversial agendas not viewd as consistent with historic Christianity.

So of course, Ordinariate parishes on three continents are overflowing with new Catholics joyous at Rome's gracious offer contained in Anglicanorum coetibus -- and petitions for new groups-in-formation are flooding in. Sorry, if the above were the case, we'd see those results. We aren't. Why not?

The supply side is the priests. There's no shortage of priests, either in Anglican denominations or in the first cohort of Ordinariate ordinations. It's worth pointing out that, as Douglas Bess noted in his invaluable Divided We Stand, disaffection with The Episcopal Church's political stances dates at least from 1960, well before women's ordination or the new prayer book -- but even Bess neglects to mention that TEC had begun departing from historic Christian teaching on birth control and divorce-and-remarriage well before then.

We might see these developments at least partly as causes of the widespread and long-term decline in church attendance that began in the 1950s, particularly in main line Protestant denominations like TEC. But wait -- there has never been any equivalent decline in Episcopal seminary enrollment! If anything, it's increased! The result has been an ever-increasing surplus of Episcopal candidates for the priesthood, and indeed, Episcopal priests, which the ordination of women and openly gay men has only exacerbated.

Obviously this is a microcosm of the educational crisis confronting Western culture: university and professional education creates an oversized quasi-elite class that is in considerable measure unemployable. Let's look at Fr Wagner's background as outlined in the link my visitor sent me:

Born on March 28, 1958, in Ravenna, Ohio, and baptized that April, he lived in Ohio before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1978, assigned in Albuquerque, N.M., and Germany. In 1988 he graduated from the University of New Mexico with a BA in Philosophy, then studied Library Science. From 1994-1996 Father David studied at Yale Divinity School, graduating with the degree of Master of Arts in Religion. After marrying Carol Anne Castillo from Albuquerque that same year, they worked in Chicago while Father David continued studies at Dominican University there. . . . In 2002 Father David responded to the interior call to ministry, entering the Episcopal Seminary in Nashotah, Wisconsin, and finishing his studies with a Master of Divinity degree. He was ordained an Episcopal priest on June 12, 2005.

So let's see, undergraduate studies in philosophy and library science which likely qualified him to work flipping burgers. I assume his professors in New Mexico nevertheless thought well enough of him to get him admitted to Yale Divinity, but that degree doesn't seem to have led to much more, so next he went to another elite school, Nashotah House, though while he was ordained an Episcopal priest, presumably due to the huge oversupply of candidates we have no record here of a pastoral assignment.

So, perhaps in hope of better opportunities with women and openly gay men out of the applicant pool, he became Catholic and was part of the initial contingent fast-tracked into ordination under Anglicanorum coetibus (although he appears to be among the dozens who, in apparent contravention to stated policy, came in without a group in formation). The end result is an observation from a diocesan priest that, with more priests than people, Bp Lopes had to find something to do with the guy.

This has crystallized other thoughts for me on what our elites are about (and make no mistake, degrees from Yale and Nashotah House make this a story about elites, or at least elite-wannabes). More to come -- but isn't it strange that the Founder of this enterprise caused consternation precisely by not aligning himself with all the right people?

UPDATE: My regular correspondent reports,

Fr Wagner has been ministering to St Gilbert's, Boerne,TX, an OCSP group with no web presence. I think it was set up by Fr Mark Cannady, now retired, who lives in Boerne and was a priest in the Episcopal diocese of Fort Worth, one of six ordained together in 2012. St Gilbert's does seem to have been a bit of a make-work project for both men. I gather from the bulletin of the host church (St Peter's, Boerne) that the St Gilbert's group will be moving to, yes, Kerrville. Since this is 35 miles away the convenience of the congregation, if any, does not seem to be a big issue.

I assume that moving the Bourne group to Kerrville would be part of trying to find more meaningful employment for Fr Wagner.

Desultory Non-Announcements

Apropos of yesterday's post, my regular correspondent sent me a copy of this announcement on the Facebook page of the St Robert Bellarmine diocesan parish in Blue Springs, MO:

My correspondent says that a former CEC clergyman, now a lay leader at the diocesan parish near Kansas City, tried to get an Ordinariate group going there. The parish web site still lists a Sunday Vespers service at 4:00 PM; whether this is from the BDW or under any particular sponsorship of the OCSP isn't clear -- nor whether the group-in-formation is still in existence.

It does puzzle me that the OCSP web site does not offer any sort of pointer for those seeking out nearby groups that might be in the early process of formation. Do certain groups (which is to say, certain OCSP clergy) have the inside track to recognition? My correspondent comments,

Apropos of whether communities resist growth in covert ways, I would say that failure to embrace the internet and social media is a pretty clear sign that new faces are not really welcome. A blizzard of posts and blogs early on, followed by nothing, or a stream of generic postings provided by News.VA or similar, suggests to me that the website and/or Facebook page is the pastor's responsibility and he is burned out. No leadership from Houston on this subject, of course. Their communication department has gone from nonexistent/incompetent to at least functional, but there is no vision. Ms Faber's changes have been minimal; clearly this is not her full-time job.

Seen On The Blessed John Henry Newman Irvine Facebook Page

This is all I know (thanks to a visitor for the heads-up):

There is no announcement of a group in formation on the US-Canadian Ordinariate site. Whether the idea was broached and shot down, or whether there's some other explanation, I don't know. I do note that the whiskey evenings and beer breakfasts continue in full force among the Irvine group -- think of the sacrifice it would be for Fr Bartus to have to sponsor additional alcohol-related events in LA County.

More On Wishful Thinking

My regular correspondent continues,

In 2014 (latest year for which I can find stats) about 67,000 adults previously baptized were received into the US Catholic church. While a not unimpressive figure, this averages out to about four per US parish. So, unsurprisingly, leaving a former denomination for the Catholic church is a relatively rare decision, and I would guess that in the majority of cases it is done in the context of marrying a Catholic (a 2009 Pew Research study estimated that this was the deciding factor in 72% of conversions but this included both adult baptisms and receptions). There is no evidence that the establishment of the OCSP has had any impact on this larger statistical reality. Most adult church attenders are happy with their denominational experience, and if they're not, blaming it on the fact that perhaps their denomination is not part of the One True Church after all is not the first idea that pops into their head. Some will come to that conclusion, but they will always be a fraction of 1%. An ecclesial structure built on their membership will be necessarily a niche operation.

Another visitor has suggested,

As to new groups, large numbers of communities tend to come in waves driven by "reforms" that make the denominations to which they belong no longer hospitable for them. The original wave that motivated the so-called "pastoral provision" was driven by the decision of the Episcopal Church -- U. S. A. (ECUSA), now known as The Episcopal Church (TEC), to ordain women. The more recent wave was driven by the TEC decision to promote a practicing homosexual to the office of bishop and push for sanction of homosexual unions in both TEC and the Anglican Church in Canada (ACC) in North America, and also by similar actions in the Church of England (CoE) and the Anglican Church in Australia. However, there are always a few outliers that petition between waves. These outliers may experience some local provocation (replacement of a supportive bishop with a bishop who is not supportive, for example) or no provocation at all.

I think there are practical problems with the idea that there may be additional waves of Anglican defections. While the Gene Robinson wave led to creation of the ACNA, it doesn't seem like there has been any further equivalent wave following the endorsement of same-sex marriages. This may be because the fate of parishes that leave their denominations in prior waves has been conclusively and consistently demonstrated -- they mostly lose their properties and dissipate their resources. It's a destructive and counterproductive effort.

The second issue is that defections have mainly been from low-church parishes. This is particularly true of the ACNA, but among those familiar with the ACA, thought to be the highest of the "continuing" denominations, even it has generally proven to be low-church. This means that a disposition to leave TEC has not automatically meant a motivation to join the US-Canadian Ordinariate.

Future For The Ordinariates? Quick Prognosis

My regular correspondent comments,

I doubt that many more groups will be entering any of the Ordinariates. Priests will be ordained to replace retiring pastors, and perhaps some new groups will be gathered, like the St Margaret's congregation in Katy, TX, around an unassigned clergyman. But I think the "continuing" bodies are tapped out, and as for and as for mainstream Anglican/TEC congregations---what could they be waiting for?

I'm inclined to agree. The basic issue is, as Frederick Kinsman had recognized by 1920, Anglicanism is a congregational denomination. Among other things, if an Episcopal parish is dissatisfied with actions of the national church, it makes little difference if they're satisfied with how things are at St Thomas Podunk and Fr Schmidlap. If they become dissatisfied with Fr Schmidlap, they kick him out and get someone new. Any idea of departing the denomination would become destructive and divisive to the community that's generally satisfied with how things are.

Clearly this has been the experience we've seen with parishes that attempt to leave either TEC or a continuing denomination.

More Policy Uncertainties

In response to yesterday's post, my regular correspondent replies,

As you mentioned, in early 2013 the priest in charge of St Thomas More, Toronto mentioned in his blog that the number of members required for official "Quasi-parish/Mission" status was 24, something he clearly got from somewhere, but this number was subsequently hotly disputed on one of the blogs of record (I'm still looking). In any event, at the OCSP clergy conference in November, 2014 five groups were officially designated as parishes and nine as quasi-parishes, without any discussion of the criteria used. One parish has been added to the former list.

The inclusion of "families" in the recently published guidelines seems less appropriate to Ordinariate groups, often consisting of single older adults, than it would to a normal Catholic parish. Otherwise I think that, as you say, it is a step forward that something is now a matter of record.

One of the topics to be discussed in detail at the plenary OCSP clergy meeting in the fall is compensation and benefits. At the moment there are no formal guidelines, but if one of the requirements for becoming a parish is stability, then it must be able to guarantee that the clergy necessary to carry out its mission will be adequately compensated. If this ceased to be the case in a mainstream Catholic or Anglican diocese, the congregation would lose its parish status. I cannot imagine it would be otherwise in an Ordinariate.

The question of what happens if a parish doesn't cover its payroll has been at the back of my mind as well. Certainly in the Anglican canons I've seen, this is cause for a parish to be declared a mission, and notwithstanding the stated desire of the Ordinariate not to follow Anglican ecclesial structures, I've got to assume not meeting payroll is a serious matter that could get a parish in trouble with secular authorities.

The problem is that, by Fr Bergman's admission, St Thomas More Scranton has been missing payroll.

This leads to a bigger unanswered question that, so far, hasn't been covered in published policies: selection criteria for Ordinariate priests. Several candidates, as far as I'm aware, have been told that the OCSP doesn't ordain priests not associated with groups in formation -- but this is unpublished oral history that clearly isn't borne out by the numbers of OCSP priests who in fact are not, and have never been, associated with any group or parish.

In addition, while the Pastoral Provision delegate, Bp Vann, has clearly designated what denominations qualify as "Anglican" for a candidate to qualify, Houston has never done this, and it has ordained CEC priests who woud not be eligible for the Pastoral Provision, and beyond that, Glenn Baaten, a former Presbyterian pastor with a previous Evangelical background, is in line for ordination to the OCSP later this month. The word I've had from St Paul Park, MN appears to be that this sort of formation does not lead to happiness in the Ordinariate, but nobody seems to be questioning this.

What I can put together from partial accounts by several candidates for the OCSP priesthood is that the typical reaction to an application is that it simply goes into a "black hole". It then depends on what sort of powerful allies the candidate can marshal to extricate the application from the black hole, but of course, most applications will not emerge from the black hole.

Yet somehow less suitable -- at least on the face of it -- candidates like Fr Treco and Mr Baaten seem to emerge from the black hole irrespective of any deficiencies in their formation.

What action Houston may or may not be taking over missed payrolls in Scranton has not come to light, either.

More Thoughts On Houston's Published Policies

A visitor raises several worthwhile points, which are worth responding to at length:

I'm not persuaded that the document to which you linked in today's post [here] reflects any sort of major change in the policy of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. A couple years ago, the pastor of St. Thomas More in Toronto remarked on his personal blog ("Peregrinations") that the ordinariate had established definitive criteria for ordinariate communities to attain the status of "mission" and then of "parish." Nevertheless, the publication of this information in an official document is clearly a major change in practice and a step in the right direction.

But unless definitive criteria, or definitive policies, for any area are written and published, they aren't very useful. Let's take one "policy" I've heard expressed several times over the past four years: a parish or group or whatever can't be involved in civil litigation, which is typically invoked to explain Houston's lack of initiative on the St Mary of the Angels case.

But in the policy as published, item (6) Stability: Civil Litigation, a "community in formation" is not excluded from civil litigation, although I assume this anticipates that any such litigation would be resolved in the process of admission.

But As of January 2012, St Mary's had not been involved in litigation, which was brought only in May 2012 by the ACA, and this was at least in part a result of miscalculation in Houston. As of 2016, it is anticipated that this litigation will be resolved favorably in a fairly short period -- which would not exclude the parish becoming a "group in formation", which is what it would have to become in any case to begin the process of admission.

On one hand, my experience in the corporate world suggests that if I were to raise this sort of issue over a corporate policy, it would be taken as yet another indication that I am a smartass. On the other, I am not currently in a position to endorse the St Mary's parish taking this step in any case. But it's an indication of why it is desirable for policies to be published, since without publication, people still "assume" what they are, often in error.

My visitor continues with another worthwhile point:

As to the situation at St. Thomas More in Scranton, I doubt that its status will change unless it really comes unglued. The stated criteria are to "become" a mission or a parish -- NOT to "remain" a mission or a parish. The last thing that the hierarchy wants is a "yoyo" community that oscillates between status as one type of community or another as families moving in and out cause its membership to oscillate around some threshold or as economic cycles cause its fluctuations in its economic situation.

In the same way, a new Benedictine priory must grow to twelve solemnly professed monks to become an abbey -- but it does not cease to be an abbey if it subsequently drops below that number. The Benedictine community with which I habitually worship had several deaths in a short time that caused it to drop to only eight monks two decades ago. It now has nine monks in solemn vows, but it's still an abbey even two decades after its membership dropped to just 2/3 of the threshold to gain that status.

Clearly, as stated in the policy, a principal goal is stability of communities, and my visitor is correct in saying it would defeat the purpose to have a community yo-yo between states. On the other hand, and the policy might have been better conceived to make this clearer, many of its criteria appear to be aimed specifically at the responsibilities -- i.e., performance criteria -- of priests in parishes.

The farther down we read in the policy, the more we see performance criteria that look a lot like those in corporate personnel appraisals -- for instance, (5) STABILITY: SACRAMENTAL DISCIPLINE, (7) VITALITY: RELATIONSHIP WITH LOCAL DIOCESE, and (8) VITALITY: DOCILITY TO ORDINARY & PEACE WITH ONE ANOTHER. One might see categories like these, or variations depending on circumstances, in a corporate annual appraisal form, the only addition being boxes for "Exceeds Expectations", "Meets Expectations", and "Improvement Needed", with space for comments.

Naturally, the appropriate response by the Ordinary if a priest is determined to be deficient in any of these areas would not be to demote the whole parish to mission. But isn't a response called for? The clearest example we see is that of St Thomas More Scranton, where an appraisal might result in "Improvement Needed" for Fr Bergman in several categories. In a corporate environment, we would expect vigorous incentives to be applied that would be aimed at rapidly bringing the individual up to par, probably within a period of months.

Yet Fr Bergman continues on the Ordinariate governing council and is an important member of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, where he is apparently valued as a member of Bp Lopes's inner circle. Not good.

Finally, Written Policies From Houston

My regular correspondent has pointed me to a new Guide for Parish Development on the US-Canadian Ordinariate website, which is described as "an essential tool for evaluating the development of our communities from their earliest beginnings as groups in formation through to their canonical erection as Parishes".

The big step is that it defines "Parish", "Quasi-parish/Mission", and "Community in Formation". Up to now, this and other issues had been vaguely referred to in informal discussions with Houston as "policy", but "policy" had varied according to convenience and was basically just oral history. Now everyone will have a clear set of guidelines on what constitutes a real parish and what a group or mission needs to do to become one.

Maybe. There seems to be general agreement, for instance, that St Thomas More Scranton is a full parish. But the financial criteria for a full parish are simply "Debt: Manageable Assets: Sufficient Location: Secured (ownership or long-term agreement)". The only information we have on St Thomas More is that its financial condition has been misrepresented, by its pastor's admission, and it is in fact not meeting debt payments and even missing payroll. What move is Houston making to investigate and correct this situation?

The guidelines also point out that "Ordinariate missions and parishes are required to have functioning pastoral and finance councils." Again, whether St Thomas More has a functioning finance council is an open question. Do favored clergy get exemptions from these guidelines? If so, this simply suggests that the OCSP is corrupt.

It does appear that Houston sees a continuing problem in another area.

We recall that while the Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, provides for the preservation of the Anglican liturgical and spiritual patrimony in the Catholic Church, it is rather more cautious about Anglican ecclesial models in the hierarchical constitution of the Church.

and

Rejecting prior forms of institutionalized animus and embracing Catholic communion is an ongoing mark of spiritual and community health and vitality.

It appears that Bp Lopes wants to avoid having the OCSP become a clone of a "continuing Anglican" denomination. One means of controlling this, of course, would be to contain the continuing tendency of OCSP priests to self-promotion.

However, while this one set of written policies is a desirable step, their consistent enforcement must follow. But beyond that, only about half of OCSP priests are connected with groups, missions, or parishes. How a candidate qualifies for ordination in the OCSP is still a matter reserved to informal oral history, and what responsibilities priests like Fr Jon Chalmers have in relation to Houston is a mystery. The few dozen or so free-floating OCSP priests strike me, frankly, as an opportunity for catastrophe down the road -- as is the apparently unresolved financial issue at St Thomas More.

So the new guidelines are a step, but only a first step. To me, they're more important mostly as a reminder of how much is yet undone.

More Of The Story

on the two former CEC priests who had been associated with the now-defunct St John Fisher group in Arlington, VA and their subsequent pastoral careers.

Following his move to Kansas City, Fr Sly's primary job has been as associate pastor of the St Therese diocesan parish there. This appears to be a parish of normal size with four Sunday masses. The Kansas City Ordinariate group is Our Lady of Hope, which meets at the Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic parish and has what I assume is a BDW mass at 9:15 on Sundays. The Our Lady of Sorrows host parish is a small and apparently declining one that had been under Fr Anthony Pileggi, who has been transferred full time to the diocesan marriage tribunal.

The Our Lady of Hope Ordinariate group has been under Fr Davis, a former Pastoral Provision priest. However, he has announced that effective July 1, he will be on a six-month sabbatical and will apparently undertake other duties on his return. In addition, a pilgrimage to Walsingham that it had been anticipated he would lead in September has been canceled for lack of interest.

Fr Joseph Cisetti announced in the latest St Therese parish newsletter that Bishop Johnston had requested that Fr Sly take over as administrator of the Our Lady of Sorrows parish until the end of the year, maintaining his duties as associate at St Therese. He doesn't mention Fr Sly's Ordinariate connection, but I assume Fr Sly will also take over the Our Lady of Hope group as well. That the diocesan bishop would want to expand Fr Sly's duties outside the Ordinariate seems to speak well of him, and Fr Cisetti seems to speak will of him in the newsletter. While some people have been skeptical of the formation some former CEC priests received, the fact that Fr Sly was also a former Wesleyan Methodist pastor may have been an advantage for him and the St Therese parish.

A visitor has clarified some of the circumstances surrounding the St Bede group in St Paul Park, MN. According to that visitor, the entire St Bede's group decided to relocate to St Paul Park, although its administrator did remain in the abbey in Collegeville. "A major consideration was demographics: the larger and generally more cosmopolitan population in the Twin Cities provided more opportunities for growth, it seemed, than would be the case in rural Collegeville." However, members drifted away from the group following the move.

In November 2015 some members of the original St Bede's group decided to form a new group, the St. Benet Biscop Chapter of St. John’s Oblates, that would allow them to "begin again" in Collegeville. "Though most of the 20 members of the St. Benet Biscop Chapter are members of the OCSP, the chapter itself is not under the jurisdiction of the OCSP but of the abbot of St. John’s." Nevertheless, Bp Lopes has contacted the group and expressed his support. To tell the truth, I'm not sure how to parse this, but I post it here in the context that in the visitor's opinion there was never a "split" among the St Bede's group.

In addition, the visitor clarifies that the group did in fact contact Msgr Steenson well before moving to St Paul Park. "It was Monsignor Steenson who contacted Bishop Cozzens." In any case, the initiative to have Fr Treco ordained would have come from Msgr Steenson. However, it's difficult to avoid seeing some subtext in the visitor's remarks that the "new start" in the Oblate group came from some level of dissatisfaction with Fr Treco, whose "Protestant Evangelical" formation "gave the members of St. Bede’s pause".

Frs Sly and Treco seem to be different people.

Let's Revisit The Clergy Moves

connected with the former St John Fisher group in Arlington, VA. We actually know very little about this group, which disappeared when Fr Sly moved to Kansas City to take over a similarly obscure Ordinariate group there. In an entry from March 2015, my regular correspondent reported,

This is a mission of St Luke's, DC, under the leadership of Fr Sly, a former Charismatic Episcopal Church bishop who became a Catholic layman in 2006 and has since been ordained. A weekly mass is offered. Numbers and other details, except about Fr Sly, are sketchy; the website still refers to St Luke's, Bladensburg, although that parish moved to DC in September 2014, so it is clearly not well-maintained.

At some time subsequent to this entry, Fr Sly had family issues that made it necessary for him to move to Kansas City, MO. He then took over vaguely defined administrative duties at the equally obscure Our Lady of Hope Ordinariate group there, while the St John Fisher group was allowed to fold. We simply don't have a clear picture of how many people the closure affected, or what they did in response to it -- how many continued as Catholics? Did any actually move to a nearby diocesan parish?

It's worth pointing out that celibate priests don't have wives, children or grandchildren, which reduces the likelihood of such family issues. Where a serious family illness does cause a celibate priest to address such an emergency in a distant place, my understanding is that he would be more likely to take a leave of absence from his diocese in order to deal with the emergency. Thus the need to relocate Fr Sly officially and provide him with a new parish is an issue almost unique to the Ordinariates.

One individual who had been associated with the St John Fisher group was Vaughn Treco, whose path into the US-Canadian Ordinariate has been a puzzle that I've already discussed here. My regular correspondent suggested that ordaining Treco in Virginia, since he had been studying for the Catholic priesthood for many years and was eventually ordained in Minnesota, might have been a logical solution to the problem raised by Fr Sly's departure for Kansas City.

I've recently learned a little more, though, about Treco's move to Minnesota and his ordination there. It appears that the Society of St Bede the Venerable Ordinariate group, then located in Collegeville, MN as of 2014, underwent some kind of a split in that year. Its membership had never been more than the low two digits, but a smaller number of this group (possibly five people) chose to move to St Louis Park, MN and maintained the name of Society of St Bede the Venerable, although it appears that other individuals remained associated with Collegeville, though that group was no longer part of the OCSP.

The smaller St Louis Park St Bede group then approached Andrew Cozzens, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Why they did this is a puzzle, since as an Ordinariate group, the responsible party would have been Msgr Steenson. However, then-Mr Treco had earlier applied to Bp Cozzens for a non-clerical job in that diocese, but Cozzens had turned down that application. In this event, though, Cozzens appears to have thought that Treco would be an appropriate candidate to serve as the administrator for the relocated St Bede group, and he discussed it with Msgr Steenson.

The upshot was that Treco was ordained a priest for this position in 2015, relocated to the Twin Cities, and was given diocesan duties as well. As best anyone can determine, now-Fr Treco says the BDW mass twice a month for the St Bede group, which has about five members.

It's hard to avoid the impression that the St John Fisher, Our Lady of Hope, and St Bede groups are all so small that they are practically nonexistent -- and the departure of Fr Sly from St John Fisher was an event of essentially no consequence, such that the group could disappear with no other discernible impact. In effect, these communities are ecclesiastical rotten boroughs, existing, as far as I can see, primarily as places to put priests to whom the ordinary owes a favor.

It's worth noting that, as soon as he was ordained in 2015, Fr Treco undertook an extensive campaign of self-promotion, via Mr Murphy's Ordinariate News site and elsewhere, although his actual priestly duties appear to be at a low level. I can't help but note that even a relatively conservative bishop like Matano of Rochester, NY is at best unsympathetic to the idea of an Ordinariate parish in his diocese. Can it be the prospect of having a newly-ordained schmendrick loudly tooting his horn outside the supervision of the vicar for communications in his diocese?

On Self-Serving Motives

Regarding yesterday's post, my regular correspondent replies,

I am sure Bernie Madoff knew he was a con artist whose motives were entirely self-serving. I am equally sure that Fr Bergman believes it's AMDG all the way at St Thomas More. But I think there is an area of overlap, insofar as Madoff (mis)led his "investors" to believe that they were part of a small in-group who were lucky enough to have been invited to place their money in his hands.

Sins dealing with money can be traced to the "greed" we see in the Catechism. But greed doesn't simply refer to Ebenezer Scrooge-style miserliness. Pope Francis has linked greed to careerism, which isn't an observation original to himself.

The accounts I've seen of Madoff's life suggest he grew up a very ordinary kid who at some point got the urge to be important, perhaps a reaction to what he saw as his very ordinariness as an adolescent. The money was probably secondary to the need to have the power and prestige it gave, which is certainly a motive covered in the Catechism. In my post yesterday I suggested there was a continuum where Fr Bergman's ambition stopped and Madoff's began, but I think it's the same continuum.

What Fr Bergman appears to be doing, if it's not directly hurting his parishioners (although it continues to disturb me that the failed store enterprise has clearly damaged Dr Evanish, his benefactor), it nevertheless seems to me to constitute a breach of faith. The offerings we make as parishioners are brought to the altar during mass, after all, and they need to be treated with reverence and respect. I don't think Fr Bergman is doing this with the faithful donors at St Thomas More Scranton.

If Fr Bergman's motive is not to acquire stockpiles of wealth, I'm less certain that his goal isn't to be the prestigious "bright spot" that he's frequently called in the US-Canadian Ordinariate. But he's doing it by proposing projects like a parish school that he can't realistically support -- indeed, there's still a question whether he can continue to heat and maintain the physical plant he has.

Fr Bergman has a repeated pattern of saying, “we need money from you now because the money we thought we’d have didn’t come in.” Our diocesan pastor promotes the idea of “sacrificial giving”, recognizing that you have to give enough that you have to forego something else. Having begun to adopt this view, I’m recognizing that it requires prudent and careful budgeting. What can we forego? What can we postpone? But then it becomes a real breach of faith for the church to say “Whoopsie! We thought this harebrained scheme would bring in half a million, but now it won’t! You good people have to fill in the gap!” We make a sacrificial pledge in good faith only to discover the church is not operating on the same premises.

This to me would be grounds to go looking for a new parish. I did this once as an Episcopalian in response to irresponsible financial planning. Given the likelihood that there probably are grounds at least here and there for Ordinariate parishioners to say “OK, Cranmer goes only so far, we’re going to look for a reverent diocesan mass” (I can vouch for the fact that these exist), what keeps people from doing this? My regular correspondent suggests (emphasis mine),

Everyone has made a financial miscalculation at some time; this is quite different from Fr Bergman's repeated and apparently cheerful announcements that once again commitments have been made, expenditures have been allocated, with no concrete expectation that the money will be forthcoming. The fact that apparently no one has called him on this is disturbing. The ostensible appeal of the Ordinariates is that one leaves the fractured denominational milieu and joins the One True Church, yet the mindset remains that of a small beleaguered group doubling down on whatever strategies the local leader deems significant. No doubt this reflects historical betrayal and heartbreak but I personally feel one must offer that up. Some no doubt are recuperating from parish ruptures in the near past as some opted for the Ordinariate and others walked away.

It seems to me that Mr Murphy at Ordinariate News has generally served as an enabler for this sort of dysfunctional attitude, not least by giving Fr Bergman a frequent platform for his self-promotion.

Pattern Of Behavior?

Regarding my prior posts on the financial and legal issues at St Thomas More Scranton, my regular correspondent remarks,

While checking to see if there was a new issue of More News I came across this externally archived issue from last January where Fr Bergman talks about hiring a headmaster for the proposed school in Scranton, although "we ...know we don't have any money to employ such a person." Fortunately for all concerned no one suitable was apparently located ("someone of faith for whom financial security is a secondary consideration") before the plug was pulled on the project. After considerable reflection on this I have come to believe this willful failure to exercise basic financial prudence is a form of abusive behaviour, disguised as energy and vision.

The same newsletter refers to the (foreseeable) legal roadblock to opening the (ill-advised from the start) store in the Guild Building but continues,

[W]hen we bought the church and restored it, we began with insufficient funds. We should have learned by now that when we step out in faith the Lord will provide the means to fulfill His intentions, since this has been proven to us again and again.

Where does stepping out in faith stop and Bernie Madoff begin? I wouldn't want to rub things in with Dr Evanish, the purchaser of the Guild Building, but the references to the fact that the poor guy has taken a bath on the store project must have some effect on his continued relationship with Fr Bergman.

This also goes to my reflections on this past weekend's ordinations in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The celibate priests are impressive and have reached their positions in an organic and transparent process that lasted many years. The younger Ordinariate priests, frankly, do not match this -- they seem in some measure to be opportunists whose skills seem more closely related to self-promotion and back-channel deals.

More Insights Into A Successful Catholic Parish

Every few Sundays lately I get another reminder of why it was a good idea for us to go into the Catholic Church via RCIA rather than rely on they very iffy promises of Anglicanorum coetibus. Yesterday, the two priests who'd been ordained Saturday from our diocesan parish celebrated their first masses there. The one who celebrated at the mass we attended was quite impressive, and this was a profoundly happy event, with the nave overflowing and a dozen or so priests from the parish and elsewhere in the diocese concelebrating the mass.

What struck me again was that these vocations occurred in a context, the parish school, the prayers of the parish, families that had been in the parish for generations, and the support and encouragement of priests in the parish and the archdiocese. It was an organic and transparent process, and it was a happy one. And as the new priest said in his remarks at the end of the mass, it doesn't mark the end of the parish's work.

The contrast with how ordinations have taken place in the US-Canadian Ordinariate is, frankly, disturbing. The ordinations and subsequent clerical moves in the OCSP seem to stem all too often from this or that back-channel deal, the moves made to suit the priest, not the parish. The inceptioin of the Ordimariate here has been anything but organic or transparent, many of the events anything but happy.

More On Personnel

Regarding yesterday's post, a visitor notes:

There is one additional complication, too. In a diocese, a bishop can move clergy from one parish to another with relative ease.

1. The potential impact of a move on a presbyter's family usually is not an issue because most presbyters are celibate. There's no issue of a spouse needing to find new work or to transfer her place of employment and no issue with transferring children into a different school at a new location.
2. And in the cases of the relatively few married presbyters received [in dioceses] from Anglican or Protestant bodies, it's often possible to reassign them within a short radius of their homes to minimize the impact on their families[.] In many cases, the family will not need to move to a new home.

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter and the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, however, must play by a completely different set of rules. Most of their congregations are not near to one another, so a reassignment is likely to involve a relocation to a different geographical area with children going to new schools and a spouse also needing to find new employment or to arrange a transfer through an employer. Such reassignment is certainly possible, but it takes a lot more preplanning and groundlaying.

The situation in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham is somewhere in between. The congregations of that ordinariate tend to be much closer together, making it feasible to reassign a presbyter to another congregation that is within commuting distance in enough instances to make a major difference.

My regular correspondent adds,

There are currently six full OCSP parishes: Calgary, Scranton, Arlington,TX, Houston, Orlando, and Towson. I imagine that Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore might soon be ready to join that list. I assume that one requirement of a full parish is the ability to provide the pastor with housing and a stipend, although predictably the OCSP has yet to develop guidelines about compensation . This means that most of the other 30+ groups have to depend on priests with some combination of a pension, private means, and diocesan or other employment to support themselves.

Already the OCSP has at least a dozen clergy who are working entirely outside the Ordinariate, presumably for financial reasons. None of the pastors of these parishes, or near-parishes, is due to retire imminently; some are decades away. Mr Simington, the young celibate candidate who was ordained to the diaconate yesterday, is going back to seminary next year. He will also be working part-time assisting at St Margaret's, Katy. What does Bp Lopes have to offer him when he is ordained to the priesthood? Something is being cooked up, no doubt, given the special treatment he has been given, but perks are in short supply in the OCSP.

The OOLW has already conceded that its non-retirement age candidates will go into local ministry with Ordinariate activity, if any, as a sideline. I think this is the kiss of death (along with the general rejection of the Divine Worship liturgy) for the UK Ordinariate. The OCSP still has potential, but it could be a very boutique operation indeed.

Personnel Issues

My regular correspondent notes,

In a typical diocese, not only would [clergy] be geographically relatively close, the majority would have been raised in local parishes, attended local schools and seminaries, served in local parishes. Should a new bishop wish to know more about the clergy handed on to him, supposing he himself was not local, he would have many people to go to. In any event, he would assume that they shared many aspects of their formation in common with his own. Bp Lopes, in the other hand, must deal with men previously in TEC, TAC, REC, CEC, assorted non-Anglican denominations, military chaplaincy, formed everywhere from Nashotah House to Yale Divinity School to Reformed Theological Seminary, men who did not previously know one another, men who have changed denomination at least once and in some instances two or three times, men who may have been seriously at odds with previous authority figures, and some men who are not currently working in any area connected with the OCSP. I would say that he must be contemplating a challenging task. If I were Bp Lopes I would be looking ahead to forming a very different clergy cohort.

I think there's an added factor of what might be called hyper-careerism in the younger members of the current clergy cohort. It isn't hard to see the motivation for recent Episcopal seminary graduates to try to find a more favorable job market than TEC, which has long had a massive surplus of all clergy candidates but in more recent decades has been more likely to privilege women and gay male candidates. The voluminous public remarks of Fr Bartus bemoaning this situation, which I've often linked here, should give observers pause. The Catholic priesthood, whether or not in an Ordinariate, is not just a clone of the prestigious, well-paid, and undemanding billets that are so much sought after in TEC.

Bp Lopes should keep this in mind -- the need to recruit celibate candidates after the first generation should change the incentives and provide a clear contrast for the exiting talent pool.