What strikes me is the vaguely defined purpose of the "new Catholic parish". It is going to save souls, reach non-Catholics, the lapsed, and the wider culture. One thing that bothers me is that at least three bishops (Lopes, Vann, and Gomez, plus auxiliaries) presumably signed off on this, and the process must have included some assurance that a new Catholic church in Pasadena would not be poaching on any existing parish. Yet the announcement is nothing but sorta-kinda shilly-shally.
There's no direct mention of Anglicanorum coetibus or the complementary norms mentioning "lay faithful originally of the Anglican tradition" -- just a "unique tradition" that may refer to Anglicanism or "wider" Catholicism. Any specific discussion is reserved for links. I would say that no equivalent proposal written this poorly would reach approval in a real corporate environment, which has me wondering about the bishops or their staff.
In many ways, it seems to me that this is an acknowledgement that in the US, Anglicanorum coetibus has failed to achieve its goals, in part due to bungling and poor personnel choices. Recall that in January 2012, it was assumed that St Mary of the Angels, 13 minutes by car from Pasadena, would have served this area with an established building and an existing parish.
But it also occurred to me that a formerly thriving Episcopal and ACNA parish 15 minutes from the Irvine group, St James Newport Beach, triply lost its property, first as TEC, then as ACNA, and then again as TEC -- yet other than Fr Baaten, very briefly an ACNA pastor there, there doesn't seem to have been much interest in the nearby Ordinariate parish, when this might have been a reasonable choice for at least some.
And why the need to be so vague about what's really on offer? There's a problem here. If nobody's buying closer to home, throwing something vague against the wall in Pasadena and hoping it might stick is not a strategy.
