New Group In Louisville, KY

I'm told that a new group has formed in Louisville, KY under the leadership of Jonathan Erdman, former rector of Calvary Church, an Episcopalian parish there.

I have two concerns. One is that, while the numbers here are so small that it's hard to establish a definite trend, it doesn't seem as though new groups are forming even at a rate to maintain the OCSP's numbers. Any small shift in the wind can blow this group away as easily as the others.

A second concern is much bigger, and it's grown as my Catholic formation has developed. I've said before that John Henry Newman is one thing, Thomas Aquinas is another. To stress Anglicanism as an element of spiritual formation is doing nobody any favors. Over the past several years, I've come to realize that not being raised in a Catholic family and not having a Catholic education have been major disadvantages in my life, and I've been doing the best I can to play catchup.

I'm enormously grateful for the Catholic resources that have been available to me in parishes, in the dioceses, in print, and on the web that have helped me to do this. One thing I've come to recognize is that all Catholics have the same set of spiritual and moral obligations. I simply don't see how there isn't something misleading about putting former Anglicans in a separate ecclesiastical structure with a separate liturgy. I'm especially skeptical about putting clergy whose formation has been in Episcopal, Methodist, or Presbyterian seminaries, and whose pastoral experience has been Protestant, in charge of the spiritual welfare of these people.

Nobody is doing these people in Louisville, or anywhere else, any favors, unless they're being brought into a much fuller Catholic life.

Not-News!

While poking around the ACA website, I found this in the September 2016 Northeast Anglican:

The College of Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion will meet in Lincoln, England, October 13-16. The last official meeting of the College of Bishops was held in Johannesburg, South Africa in February, 2012. At that time, Archbishop Samuel Prakash, by right of seniority, was named Acting Primate.

The agenda, which is still being developed. includes: a report on the ratification of the Concordat; the election of a new Primate; Inter-church relations; marriage licenses and clergy serving as agents of the state; TAC finance committee; IAF; goals for the TAC and education. Other items will likely be added to this agenda. We ask your prayers as the College of Bishops meets to transact the important business of the communion.

The TAC web page has no mention of this meeting, if in fact it took place. The TAC Wikipedia entry still lists Samuel Prakash as acting primate. "Father" Smuts, at one time the de facto PR spox of the TAC, hasn't updated his blog since 2015. If a TAC primate is elected but no one is there to see it, did it happen? Remember that the 2007 Portsmouth Petition from the TAC, strange as it now seems, was the cause of much optimism and excitement for the Anglican ecumenism movement. .

This is an indication, if any is needed, that the excitement has left the movement like the gas from last year's party balloon. The Anglo-Catholic bloggers have folded up and left. The reason, it seems to me is the overwhelming sense of disappointment and betrayal caused by the events of 2012: the purging of John Hepworth and David Moyer from the TAC, the dawning recognition that the OCSP was the exclusive agenda of an Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clique, and the spectacular bungling of the St Mary of the Angels, St Aidan's Des Moines, and Our Lady of the Atonement cases.

If Bp Lopes has any prospect of saving the OCSP, a key task in front of him is to do whatever is needed to bring St Mary of the Angels into the OCSP with Fr Kelley. This would be a major move to reverse the overwhelming atmosphere of betrayal and disappointment that has surrounded the whole Anglicanorum coetibus project since 2012.

Pasadena Ordinariate Group

My regular correspondent reports,

Inaugural service/social event attracted fourteen attendees, according to Facebook. Many of the long-established groups attract fewer than that number for Sunday mass, so this is not a not a negligible start by Ordinariate standards, although we are always left to wonder what purpose it serves to have Catholics worshipping at Parish A switch their allegiance to Parish B, and why, if Fr Bartus is looking to grow his flock he does not focus his efforts on BlJHN.

They currently worship in a relatively small chapel whose location may not be convenient for everyone in the congregation, but I do not think these problems will be solved by setting up satellite operations in communities where no one is available (other than Fr Bartus) to minister to them. In the past year least five OCSP groups have folded or greatly reduced their activity because their priest has retired or become incapacitated. It is presumably unrealistic to expect that clergy would be appointed to these new groups.

In effect, my correspondent is piping up with the inconvenient question, "What problem are we trying to solve here?" I think if we approach this from the supply-side perspective, we might get a better answer. The OCSP, especially in the US, has been clergy-centered, not people-centered, from before its official inception. It makes no difference from the viewpoint of its founding clergy whether 14 people show up or 1400, the point is that the Fort Worth clique advances in its respective careers.

So the relevant question in Pasadena is, "How can Fr Bartus build an empire and look good to Bps Lopes, Vann, and Gómez?" It is more to his advantage to have a separate group where maybe a dozen celebrate evensong once a month than to add a dozen regular parishioners in Irvine, although from a diocesan perspective, all these numbers are nothing but statistical chatter. I suspect as well that he has another highly marginal candidate for ordination who will become his protégé in Pasadena a la Fr Baaten in Oceanside.

I think a better question for Bp Lopes to be asking would be, "If there is a market amounting to perhaps 100 people total in the Hollywood-Pasadena area for an OCSP parish, why not center it in the St Mary of the Angels facility? -- that group is the largest to start with and has a very nice church." Where there's a will there's a way.

More On Ecumenism

My regular correspondent comments,

The existence of the Ordinariates is of course a complete embarrassment to those in the Church who deal officially with representatives of the Anglican Communion. There is no possibility that Ordinariate clergy would be called on to advise or comment, and indeed, like married Catholic priests formerly Anglican on the subject of clerical celibacy, one finds them to be more conservative, more negative about what they have left behind than a disinterested party would be. Part of dealing with the pain of rupture is denigrating what is lost; that is normal human behaviour. The situation of former mainstream Anglicans trying to hold on to what they do still value with the assistance of a former Methodist, Presbyterian or other cleric who then spent some significant years in the CEC or other fringe body before metamorphosing into a Catholic priest strikes me as very sad.

The definition of "ecumenism" I typically find is something like "efforts by Christians of different church traditions to develop closer relationships and better understandings", which strikes me as uselessly vague. It's worth pointing out that the generally accepted history of St Mary of the Angels is that Cardinal Manning and Bishop Rusack opposed its joining the Catholic archdiocese on the basis that it would damage their ecumenical efforts.

Unity isn't going to come about because, say, Presbyterian groups suddenly decide that breaking with Rome was a big mistake -- or the Vatican decides to split the difference with Presbyterians in some way. On the other hand, some of the best-known Catholic apologists, David Campbell, Scott Hahn, and Peter Kreeft, are all former Calvinists, but I think it's significant that their decisions to come over were individual.

I've noted before that there's simply no figure in the OCSP who is remotely equivalent as a Catholic apologist or a published intellectual. Even the bloggers who were prominent before 2012 have gone silent. The movement, such as it is, has no public voice that makes any sort of argument for why any former Anglicans should consider coming over as a group. (The one individual who might be able to do this, I hate to say it, is Fr Kelley, who has been blackballed.)

I've got to say I continue to think the OCSP was conceived and founded by opportunists who came in as a first wave. Then there was a second wave of "former Methodist, Presbyterian or other" recruits who, I strongly suspect, would with few exceptions struggle to conduct a Catholic catechism, although the groups they serve are so small it makes little difference.

Embarrassment? Bp Lopes?

Web Updates

My regular corespondent reports,

The Pasadena Ordinariate Group will be having its first get-together on Sunday, but the Blessed John Henry Newman website is already announcing that the group will be offering Evensong on the first Sunday of the month starting December 4. While the Riverside ordinariate group appears to be a non-starter, the BlHJN website is now looking for those interested in forming an "Inland Empire" Ordinariate Group.

Riverside is part of the Inland Empire, along with San Bernardino, so this is a minimal recalibration.

Daily Mass at the "Rosasy Chapel" [sic] continues to be posted, despite the apparent abandonment of plans to make it a major architectural destination.

This presumably is a full-employment measure for Fr Baaten.

The Newman Academy is looking to start as a K-3 school of sixty students. And the St Augustine's Ordinariate Group seems to be presenting as a BlJHN affiliate on the main website. Recent pictures posted on the St Augustine's Facebook page show Fr Baaten ministering to a congregation of eleven, by my count, so sharing activities with a larger group seems like a good idea, although I do not know if this makes geographical sense.

A quick check of online maps shows it's 60 miles, or about an hour from Irvine. It appears that Fr Baaten is the creature of Fr Bartus in any case, so having St Augustine's as a branch office of the Newman group is only logical.

On an unrelated subject, the new slogan on the OCSP Facebook page [but not on the main web site] is "Ecumenism in the front row." I am not sure what this means exactly; the Ordinariates have not been in any row in recent meetings between Anglicans and Catholics under the ARCIC/IARCCUM ombrellino, if that is what is meant by ecumenism, i.e. co-operation and understanding. If ecumenism is interpreted as full, visible unity, leaving one denomination for another does nothing to achieve this on a wider scale, however beneficial the change is for the person or congregation involved. In any event, no explanation, no context. Indistinct pic of group of clerics---possibly recent candidates for office of acolyte. If this is a rebranding initiative coming out of the recent clergy meeting I am not hopeful.

The problem I see is that Anglicanorum coetibus, briefly thought to have been either a critical blow to spinelessness in Canterbury or an epoch-making step toward reconciliation, has proven to be neither. It damages the case to insist things are otherwise.

Thee, Thou, and Isaac Watts

I have a special relationship with Isaac Watts. I learned to read before I started school, and one of the first things I read was the fine print in the Presbyterian hymnal when my parents took me to church. (I presumably was not paying attention to the service, but at least I wasn't scribbling in the hymn book like modern kids.) So down at the bottom of the page I kept seeing something called Isaac Watts, whatever that was. However, I had already developed my interest in electric trains, and the Watts part made me think there was something electrical involved, so that made it the more interesting and mysterious.

I learned nothing else about Isaac Watts until graduate school. My graduate supervisor was a low-church Canadian who had left his Christianity behind but was still low-church, if you can understand this. He was a Samuel Johnson specialist, so I would say they had a great deal in common, and several of his acolytes were rather grim Canadians as well. One of them did a paper on Isaac Watts, and I finally discovered who the name at the bottom of the hymnal page from my childhood actually was.

The missal book at our diocesan parish includes a great many traditional Anglican hymns, including those by Watts. (Watts himself was not Anglican.) I observed not long ago that it had edited the Anglican words of Lobe den Herren to change the archaic thees and thys to the modern yous and yours. Last Sunday we sang the Watts words to St Anne, "O God our help in ages past", but when we got to the second stanza, I found, "Under the shadow of your throne", and things proceeded from there.

I'm a little more uncomfortable with the editors doing this with Watts than Lobe den Herren, since the Anglican version of that one is a 19th-century translation from German, while the Watts text is from Watts's hand and was intended that way by its author. By about 1705, when Watts was writing hymns, the English familiar second-person had become archaic. (The angry and unstable Hamlet was using both forms indiscriminately a century earlier.) This suggests that Watts was emulating the language of the King James Bible, which itself adopted an archaic tone to emphasize the special nature of religious language.

It's worth noting that the Ordinary Form mass mostly uses modern "you", but the Our Father continues with "hallowed be Thy name". None of this is support for the idea of a made-up BDW mass dating from 1905 self-consciously adopting faux archaism.

Correction

I had an inkling I had misstated the statistics in my update to yesterday's post. A visitor explains my problem:

In the "update" paragraph of today's post, you seem to have confused the "mean" and the "median" -- which are not the same. The "mean" is the arithmetic average, obtained by dividing the total of all gifts by the number of givers. The "median" is the fiftieth percentile -- the amount that has an equal number of equal or larger and equal or smaller donations. . . . It's pretty normal for twenty percent of the donors to account for eighty percent of the donated funds -- and a few large donations really do skew the mean[.]

More On Giving

My regular correspondent comments,

The average annual parish giving per member in the US Catholic church was $497 in 2013 (latest figures I could find). The 2013 figure for TEC was $2556. Even if the figures were calculated somewhat differently and aren't completely comparable it is evident that Catholics are not in the same ballpark as Episcopalians when it comes to financial support of their church.

By "average", I assume my correspondent means "arithmetic mean". The TEC sample size is much smaller than the Catholic and is probably skewed by the small number of high-end donors. I'm not sure if it says much of anything about the OCSP, whose own numbers are going to be skewed by the half a dozen self-sustaining parishes against the two dozen groups and missions -- but even there, the law of small numbers is going to apply. My correspondent continues,

Catholic priests are very poorly compensated relative to the clergy of other denominations and retirement support is often a matter of charity rather than a funded benefit, so they are in effect subsidising their parishes/dioceses, just as in the past women religious subsidised the operation of Catholic schools and hospitals. It's a mindset.

I would characterize it as something other than a mindset -- vocation is involved. Bp Barron has noted that the women religious whom feminists decry as providing cheap labor have taken vows of poverty and are undertaking those lives via free and informed choice. The same applies to Catholic priests, who again are fully aware of the conditions under which they will work. Episcopal priests, in contrast, are typically seeking socially prestigious positions that will in many cases fund a prosperous family life.

The funding of so many aspects of diocesan and national church life through second collections rather than an effective system of allotment of parish funds to the diocese is inferior to the model used in TEC and the ACC, in my estimation. One feels sorry for the intended beneficiaries of a second collection scheduled for January. Presumably the idea is that donors can pick and choose their priorities but I think this is actually a rather Protestant approach.

The bottom line for me is that it strikes me as doubtful that parish pledges or special collections can fund projects like a clergy pension fund. In fact, the Episcopal retirement fund in the US was only begun about 1920 in a campaign led by J.P.Morgan Jr. If Bp Lopes can find equivalent donors, more power to him, but that's what will be needed. However, while responsible diocesan laity should be considering the Church in their estate planning, it seems to me that overall priorities for the Church must go beyond a boutique issue like the OCSP.

UPDATE: The more I think about the TEC annual giving average of $2556, the less credible it seems to me. This amounts to an average weekly pledge of $49.15, with 50% of pledges being greater. 30 years ago I served as an assistant treasurer at All Saints Episcopal Beverly Hills, with access to weekly pledge amounts. Beverly Hills is a prosperous community, and this is a prosperous and prestigious parish. Even allowing for inflation, I can say that I never saw weekly pledges coming anywhere close to $50, and certainly never a situation with half of the pledge checks coming in for more.

Concert At St Mary Of The Angels October 23

From Fr Kelley:

At 3:00 PM on October 23, the Sunday after St Luke's Day, the California state University Northridge Women's Chorale will offer the Premier Performance of "Magnificat" by James Domine, together with other works.

Dr Katherine Baker will direct the Chorale. Dr Kathleen Moon will play the harp.

This is part of the Fall Music Program at St Mary of the Angels. There is no admission charge. A free-will offering will be taken to support the musical outreach program of the parish.

Fr Kelley confirms that arrangements will be made for parking behind the parish.

Clergy Conference Wrapup

My regular correspondent reports,

The clegy conference has wrapped up and I think it is clear that while Ms Faber may not be doing much as Director of Communications---promised July issue of the Ordinariate Observer never appeared and the "Parish Spotlight" on the home page celebrated its one year anniversary last month---she has been devoting a lot of time to her other role as Director of Strategic Planning. A sophisticated timeline and planning process for second collections has been rolled out, including an annual appeal for a retirement fund for OCSP clergy. This last, along with financial support for seminarians, is of course crucial if the OCSP is to attract younger clergy prepared to dedicate themselves full-time to ministry in the Ordinariate, which is in turn the key to growth, IMHO.

On the one hand, I am not sure that the majority of OCSP laypeople, retirees on fixed incomes used to the once a year pledge system of TEC, are going to be happy with being hit up with a special collection for extra-parochial purposes every three months. On the other hand, it tells us that getting the financial house in order has been identified as Job One in Houston, or perhaps Job Two if we regard the complete turnover of the previous leadership team as the first order of business. In any event, your observation that the potential financial contribution of St Mary's would have been extremely helpful to the Ordinariate had the ball not been so decisively fumbled by that same previous leadership is clearly accurate.

While second collections are ubiquitous in Catholic parishes, as a sometime usher who's passed the basket for them, I'm not at all sure how productive they are. I've exchanged looks with the head usher as we total up maybe $20 in small bills from such a one. On the other hand, our current diocesan pastor has apparently been the cause of complaints to the bishop on how frequently he stresses the need for financial support, citing on his behalf the number of times Our Lord speaks of money in the Gospels. The parish is in fact successful.

In older days, wealthy Episcopalians were generous with endowments, but I believe those times have passed. I became an Episcopalian about the time I got serious about a career, and I at least tried to approach a tithe (but never got there) on a fairly modest income. Nevertheless, I was regarded as a major donor in the parish. I don't know what mindset former Episcopalians bring to the OCSP in the matter of donations, but I've always been suspicious that Episcopalianism was popular, to the extent it ever was, because it made few actual demands on its adherents, financially or morally.

A Tangentially Interesting Video

I ran into a roughly 1-hour presentation by Dr David Campbell, a former Presbyterian pastor who became Catholic (and in doing so apparently gave up a prestigious clerical post to become a schoolteacher).

He makes no mention of Angicanorum coetibus, but he speaks persuasively about "unchurched spirituality", a much wider source of error than heterodox Anglicanism. This hit home with me in particular because it pointed out how much of my elite-school education (in which required readings certainly included Emerson and William James but never Aquinas) built on my poorly catechized childhood.

This convinces me in turn that Anglicanism isn't going to bring a whole lot to the table in equipping the Catholic faith for what it is likely to encounter in coming decades, but an understanding of what Dr Campbell is discussing certainly will.

Here's A Puzzle

Amid revelations of anti-Catholic remarks by members of a campaign staff, I'm intrigued in particular by an e-mail characterizing Catholicism "a middle ages dictatorship". The campaign is apparently slow-walking any response to calls for resignations. But how quickly would any campaign react to calls for resignation if any staffer characterized Mahometanism as the same thing?

This feeds my continuing view that Mahometan migration to the West is being encouraged as a specifically anti-Christian measure. Mahometans are offended by any number of Christian customs, they appeal to the state for redress under the threat of violent outbursts, and the state decides it must choose winners in the dispute. The end result is that one side is designated a medieval dictatorship, while the other is not.

The Catholic Church needs to be aware of the potential here and be ready for it.

Fr Bartus Is Busy

My regular correspondent reports,

Once again, it appears Fr Bartus will be absent from the annual OCSP [clergy conference], being held in Niagara Falls this week. Attendance is mandatory unless one is excused, so I presume that Fr Bartus has again made a convincing case that his teaching job, pastoral work, and/or family responsibilities do not allow him to get away for five weekdays. But this does not strike me as a prudent move for someone so clearly ambitious as Fr B. Perhaps one might have wished to distance oneself from the rather shambolic opening period of the North American Ordinariate, but I think that Bp Lopes is making an effort to make the OCSP a respectable, if tiny, part of the American Church. And as a Catholic Ordinary, he can move a man to another parish, or no parish, in a way unlike the process in TEC.

I Learn Something New Every Day

At least, it seems that way. Last night, in addition to a great deal on the Turin Shroud (such as its connection with St Charles Borromeo), I learned that there is such a thing as a four-point biretta, which is academic garb to which holders of doctoral degrees are entitled. It is not used liturgically among either Anglicans or Catholics.

Fr Kelley has one, since he was granted a DD degree by the University of Turin (a DD is an honorary degree) for research he did on the Turin Shroud in the 1970s.

This is the individual against whom a relentless campaign of character assassination has been conducted by Anthony Morello, Stephen Strawn, Brian Marsh, Andrew Bartus, Marilyn Bush, and their associates, with the tacit support of the Steenson-Hurd clique in the OCSP. The presentation he gave on the Turin Shroud is part of an extraordinary effort to restore the parish and its role in the community.

I think this is especially significant, because it has clearly turned out that the OCSP could not afford to lose either Fr Kelley or the St Mary of the Angels parish, which it did as a result of its own miscalculations.

Reflections On The 2011 E-Mail

I hadn't looked at this e-mail for almost five years. My first reaction is sympathy for the predicament I found myself in. My second is astonishment at the prescience it shows.

My attitude once I was asked to take over the treasurer's job at St Mary of the Angels in late September 2011 and began to get an idea of what it involved was to think I had to make straight the way of the Lord, the way in this case being Anglicanorum coetibus and the parish's path into the prospective ordinariate. The enthusiasm about the prospect was visible on the various Anglo-Catholic blogs, and I certainly picked up on it.

By early December, I had begun to recognize that, while I'd been able to work through the backlog of unpaid bills, important files, as well as all tax records, had been removed from the treasurer's office, presumably by the former treasurer and dissidents on the vestry. This much is clear in the e-mail, but I was clearly still scratching my head about it. It wasn't until Easter week 2012 and the abortive attempt by the dissidents to seize the parish in the wake of the IRS notice of unpaid taxes that context became clearer.

The reason for my removal as treasurer at the insistence of dissident vestry members in December was that I was beginning to get to the bottom of the problem, and I would either find a way to pay any unresolved tax bills myself or engage a payroll service that would do it. For the dissidents' agenda, that couldn't happen. I was replaced as treasurer by Mr Cothran, a professional actor who, by his own admission, could not balance his own checkbook. It's telling that Mrs Bush has apparently relied on Mr Cothran for the dissident group's business dealings ever since, and his signature appears with hers on the apparently fraudulent 2014 mortgage.

Another thing that strikes me in re-reading the e-mail is the conscientious approach I was taking to getting the parish's affairs in order. The problem I have with this is that, as far as I can see, Fr Bartus was aligned with the dissident group in wanting to see financial scandal in the parish, which would result in knocking Fr Kelley out of the running as pastor and placing him in that position, only two years out of seminary. That's just ordinary ambition, though -- the bigger problem for me is the apparent cynicism among the Steenson-Hurd clique, which must have been generally aware of Bartus's agenda and at least tacitly supported it.

I wonder, in fact, whether this has some bearing on Msgr William Stetson's puzzling December 2011 remarks that, regarding who would be accepted in the parish following its admission to the OCSP, he didn't "check passports at the communion rail". Some of the dissidents had obstacles to receiving communion. Could this have been a tacit promise that if Msgr Stetson became interim chaplain and Bartus subsequently became pastor, they could continue in good standing? When I first reported Msgr Stetson's remarks here, they raised eyebrows. It's hard to avoid a feeling that there was a level of cynicism that prevailed in the hierarchy as a whole.

I would note that my remarks in the 2011 e-mail make it plain that I was tentatively budgeting for a substantial diocesan tithe to the prospective ordinariate. My estimate was 10%, or about $24,000 per year. This is a resource the OCSP denied itself in its subsequent bungling.

In light of the future prospects for the OCSP, I'm convinced the parish needs to find another path for itself, although I'm sure that, if Bp Lopes made a serious effort to retrieve the situation, some effort would be made to work through the issues.

2011 E-Mail Regarding St Mary's Treasurer

Someone asked me a question the other day about my brief term as St Mary's "probationary acting interim assistant treasurer" or whatever it was during October and November 2011. I sent him a copy of the e-mail I sent to John Cothran, a vestry member who was terming out in early 2012, who had been designated the new treasurer in the attempted putsch of December 11, 2012. Mr Cothran's most extensive appearance here was during a somewhat disturbing courtroom outburst last February.

From: John Bruce
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 7:42 PM
To: John Cothran
Subject: St Mary's Treasurer Turnover

John, thanks for the phone message, I hope we can get together to discuss additional questions you may have. However, my wife, a retired attorney, advises me that the assistance I can provide is limited, not only because she sees the potential for litigation regarding the Rector’s status, but also since I’m no longer an officer or employee of St Mary’s, and I may not be covered by the parish’s insurance for errors and omissions. I’ll be forwarding any additional correspondence that needs your attention, and I can tell you over the phone the physical locations of files and other items in the office. However, it would not be ethical for me to give you any passwords. I’ve given you the location of the password steno book, and Keith has the Windows password. I would advise you to change this password immediately once you sign on for the first time. It would not be appropriate for me to come into St Mary’s or the Treasurer’s office, since I’ve been advised that the atmosphere there is toxic, and I should not let myself be pulled into any controversy.

As I told the vestry on Sunday, I’d been putting in several days a week in the Treasurer’s office, and I’d expected to continue doing that until I was unexpectedly replaced. The turnover list here reflects items that had been on my plate to get done on that kind of a continued schedule. I certainly hope you’ll be available to put in the necessary time to come up to speed and complete these matters, especially since we’ve already lost a whole week that could have been spent on doing these items.

End of Year and January 2012 Turnover

Receive pledge envelopes (already ordered and paid for from American Church) and make sure pledgers get them by the first Sunday in January. Record pledges in Quickbooks.

Check Treasurer’s in-box in parish office at least once a week, pick up bills, and make sure they are paid. File paid invoices in vendor folders.

Total any payments made to St Mary of the Angels but marked Rector’s Discretionary Fund since mid-November. Write check to Rector’s Discretionary Fund for this total and give to Fr Kelley.

You need to research exactly how [redacted], the cleaner, is paid – whether by week or by hour. Then be sure she’s paid the correct amount on the fourth Sunday in December (12/25).

Payroll is due the fourth Sunday in December (12.25). Be sure all clergy are paid the correct stipends, housing allowance, utility allowance, and mileage. Others to be paid are [redacted].

You will need to research what tax documents – state, federal, Social Security, and anything else – are due by the end of the year and send them in. Also you will need to calculate withholding and pay that to the appropriate agencies. [emphasis mine]

You will need to complete the parish budget by the January vestry meeting so it can be approved by them and submitted to the parish annual meeting.

You will need to complete the payroll documents Meridian Payroll needs to start the payroll service on February 1. I’m forwarding you an e-mail from them on this. You’ll also need to prepare the resolution for the parish annual meeting recommending the parish go with their service.

You will need to learn how to enter plate and pledge payments from Sunday counting into Quickbooks to keep this up to date. I can’t help here, since I’m no longer Treasurer, and this is confidential information I’m no longer entitled to see.

I’ve started printing checks directly from Quickbooks. You’ll need to figure out how to do this; unfortunately, I’ve been advised not to come into the office, or I’d sit with you and go over it..

The Bylaws say that each January and July, the Treasurer must provide the Rector with a list of parish members in good standing. This has not been done recently, and the most current list has some deceased people on it.

You will need to follow up with [redacted]. I believe this bill is already overdue. You may be able to find the bill online and pay it that way. I wasn’t able to research this before I was replaced. [emphasis mine]

Likewise, see if you can get the 2011 insurance files that Pat [Myers AKA Omeirs] has removed from the Treasurer’s office back. He took them to research our payments and policies, but I’m not aware that he did anything worthwhile once he took them.

The wardens actually caught me unawares when I started in this job, and they did make off with some important files (and then forgot about them) before I recognized that I should not allow this. You need to be vigilant about not letting them take files out of the office without making copies.

I can probably talk you through Sunday count procedures over the phone, but again, I can’t help you in person, because this is confidential information that I’m no longer entitled to see. [redacted]

Before there’s any sort of audit, you’ll need to research why there’s about $10-20,000 more in the BofA checking account than Quickbooks thinks there is, and work out a way to correct it.

You’ll need to determine how much we finally pay on the renovations (and separately, on the spire) over and above the November deposit, and then determine how much we can withdraw from the Citibank renovation fund to repay the general fund. The spire fund is accounted for separately in Quickbooks, but you’ll need to total that for the January Treasurer’s report to the vestry.

You’ll need to determine what our exact financial obligations are to the Ordinariate and determine how best to budget for them. Among other things, I don’t know if we’ll have to pay the Catholic priest who’ll supervise us while Frs Kelley, Bartus, and [redacted] are re-ordained. I also don’t know if we’ll be obligated for tithes or dues to the Ordinariate, how much they’ll be, and how they’ll be budgeted.

I never met with Mr Cothran in person, and every indication we have is that neither he nor anyone else connected with the dissident group acted on these recommendations in any serious way. In particular, they were clearly on notice that there were outstanding tax issues that they did nothing to resolve prior to the IRS final notice in March 2012.

I'll have more to say about what this e-mail indicates

Shroud Of Turin Class At St Mary Of The Angels

There will be a three-part class on the Shroud of Turin beginning at 4 PM Saturday, October 8, at the St Mary of the Angels parish. The schedule is:

Part I. "What does the Shroud have to Say for Itself?" (approx. 1 hr.)

Potluck Supper. "Bring Something to Share." (-- Best if this can be brought before 4pm, So we can start on time. Thanks!)

Part II. "What does Art History Show? The Case for an Unbroken Thread."

Dessert & Coffee. (Shared items welcome!)

Part III. "What Has Modern Science Found?"

Parking will be available in the lot behind the parish.

Backtrack In Irvine

My regular correspondent reports,

References to the "Walsingham Chapel" at the Santiago Retreat Center, and to the "Riverside Ordinariate Group" have been removed from the Blessed John Henry Newman website, I note. The links are still on Google and Facebook, but clicking produces a message that that content has been removed. We will see how long the Newman Academy continues to search for supporters. One does not wish to stifle initiative, but I felt that more thought had gone into the optics of the upgraded website than into the practical details of the proposed projects.

it sounds as though someone has recognized that blue-sky projections and hype don't serve the OCSP's interests.

More On Delict Of Schism

A visitor comments,

Regarding your post on "delict of schism" as of last Friday, such delicts are curable -- but there are more than a few nuances.

First, anybody who was ordained in the Catholic Church normally would be expected to return to the diocese for which he was ordained, if he returns to ordained ministry at all. This principle is the basis of the first sentence of Article 6, Section 3, of the Complementary Norms to the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, which states: "Those who have been previously ordained in the Catholic Church and subsequently have become Anglicans, may not exercise sacred ministry in the Ordinariate." Note that this prohibition does not apply to somebody who left the Catholic Church as a lay man or woman.

Second, the cure would depend highly upon the circumstances of the individual's departure. At one extreme, you have an individual who was baptized in the Catholic Church as an infant but never catechized, and later introduced to Christian faith by members of another denomination -- who would be welcomed back into the full communion of the Catholic Church, and subsequently allowed to seek ordination, with nothing more than a profession of faith. The next step would be somebody who, in his or her youth, was brought to another denomination due to a change in family situation (adoption, foster care, etc.), and had virtually no say in the matter. Next, one can consider an individual who married a Christian of another denomination and decided to join the spouse's denomination for the sake of family unity -- certainly a mitigating circumstance that would diminish the gravity of the act.

Third, the usual conditions for any canonical penalty to apply here as well: the offender must know that the act is egregiously wrong and freely choose to do the act anyway, with full awareness of the nature of the act and its consequences.

The records of prospective clergy are not public, so none of us -- not even your "correspondent" have any way to find out which factors might or might not have been present in any of the cases. The result is that the process may seem to be arbitrary precisely because we don't know the differences among the various situations.

Regarding your post of Saturday, there were a significant number of clergy of The Episcopal Church (TEC) who put the transition into the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter on hold because there was no way to close the financial gap: they were not coming with congregations large enough to pay stipends and efforts to identify other assignments came up short. It is likely that at least some of these individuals will make the transition when they qualify for retirement from TEC, and thus will be able to subsist on their pensions.

Information on these last cases is of course anecdotal, and the specific circumstances are also confidential. Given that, I'm simply not aware of any current TEC priests whose transitions are on hold until they retire. I am, on the other hand, aware of TEC priests who have been eased out of the transition process. It doesn't appear to me, in any case, that given the current oversupply of OCSP priests and the diminishing number of groups, there would be any openings for new priests of TEC retirement age.

OCSP Career Paths?

My regular correspondent says,

Leaving aside the motives of the current OCSP crop, about which we can only speculate, what are the prospects of the next generation? The OCSP has seven parishes at the moment, and we could predict that another two or three congregations will attain this status in the next year or two. So the pastors of these parishes can expect stipends, housing, and benefits at least as generous as those provided by a diocesan parish, with a substantially smaller workload. Beyond that, the prospects are mixed.

Most of the younger OCSP clergy, like Fr Bartus, are cobbling together a livelihood from part-time ministry to their quasi-parish group, teaching, chaplaincy, and similar employment. The Complementary Norms of AC made provision for priests to engage in a "secular profession" if necessary but I do not know of any instances of this. In any event this is a demanding arrangement: a combination of part-time jobs all too familiar to younger people today. It is the norm in many fringe denominations but I cannot imagine that many men entering the Catholic priesthood would find this a congenial prospect, when so many diocesan parishes are desperate for full-time clergy. No doubt some believe that with energy and vision they can transform a small congregation into a large one, but we have not seen any recent instances of this. I think it is safe to say that growth of this kind will always be the exception, not the rule.

A compromise is illustrated in the ministry of Fr Luke Reese, at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis. This parish offers DW, OF, and EF masses on Sundays and through the week. On Wednesday there is DW Evensong combined with Benediction. Fr Reese, Parochial Vicar of the parish, participates in all three forms of the mass. This is also the arrangement at St Anselm, Corpus Christi, where Fr Vidal celebrates both an OF and a DW mass every Sunday. Social events and parish activities at these churches are open to members of all Sunday congregations. This could be an attractive arrangement for a priest who was committed to Anglican Patrimony and wished to offer the DW mass but was not attracted to the full-time/part-time model. Whether it guarantees the long-term survival of the Ordinariate congregation is another matter, of course.

So my correspondent suggests here, as once or twice elsewhere, that the main selling point for a prospective celibate seminarian considering the OCSP would be a possibly higher salary and a lower workload, but this would apply to perhaps half a dozen open billets -- the rest would be unattractive in comparison to a diocesan post.

One problem I see is that the OCSP is shifting to a radically different model of clergy; a first generation of (mostly) married former Anglican priests, many in their sixties and seventies, is rapidly retiring. What attracted this group was the prestige of going to a Catholic clone of TEC, complete with a diminishing parish of aging upscale fuddy-duddies. But how is it in the Church's interest to emulate a model that's patently on its way out everywhere in the West?

The next generation will be celibate seminarians. For some reason I think of Fr N, an associate at our diocesan parish, who had previously been a pastor of his own parish. He is, from what I can gather, returning from a leave of absence, and from what I can put together from occasional remarks in his homilies, before becoming pastor, he had been a military chaplain who saw combat in Gulf deployments. He survived this apparently without PTSD, but when he took over parish duties, he presided over a wedding in which the bride became hysterical because a measurement in her train was off. This brought Fr N to some type of breakdown.

I've got to assume that Fr N found his vocation via a set of reasons largely inconsistent with the question of whether a bride's gown was a precise fit. I suspect as well that what would bring a celibate seminarian to a vocation would be in many ways inconsistent with ministering to some small clique of affluent fuddy-duddies, however high the pay or low the workload.

I have enormous respect for Fr N and his colleagues. For the vast majority of current OCSP clergy, less so -- and it appears that Bp Lopes is easing them out with all deliberate speed. But how can he replace them if what could motivate their successors is not the sort of thing that would motivate a Fr N?