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.
