OK, Let's Get Real

I've had a couple of interesting reactions to yesterday's post on the sketchy attendance -- or at least, the appearance thereof -- at the institution mass at St John the Baptist Bridgeport, PA. The points my visitors raise boil down to these:

• I see the glass as half empty, others may see it as half full. The spaces in the pews in fact represent the parish's potential for growth
• And attendance notwithstanding, the parish is meeting its cathedraticum, as well as a hefty assessment in the Bishop's Appeal. It has paid for, and is maintaining, its building.

My knowledgeable regular correspondent, whose familiarity with the details of the OCSP makes me wonder why neither Bp Lopes nor Msgr Steenson has made greater use of this individual, tells me that my estimate of 100 in the church on November 18 is probably right -- parish bulletins on regular Sundays show attendance considerably lower; 100 would be a really good day.

Nevertheless, my correspondent pointed me to the OCSP's Guide to Parish Development. On Page 5, the minimum size for a parish is listed as 30 families or 100 members. My correspondent feels that this makes the Bridgeport parish eligible to be designated as such, but I think there has to be acknowledgement that it is squeaking by at the bare minimum if it can muster 100 on only the best days.

Stability is another criterion, and naturally, this is especially important if the parish is hovering at the minimum criterion for membership. It's worth pointing out that that capacious nave with so much room for growth must be heated in the winter, and presumably for daily offices. Winter hasn't even started in Philly, and I assume the parking lot has to be plowed as well. What kind of resources are available for emergency organ and furnace repair? My correspondent asks, "The big questions are whether the parish can grow to a size where the disappearance of particular donors will not have a serious impact, and who will be available to replace Fr Ousley."

My correspondent points out as well, "Fr Ousley is a retired TEC clergyman and presumably has pension income. He is 65, the second-oldest of the current OCSP pastors, but he seems to be an active and dynamic leader." This raises two questions. Is the parish getting a bargain in the pastor's salary and benefits if Fr Ousley can rely on his TEC pension and health care? And how does the OCSP plan to replace him five years down the road with its current small crop of seminarians?

Another point neither visitor raised yesterday is the general demographics apparent in the photos of the mass: lots of gray hair, no multigenerational groups. This is a big contrast to my successful diocesan parish, where my wife and I exchange the peace with well-behaved and reverent children and teens every Sunday. And this goes to what I think is a central problem in Anglicanorum coetibus: the account of Bp Pope's and Msgr Steenson's 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger, as well as Fr Barker's account of the Pastoral Provision, both make the point that the market for the constitution was disaffected US Episcopalians and "continuing" Anglicans.

The size of this group has always been overstated, according to its chief historian, Mr Bess. But people familiar with the movement, like David Virtue, have made the point that it is in fact graying, and whatever appeal "continuing" groups had in the late 20th century has been superseded largely by the low-church ACNA, definitely not a Catholic-friendly market. The visible attendance at the Bridgeport institution was, let's face it, overwhelmingly aging baby boomers, a low birthrate group, and nobody was visible there from their progeny. Period. I won't go into vocations.

So let's back up a little and ask what's going on here. Msgr Steenson was summarily "retired" a year ago at 63, a remarkably unusual occurrence in the Church, where the most underperforming bishops frequently last to 75. I think a reasonable explanation (though possibly not the only one) was simply a failure of the OCSP to thrive, although given the factors working against it, often discussed here, this was a predictable result not necessarily Msgr Steenson's fault.

I've got to think the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith came to some kind of a tipping point: fix this thing or shut it down, and Bp Lopes, I would assume, has got to be under some amount of pressure. As a result, with his one-year performance review looming, he had to show some visible progress, and the Bridgeport institution, somewhat iffy in my view, was a "success" he could point to.

This may also be an explanation for the very recent St Alban's fiasco, whereby a remarkably optimistic message was clearly drafted with Fr Perkins's cooperation (and I would have to think approval) and then sent out as, effectively, a press release. Also, I betcha, with Perkins's approval, if not at his specific instigation. The problem is that it bubbled over about Bp Matano's state of mind and effectively committed Bp Matano to doing things a year from now.

Bad move would be my guess, which Houston then told Rochester to pull back in a hurry, trying to blame it on the bloggers, even though Houston had to be behind it. (Bp Lopes, you want me on your side.) But why would the OCSP hierarchy feel the need to make such an ill-advised announcement? Pressure to succeed, or at least to create the appearance of success next year maybe, would be my surmise.

This is a marginal thing. Even after churning out its whole first generation of managers, it's still running an amateur night. I don't give it a whole lot of future, frankly.

Maybe I'm Spoiled

By going to a diocesan parish, but looking at the photos currently posted at Ordinariate News of the institution mass at St John the Baptist, Bridgeport reminds me more of my days in TEC than as a Catholic.

One memory my wife and I have of being Episcopalians is the common experience of having to lean over two rows of pews to exchange the peace. This mass at St John the Baptist was, admittedly, on a Friday night, although the mean temperature for that day in Philadelphia was 56, with no precipitation.

I have simply never seen such a sparse attendance at our diocesan parish, even at noon mass on holy days of obligation. But this was a special occasion -- presumably the most important in the parish's history. No need, it seems, for ushers to direct traffic to the communion rail. My rough guess here is that the maximum attendance would have been maybe 100, including choir and altar party.

I've mused in the past that pushing too hard to provide visuals of success is likely to result in embarrassment over any medium or long term. But realistically speaking, these photos of what ought to be a very special occasion for the parish are on the borderline of discouraging already.

I'm wondering if Bp Lopes is under heavy pressure to show some kind of success with the OCSP.

A Suggestion For Bp Lopes

I've been made aware that certain quarters are unhappy with recent posts here concerning the St Alban's Rochester group. The concern appears to be that the speculation could in fact be a hindrance to the group's progress. I have several observations to make.

• I have passed on information that appears, wisely or not, to have been released on a fairly wide basis. An item of concern, the most recent e-mail from Mr Smith at the Rochester group, was also posted on the Ordinariate News site. As best I can see, there was no breach of confidence in publishing this e-mail. A quick search brings up 23 posts mentioning the St Alban’s group on my blog over a period of years, nearly all based on public releases from the group's lay leadership, with no previous objection.
• The speculation on my blog has been clearly identified as speculation. It has been based on previously published information in the public record, including Fr Catania's sudden departure from Rochester last April, Msgr Steenson's 2015 replacement as Ordinary, and Bp Matano's arrival as Bishop of Rochester in 2014, as well as his characterization as a centrist bishop. I can see no calumny in publishing this speculation. My assumption is that both Bp Lopes and Bp Matano are sincerely doing their best.
• On that basis, although a request was made that I delete the recent posts on the Rochester group, I've got to say that I can't see a reason to do this, especially considering that the same information, often with speculation in the comments, has consistently been published at Ordinariate News over the years.

I'm told that the same request was made of Mr Murphy to delete the announcement from Mr Smith on his blog that was made of me. So far, Mr Murphy hasn't done this. But this indicates the problem is bigger than this blog, or Mr Murphy's blog.

My knowledgeable regular correspondent has often suggested that Houston's press relations function needs work. If Bp Lopes is concerned that bloggers are putting the wrong spin on public information, it would probably be a positive step to find someone who can put the Ordinariate's press relations on a more professional basis. It's worth pointing out that each of the OCSP's parishes and groups puts out individual e-mails and announcements, apparently without central coordination in Houston.

Normally this would be fine -- my diocesan parish bulletins carry lots of announcements covering landscaping projects, school events, and fundraisers that give rise to little speculation. The problem is that events as they apply to Rochester do give rise to speculation. If Houston doesn't like that, it needs to take control of publicity from all parishes and groups, and indeed to take this issue seriously.

I have every good wish for Bp Lopes and the OCSP, but I'm entitled to express my opinion that a good many things still need fixing. My regular correspondent adds,

I suppose if there were obstacles in the past and Fr Perkins is using his skills to remove them he and his Ordinary would not want attention to be drawn to his efforts, lest Bp Matano be reminded of something that would be counterproductive to the OCSP's plan. [We have no reason to think this is the case, except that the concern here may feed such speculation.] But as you say, your role is not to augment the Ordinariate's PR staff. The latter, like that of many other dioceses, exaggerates its ability to control the message, despite the abundant evidence in recent years that this is neither possible nor desirable. It is particularly absurd in the case of the OCSP, whose Communication and Strategic Planning Director's time seems entirely taken up by fund-raising campaigns and attempts to get the membership list, contact information, and other basic matters into some kind of order. The idea that they are trying to get out some kind of coherent message which you are sabotaging is clearly nonsense.

My blogger profile in the sidebar used to include a warning that e-mails are subject to publication here unless there is a specific request to keep the information confidential. (I dropped this when I began two other blogs using the same profile, and I saw no need to adopt this sort of stance there.) Most of my correspondents have understood this precaution, but I want to stress it again here: I definitely keep information confidential when requested, or indeed, without a request if it's clear it shouldn't be public.

However, this particular situation, involving an essentially public announcement, appears to be a policy issue that needed to be better clarified in Houston, and I don't feel a need to correct a problem that should have been addressed there.

More Rochester Comment

A regular visitor notes,

With respect to your recent posts on the situation in Rochester, the web site of the Diocese of Rochester shows that Bishop Matano, previously Coadjutor of the Diocese of Burlington (Vermont), was installed as Bishop of Rochester on 03 January 2014. Here are a few observations.

1. If there was any "bad blood" between the diocese and the ordinariate, or its congregation there, it probably arose during the tenure of the previous bishop and involved Msgr. Steenson's team. Both of those circumstances have changed, perhaps paving the way for relations between the ordinariate and the diocese to move forward.
2. It typically takes a new diocesan bishop several months to figure out who is who and where problems exist in the diocesan curia, then to make the appropriate personnel moves to resolve them.
3. In his former position as Coadjutor of the Diocese of Burlington, Bishop Matano probably had no contact at all with any ordinariate members because the ordinariate did not, and still does not, have a community in that diocese. Upon learning that there was an ordinariate community in his new diocese, which likely did not happen on "day one" of his tenure as bishop, he probably needed some amount of time to understand it. It's also possible that he had concerns about the orthodoxy of clergy coming from an Anglican background. Additionally, if there was previous "bad blood," he probably was getting negative input about it from his inner circle of advisors that he inherited from his predecessor, perhaps including the Bishop Emeritus himself.
4. On the other hand, his diocese has a serious shortage of clergy -- according to the diocesan web site, a couple dozen of its parishes do not have resident clergy. Thus, he probably would welcome anybody who can help the situation, once he was certain of the potential pastor's theological orthodoxy.
5. Of course, none of this discounts the possibility that Bishop Matano might have received some, ah, "guidance" from somebody high up in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or perhaps from the Papal Nuncio, that the establishment of an ordinariate community in his new diocese is an important project that he would do well to support....

But in any case, the new-found support of the Diocese of Rochester for St. Alban's Fellowship is certainly welcome news!

With my visitor, I'm inclined to endorse the Scholastic position that entities should not be multiplied, or that we should take the simplest explanation that fits the known facts. The problem for me is that we do have pieces of the puzzle that don't seem to fit. Bp Matano went to Rochester in 2014, but Fr Catania didn't suddenly leave for Omaha until just last April. It's possible that Bp Matano, replacing a very liberal bishop, had so much on his plate that he couldn't get to resolving any conflict (if it existed) with Houston for a couple of years. But there could be other explanations, too.

From my viewpoint as a centrist diocesan Catholic, I would think that bringing in an OCSP priest resolves only one problem for a bishop like Matano, the shortage of parish priests. Unless the new candidate is exceptional, he doesn't address the cultural issues the Church faces, the dropoff in faithful Catholics, the need to revitalize Catholic education, and so forth.

Rochester News Reaction

My regular correspondent comments,

This is very good news for the St Alban's group. I recall that Msgr Steenson ran into a complete brick wall trying to line up a similar arrangement for Fr Catania so something has certainly changed. I also recall that back in April 2015 Evan Simington was scheduled to make a visit to the St Alban's group. This didn't come off, but even the tentative plan suggests there might be some Rochester connection which made the community of interest to him. Mr Simington is now a deacon as you probably know and one assumes due for priestly ordination in June 2017.

The news item over Fr Catania's sudden move from Rochester to Omaha appeared here in April 2016. The information at the time suggested that the Rochester diocese's opposition to the St Alban's group dated back as far as Msgr Steenson's tenure. What's puzzling is that Bp Matano is generally seen as a conservative or centrist bishop. Anglicanorum coetibus is seen as, at minimum, a pro-liturgy move from a pope who focused on liturgy, although Msgr Steenson, possibly under the influence of Cardinal Wuerl, dissociated the OCSP from Latin mass or traditionalist tendencies.

A reasonable interpretation of events might be that Bp Lopes was able to change Bp Matano's mind and reassure him that the OCSP was compatible with centrist or conservative tendencies in the Church, whatever his earlier impression may have been. A reservation I've expressed here is that despite appearances, Anglicanism is thoroughly Reformed and congregational, and the differences with Catholicism can't be finessed. In that context, Evangelium isn't especially thorough as catechesis, and the "instant ordinations" of favored Anglican clergy in 2012 weren't reassuring. It appears that Dcn Simington will be more fully formed as a Catholic priest, on the other hand. But we may never know more.

Rochester News

Prof Jordan has kindly passed on an e-mail from Peter Jesserer Smith of the St Alban's group:

I talked with Father Timothy Perkins, our vicar general, and we have some very encouraging news coming out of his meeting on Monday with Bishop Salvatore Matano! First of all, Father Perkins wanted to express his deep gratitude for the wonderful hospitality he received from the St. Alban's. He very much enjoyed his fellowship with us, and was glad for the opportunity to know us better.

Father Perkins said the meeting with Bishop Matano was "wonderful," and very much a meeting of the mind and heart. He told me that he had high hopes for the meeting, and even those were truly surpassed. Bishop Matano expressed his admiration for the Ordinariate's English spiritual and liturgical patrimony, and told Father Perkins he found our prayers very beautiful and moving. Bishop Matano also recognized that our mind and heart as a Catholic community are right in line with his own, and he appreciates that we are both going in the same direction.

Bishop Matano also told Father Perkins that he is working on a plan to put St. Alban's in a parish setting where we would be able to thrive, do a lot of good to spread the Gospel here in Rochester. He recognized that our current situation is no where near ideal, and is trying to fix it. Right now, Bishop Matano is trying to figure out the parish setting that would allow us to have a morning Mass time, full use of their facilities for other prayer and church functions, and be a good fit for the priest the Ordinariate would send.

Father Perkins said there are still a lot of discussions that need to take place, but this first meeting covered a lot of important ground, and we should really be encouraged. Bishop Matano told him St. Alban's has an important role to play in Rochester, and he's always been enormously impressed by everyone in St. Alban's he's met. He was also going to look into whether a diocesan priest could offer us the sacraments in our Ordinariate form.

In sum, Father Perkins said he's very hopeful that we shall have a new pastor by the summer or fall of 2017, so please pray for him!

With the end finally in sight, Father Perkins also said the months leading up to our new priest also provides St. Alban's an opportunity to look for creative ways to build our community and evangelize.

So please pray Bishop Matano and Bishop Steven Lopes as they continue to work together to find a priest and a parish setting for St. Alban's!

I've recently seen Bp Matano characterized elsewhere as a "good bishop". It does look like his vision for an Ordinariate parish follows a different model from the usual BDW mass between the Spanish and Korean ones on Sunday afternoon or whatever, which would certainly be a step forward. We'll have to see what develops, but I agree that this looks like good news.

Updated Theory Of The Frammis

Reflecting on yesterday's post, I believe I've underestimated Msgr Stetson's role in events from December 2011 to April 13, 2012, when Fr Bartus, dismissed from the St Mary's parish on Easter Monday. April 9, was received into the Catholic Church under Stetson's sponsorship. I doubt if the timing was accidental.

Stetson, I'm increasingly convinced, was intimately familiar with every detail in the process running up to Anglicanorum coetibus and then the erection of the OCSP. Since he was on the scene at St Mary of the Angels, I have no choice but to believe he transmitted everything he saw and heard to Wuerl, Hurd, and Steenson, and probably to Margaret Chalmers, the OCSP's attorney working under the title of chancellor.

The first big puzzle I have is why he appears to have ignored the legal problem with the St Mary's bylaws, which presented a can't-get-there-from-here. Fr Kelley told me about the problem in December 2011, and he told me later that the OCSP authorities, presumably Stetson and Hurd at minimum, wouldn't listen. According to the parish bylaws, the members had to be Anglican. Thus if any members were received as Catholics, absent a bylaw revision, they would cease to be voting members on the spot.

However, if any members of the parish remained Anglican, as a minority were certain to do, they would remain as voting members of the parish, and the property would belong to them. (This problem was over and above the issues raised by the January 2011 bylaw revision putting the parish in the Patrimony of the Primate, a major focus of the ongoing litigation.) It's a puzzle to me how Ms Chalmers, the OCSP attorney, and Msgr Stetson, with a degree from Harvard Law, could have ignored this, but they did.

The only way to handle this would have been a bylaw revision. But by December 2011, the parish was so bitterly divided that it would probably have been impossible even to conduct a parish meeting to consider such a revision -- even removing individuals threatening violent disruption, of which they were fully capable, would have been an insurmountable problem. In hindsight, Msgr Stetson was not the sort of leader such circumstances required, and he seems not to have wanted to address even the legal issue.

Stetson made no direct announcement following the apparent postponement of the parish's reception into the OCSP in early January 2012; it was explained by St Mary's clergy during a mass that Houston wanted a new vote on joining the Ordinariate. However, vote or no, this would still not have resolved the legal issue that would have resulted from receiving the parish majority without a bylaw revision.

Instead, as I noted here, Stetson addressed the parish on January 22, 2012 and answered our questions. As he put it, "Archbishop Falk contacted Cardinal Wuerl with new information that's caused us to re-evaluate what's happening." In that meeting, in response to a direct question that may have been from me, Stetson said definitely that no bylaw revision would be required before the parish could be received into the OCSP -- Houston simply wanted another vote.

In hindsight, I've got to conclude that Msgr Stetson here was either disingenuous or stunningly incompetent. My guess, based on what I've subsequently learned of chanceries and the like, is that nobody in Washington took the information Falk is said to have passed on seriously. (This was apparently an ungrammatical 40-page rant against Fr Kelley drafted by dissident parishioners, although no one outside that group has seen it.) Get real, if Wuerl wanted the parish in, it would have come in, 40-page rant or no.

I would guess instead that both Stetson and Fr Hurd were listening to back-channel allegations of financial impropriety from Fr Bartus, which they likely took no more seriously, but nevertheless found convenient to their purposes. However, it would also have been convenient to blame the issue on Falk and keep Bartus out of it.

But the bottom line is that the conditions Houston was now imposing, a new vote and, I believe subsequently to January 22, an audit, would still not have cleared the legal way for receiving the parish. At this remove, to negotiate the full set of obstacles that Houston had placed in the way of reception, and then to revise the bylaws to prevent a legal debacle, would have required a strong leader with solid organizational and interpersonal skills. This wasn't Stetson, it wasn't Steenson, either.

We can only surmise what the precise agenda was for Wuerl, Stetson, and Steenson, although I have got to assume it was precise. Stetson, I'm now convinced, was not the guy to try to bring it about, since whatever it was -- it must have involved putting Bartus in as pastor of St Mary's and harvesting the parish's resources -- it was ignominiously thwarted, in large measure by Stetson's apparent incompetence.

Whether Steenson's replacement arose from leadership qualities that may have contributed to this and other disasters is an open issue. But I'm learning that this sort of problem isn't unique in the Church as we now have it.

How Much Don't We Know?

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, was the Vatican Delegate for the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus in 2011. A Pastoral Provision priest in his archdiocese, Fr Scott Hurd, assisted Wuerl in this assignment and became the first vicar general for the OCSP under Msgr Steenson.

A native of Pittsburgh, [Wuerl] received graduate degrees from The Catholic University of America, Gregorian University in Rome, Italy and the University of St. Thomas in Rome, where he received a doctorate in theology in 1974. Ordained to the priesthood in 1966, he was ordained a bishop by Pope John Paul II in 1986 and will celebrate his 25th anniversary as a bishop in January 2011.

He was elevated to Cardinal by Benedict XVI in 2010.

In March 2012, soon after turning the OCSP over to Msgr Steenson, Wuerl was at the center of controversy:

In March 2012, Wuerl . . . punished a priest for his attempt to defend the Eucharist. Father Marcel Guarnizo, longtime visiting priest in D.C., learned just before a funeral Mass that a practicing lesbian Buddhist was in attendance. When she came up to receive, he quietly withheld Communion from her, after which she promptly switched lines and received from the extraordinary minister instead.

Cardinal Wuerl's condemnation was swift. Within days Fr. Guarnizo was stripped of his priestly faculties and placed on administrative leave, accused by the archdiocese of allegedly "intimidating behavior" — while the archdiocese went out of its way to issue an apology to the lesbian.

Wuerl is generally recognized as a member of the liberal faction of US bishops on issues like communion for the divorced and remarried. More recently, he became the subject of media attention for his lavish lifestyle (the author of this piece, George Neumayr, appears to be a frequent Wuerl critic).

The Catholic cardinal of the nation’s capital since 2006, Wuerl has long had a reputation for high living — despite his exalted status as the most powerful American prelate in what the media calls the “humble church” of Pope Francis. (In his previous posting as a bishop in Pittsburgh, he lived in a 31-room mansion filled with antiques, rugs, and art.) But few know the details of his furtive pursuits on Embassy Row — a posh lifestyle which stands in shocking contrast to the simplicity Pope Francis insists he wants his shepherds to embrace.

Further,

Earlier in the day, I had called Fr. Charles Cortinovis, the personal secretary to Cardinal Wuerl, multiple times and received no response. I had learned that Cortinovis lives, along with Wuerl, on the fourth floor of the archdiocesan building at 2200 California, a property priced at north of $43,000,000.

Cortinovis is the third personal secretary to Cardinal Wuerl during a tenure less than a decade. The other two had also lived on the same floor with the cardinal, which is “12,000 square feet,” according to a rough estimate by a lawyer familiar with the property records for the building.

Neumayr related two attempts to confront Wuerl in person at book signings. At the second,

[O]fficials with Opus Dei, the organization that runs the Catholic Information Center, encircled me and demanded that I leave. Evidently they had been briefed by archdiocesan officials on my journalistic investigation into the cardinal’s Embassy Row lifestyle. “I am a member of the press,” I replied as they pressed against me. “Call the police” if you want me to leave, I said to them as they temporized about what to do with me.

As it happens, Msgr William Stetson was Director of the Catholic Information Center from 2004 to 2007 and continues to be a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei. In 2011-12, he was assigned, presumably by Cardinal Wuerl, to supervise the transition of St Mary of the Angels into the OCSP -- the original intent, stated by Stetson, was that the parish would be the first to enter the OCSP, on the first Sunday following the new year 2012.

This intent quickly went wrong -- in the first days of January, members of the parish were supposedly to make a first confession before being received, but it was never scheduled, and that strongly suggested to me that plans had changed, well before any announcement was made. It's hard to avoid concluding that Stetson, Wuerl, Hurd, and the newly-designated Steenson were all closely involved in this, with Fr Kelley and the parish kept in the dark.

Stetson has also been closely associated with Cardinal Bernard Law, dating back to their days together at Harvard in the late 1940s. He appears to have been a conduit between Law, Wuerl, and the Anglican Use, and then to Jeffrey Steenson. According to Wikipedia,

Since 1983 Monsignor Stetson has also served as consultant and later secretary to the Ecclesiastical Delegate of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the Pastoral Provision for former Episcopal priests, by means of which over a hundred men have been ordained for priestly service in the Roman Catholic Church. He maintained the Pastoral Provision Office at Our Lady of Walsingham parish, an Anglican Use congregation in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston from 2007-2010.

By Msgr Steenson's account, Stetson, a canon lawyer, was his adviser in the 2007 negotiations with TEC Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori that led to Steenson's amicable resignation as TEC Bishop of the Rio Grande and departure for Rome.

We actually have only a few data points in the developments that led to Anglicanorum coetibus. It was difficult enough to track down the meeting among TEC Bp Pope, then-Fr Steenson, and then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, in which the structure of Anglicanorum coetibus was first mooted. But Stetson's biography strongly suggests that more happened between 1993 and 2010 than we now know, and that Law and Wuerl were closely involved, presumably with Benedict in the final phases.

Neither Law nor Wuerl is a theological conservative. Indeed, actual scandal surrounds Law, and there's at least a suggestion surrounding Wuerl. There must have been an agenda in the works. What don't we know?

Janzen Traces

It occurred to me that someone (presumably Abp Janzen himself) went to the trouble of writing the entry on his parish blog as a press release -- but absolutely nobody ran it, assuming he sent it out. When I first saw the note of the TAC bishops' meeting, I went to Virtue Online, assuming he'd carry something about it. Nope.

This morning, to double check, I did a Google search on "virtue janzen", but all that came up was this 2010 article:

The former Rector of St. John the Evangelist, Canon Stanley Sinclair, has been expelled from the cathedral and excommunicated from his parish and the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada based in Victoria, BC because he refuses to accept the Pope's offer of unity being promoted by the Traditional Anglican Communion.

Canon Sinclair was summarily dismissed from his post by The The Very Rev. Shane B. Janzen, who accused Canon Sinclair of "sowing discord", and "going behind my back to spread false information, fear and disunity."

In a letter to Sinclair, which VOL has obtained, Shane described himself as "appalled" and said Sinclair was "duplicitous" and accused him of "shredding his ministry, breaking friendship" and that "a clergyman of your years and maturity should have acted differently. I hope the ends justify the means," he said in a final blast at the priest.

Janzen changed his stance, for reasons outlined yesterday by my regular correspondent, and seems not to have objected when the TAC bishops expelled John Hepworth.

But it's remarkable that not even VOL carried the news of Janzen's election as primate. How things have fallen from the days of Hepworth and Moyer.

Not-News Update!

A few weeks ago, I noted that there had been an announcement in the ACA's Northeast Anglican (but apparently nowhere else) of an upcoming meeting of the TAC's College of Bishops to elect a new primate. I could find no announcement of who'd been elected, nor even if the meeting had occurred.

Finally, poking around on the ACA Diocese of the West site, I found a cryptic mention on the Information page of The Most Reverend Shane Janzen, D.D., no title listed, under Traditional Anglican Communion. This took me to Google, where I found this announcement at Abp Janzen's home parish web site:

The Most Reverend Shane Janzen was elected Primate of the world-wide Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) by its governing College of Bishops in Lincoln, England on Friday, October 14, and formally Installed as Primate at the Eucharist held Sunday morning at St. Katherine’s Cathedral Church in Lincoln.

The 57-year old Saanich, British Columbia resident is also Rector of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Evangelist (990 Falmouth Rd in Saanich) and Metropolitan of the Traditional Anglican Communion in Canada (The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada).

Good we could get that cleared up! So far, I have located no equivalent announcement on the ACA web site, nor even on the TAC web site, which still lists Prakash as acting primate. Somehow I don't get a sense of joy at new beginnings here, and I even wonder if the ACA is trying to minimize its involvement with the TAC. "Father" Smuts hasn't updated his blog in over a year, which is probably a symptom of what's become of the Anglo-Catholic project overall.

Abp Janzen is Primate over 10 parishes and missions in the rump ACCC. In addition, the Rt Rev Owen Rhys Williams is now listed as priest in charge at All Saints Fountain Valley, so it looks like he moved down the road after he disappeared from Hollywood. He is also now listed as Ordinary, rather than Episcopal Visitor, of the ACA DOW. On the other hand, Bp Marsh is listed as visiting the St. Augustine of Canterbury mission in Hamilton, Montana this very day -- but isn't this in Bp Williams's territory?

I suspect Bp Marsh trusts neither Williams nor Janzen. They're both terrified of Marsh, I betcha.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds:

Well, well, well. This is the clergyman who almost led his parish into the Ordinariate, until he was told that, despite Hepworth's assurances, the fact that he had converted to the Catholic church as an adult (from some kind of evangelical background) before becoming an Anglican and then a "continuing" Anglican disqualified him for ordination on the basis of delict of schism. This led to an abrupt volte-face. His treatment up to that point of those who were hesitating about joining the Ordinariate lacked judgement and charity, in my estimation.

Now he and the bishop on the other Canadian coast have been sharing episcopal oversight of their remaining flock of perhaps 250. The OCSP has many problems but of course even if, say, The Sodality of St Swithun ceases to function its members are now members of the Church and can find their way to a new parish and perhaps even a broader vision of worship and mission. Those who stayed with the "Continuum" are in dire straits.

Serving Two Masters

Regarding the news of a potential St Alban's group revival, my regular correspondent offers these comments:

Regarding an OCSP priest's being shared between an Ordinariate congregation and a diocesan parish, I agree there are challenges of the "serving two masters" variety. Either he will love the one and hate the other, or vice versa, as they say. Of the current 42 congregations, nine are headed by OCSP priests who also have diocesan responsibilites. Another four are led by men who also teach in local Catholic schools , and one man has all three jobs. Five have diocesan priests who say mass for the Ordinariate congregation (I am including in this number the dozen or so members of St Gregory the Great, Stoneham who are now attending St Athanasius, Chestnut Hill). Generally there is also a lay leader of these congregations.

None of these are growing groups, with the possible exception of St Margaret's, Katy, where Fr Sellers is assisted by Fr Blick, the school chaplain, and Deacon Evan Simington. Annunciation, Ottawa also has an assistant priest, and while perhaps not growing is at least holding its own, and Fr Scheiblhofer has not fully retired from St Barnabas, Omaha where Fr Catania is a part-time pastoral assistant. But the others betray signs of stagnation or worse: an infrequently/never updated web/Facebook page (or no web presence at all, like St Gilbert, Ingram) and/or no activities beyond Sunday mass.

St George, Republic, which Mr Schaetzel pretty much kept going single-handed before Fr Seraiah arrived, is an exception to this pattern. St Alban's also seems to have active lay leadership. I think that a small group of Ordinariate congregants is bound to come low on the list of priorities of a man with one or two (paying) jobs and a family, and this is a problem for a worship community that does not have a natural, ready-made market. Getting a congregation to critical mass is a demanding job which requires energy, commitment, and imagination.

We're back to the question of "a worship community that does not have a natural, ready-made market". I think one of the biggest assumptions behind the Anglican ecumenism movement spearheaded by Cardinal Law was the idea that, once US Anglicanism become really, really Protestant by revising its prayer book and ordaining women priests, a significant number would see the errors and reunite with Rome.

This ignored a problem that Michael Voris in particular has stressed about Protestantism: the major Anglican denominations dropped their opposition to contraception, as I understand it, in the 1930s. By the time James Pike became a TEC bishop, divorce-and-remarriage was a big deal only for clergy, and Catholics with irregular marriage situations routinely became Episcopalian. More recently, even if some Anglicans don't like the idea of bishops in openly same-sex relationships, pretty much anything else applies even for clergy.

Regarding Freemasonry, I heard a dissenting view on this subject from a good friend at St Mary of the Angels, and I certainly agree that Masons can be fine folks and intend to be so -- the issue is Rome's doctrinal opposition. (Divorced and remarried people can be fine folks, too, for that matter.) But the fact is that there's no opposition to Freemasonry among Anglicans -- I believe Bp Marsh of the ACA is a Mason, for instance. Rome's opposition to Freemasonry was a sticking point in St Aidan's Des Moines's reversal on the OCSP.

The issue is simply that Anglicans are Protestants, and the issues that separate them from Rome go deeper than prayer books or women priests. I think this was a major miscalculation in drafting both the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus. Contraception, divorce-and-remarriage, and Freemasonry also feed the continued division that means the OCSP is "a worship community that does not have a natural, ready-made market". Liturgy alone will not bring people to Rome.

Rochester Group Revival?

Prof Jordan kindly copied me on an e-mail announcing that Fr Timothy Perkins, the Ordinariate's vicar general, will celebrate a BDW mass with the St Alban's group at Good Shepherd Church in Henrietta, NY (a suburb of Rochester) on November 20. The e-mail continues,

Father Perkins will be here to speak with Bishop Matano about our future location, and how an Ordinariate priest might also serve the diocese. Please keep them in your prayers, and that it may be a success!

My regular correspondent commented,

My understanding was that previous OCSP negotiations with the Diocese of Rochester regarding a shared assignment had gotten nowhere---hence Fr Catania's departure to Omaha. Let us hope that Fr Perkins has greater success. I can't think who would be available from the OCSP for such an assignment, but we await further details with interest.

I agree that the implication seems to be that an OCSP priest other than Fr Catania would be available to relocate to upstate New York and take over responsibility for a diocesan parish. This also presents the dilemma that the diocesan parish could easily dominate the OCSP priest's attention, with a weekly BDW mass a very secondary responsibility.

We keep the Church in our prayers.

Clergy Replacement Rate

Some recent posts have brought me to the question of how old OCSP clergy are, and how likely they are to be replaced on retirement from within the OCSP. I decided to concentrate on the pastors at the eight self-sustaining parishes, since these are the most visible and represent the posts that would be most desirable for seminarians. My regular correspondent very kindly provided this list after considerable research (I will be grateful for corrections):

Charles Hough IV 35
Lee Kenyon 38
Eric Bergman 45
Prentice Dean c58
Edward Meeks 68
William Holliday c55-60
David Ousley 65
Mark Lewis 56

If we consider the OCSP retirement age of 70 announced by Bp Lopes, we can see that Frs Meeks and Ousley will be due for retirement within five years, which would be the approximate period of formation for a new seminarian. Another three will be due within 12-15 years. My correspondent says, "Currently there are only four seminarians, two in pre-theology, i.e. about five or six years from ordination."

Bp Lopes appears to have good contacts among other bishops, which have allowed him to find placements for OCSP priests in diocesan parishes, as well as to reach into a diocese to fill the St Mary the Virgin vacancy. The question is, given the shortage of diocesan priests, how often he can go to the well of finding Pastoral Provision priests in dioceses.

It's worth pointing out that in 2012, there was a surplus of former Anglican priests wanting to go into the OCSP, which isn't surprising; many saw these as undemanding and prestigious jobs that could supplement their TEC pensions. The requirement that the next generation of OCSP priests must be celibate and undergo more extensive Catholic formation has changed things entirely.

In addition, there are more pastors in OCSP missions and groups who are in late middle age, and if the current pattern holds, those groups may well be disbanded when they retire. This raises questions for me about how long the OCSP can maintain even the numbers it has.

Benedict Skepticism

The more I poke around YouTube, the more I find alternative opinions on Pope Benedict XVI, like this one from Michael Voris. Voris, by his own admission, has a colorful past, but so far, I see nothing heterodox in his opinions, though he is conservative.

In Voris's view, Benedict is responsible for appointing many of the bishops and cardinals who have been most problematic in the current controversies over matters like communion for the divorced and remarried. This is hard to dispute.

He also notes that Benedict is responsible for an innovation nearly as stunning as married priests, the idea that a pope would retire and not serve for life. He feels this will cause enormous mischief, now and in the future -- we may speculate on the precise cause of Benedict's abdication, but the practical result is that a pope can now be forced out like an unpopular CEO.

Voris makes no mention of the feckless Anglicanorum coetibus.

Thoughts On The Trump Agenda

One answer to Bp Barron's recent question, "Where are the apologists?' is "On YouTube, with you, Bp Barron". I recently discovered Catholic apologists John Salza and Michael Voris, who focus extensively, though not exclusively, on Freemasonry. Originally I thought this was a mildly interesting but relatively remote quirk of Catholic doctrine, since I was never a Freemason, but listening more closely, I can see the reasons for the Church's opposition, which shed more light on Catholicism for me as a new Catholic.

(My parents, in hindsight, gave me quite a bit of bad advice, including their wish that I become a member of something called DeMolay, without, however, explaining to me that it was the youth auxiliary of the Freemasons. Luckily, that went by the board.)

Freemasons, as explained by Salza and Voris, have a somewhat wacky theology that in Catholic terms is syncretist and indifferentist. The Masonic Architect of the Universe is not the God of the Christian creeds. According to Catholic Answers,

Masonry is a parallel religion to Christianity. The New Catholic Encyclopedia states, "Freemasonry displays all the elements of religion, and as such it becomes a rival to the religion of the Gospel. It includes temples and altars, prayers, a moral code, worship, vestments, feast days, the promise of reward or punishment in the afterlife, a hierarchy, and initiation and burial rites."

Voris in particular points out that Leo XIII's encyclical Humanum Genus extends the condemnation of Freemasonry to "other societies of the same sort, which plot against the Church or against legitimate civil authority". In Voris's view, this includes contemporary globalist groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg group, which tend to advocate a world government or supergovernmental entities like the EU.

In this context, President-elect Trump's anti-globalist positions have more resonance. While it's generally acknowledged that Trump is not a churchgoer and has broad ignorance of Christianity, he's had wide support from evanglicals like Franklin Graham, as well as tacit endorsement from Catholics who see his prospective Supreme Court nominations as more likely to preserve protections for the unborn and free exercise of Catholic religion. He obtained a clear majority of all observant Christians in the election.

It appears that his opposition to globalism is also a Catholic-friendly position.

More On Pensions

A regular visitor points out,

If the issue really is young clergy men who are still in seminary, their retirement is forty to fifty years away. At even average stock market growth of 10.8% per year, an investment of $1,000,000 in the manner of a total stock market index fund will grow to $60,477,025 in forty years and to $168,650,650 in fifty years. A strategy of investing in solid, well-run, growing businesses should exceed a growth rate of 20% -- which will grow the same initial investment of $1,000,000 to $1,469,771,568 in forty years and to $9,100,438,150 in fifty years. The key is to allow sufficient time for the power of compounding to work its magic.

My regular correspondent pointed me to this page on the Ordinariate web site that answers at least some questions. From it, we learn that Bp Lopes wants to raise a total of $1 million, "a $500,000 corpus and raising another $500,000 for distribution to retired priests vested in the plan for 10 years."

This isn't entirely clear -- I'm assuming the plan is non-contributory, meaning that simply by being priests in the Ordinariate, apparently for a minimum of 10 years, they are eligible to receive a pension at age 70 or on retirement. But does this apply to non-stipendiary priests? Is the pension expressed as a percentage of salary averaged over a certain number of years, or some similar formula?

If the pension applies only to stipendiary priests, a $1 million amount put in reserve for the minimal number of eligible priests currently in the OCSP might be reasonable. On the other hand, it does seem to me that the future of the OCSP as anything other than an aggregation of fewer than a dozen self-sustaining parishes is a very iffy proposition, and the numbers we're looking at here reflect this.

Another issue is the shaky track record of Ordinariate officers. The first generation has largely been replaced, although my regular correspondent still uses the term "incompetent". None of this, frankly, makes me wish I could find an Ordinariate parish, and frankly, the only thing that might make me consider an Ordinariate vocation if I were an aspirant to the priesthood would be some assurance that Bp Lopes would take me with him when he's promoted out of Houston -- pension or not.

Frankly, This Is Disturbing

In response to my earlier post today, my regular correspondent said,

There seems to be a plan to build up a retirement fund through a combination of member contributions and charitable donations from parish and other sources. The initial candidates for ordination in the OCSP had to provide proof that they were financially self-sufficient. I would estimate that a third of the current OCSP clergy are already receiving pensions from former TEC or other employment. Another fifteen or so are military chaplains or diocesan, etc employees who will draw pensions from other sources. So of the current crop, relatively few will be dependent solely on the OCSP for retirement support. But going forward the supply of pensioners will dry up, and the OCSP will be looking to find vocations among young men who will give their entire ministry to the Ordinariate, and will need stipends and benefits comparable to those of other dioceses to attract them. Otherwise they are up the creek.

The problem is that this will be a far bigger project than the chancery in Houston, which I take to be in the $5 million order of magnitude. I have absolutely no idea of what it would take to make a pension fund for 200 people actuarially sound, but this number is simply absurdly small to start with. But let's consider that such a fund will require administrative support -- billing, investment, payout, accounting, actuarial work, and so forth. It would need an annual payroll itself at least in the $1 million order of magnitude.

Now maybe there is a practical plan to join some sort of group pension plan, which would avoid many of these reservations, although none of the group services would be free, and the investment would still need to be there. The problem is that we have absolutely no information about what's being proposed. Certainly if Bp Lopes is looking for multimillion-dollar philanthropy to support this vision, he's going to have to be much more specific. But as an adult with ordinary prudence, I would not waste a five-dollar bill for a second collection given the lack of information we have so far. I have no idea what a financially savvy person of wealth would say.

What are they smoking in Houston?

OCSP Retirement Fund?

My regular correspondenrt notes,

OCSP parishioners will barely have closed their wallets after the Bishop's Annual Appeal and the Seminarians' Appeal when they will be asked to contribute next month to a clergy retirement fund. Clearly the Ordinariates will not be able to attract clergy if they cannot provide basic financial security; however I am rather puzzled by the choice of Msgr Peter Wilkinson as the (anonymous) poster boy. Although he was ordained as a CofE clergyman, Msgr Wilkinson spent most of his working life as a provincial civil servant in Canada and retired with a full government-secured pension before taking on duties as a bishop in the ACCC. As a Canadian, he is covered by his provincial health care plan. Ordained as a priest in December 2012, he served less than two years before retiring as parochial administrator of BlJHN, Victoria in 2014 at 74. Not what I would regard as "the case for support."

It is evident that the OCSP regards getting its financial house in order as Job 1 right now. There has been only one issue of the Ordinariate Observer this year, the official website is spartan, social media rarely updated. With Ordinariate Expats apparently out of steam we hear little about what is going on even from unofficial sources, possibly at Houston's request. But the second collections are rolling out regularly with all possible professional apparatus (except a way of giving Canadians a tax receipt for their contributions). I think there could be some backlash.

I have a slight background with insurance and annuities -- would that my late father-in-law, an insurance executive, were here to give advice. But it sounds as if Bp Lopes is somehow thinking about giving OCSP priests, a large cohort of whom will be retiring within a decade at most, some type of pension. So we will be looking at a population top-heavy with retirees withdrawing from the system, with a smaller number still contributing.

This will require multimilion-dollar funding, with a very small population involved. Insurance and annuities require large enough populations for the law of large numbers to override exceptions -- if Fr Jones lives to 110, it's important, actuarially speaking, for Fr Smith to pass away at 65 after paying into the system throughout his career.

At minimum, this will require philanthropy far beyond what has already taken place for the OCSP -- second collections aren't going to do it. But what other Catholic projects should have higher priority for this kind of money?

Ecumenism vs Apologetics

In a recent YouTube video on Catholics leaving the Church, Bp Barron basically asks, "Where are the apologists?" It occurs to me that the number of US Catholics who have left the Church in, say, the past 50 years, is probably greater than the current number in all main line Protestant denominations. That ought to give an idea of where the real priorities lie.

Then I thought about a Reformed critique of Aquinas I encountered a week or so ago on the web -- I forget where, so I can't link to it. The author's issue with Aquinas was that he didn't believe in sola scriptura and regarded reason as not corrupted by the rest of depraved human nature. But this led me to the problem the author shares with secular materialists: they say reason can only have arisen through evolution and is simply another accidental development that allowed humans to prevail over chickens or whatever in the struggle for survival.

But this means reason can't be trusted, any more than conventional morality, the rule of law, or whatever. So why trust Calvin or Luther any more than Aquinas -- aren't their interpretations of scripture based on reason? The same, of course, applies to Darwin -- if his argument for natural selection is based on reason, why should we trust it?

Catholics and Anglicans don't have this problem, since both rely on scripture, reason, and tradition. On the other hand, my experience with the Evangelium course is that it relegated a great deal of Catholicism as practiced to a short session on "everything else", like the rosary, Marian devotion, the Fatima prophecies, and so forth. All that superstitious stuff, in other words, that we former Anglicans don't need to pay attention to. (My memory of Evanagelium, which may be imperfect, is that it also never mentioned Aquinas.)

The problem is that one of the greatest apologists of recent times, Ven Fulton Sheen, paid attention to all those things, and he was an Aquinas scholar. St John Paul took the Fatima prophecies very seriously indeed, since he was in them.

So as far as I can see, the Church is letting tens of millions go while working on giving a couple thousand a Protestantized version of Catholicism that someone thinks is acceptable to Episcopalians.

Separated Brethren

I've had a productive and friendly exchange for several years now with the visitor whose e-mail I've quoted this week. We basically have a friendly disagreement over what to do with Protestants. As he said, he feels Anglicanorum coetibus is a potential model for approaches to other Protestant denominations. My own view is that it's a false start.

We have two examples of "separated brethren" in the earlier history of the Church. In the New Testament, we get hints of the target market for the gospels: Pharisees and other Jews, Samaritans, Greek and Roman pagans, and everyone else. The controversy among the apostles in Acts resolves itself in the agreement between Peter and Paul that Jews and Gentiles will all be treated the same way -- they'll come in as individuals and families via parishes in a single missionary episcopal structure.

The second model, it seems to me, is the early heresies, which I understand at the 30,000 foot level via MacCulloch and others. Arianism is an example: it was attacked by Augustine and established as heretical in fourth-century ecumenical councils, but that didn't make it go away. According to Wikipedia,

During the time of Arianism's flowering in Constantinople, the Gothic convert Ulfilas (later the subject of the letter of Auxentius cited above) was sent as a missionary to the Gothic barbarians across the Danube, a mission favored for political reasons by emperor Constantius II. Ulfilas' initial success in converting this Germanic people to an Arian form of Christianity was strengthened by later events. When the Germanic peoples entered the Roman Empire and founded successor-kingdoms in the western part, most had been Arian Christians for more than a century.

The conflict in the 4th century AD had seen Arian and Nicene factions struggling for control of the Church. In contrast, in the Arian German kingdoms established on the wreckage of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, there were entirely separate Arian and Nicene Churches with parallel hierarchies, each serving different sets of believers. The Germanic elites were Arians, and the Romance majority population was Nicene. Many scholars see the persistence of Germanic Arianism as a strategy that was followed in order to differentiate the Germanic elite from the local inhabitants and their culture and also to maintain the Germanic elite's separate group identity.

Most Germanic tribes were generally tolerant of the Nicene beliefs of their subjects. However, the Vandals tried for several decades to force their Arian beliefs on their North African Nicene subjects, exiling Nicene clergy, dissolving monasteries, and exercising heavy pressure on non-conforming Nicene Christians.

The apparent resurgence of Arianism after Nicaea was more an anti-Nicene reaction exploited by Arian sympathizers than a pro-Arian development. By the end of the 4th century it had surrendered its remaining ground to Trinitarianism. In western Europe, Arianism, which had been taught by Ulfilas, the Arian missionary to the barbarian Germanic tribes, was dominant among the Goths, Lombards and Vandals). By the 8th century it had ceased to be the tribes' mainstream belief as the tribal rulers gradually came to adopt Catholicism.

In other words, Arianism was a structure of beliefs that reinforced social and political arrangements, including who qualified to be members of the elite. Protestantism has served a similar purpose in the UK and parts of Germany, for example. Arianism eventually collapsed after several centuries. For whatever reason, the Holy Spirit seems to have guided the Church in large measure simply to bypass Arianism, as it seems to have taken no special measures to make itself appealing to Arians.

It seems to me that Protestantism is in a similar process of collapse. The ordinariates are a relatively expensive measure that has had minimal appeal, but they have a downside in creating the appearance of failure.

In addition, the Church's priorities for evangelization are not with Protestants -- they're with secular materialists, the unchurched Unitarian transcendentalists, and Mahometans. Protestantism, especially the main line variety, is collapsing of its own weight. As the maxim goes, when your enemy is destroying himself, don't get in his way.

Another View -- Part III

My visitor concludes,

I hear your concerns regarding lightweight theology and poor formation -- and I'm delighted that you have found a parish where you have received some decent formation -- but there are many Catholic dioceses in which woefully inadequate spiritual formation is the norm, even for those who went to supposedly Catholic schools, and programs of ongoing formation for adults are non-existent. All of the congregations received into the ordinariates went through extensive programs of formation as part of the process of reception, so most members of the ordinariates probably have more extensive and more thorough formation than their diocesan counterparts. The real concern, going forward, is that children of smaller ordinariate communities who participate in spiritual formation alongside their diocesan counterparts may fall victim to the same deficiencies. In ordinariate congregations that are large enough to run their own formation programs, including "bible study" or other continuing formation for adults, this is less likely to be a problem.

Finally, there's no need for the ordinariate to receive new communities in order to sustain itself and even to grow. Note the following wording of the apostolic constitution "Anglicanorum coetibus" (Article I, Section 4).

"The Ordinariate is composed of lay faithful, clerics and members of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, originally belonging to the Anglican Communion and now in full communion with the Catholic Church, or those who receive the Sacraments of Initiation within the jurisdiction of the Ordinariate."

The last clause permits children of ordinariate members, raised and nurtured in an ordinariate congregation, to become members of the respective ordinariate, thus sustaining the ordinariates through future generations. The larger congregations, now canonically erected as parishes, all have plenty of children in their ranks, and this probably also is true of the medium-sized congregations designated as missions ("quasi-parishes" under canon law). The smaller congregations obviously are more likely to dissolve over time as their members die off or drift away, especially if their members are older, they have few children in their ranks, and they fail to draw new members into their ranks in one way or another. However, such communities probably represent a relatively small percentage of the ordinariate's membership. Here, the 80/20 rule comes to mind: statistically, the largest 20% of an ordinariate's congregations probably represent 80% of its membership. With respect to the ordinariate's numbers, the congregations that are most likely to dissolve really are not very significant.

I agree that the latest report from Scranton is optimistic, although one subtext of the report appears to be that, as used to be the case with TEC, serious philanthropy is an ingredient of success.

However, even if families with children are sufficient to ensure survival in the largest parishes, it seems to me that there's a bigger actuarial problem with clergy. Most OCSP priests are retired from Anglican posts. As these reach 75 or are forced to retire earlier, I don't see enough seminarians in the pipeline to replace them. Bp Lopes has already had to look outside the OCSP to replace the pastor at St Mary the Virgin, for instance.

My regular correspondent also remarks,

I do agree that the full parishes in the OCSP can probably sustain themselves going forward without having to attract many new "converts." However, there are only seven of them, eight as of next month. Perhaps a few more will attain self-supporting status in the next few years. But what is the value of a diocese of twelve parishes? There were about that many "Anglican Use" PP parishes, at the high water mark, and this was apparently regarded as a failure.

And of course, the successful Anglican Use parishes did in fact succumb to attrition in a fairly short space of time. My late father-in-law, who rose high in the insurance industry, was fond of saying, "An insurance company has to write new business." But this maxim applies much more generally. You can't stand still, or you'll fall behind.

Another View -- Part II

Here is Part II of my visitor's very thoughtful and thorough e-mail, with some of my comments:

More recently, the Vatican established two bodies for those who continue to adhere to the Tridentine form or the Roman liturgy after the Second Vatican Council.

• In 1988, Pope John Paul II constituted the Fraternal Society of St. Peter (FSSP) as a clerical religious order for former members of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) who chose not to follow Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the rest of the SSPX into schism.
• In 2002, Pope John Paul II canonically erected the Personal Apostolic Administration of St. John Mary Vianney, officially with the same territory of the Diocese of Campos, Brazil, for the newly reconciled former Priestly Union of St. John Mary Vianney, with Bishop Lucinio Rangell of the former organization becoming its first apostolic administrator. Pope John Paul II subsequently appointed Fr. Fernando Arêas Rifan, then Bishop Rangell's vicar general, as Coadjutor Bishop of this body. Bishop Rifan subsequently became the Apostolic Administrator by automatic succession upon Bishop Rangell's death in December 2002. Like each of the ordinariates, this body is canonically equivalent to a diocese.

Pope Benedict XVI also put an autonomous ecclesial structure for the SSPX on the table in negotiations with the SSPX. Unfortunately, that body's doctrinal errors are standing in the way of reconciliation. It seems pretty clear the establishment of some sort of structure that would enable former Anglicans and former Protestants to retain their liturgical and ecclesiastical traditions and their pastoral leadership within the Catholic Church would be consistent with all of this precedent. Of course, there are two significant differences.

1. Anglican and Protestant Christians generally do not teach the whole of Catholic doctrine, nor are they validly confirmed, nor are their clergy validly ordained. The process of reception must rectify these deficiencies, and thus must be more substantial than the stroke of a pen to create a new jurisdiction.
2. Bishops, or those in similar positions of leadership, in Anglican and Protestant bodies typically are married. The Orthodox Communion maintains a celibate episcopacy, so the Vatican has no small concern that ordination of married men to the episcopate would create new issues in ecumenical relations with the Orthodox Communion -- which, BTW, are progressing very, very well. The Vatican decided to call these jurisdictions "ordinariates" rather than "dioceses" to permit a married presbyter to serve as the "ordinary." The intent, indicated in the apostolic constitution "Anglicanorum coetibus" and the associated "Complementary Norms," has always been that a celibate "ordinary" will receive episcopal ordination, but that a married "ordinary" will not.

The Holy Father's visit to Lund, Sweden as some sort of ecumenical gesture is problematic. It doesn't seem as though the Vatican's stance over Lutheranism will change, yet vague moves or statements could lead to confusion here. In any case, nobody in Sweden seems to have taken it seriously. But this does raise serious questions about the specifics of any such Protestant reconciliation, which goes to the issue I will raise below. My visitor continues,

The ability of pastors to retain their positions of leadership is vital if we are to realize full Christian unity, which is the Catholic Church understands to be the ultimate goal of all ecumenism.

Pastors who will be "out of a job" upon receptions of their congregations into the full communion of the Catholic Church are not likely to lead their congregations in that direction.

Parishioners who know and love their pastors are not likely to be so eager to come into the full communion of the Catholic Church if doing so means unknown and uncertain pastoral leadership. So the result is that congregations and larger bodies will remain separate in the absence of such provisions. The present ordinariates are prophetic, in that they show the way to reconciliation and full Christian unity.

The inability of pastors to retain their positions was a major factor that contributed to the disappointment in the startup of the OCSP. The ACA St Columba Lancaster, CA parish stayed out of the OCSP when Houston discovered obstacles to its pastor's ordination. The inability of St Mary of the Angels and Our Lady of the Atonement to join appears to have been related directly to political maneuvering to replace the pastors in those parishes. There may have been other such cases, and by the summer of 2012, the opinion was expressed that former Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clergy were corrupting the selection process.

The difficulty in any attempt to take a Protestant body into the Catholic Church is always, it seems to me, going to be tied up with who keeps his job. Clearly Houston was insufficiently sensitive to this issue.

Another View

A regular visitor sent me a very long and thoughtful e-mail disagreeing with my views on the OCSP's prospects for success. It raises too many points to address in a single post, but I'll take on his first one as best I can here:

I think that you are missing a much bigger picture with respect to the whole issue of ecumenism and ecclesiastical structures. Historically, the Catholic Church has always provided a vehicle for reconciliation of separated Christians that has substantially preserved their ecclesial structures, leadership, and liturgical traditions, and pastoral practice.

Throughout the later middle ages, the Catholic Church welcomed many dioceses from other communions or churches into full communion. These bodies became the founding cores of the present "sui juris" ritual churches, each of which preserves its own ecclesiastical and liturgical traditions and laws ("sui juris" literally meaning "by its own law"). The majority of these churches have either a "patriarch" or a "major archbishop" and a synod composed of their bishops which elects their bishops, including the patriarch or major archbishop, after which the pope "gives his assent" to the synod's election. The pope officially "appoints" bishops for "sui juris" ritual churches that are too small to constitute a synod, but this clearly is not the preferred arrangement. The following bodies are quite small (specifics come from the 2015 edition of the Catholic Almanac published by Our Sunday Visitor).

The Belarusan Catholics and the Russian Catholics each have a few parishes overseen by an apostolic visitor. The Catholic Almanac does not indicate membership.

The Bulgarian Catholic Church consists of one apostolic exarchate and about 10,000 members.

The Greek Catholic Church consists of two apostolic exarchates and about 6,020 members.

And all of these entities have existed, and sustained themselves, far longer than the ordinariates for former Anglicans, so the Vatican clearly has experience dealing with such small entities.

I know too little about Eastern rite Catholics to make an effective response, but this prompted an exchange with my regular correspondent, who points out,

A big part of the story of the "sui juris" churches in communion with the pope is political, and generally coercive. I do not know the history of every one of them but I doubt that we will find many models which can be adapted to contemporary circumstances. And the numbers in even the smallest of these entities are significantly greater than all three Ordinariates combined, as you point out. In any event, "sui juris" status for the "Anglican Rite" was explicitly rejected. This played a decisive role in the decline and fall of John Hepworth.

As far as I can see, the Eastern rite churches are only a very rough parallel to the Anglican ordinariates. While it is an argument in their favor on one hand that they've lasted so long, this nevertheless is a contrast to the ordinariates, which are actuarially shaky even now. I can think of at least two prominent Eastern rite Catholics in current US life, Robert Spencer, the Mahometan counterapologist and Jeanine Pirro, the Fox commentator. There are no remotely equivalent ordinariate members, which I find a matter of concern given the robust intellectual tradition among Anglicans.

My regular correspondent added,

In every instance, the small sui juris churches are either Catholic enclaves within a majority Orthodox environment, or expatriate entities maintaining their ethnic/linguistic identity. These circumstances are not analogous to that of former Anglicans, whose liturgical and cultural differences from mainstream Latin Rite Catholicism in the UK, North America, or Australia are very small, and getting smaller as elements of typical Catholic parish life such as the Knights of Columbus or the Divine Mercy devotions are embraced.

My visitor responded later,

Don't forget that the Bulgarian Catholic Church and the Greek Catholic Church were considerably smaller than their present size when they came into full communion.

I'm not persuaded that the nuance of a "separate rite" verses a "variation of the Roman Rite" is all that critical. It's quite easy to envision the Anglican Communion becoming a "sui juris" ritual church with the see of Canterbury as its major archbishopric at some point in the future. Unfortunately, recent changes in the Anglican Communion have made such an event much less imminent than it might have seemed a couple decades ago. I cannot envision the Catholic Church accepting Bishop Gene Robinson, for example, as a candidate for ordination, and anything resembling a marital union of homosexual couples is out of the question in the Catholic Church.

The problem I see here is that, even as my visitor acknowledges, this simply isn't likely.