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.