A puzzle for me is that the parish and its people should actually have no problem at all. Whether in the archdiocese or the OCSP, they keep their BDW liturgy, their music program, and their fellowship. What the bishops do is above their paygrade, and the essence of Catholicism is obedience. The difficulty is that the social media agitation -- and it's there; copies of the archbishop's letter have clearly been sent out to lots of people -- is coming from parishioners.
Their problem is what could happen after Fr Phillips retires, and this could come soon. A regular visitor says,
Fr. Phillips was born in 1949, so he will reach the normal retirement age for Catholic clergy in just seven years. It would be exceedingly problematic if the archbishop appoints a new pastor for the parish and the overwhelming majority of the parishioners reject both the new pastor and the archbishop’s authority to make the appointment upon Fr. Phillips’s retirement. The bishop probably raised his concern to Fr. Phillips a while ago and determined the situation has not improved to his satisfaction (and actually might have grown worse). It sounds like the archbishop is attempting to determine whether, and to what extent, Fr. Phillips might be part of the problem and a change in pastoral leadership might be necessary to solve it. Msgr. Kurzaj undoubtedly has the task to assess this over the next several months.In other words, the parishioners may feel they'd get a better deal from Bp Lopes. I question that: I would put Fr Bartus, who is from Texas and has thoroughly ingratiated himself with Fr Phillips, at the head of the line for the preferment on Fr Phillips's retirement if Bp Lopes has the choice.
There's another issue: normally Catholic pastors rotate among parishes, I believe on six or twelve-year terms. A diocese would not normally have a pastor staying with one parish for over 35 years. This adds to the problem of congregationalism, which is actually at the root of the whole Anglican ecumenism project: both the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus were set up on the idea that dissident Episcopalian congregations would vote themselves Catholic, simply following the "continuing" model.
One problem I noted as St Mary of the Angels wrestled with going into the Ordinariate in early 2012 was that indeed, it would need to revise its bylaws to drop the idea that it could simply vote itself out of the Catholic Church again. I'm not sure if Our Lady of the Atonement ever quite grasped the issue here: it was not going to be able simply to vote itself into another jurisdiction. Think of what would happen if Fr O'Connor thought to lead his St Athanasius parish down the road into becoming Lutheran --- I assume you'd have a result not much different from what's happened at Our Lady of the Atonement.
So for Bp Garcia-Siller, you have a problem of syncretism and obedience, although I suspect other issues were involved, not least that he simply may have been surprised at some point -- I'll deal with that below.
What problem is Bp Lopes trying to solve? That seems pretty simple. The OCSP's growth has stalled, and it isn't thriving. His current efforts at publicizing himself -- the recent press releases come with big photos, after all -- show a need to demonstrate success, but there's little concrete to point to. The best possibility would be for Our Lady of the Atonement, a prestige parish with a well-known pastor and several thousand members, to come into the OCSP. It's generally understood that it stayed out in 2012 due to Jeffrey Steenson; for it to come in in 2017 would be a feather in Bp Lopes's mitre. We could expect further big pictures of himself in the NCRand elsewhere.
So what happened? A visitor passed on to me that canonical application was made in Rome for the parish to transfer to the OCSP last summer, and the result was likely to be in the parish's favor. However, although Abp Garcia-Siller had previously assured the parish in 2012 that he would not stand in the way of a later reconsideration, when he heard of the new attempt, he apparently lost his temper, and the suspension of Fr Phillips was the outcome.
The difficulty I see with this interpretation is that for Fr Phillips, where the parish goes is simply above his paygrade. This is for the bishops to work out. And I assume that bishops have sufficient collegiality to do this -- after all, Fr Phillips has a dotted line to Bp Vann, the delegate for the Pastoral Provision, as well as a direct report to Abp Garcia-Siller. Shouldn't they and Bp Lopes have worked this out (or not) among themselves?
So I've got to think something was bungled here -- quite possibly a canonical move was made without taking the trouble to get the archbishop on board with it. But then you have the whole ambiguity of giving Anglican congregations, whether Ordinariate or Anglican Use, a special status in the Catholic Church. Note the awkwardness with which commenters try to grasp that "Anglican rite" is sorta-kinda Roman Rite, but of course not quite, but also not Eastern Rite. This was never thought through from the start, and the price is being paid.
Not to mention what will happen when a pastor with a good Anglo name is replaced by a Fr Estrella or a Fr Smuczyinski. As I've said before, I'm not sure whether, if an OCSP group-in-formation folds, the members would ever go to a diocesan parish.
