Updates And Commentary

The Our Lady Of The Atonement controversy has begun to reach the media. Church Militant has now picked up the story, and its reaction is, unfortunately, predictable. There is a more even-handed story in the San Antonio Express-News. Apparently the Save Atonement! website is being updated, and a revised version of the Wilson letter reappears here. A traditional Catholic forum has picked up the news and has predictable anti-Garcia-Siller views, not all of which are fully informed. I do note an annoucement there:

There will be a meeting at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 26, 2017 in the ballroom at The Embassy Suites of San Antonio. Sponsored and presented by the St. Joseph Foundation, speakers will include Founder Charles Wilson, M.T.S., and President Philip C.L. Gray, J.C.L.. Although specifically to provide information to the parishioners about the situation involving their church and pastor, it is open to the public.

A regular visitor who has a very strong avocational interest in canon law has provided a comprehensive analysis of the situation, as far as we can understand it from a public perspective. I am deeply grateful for this and am quoting it here in its entirety.

Canonically, all three ordinariates are directly subject to the Holy See. Thus, no diocesan bishop has any official jurisdiction whatsoever over any of them. If the Archbishop of San Antonio does not like action undertaken by the Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, he can ask the Vatican to intervene — and that is about the limit of his canonical authority.

Now, the question of how many members of the parish have enrolled in the ordinariate is particularly critical. Note the provision of the first section of Title VIII of the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus:

VIII. § 1. The Ordinary, according to the norm of law, after having heard the opinion of the Diocesan Bishop of the place, may erect, with the consent of the Holy See, personal parishes for the faithful who belong to the Ordinariate.

This provision is particularly nuanced: it requires the ordinary to ask the opinion of the diocesan bishop, but not necessarily to follow it. Thus, the ordinary canonically may erect an ordinariate parish in San Antonio even if the Archbishop of San Antonio objects thereto. Of course, the ordinariate cannot confiscate the property of a diocesan parish for a parish of its own to use, so it would have to make some other arrangement. But if the overwhelming majority of the parishioners of Our Lady of the Atonement have joined the ordinariate and they decide to abandon that parish in favor of a parish erected by the ordinariate in that city, the archbishop will be left with few options. The most likely outcome would be closure of the present parish and sale of its property.

The Archbishop of San Antonio also has no canonical jurisdiction over any members of the ordinariate who might reside in that archdiocese, except as it pertains to their participation in diocesan events, programs, and parish life. Thus, the Archbishop of San Antonio would not be able to prevent members of the ordinariate from going to an ordinariate mass somewhere in the city if the ordinary were to erect a parish or a mission there. But as long as Our Lady of the Atonement remains a diocesan parish, the parish and all aspects of parish life remain subject to the Archbishop of San Antonio. The Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter has no canonical jurisdiction whatsoever over that parish, regardless of how many ordinariate members worship there, send their children to its parochial school, or otherwise participate in parish life.

Now, the apostolic constitution obviously envisions a collaborative working relationship between the diocesan bishop and the ordinary and between the clergy of an ordinariate parish and the clergy of the diocese within which that parish is located. The first piece of that collaborative relationship seems to have broken down. In this instance, the Archbishop of San Antonio appears to have misplayed his hand since Bishop Lopes is clearly the Vatican’s hand-picked Ordinary and is very well connected within the relevant dicasteries of the Roman curia.

That said, the “Save Atonement!” web site and Mr. Wilson’s letter are quite interesting in several regards.

1. The fact that a “Save Atonement!” web site even exists shows that there is, at best, a very strong distrust, and probably a high degree of animosity, between the parishioners who are behind it and the Archbishop of San Antonio. This is extremely unfortunate, to say the least, and it will not be received very well within the Vatican.
2. If Mr. Wilson’s statements regarding the Archbishop of San Antonio initiating a penalty process to remove Fr. Phillips permanently are well-founded, that’s significant news that probably was not intended to become public — and the fact that it is public undoubtedly is not constructive.
3. Mr. Wilson’s counsel of caution in protest is also very well-founded. The Vatican does take notice of public protests, and inevitably rejects what they seek as a matter of policy. The same is generally true of abusive or intemperate communications that do not reflect a spirit of Christian charity to those involved in a disagreement.
4. I’m not persuaded that Our Lady of the Atonement would become a territorial parish, partly because its physical location is within a territorial parish (most likely either St. Francis of Assisi, located a few blocks to the east, or Our Lady of Guadalupe, located a few blocks to the west) and partly because there is nothing that prevents the archbishop from designating the current parish as a territorial parish as well as a personal parish for the so-called “pastoral provision,” or even from erecting a distinct territorial parish with a separate pastor that would share the same premises for worship and spiritual formation, if he deems it appropriate to do so.
5. The fact that the status of the parish is “before the competent dicastery of the Holy See right now” is major news that probably was not intended to become public information yet. This may be what is fueling the archbishop’s apparent ire, especially if he is not fully behind a possible transfer of the parish to the ordinariate.
6. This whole to-do also could be about money. The archbishop might want some compensation for the loss of income from the parish’s cathedraticum, or even some payback for whatever sum he thinks that the archdiocese may have invested in the erection of the parish over thirty years ago (I doubt that it was much since the parish, a distinct legal corporation from the archdiocese, purchased its own land and paid the full cost of construction of its buildings on its own).

Your question triggered me to do some investigating that turned up another very interesting fact. If you use the parish search feature on the web site of the Archdiocese of San Antonio , the Parish of Our Lady of the Atonement does not turn up — even if you inaugurate the search by selecting that parish’s zip code (78255)! If the parish is indeed part of the archdiocese, one wonders why it does not appear in the parish search feature even though other personal parishes do appear. In fact, the web site of the first parish in the list that appears when you inaugurate a search with this zip code is entirely in Vietnamese! So when it comes to fostering the idea that the parish is “within but not part of” the archdiocese, the archbishop and his staff need to take a bloody good look in a mirror before pointing fingers at the pastor and the parishioners.

Incidentally, Fr. Phillips is continuing to publish daily articles on his blog, none of which say anything whatsoever about this. One that caught my eye, however, is that of 14 January 2017, showing a new main entrance to one of the parish’s buildings that’s part of an expansion to accommodate the parish’s continuing growth. Does the archbishop perceive this growth to be an embarrassment to the rest of the archdiocese?

On a separate note, I think that it was precisely the experience of the personal parishes that persuaded the Vatican of the need for a separate jurisdiction equivalent to a diocese, and that ultimately gave rise to the erection of the present ordinariates for former Anglicans. The problem was that it was too easy for a diocesan bishop to reject a congregation, as happened with [St Mary] of the Angels, or to dissolve a parish that he did not wish to staff, as happened in Las Vegas. The ordinariate structure takes this out of the hands of the diocesan bishop permanently.

Again, I'm enormously grateful for this contribution, and for now, although I have additional input from visitors, this post is long enough.