the St Joseph Foundation is collecting official declarations of support from OLA parishioners and seems confident that a super-majority will provide them. Although the procurator's mandate form itself refers only to decisions regarding the parish, its school and property, the accompanying letter describes it as a demonstration that signers are "united in their support of our pastor." They at least seem convinced that this is a property issue unconnected with any other aspect of Fr Phillips' leadership.The meat of it, in Mr Wilson's words:
So far, the campaign to collect procurator’s mandates is going very well. Philip took about 160 that were collected at the Embassy Suites meeting on January 26th and about 25 more were delivered to my home. On February 5, packets were distributed after all the parish Masses and our Hopedale office reports that some 300 to 400 have been received there. An exact count is not available because our staff has been too busy to do much more than open the incoming envelopes. My guesstimate is that some 1,000 mandates were distributed and I think that the rate of return will soon reach 60% if it has not already done so. It is not unreasonable to hope that the final rate will be close to 75%.A visitor asks,One time when I had jury duty the judge told us that our mere presence in the jury room prompted settlement of many cases that would otherwise remained unresolved. The same is true of the mandates. We may never have to use them; but the fact that we have them could influence the outcome. Once again, I thank those good parishioners who participated in assembling and distributing the packets.
There has never been a vote of the parish to join the Ordinariate, and it doesn't seem much effort has been taken as to what percentage of the parish should actually qualify. I've heard it said that a number of cradle Catholics in the parish are married to converts, though I'd expect that few of those have anything to do with the parish having brought them in to full Communion. I'd expect the vast majority come for a solemn liturgy with beautiful music and could care less that it has a few prayers from the Book of Common Prayers.Now, having gone through an actual electoral process by which St Mary of the Angels voted itself (several times) out of the ACA, what the OLA parish is doing is basically just play-acting. There is no legally applicable definition of what constitutes a "member" eligible to vote, nor what constitutes a supermajority, and I question whether any of this collecting procurators' mandates follows any sort of recognized procedure under Texas law -- or if there's anything in canon law that covers this kind of thing at all.
But those who wind up embittered by the process have a perfectly good alternative, and I'm sure Bps Strawn and Marsh of the ACA would look very favorably on their petition to join.
