There have been notorious arbitrary moves and feuds in the Church, like the conflict between Cardinal Spellman and Ven Fulton Sheen. On the other hand, the personalities of Spellman and Sheen, along with supportive anecdotes like the milk dispute that went to Pius XII and was resolved in Sheen's favor, can credibly explain it. But as an armchair detective trying to apply the principle of sufficient reason to the Our Lady of the Atonement situation, I've got to conclude that something's missing from the conventional version -- which says that Abp Garcia-Siller is resisting the move of OLA to the OCSP for petty reasons, at best the money involved.
Let's look at one lead that emerged last week, the seminarian who transferred from the Archdiocese seminary to the OCSP seminary. This is just a lead at this point, but I'm not yet willing to drop it. (The seminarian himself is almost certainly an innocent party, and to keep him from being drawn into this unnecessarily, I'm not going to give his name. Let's call him Mr S, for seminarian.)
Mr S is is a cradle Catholic who completed the sacraments of initiation and then found a vocation and attended seminary in the Archdiocese of San Antonio. He attended mass at OLA occasionally when in seminary. At some point he apparently took a leave from seminary before ordination. (My understanding is that this is not an unusual part of the priestly formation process.)
He then went and held a teaching position position at the OLA school. Then, after about two years, he decided to return to seminary, but under Bp Lopes and at the Ordinariate seminary in Houston. A visitor suggests this would need a dispensation from Rome, since Mr S had completed the sacraments of initiation well before he ever attended mass at OLA. Clearly there are issues that haven't come fully to light -- something drew Mr S to the Book of Divine Worship, for instance.
But I've got to wonder how and under what circumstances this issue went to Bp Lopes. How was Fr Phillips involved in the discussions, which he must have been? And what else might have been discussed in Rome in this whole context? And maybe Abp Garcia-Siller learned of all this through a channel, or in a context, he didn't expect? If I learned one important lesson in my working career, it's that bosses don't like surprises.
Comments on various sites suggest that problems for Fr Phillips arose during the summer of 2016. My regular correspondent points out that Mr S's departure for the Ordinariate seminary in Houston was announced in a May 2016 OLA bulletin. Unless one holds a somewhat Humean view of causality, it seems reasonable to suspect some connection here.
But as I've said all along, with the canon lawyer at the Register, I'm convinced we just don't know the whole story. The bits and pieces that are coming out just go to reinforce this.
