Sacred Heart drew members from across western Maryland. Since July 2011, it has been renting the historic St. Michael church - a petite, white clapboard building across the road from the main church - for its Sunday liturgies.My correspondent was actually trying to trace which community Fr Vidal may have entered the OCSP with -- as best we can determine, the St. Augustine Anglican with which he was associated in yesterday's post doesn't seem to have come into the OCSP. The VOL piece mentions Sacred Heart's former pastor, Dennis Hewitt, who was received as a Catholic layman and was apparently not in line for ordination. My correspondent believes he may have had a problem with delict of schism. According to the release,This forged a relationship between the two communities, whose members shared social and educational activities, and now can share Mass.
Many members of the congregation split from the Episcopal Diocese in Maryland in 1994 due to theological disagreements and joined the recently established Charismatic Episcopal Church, a denomination not affiliated with the Episcopal Church, worshipping with the Life in Jesus community in Libertytown. The congregation left the CEC in 2007 to participate in a new diocese exploring affiliation with the Anglican or Catholic Church. It joined the Anglican Church in America in 2009, taking the name Sacred Heart.. . . Sacred Heart is a mission parish of Christ the King in Towson, which joined the ordinariate in June.
. . . A retired Department of Defense employee who also served in the U.S. Air Force, Hewitt will not be ordained a Catholic priest, but will continue to serve as Sacred Heart's administrator.
Mt Airy, however, is in the Baltimore-Washington exurbs -- it was the boonies when I was growing up in the area -- 40 miles from Towson. It's hard to imagine how the two parishes could share activities, and as far as I can see, they never did. If someone can clarify this, I will greatly appreciate it.
The absolute star of the press release at VOL, though, was Father R. Scott Hurd, then-vicar general of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, who is mentioned in the first sentence and also just two paragraphs further down as "Father R. Scott Hurd, the ordinariate's vicar general and a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington". Someone involved with this wanted to toot Fr Hurd's horn, clearly.
There's something odd here, though. First, the original intent of Anglicanorum coetibus was to bring groups of Anglicans into the Church as established parishes, with their clergy. The policy was that such parishes would retain their Anglican clergy as lay administrators, with an interim Catholic priest serving as chaplain or mentor for a fairly brief period until the Anglican administrator could be ordained a Catholic priest of the OCSP.
As things have shaken out, this has almost never occurred, and the example of the Mt Airy group shows that within a year of the OCSP's erection, there had been major departures from the original model. As far as I can tell, the Mt Airy group never appeared on any OCSP list of communities, and as far as I can tell, it never received an OCSP priest. If the group survived at all, it must have been as a small fellowship in the St Michael's diocesan parish.
My correspondent comments,
I guess they joined Christ the King [but this is 40 miles away] or were absorbed into the host parish. There were many (6 or 7) former clergy entering the OCSP in the greater Baltimore area but they were in need of stipends and could not stick around to pastor small groups. I am convinced that St Timothy's, Catonsville is still in existence only because of its dedicated Music Director. Sunday mass is celebrated by a number of supply priests.This leaves open the question of what happened to Fr Vidal's former St. Augustine Anglican parish, of which at this point no trace remains. That Fr Vidal was ordained in June 2012 indicates that he was well-connected, presumably with Fr Hurd, and that the OCSP was already ordaining clergy surplus to parish requirements. Of the three new priests listed in the June 2012 press release, my correspondent points out,
It is interesting that all three clergy left Mt Calvary shortly after their ordination and were replaced by a new parochial administrator, who had previously been curate at Good Shepherd, Rosemont. Fr Catania as we know lingered unassigned for over a year before going to Canada. Fr Reamsnyder has recently been excardinated to the Diocese of Lansing, where he has served since 2012.What this says to me is that there was never any serious plan for forming the OCSP or growing it, and whatever vague intentions existed were quickly abandoned.
