Here's A Question I'd Put To Bp Lopes

My regular correspondent sent me an update on Christ the King Towson, MD on Saturday, which I'd planned to post about yesterday, but then the links to Bp Lopes's interview came in, and I posted on that. But as I've reflected on the interview, Christ the King kept coming up as an important exception to many of the PR-oriented generalizations Bp Lopes made.

Christ the King was covered in a post here just this past June, so a lot of the information we have on it is pretty recent. But in the September 27 interview, Bp Lopes said,

Mass in the Ordinariate is celebrated ad orientem, with the priest facing the same direction as the congregation during the Eucharistic Prayer. “This is simply the long pastoral experience of these communities,” the bishop said, “without the ‘heat’ or baggage of conversations on the orientation of liturgical prayer that one often encounters.” Not having grown up with Anglican worship, Lopes especially appreciates “the richness of sung Mass propers, a deep repertoire of choral music, and full-voiced congregational singing.”

As best we can establish, mass is versus populum at Christ the King, and music is about what you'd expect at a low-end OF Catholic parish, as you can see to the left. This is a full OCSP parish, with membership in the low three digits. The picture Bp Lopes gives of "the long pastoral experience of these communities" isn't really borne out; the parish came from the CEC, established de novo in 1992; it largely uses the 1979 TEC BCP.

There's another, bigger problem. My regular correspondent noted Saturday,

I have just listened to two on-lime sermons by Fr Ed Meeks [one can be found here], a man who over the last twenty years has led Christ the King, Towson as a CEC, an ACA, and now a Catholic pastor (he started out as a Catholic seminarian, but left the Church in his mid-twenties).

This reminded me again of Fr Meeks's potential problem with delict of schism, which I covered in a post here a year ago. It's worth noting that until April 2016, Fr Meeks was the OCSP Vicar for Vocations -- when he must himself have been involved in de-selecting other candidates for delict of schism! We know that several in fact did have this problem.

Well, he brought in a property and 100-odd "members". But isn't this congregationalism? And what of the parellel situation at St Mary of the Angels, where the accepted version of what's going to happen (at least according to an e-mail I received from Fr Baaten) is that the parish will come in, but Fr Kelley as a priest will not. How come you can make all kinds of exceptions for Fr Meeks, but policy must strictly be followed with other priests?

So I'd be pursuing this question with Bp Lopes -- why are there so many exceptions in such a tiny prelature, with those who've had the benefit of such exceptions, including Frs Meeks and Baaten, the ones who get to determine who doesn't get them? Of course, Bp Lopes answered the questions put to him in the September 27 interview via e-mail, so all I can say is that my address appears to the right on this page.