Starting January 7, Fr Bartus will be celebrating an 8 am Sunday mass here. The venue looks less than ideal and the time will make for a long day for Fr B, who has two morning masses in Irvine and a 6 pm mass in Pasadena. For whom is he getting this group up and running, I wonder?The site, Monteleone Meadows, is a wine country-style wedding and banquet venue, not a Catholic church. My correspondent continued,
On further inspection of the map I see that it would not be possible for the same person to celebrate the 8 am in Murrieta and the 9 am in Irvine. We await particulars. The fact that the first Sunday get-together is a mass tells us that the attendees are expected to already be practising Catholics, like the 349 members of the "Events" group are, judging by their names, jobs, etc. Another exercise in faux evangelism.The group's Facebook page is here. Fr Jack Barker was Pastor of St Martha's Catholic Church in Murrieta until his retirement in 2013. However, the new gathered group in Murrieta so far doesn't have any visible connection with that parish and for whatever reason is not meeting there. Murietta is 58 miles from Irvine via a highly indirect route. It's possible that Fr Barker is taking the 9 AM Sunday mass in Irvine while Fr Bartus celebrates in Murietta, or Fr Barker may take the Murietta mass on a more permanent basis. On the other hand, it's hard to understand why the mass is at 8 AM at all, unless Monteleone Meadows has a conflict with any later time.
My regular correspondent observes,
Fr Bartus collects groups of Catholics who have never met an Anglican to celebrate DW. Not only do OCSP groups divert ordained men needed more urgently elsewhere, they divert cradle Catholics and those who entered the Church years ago. We are told that the Ordinariate is preserving the splendours of some ill-defined "patrimony" for the Catholic church, although when one seeks details it seems to consist of everything from Christmas crackers to pink chasubles. "Ordinariate" worship and parish culture runs the gamut from guitars and keyboards to Palestrina, OF to DW, cupcake rosaries to simnel cake. Even if we could define the project I am sure that it means nothing to the average Catholic bishop, and that goes for the current Bishop of Rome, in my observation. And why would a bishop wish to encourage parishioners who were supporting a parish in his diocese to start diverting their contributions to another Catholic jurisdiction, even if he cared that Thomas Cranmer was a great prose stylist? The formation issue is probably the least of his worries; he is already probably dealing with many clergy ordained in Third World countries who are struggling with English. But at least their parishes are supporting his diocese.It's also troubling that the California efforts are spread so thin. There seem to be groups of a dozen or two now in Pasadena, Murrieta (in formation), and San Diego, with only the Irvine group showing any potential for growth. Are the efforts to gather little cliques of oddball Catholics diverting attention from the need to find a permanent home for the Irvine group?
Also troubling is a pattern that's starting to emerge, that small and distant groups suffer from lack of effective supervision, so that potential scandals can develop out of sight until they become unmanageable. Each of the four California groups is in a different diocese, which makes it likely that problems in any will escape the attention of diocesan authorities who might otherwise be in a position to notify Houston.
As we saw with the Athens, GA group, announcements are made before a permanent venue can be located. This seems like a slapdash way to set things up, perhaps playing to an audience in Houston, not to serious parishioners in the geographic location.
We're departing more and more from the original Anglicanorum coetibus model of established groups of Anglicans, originally meant to be whole parishes or rumps thereof, coming into the Church and catechized with their original clergy. That model didn't last much past 2012. Now we're starting to get cliques of cradle Catholics who for whatever reason can't find satisfactory parishes in their dioceses, notwithstanding the existing variety of Latin mass, music programs, devotional activities, social opportunities, and celebration styles available there.
And we'll be in a situation, if a scandal develops (it seems like we're getting close here and there), the diocesan bishop will have to do some sort of explanation for the 5 o'clock news about how yes, these are Catholics, but they aren't his Catholics.
