Poor Clare Sisters Leave Our Lady Of The Atonement

At the end of mass on Epiphany Sunday at Our Lady of the Atonement, Fr Lewis read a letter from the Mother Superior of the Poor Clare Sisters in Alabama, saying that the nuns who had resided in a convent at OLA were returning to Alabama in response to a request by Archbishop of San Antonio Gustavo Garcia-Siller. It was not made clear, and it isn't clear to observers, if they were ordered to leave or what exactly the request was. The letter also spoke of discernment on the nuns' part.

An announcement of this appeared briefly on the Atonement Online blog, authored by Fr Phillips, but it was taken down almost immediately. A source apparently at OLA also notified this blog of the news:

Traditional Nuns Forced From Texas Diocese

Church Militant Headines – 1/8/18

Sources say Poor Clares [resident at Our Lady of the Atonement, an Anglican-use Catholic parish] suffering payback from new San Antonio archbishop [because of the recent transfer of the parish to the Anglican-use Catholic Ordinariate].

FULL STORY COMING SOON

As far as anyone can tell, what we currently know of the "full story" doesn't imply that anything was "forced", nor whether it had anything to do with either "payback" or tradition. In my view, opinion from what I would call very solid priests like Fr Chad Ripperger is that "traditionalism" can easily turn into "substitution of private judgment", of which Anglo-Catholics have always been notably guilty. I would cite only the most recent pronouncement from the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society that, in its semi-official view, it is not needful for Catholics to avoid near occasions of sin, as this is not consonant with the Anglican Patrimony.

I'm told, though, that coffee-hour conventional wisdom at OLA was that this was "payback" from the archbishop, though I'm not exactly sure how this would pay anything back. An observer suggests that changes in administration at OLA due to recent audits may have resulted in review of the nuns' use of the parish house and the convent. This may in fact be about discernment, rather than anything the archbishop may have in mind. But I await the FULL STORY.

There's a troubling issue lurking behind this, which is the OCSP's non-existent policy on social media. By my count of at least the issues that have come to me, this is the third case where a community issues some type of semi-official public announcement that basically steps on, or could conceivably step on, the prerogatives of a diocesan bishop and must quickly be taken down. Clearly the short-lived post at Atonement Online allowed visitors to conclude unfavorable things about the archbishop, and the news item that apparently went to Church Militant said the same things more directly, and could well have come from the same source.

Somebody needs to make it clear to the little Shakespeares authoring social media posts at OCSP communities that any post that mentions a diocesan bishop or local diocese must be approved by Houston. At best, this paints a continued picture of the OCSP as amateur hour, and someone should have seen the need to make such policies clear before this instance -- although if Fr Phillips is running his own freelance press office, I assume that there are disciplinary options available to a bishop even for retired priests. Bp Lopes, this is not a good look.

But this leads me to wonder about other possible issues. We seem to be coming to more episodes of difficulties with local dioceses. For whatever reason, recent announcements of groups-in-formation at Athens, GA and Murietta, CA aren't accompanied by a set location, even though use of local diocesan facilities would be the logical option. As best we know the story, Bp Parkes of St Petersburg would not allow diocesan facilities to be used for a Tampa-area OCSP group, although he afterward accepted its candidate priest into the Pastoral Provision. Bp Matano seems to have had some level of hesitation to allow the OCSP group in Rochester to use diocesan facilities.

Are bishops conferring among themselves on the desirability of allowing OCSP groups in their dioceses? Certainly my own impression of the OCSP, reinforced by what we hear from the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, is that there are lots of poorly catechized laity and poorly formed, poorly supervised priests making all kinds of crazy assertions about what's "traditional". As a bishop, I can keep some sort of a lid on this stuff in my diocese. But to have a group calling itself "Catholic" in my diocese beyond my control, under the authority of some prelate who may not know what's going on thousands of miles away, doesn't seem appetizing at all.

Stay tuned.