Bp Lopes visited St Barnabas, Omaha late last year to consecrate it as a Catholic church, but he did not take that opportunity to raise it to full parish status, which must mean that membership is significantly below the 100 individuals/30 families benchmark. Nonetheless the congregation, thanks to a significant bequest, as I believe you reported, has undertaken significant restoration work on the church, acquired a new rectory, and can pay Fr Catania a full stipend.This situation sounds like a first cousin to what St Mary of the Angels would have been had it come into the OCSP. As of early 2012, it had about 65 members and rental income to sustain it indefinitely. One problem is there's not enough going on to keep people busy, which provides openings for mischief.
And why, exactly, are we doing this? I'm getting more and more of a feeling that with poorly catechized laity and poorly formed, poorly supervised clergy, there's a developing unspoken assumption that the OCSP is a freelance version of Catholicism where, as the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society recently announced, old-fashioned silliness over things like near occasions of sin is not to be countenanced. Why else have your own cozy little establishment only a few blocks from a diocesan parish?
My correspondent offers additional comments on the situation in Canada:
Growth is often an elusive goal---funerals and baptisms balance one another off, as it were---but stasis is not so difficult to achieve. Mostly it's about money. The problem for much of the OCSP is that this stasis depends on the ministry of a priest who has independent means, or an outside job. The latter situation is not ideal---it largely precludes growth, because the priest has to divide his time---but potentially could be sustained indefinitely. The former case, where a priest, usually retired on a pension, can forego a full stipend, is not sustainable. Sooner rather than later he will die or fully retire and the congregation will not be able to find a replacement on similar terms.I would say that virtually the entire Canadian Deanery is facing this eventuality. All of the groups are led by retired men, with the exception of St John the Evangelist, Calgary and Annunciation, Ottawa which has one of its two priests still actively working as a teacher. And Christ the King, Tyendinaga, whose lay leader/candidate for the permanent diaconate has been hospitalised for the last two months. Not sure what is going on there; usual ad with service info has not been placed in reserve newspaper since his illness.
But point is that no vocations, with the exception of the Bros, have come forward from ACC clergy since 2012. ACC dioceses only ordain as many candidates as there are upcoming vacancies, so they do not have the pool of un/der-employed clergy that is providing OCSP candidates in the US The ACCC has given its all, at least for the priesthood (there is a diaconal candidate at Annunciation) and I do not detect any young celibate candidates on the horizon. So I predict that one by one the communities in Canada will fold.
