[O]ur man Philip Mayer will be created and declared in Houston, TX, as among the Sacred Order of Deacons! . . . "Phil and fam" will be moving to our area in about a month and a half, and the bishop has assigned him to St. James, pending the highly anticipated official announcement of his appointment as our new priest administrator, effective sometime in February, 2019. As I have already indicated, I will certainly still be around for a while thereafter, to help with the transition in any way that I can.Fr Marziani is 68, which is not quite canonical retirement age, so we must assume that either he wants to leave early, or Houston wants him to leave, or it's mutual.
Philip Mayer, we've come to know, was a Pastoral Provision candidate for the priesthood in the Diocese of St Petersburg frm 2011 to 2017. By his account on social media, he was attending the diocesan seminary for at least part of that time. My understanding is that seminarians are evaluated periodically by diocesan vocation directors, and recommendations are made on their progress and suitability for ordination.
We've also learned that two years is the normal time for priestly formation for ex-Anglican priests under the Pastoral Provision. It's very hard to avoid thinking that Mayer's progress toward ordination in the Diocese of St Petersburg was deemed unsatisfactory, and he then turned to the OCSP. When Bp Parkes of St Petersburg learned that Mayer was forming a Tampa-area OCSP group as part of a new path to ordination, he immediately requested that it be shut down. Houston subsequently found Mayer a job in a Catholic school outside the diocese. It sounds very much as though Bp Parkes did not want Mayer functioning as anything like a priest in his territory.
We now see that Mayer will be relocating to St Augustine, on the other side of the state and two dioceses distant. We anticipate that he will receive some sort of diocesan job to support his family.
What about the St James group in St Augustine? My regular correspondent reports,
Fr Marziani began leading this group within the ACA Pro-Diocese of the Holy Family, under Louis Campese, while he was a Catholic layman. The second link below says that There were seven people regularly attending Evensong at that time. Estimates of future attendance in the blog obviously quite inaccurate, given the size of the original venue---the House of Prayer in St Augustine (they moved to St Benedict the Moor in 2014). I can find no account of the reception of any non-Catholic members---nothing even on Fr Marziani's FB page, normally quite newsy. Perhaps they were received with Incarnation, Orlando? It is also possible that non-Ordinariate Catholics attend, as the only other Sunday mass at St Benedict's is at 8 AM.A 2015 photo shows 25 at mass. However, my regular correspondent reports,
In May 2016, Fr Marziani noted in the current "Midweek Musing" that 21 people at mass was a new best. At that point St James had an organist and hymns. That seems to have gone by the boards, although he is now hoping music can be reintroduced into worship at St James. This does not sound like there has been growth in the interim; more like the reverse.So what is the point of this exercise? Mrs Fisher has been skeptical, given the OCSP's history with Luke Reese, of its policy of ordaining poorly vetted priests and giving them minimal supervision. Houston is 908 miles from St Augustine, FL. Apparently for some period of time, Mayer will have cursory supervision from a recent convert priest whose own formation is at best half-baked, though he seems eager to be out the door, but after that, he's got probably fewer than 20 people to help or hurt, though whatever happens, Houston will be among the last to know, I assume.
Meanwhile, this group of 20 will be ghettoized in some sort of backwater sharing the precious spiritual treasures of the Anglican patrimony but otherwise isolated from Catholic diocesan and parish life, including Catholic fellowship, devotions, retreats, and the sacramental and spiritual leadership of fully formed Catholic fathers. But maybe they can get some sort of music program restarted, huh?
Why is Rome doing this?
