More Questions On Bp Lopes's Bishop's Appeal

I've had a chance to reflect on several comments by visitors on the overall subject of the 2019 bishop's appeal from the North American ordinariate. The first big one is the note that my regular correspondent had in yesterday's post: it simply funds current Houston chancery operations over and above the parish tithe. Several issues cascade from that.

A visitor sent me links two two much more typical diocesan bishops' appeals, a current one from the Diocese of Albany and a 2014 one from the Diocese of Savannah. The visitor said, "Almost every diocese puts out an appeal with real breakdowns." (Bp Scharfenberger of Albany is one of the current bright lights anyhow.) The bullet-point beneficiaries of the Albany appeal include:

• our parish Faith Formation Programs
• The Diocese of Albany Catholic Schools
• Nurturing an Ongoing Culture of Vocations
• agencies and programs of Catholic Charities like Sunnyside Child Development Center.

The closest corresponding category in the 2019 Houston bishop's appeal is the $75,000 for "clergy and seminarians", although this seems to go almost entirely to seminarians and current clergy, not to fostering vocations among younger members. The money budgeted for parish support in Houston is described as going to "Chancery support for communities’ development; canonical services; digital tools to gather and track parishioner information; and Safe Environment activites". In other words, none of it will go to any actual communities outside Houston, which will use it for staff and computers there.

In contrast, our own bishop's appeal in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles almost always in my experience includes pitches in homilies from visiting priests at poor parishes outlining the difference those parishes make in communities with gang, drug, and homeless problems. These include stories of gang members who reform their lives and come to mass; most recently, we heard from a former associate at our parish who'd become pastor at a poor parish up the freeway that not only had masses in four languages, but had produced one priest with a second in the pipeline.

So far, we see nothing of this sort of thing in the North American ordinariate. Let's recall that the target market for Anglicanorum coetibus has always been the affluent disgruntled, whether that be senescent refugees from the 1979 BCP or diocesan millennials impressed with the phony thees and thous in the DW missal and the air of exclusivity in their little groups. Masses in Tagalog or Vietnamese don't register. Drugs and gangs are someone else's problem.

Beyond that, a visitor reports that the goal at Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio for the 2019 Houston appeal is $50,000. It took a day or two for this to sink in. OLA, one of the largest parishes in the North American ordinariate, still has membership somewhere in the mid-three figures of families; the word I have is that its membership had been overstated coming into the ordinariate and has since been somewhat disappointing. This makes it quite small by diocesan standards.

Yet the two parishes my wife and I are familiar with in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, both much larger by factors of three to five (at least), have goals for our bishop's appeal in the $90,000 range. But this money, again, is going to programs outside the chancery -- schools, poor parishes, outreach to the genuinely poor, and so forth. So Our Lady of the Atonement is being assessed far more, proportionately, than normal diocesan parishes, for purposes normally covered by parish tithes, not charitable donations above-and-beyond.

This says quite a bit about the viability of the whole Anglicanorum coetibus concept. A normal diocese is financially self-sustaining to the point that it can self-insure and self-finance building projects. The response to Anglicanorum coetibus after nearly a decade has been nowhere near showing an ability to become anything like that.

It's also worth updating once again the question raised about the Ordinariate Observer in Thursday's post.

I would also, if I were an OCSP member, ask why the 2018 appeal asked for $63,281,25 for "communications outreach", while the amount for 2019 has been increased to an even $75,000 -- but as far as my regular correspondent can determine, no issues of the Ordinariate Observer have been published since 2017. Where has this money gone?

I updated this to reflect an e-mail from a visitor who said he'd been receiving regular quarterly copies of the Ordinariate Observer in the mail. However, my regular correspondent double-checked this and found

There was one issue in 2018. As you can see, it is Fall 2018 Vol 4, No 1. The issue linked on the OCSP is Fall 2017 Vol 3, No 1. So your correspondent has not been receiving it quarterly, although the appearance of Vol 5, No 1 this Spring suggests that there is going to be an effort to get it out more frequently than once a year.

So budget amounts in the $60-65,000 range in 2017 and 2018 have still gone to one issue of the Ordinariate Observer per year. With $75,000 budgeted for 2019, maybe they'll sorta do better. The visitor who submitted the correction acknowledges his memory was faulty.

This is simply not a good record for Bp Lopes, and I suspect this is contributing to a reputation among his colleagues, if indeed any are noticing him.