Why do you say that the Chancery is under staffed? In small mom and pop businesses, the owner is also the accountant, and is also the pest control guy, and so on. . .Well, you can kinda still have a mom and pop grocery, or hardware store, or whatever, but it's worth recognizing that in the 21st century, this is harder and harder. Chain groceries use their buying power to get deals from wholesalers that mom and pop groceries can't match. Mom and pop hardware stores face competition from big-box stores, and they have to scramble to provide personal service that customers will value above price. Many types of stores, from bookstores to specialized hobby shops, have been driven to near-extinction by competition from the web.
I don't know if you could ever have a real mom-and-pop bank along the lines of Bedford Falls's Bailey Building and Loan, but you certainly can't do it now. Having spent some of my career in the banking industry, I would say that an unacknowledged factor in the changes that turned the industry upside-down in the past 30 years was the prevalence of fraud and the rise of new systems to prevent it. These systems cost money, require an unavoidable minimum staffing level, and add numerous steps to to-do lists. Banks had no choice but to get bigger and automate to absorb those costs.
The Catholic Church has responsibilities that go beyond banks. Everyone who puts a check in the basket has a right to expect the money will be effectively used, but then there's the issue of making sure personnel can be trusted, not just with money (which a bank must also do), but to keep kids safe and to avoid fostering an organizational culture of immorality. This means there must be an unavoidable minimum staffing level and numerous extra steps on to-do lists. But there's less room for automation.
What experience with the North American ordinariate is showing is that you can't have a mom-and-pop diocese, any more than you can have a mom-and-pop bank. While the procedures I cited yesterday from the Diocese of Harrisburg may seem daunting, something like them is certainly necessary when you're dealing with major building projects to prevent corruption and provide effective supervision. My regular correspondent has looked for similar policies, either formally or informally in effect, in the North American ordinariate and can't find them:
So far I have found nothing comparable to the policies you forwarded on the OCSP website or referred to elsewhere. SJE, Calgary and Mt Calvary, Baltimore bought their properties from the local Anglican/TEC diocese; STM, Scranton and SJB, Bridgeport bought their buildings from the local Catholic diocese. STM, Scranton; St Barnabas, Omaha; Christ the King, Towson have undertaken significant building/renovation projects and SJB, Bridgeport is beginning the process, as you have seen from the parish bulletins. St John Vianney, Cleburne has acquired a building site and St Luke, Washington is in the process of doing so.The example of the bookshop/cafe in Scranton is especially pertinent. It involved an angel who was going to sink major money into reopening a bookstore that the diocese had previously run in a building it had sold (but who on earth opens a bookstore to compete with Amazon these days?) without, apparently, knowing that in purchasing the property from the diocese, it almost certainly came with a non-compete agreement that specifically ruled out running a bookstore!I have only read informal accounts of all these in newsletters and on websites and FB pages, but while in some cases consultation with Houston has been mentioned, it seems to be an informal process; for example, when Bp Lopes was last in Scranton he had a walk-around of the former convent and school on the property and gave some advice. Fr Phillips had also done this, earlier.
We recall the shambolic scheme to run a bookshop/cafe in the former Guild Studio building in downtown Scranton which would fund the reopening of a school at STM. I am not saying that there are no policies in place, only that they are not referred to and it seems unlikely that there is anything as detailed as the examples you have researched.
So we've already seen a well-intended but half-baked effort at trying to do something a diocese had rightly recognized was no longer commercially viable. If there had been procedures and staff in place to review the Scranton project -- indeed, if we hypothetically imagine a Houston chancery comparable to a territorial diocese -- the Houston building department would likely have touched base with the Scranton building department, and a lot of time would have been saved and some donation money probably not wasted.
Someone might say, with reference to Anglicanorum coetibus, that you've got to start somewhere. Now and then people tell me the Church thinks in terms of centuries, not decades, and certainly not quarters. On some matters, maybe so, but you can't use that to justify pie-in-the-sky thinking. "I know our Ponzi scheme looks like it's gonna collapse now, but you've got to keep the vision of how rich you're gonna get five years from now!!" I would simply ask why the CDF canceled last year's symposium to celebrate Anglicanorum coetibus. If it looked like a winner, would they have canceled it, especially with the golden boy Lopes's career hitched to that particular star? The real outlook must have been grim indeed.
A basic question I would ask about the Southern California building projects is why the Irvine group, after years of work, seems not to have reached critical mass. Why did nobody look at moving to a bigger venue there? And what's been the growth of the Murrieta group now that it's in a semi-permanent location? How do the pledges look from any of these groups? Who are they, and where are they going?
Dioceses ask these questions. From what I see, priests are evaluated based on questions like these; the good ones go to the best parishes. So far, a system like diocesan systems doesn't seem to have taken root in Houston, and it's not a good sign.
