Our Lady of Grace's move to Covina must have been somewhat spur-of-the-moment, because they (or a donor) commissioned a new portable altar of some artistic pretension for the high school cafetorium in Pasadena where they previously met. It was delivered last June. [Now they're renovating the sanctuary of the Covina building, so one wonders what happened to the other altar.] As we recall, Fr Bartus regularly celebrated Sunday mass at OLG until Fr Bayles was ordained, but he seems to have had little or no direct involvement since. He is likewise conspicuously absent from Blessed John Henry Newman, unless a visit from Bp Lopes is taking place.Speaking from brief experience as a "continuing" Anglican parish treasurer, I'd be interested to learn what the pledges at these groups look like. I think one among several of Fr Barker's errors of judgment at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood was to acquire a major income property for the parish in the 1980s. The eventual result was that none of the parishioners had any real skin in the game -- they were squabbling over a massive resource that none had built. Several of the most prominent dissidents in 2011-12 didn't even pledge.Any idea that Holy Martyrs, Murrieta was a chapel of ease for parishioners of the main community, BJHN, is contradicted by the fact that its regular Sunday congregation appears considerably larger than that in Irvine and Fr Bartus is the regular celebrant, while we know the maximum capacity of the Irvine venue is 65. Murreita alone had the full complement of Triduum and Easter Sunday services. BJHN had a 9 am mass on Easter Day, but no 11 am.
BJHN and St Augustine of Canterbury in San Diego were established with a core of former Anglicans who accompanied their clergyman into the Church. The latter community seems to have dwindled from perhaps three dozen to around ten under Fr Baaten's leadership. BJHN has been effectively off-loaded onto supply clergy, and remains a mission.
OLG seems to have been "disaffected Catholics" from the get-go, gathered as a pretext for the ordination of Fr Bayles. Hard to know if it has potential for growth without consistent pastoral leadership. HM is likewise mostly disaffected Catholics, but for whatever reason Fr Bartus feels it has potential that none of the others displayed, so he has decided to focus his efforts there. My impression is that his efforts are not really bankable.
The SoCal Ordinariate to this point is a Potemkin village, or maybe I mean a Big Store. As you point out, people like Ms Nicolosi are wasting their time in these congregations with little to offer and less of a future, instead of contributing time, talent, and treasure to existing parishes. Bad enough, without adding insult to injury by claiming on Facebook that the entire Archdiocese of Los Angeles is uniformly a disaster area. "We are here to show you how it should be done" is a risky approach, especially in a situation where resources are scarce.
Fr Bartus, whose first clergy assignment was at St Mary of the Angels, seems not to have learned a key lesson, that a parish needs to be a cooperative effort. Instead, he's relying on angels, like the Truax family in Murrieta, or the willingness of the Busch company to host the Newman group in Irvine -- both probably relieve their groups of costs they'd otherwise have to pay. I have no idea what the arrangement is for the aging facility in Covina, although I have a sense the owner would like to unload it and is allowing its use on generous terms in hopes the group will eventually be able to buy. Yeah, right.
The sense I have is that these groups think they're getting something on the cheap. Again, it's just a sense, fed by my experience at St Mary of the Angels: not only do they get to associate with an exclusive group of like-minded people (that won't last), but they get to be big fish without paying big-fish dues. It's just a guess, but again, my estimate from St Mary of the Angels would be that an average weekly pledge of $20 is on the high side, but other than the angels themselves, there won't be other serious givers. (If the treasurers of any of these groups would like to disagree, I'll gladly listen.)
Why else is Fr Bartus turning to a garden party in hopes of identifying new angel donors? In our parish, the pastor regularly stresses the importance of sacrificial giving in his homilies, and even in the regular exhortation to "reflect on our sacrificial giving" before each mass's offering. It shows. But for whatever reason, Fr Bartus -- and Bp Lopes is clearly on board -- is looking toward hypothetical new philanthropists, not his own parishioners, to expand.
Just before everything went south at St Mary of the Angels in 2012, I met with the parish's then-accountant. I stressed my concerns that the parish wasn't relying on pledge income, and instead assumed the rent from the tenant on its commercial property would always be there. He agreed. He reminded me that business conditions change, tenants move or go out of business. In 2012, the St Mary's tenant was a bank in a rapidly changing industry, and soon enough it moved out.
By the same token, the wealthy families of angel donors aren't always of the same mind. The angel can suddenly pass on, and the family or the business managers may have other ideas about the facility that's been provided for the ordinariate group. I think Fr Bartus and Bp Lopes must be aware of this, but clearly the solution can't be to go looking for backup angels.
The problem is that the target market they're serving now is in effect "continuing Catholics" who don't like their dioceses and want exclusive groups to suit themselves -- without paying the dues real Catholics have to pay. This is not a recipe for success. I don't think it's a coincidence, actually, that Bp Lopes didn't rise to his position through a diocesan promotion process. As visitors have commented now and then, dioceses have become what they are through centuries of experience in what works.
"Continuers" of any flavor, not so much.
