Relaxed English Garden Party!

My regular correspondent sent me a screen shot of this Facebook post from the Bl John Henry Newman group in Irvine, CA (click on the image for a larger version):

The first thing that strikes me is the Union Jack in the image. The second thing is that this is to be a Choral Evensong and Garden Party. The Catholic part is buried down in the text.

The third thing is that it's "a developers event. . . . to discern if you can assist us in forming an investors & development team, for future fundraising. . ." My regular correspondent comments,

" 'Featuring' The Most Rev. Steven J. Lopes." What an expression. "Dress: Business casual." Let's just say this is going to stand in the same relationship to an English garden party as the Toad Hall Restaurant at Disneyland Paris stands to an English manor house. More importantly, this community, which has been meeting for eight years, (six at its current location), has apparently still not met the relatively low standard for OCSP parish status nor realised any of Fr Bartus' other projects.

I suspect this initiative, despite its pretentious kick-off, will fare no better than the school or the Rosary Chapel. BJHN is, of course, doing better than St Augustine of Canterbury, Del Mar, whose members were received at the same service as BJHN, back in 2012.

I sense an air of desperation here. The target market seems to be Anglophile philanthropists with money burning holes in their pockets, eager to schmooze with a Most Rev of Polish and Portuguese background. Will there be a dialect coach to polish Bp Lopes's Received Pronunciation, I wonder?

I'm not a professional fundraiser by any means, but I do have a sense that major donors are not recruited via public invitations like this one. And if I wanted major Catholic donors, I think the guys to schmooze with would be Gómez, Vann, or Barron. Where are Carl and Lois Davis in Houston, or Timothy Busch, right down the hall in the facility they're using in Irvine? Are they not on board? You don't recruit them with a garden party on the patio, though.

I'm not saying they might not already have such people lined up, but I do get a feeling that they're casting about at random here for some loose millionaires who might be interested, but they don't yet know about.

A real bishop has fundraising experts on staff or on retainer. These were engaged, for instance, in cooperation with the archdiocese for our parish's current building campaign. I don't have a sense that anything like this is going on in Irvine, or Houston, for that matter. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.