I'm a Roman Catholic in the diocese of [redacted] with family both in the Ordinariate and in the Episcopal Church. I've been reading your blog for a few months. I think you raise some important concerns, but I wanted to push back on the idea that ordinariate groups are irredeemably small compared to "regular" Catholic dioceses.This got me thinking pretty hard, and I ran it past my regular correspondent as well. I looked up the term "mission diocese" and could only find Home Mission Diocese on the USCCB site, which says, "These dioceses lack the resources to provide basic pastoral ministry to their populations." The practical effect of this designation is that they receive grants from the USCCB for specific purposes. In fact, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter does receive a $155,000 grant for travel and administration. (Does Bp Lopes fly first class?)You mentioned that most groups/parishes don't grow beyond a few dozen. I imagine that's true, but that tracks pretty closely with what we experience in mission dioceses in the Midwest and South. Of the diocesan parishes I have numbers for, the majority have fewer than 125 registered households. Parishes with 20-30 families are common, and two parishes have, respectively, six and seven registered households. "What will we do when Fr. X retires or is moved?" is a live question in many of these places. Even our cathedral parish is only a little bit bigger (~850 families) than OLW Cathedral (~600?).
To be fair, these numbers are balanced out in our diocese by eight or ten parishes with 1,000-2,500 households. I imagine the North American ordinariate doesn't have those numbers in any parish. But it's not unusual for a Catholic diocese, for historical, geographic, or other reasons to have a generous definition of "stable group" and for a parish to max out at a few dozen. Unless all the US mission dioceses have failed, I don't think a small target audience should be used to claim that the Ordinariate has failed.
On the other hand, if I think about "mission diocese", I normally think more in the direction of Prince Gallitzin or Bp Lamy. My regular correspondent thinks of a mission parish as being in a very poor area, a sparsely populated area, an area where Catholics are in a small minority, or an area where the population is entirely unchurched. The problem with calling the North American ordinariate a "mission" is that the target population, and the groups actually being reached, fit none of these categories.
Let's try to parse out the original intent behind Anglicanorum coetibus. Bishop-then-Cardinal Bernard Law was behind the project from the start, working through intermediaries with dissident Episcopalian clergy in the controversies surrounding the 1976 Episcopalian General Convention. The dissidents intended to set up a secessionist Anglican jurisdiction responding to TEC's approval of women's ordination, with a subsidiary issue being the projected revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. It goes without saying that everyone involved was a baptized Christian, and Episcopalians have always been recognized as an affluent and influential group of people.
The accounts we have make it clear that, although then-Bp Law worked with about half a dozen Episcopalian clergy interested in joining a new Roman Catholic jurisdiction, this was a minority view among the 1976 dissidents, and in fact the group was seen as hotheaded and unserious by the majority. But beyond that, Douglas Bess's indispensable history of the movement, Divided We Stand, makes it plain that all the dissidents, who coagulated as "continuing" Anglicans, wildly overestimated their size and influence from the start
Exactly why Law associated himself with a splinter group among a larger assortment of oddballs is unclear. The best insight I've had, from someone who knew him in the 1970s, is that Law was extremely ambitious, and he may have felt that bringing in a significant group of Protestants would be a feather in his cap. By the late 1990s, he in fact expected to succeed John Paul II as pope, and this may have been part of a case he expected to make with a conclave.
Law's first effort was with the Pastoral Provision, although this was itself a Plan B after John Paul resisted creating a personal prelature for the dissident Anglicans in the late 1970s. The problem was that only a handful of parishes succeeded under the Pastoral Provision over the 1980s, with a notable failure when successive archbishops of Los Angeles refused to allow several former Episcopalian parishes to come in under the provision. Clearly Law, probably for the sake of his own agenda, felt the concept had more potential than it did. He apparently still hoped a personal prelature would somehow change its dismal prospects.
Law facilitated a meeting between several conservative Episcopalian clergy and Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, which resulted in a draft of Anglicanorum coetibus. John Paul, still skeptical, told Ratzinger to put it to a vote with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which presumably both understood wouldn't pass, and Ratzinger kept it in a drawer in his desk, figuratively speaking. It's worth pointing out that during the 1993 meeting, an Episcopalian bishop gave Ratzinger the estimate that 250,000 Episcopalians would join a Catholic personal prelature.
The best estimate we have is that as of 2019, the North American ordinariate numbers in the mid four figures, somewhere between 1% and 2% of the original estimate. I think a perfectly reasonable question would be whether Pope Benedict XVI would have issued the apostolic constitution if he'd been aware of its actual level of interest. Indeed, might Cardinal Law have been better advised to focus his efforts elsewhere? My regular correspondent points out,
[S]ome of the smallest OCSP groups are in cities with very large Anglican populations. The Anglican Diocese of Toronto has 54,000 people on its parish rolls. The ["continuing"] ACCC community in Greater Vancouver led by the now-administrator of Our Lady of Walsingham, Maple Ridge had 100 members and had purchased a church---it was probably the second-largest group in the ACCC. The target market is large, but the Ordinariate uptake is almost non-existent. . . . in calculating the size of the target market here, there must be hundreds of thousands of current Catholics with family connections to the United Church of Canada or the ACC, (Canada's two largest Protestant denominations), qualifying them for Ordinariate membership.Missions or not, bishops are called to be effective stewards of the Church's resources. Closing and merging parishes are part of their job. Ending one form of outreach can enable a more effective one.
