There is a difference between a Mission Diocese (which receives funds from the larger group of Dioceses (USCCB)/Church to help fund specific and particular ministries and activities in a sparsely populated diocese, e.g. Santa Rosa receiving funds to maintain two college Newman Centers since college kids are notoriously broke and cannot sustain it by themselves, but the ministry produces good fruit) and Mission churches within a diocese which are too small to remain viable on their own or be classified as a parish and receive funds from within the same diocese to provide basic sacraments and Mass to sparsely populated areas.If you go to the USCCB Mission Territory page that I linked yesterday, the entry for the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter lists "Areas of Need: Ordinariate Travel; Communications Support; Diocesan Administratation" as the uses to which a $155,000 grant will be put -- in other words, entirely internal to the chancery and travel. Compare that to a $125,000 grant to the Diocese of Laredo for "Mission Support; Religious Education for Children; Religious Education for Adults and New Evangelization; Seminarian Education and Vocations; Youth Ministry; Refugee and Jail Ministry; Diaconate Formation and Permanent Diaconate; Family Life Ministry".There is also a difference between an active small mission group, supported by a Diocese where there are very few people because the next nearest parish/mission is tens or hundreds of miles away, they(and their families before them) invested over time, have a physical church and some facilities but don’t have enough people to justify a full time/live-in priest versus a group of people with a dream, no facilities, no real ties to a location, and other actual viable parishes within easy driving distance.
The first group needs funds to have the bare minimum of Catholicism, the latter group needs funds to avoid attending Mass where they do not like the priest or the vestments or the liturgy or the. . . (insert pet peeve here). It is easy to see which model will be sustainable over time and which will become a footnote in the history of the Church. $155,000.00 is not small change. It will be interesting to see how long the brother Bishops will let go of that kind of money if there are not some better numbers in the future.
Just last March I took a look at the 2019 Bishop's Appeal for the ordinariate, which seeks to raise $300,000, $225,000 (or 75%) of which will go to chancery functions ("communications outreach" and "parish development") and the bishop's travel ("evangelization"). In our archdiocese, the bishop's appeal is called "Together in Mission", and it goes specifically to support parishes and schools in poorer areas that need the extra money.
In contrast, everything from the USCCB is going to Houston bureaucracy and the bishop's travel, while 75% of the ordinariate bishop's appeal goes to the same (the other 25% goes to seminarian support). I would say there's a major disconnect between what Houston calls "mission" and other Catholic bishops call "mission". So I think another answer to the question the visitor raised yesterday is, "It depends on what the meaning of 'mission' is."
Another conclusion one might draw is that the tithe from individual communities can't support even the internal functions of the ordinariate, such that it has to go begging to pay for office staff and air conditioning. (
There's something seriously wrong here.
