: Most small groups aren't shrivelling away like St Augustine, San Diego---they just aren't growing. That doesn't mean the membership is unchanged, of course. In 2012 twelve members of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, including the former clergyman and his wife, were received into the Church at the cathedral in Vancouver. Two years later the former clergyman was ordained and began celebrating Sunday mass in a former convent chapel on the grounds of the parish church in Maple Ridge, an exurb of Vancouver.Well, one question that comes up is, "what does 'viable' mean here?" How is a dozen people viable? An accountant auditing a business takes into consideration the ability of the business to continue. If I made a million bucks selling hula hoops when they were a fad, how will I attract new investment if I don't have a serious plan to sell other items when hula hoops are no longer popular? This group is "viable" until the administrator's health makes it no longer "viable", if for no other reason. So it's actually not viable at all.In 2019 the ASA remains about a dozen, but not the same dozen. Half of the original twelve can no longer make it from downtown Vancouver to Maple Ridge, because of health or lack of transport. One or two new members have joined and attend regularly. Some new families started attending, but have since moved away. Some local families split their time between the DW mass and the TLM parish in downtown Vancouver. So a precarious group remains precarious.
Why? I suppose one issue is the Maple Ridge location. Another is the utter lack of publicity: no website, no FaceBook page, no indication in the bulletin of the host parish that the DW mass is celebrated there. Nothing on the "Mass Finder" page of the Archdiocesan website. There are no activities outside of Sunday mass and coffee hour. The current administrator lives on his pension so the community remains viable. But when he goes it is hard to see Houston replacing him. I think this group is typical of about a dozen current OCSP communities.
But there's a bigger question. How many groups or parishes in the North American ordinariate are growing -- not just the marginal operations? Growth in new communities comes from two sources now, either evensong groups meeting in front parlors mainly to justify ordaining some freelance Protestant loser, or the Southern California groups that draw their membership from disgruntled Catholics, not evangelized Anglicans. It's been several years since an existing coetus of any denomination came into the Church as a body with its clergy.
And referring to the San Diego nursing kerfuffle on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog, my regular correspondent commented,
I had forgotten that "Mrs Schmidlap" mentioned that such growth as her group had experienced came from"people who are attracted to Latin Mass...looking for an English version of the Latin Mass." I think this is ubiquitous in the OCSP. In other words, AC is not just a poach job, it's an internal poach job.I think the diocesan bishops have begun to exhibit a greater or lesser degree of skepticism over this project. I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear them get together to talk about Bp Lopes.
