What's The Payoff?

By coincidence, just as I was planning to look for a photo of the reredos in St Thomas Episcopal Fifth Avenue to use in today's post, a visitor sent me one he'd taken, so here it is:

And here's a counterpart on the opposite coast, our former parish, St Thomas Episcopal Hollywood:

In contrast, here's a shot of the reredos at the latest little club in the North American ordinariate, the Church of the Presentation:

Now, someone will certainly answer that I'm being completely unfair, those churches took decades to bring to their current state, and this is just the ordinariate group's hopeful start, and who knows what they'll have in 50 years, the longest journey blah blah blah.

And my regular correspondent notes that the Presentation group just recently announced they've "come to an agreement" to buy a property that they'll convert to a church, but a photo on the realtor's site shows a Texas McMansion that's going to take one heck of a lot of renovation to turn into anything like St Thomas on either coast. Meanwhile, we get a reredos just back from the laundry.

And let's recognize that almost all the ordinariate parishes have interiors closer to the Church of the Presentation than either St Thomas. Indeed, both Our Lady of Walsingham and Our Lady of the Atonement are low-rent in comparison.

This isn't the first time I've mentioned this contrast here, and certainly not the first time I've thought of it. It always brings to mind the initial bait-and-switch that Bernard Law sold Cardinal Ratzinger through intermediaries, that 250,000 Episcopalians were going to come into the US Catholic Church as parishes and bring their property with them. Surely this was what Ratzinger-as-pontiff envisioned as the outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus.

And while a St Thomas Episcopal may not be matched in many US Catholic dioceses, few Catholics have that reredos-from-the-laundry as their only option. In many cases, all they need to do is go up the stairs from that basement chapel and attend the 9:30 OF Mass in a much, much nicer venue. So let's get real. There must be some reason people are deliberately avoiding something that, as Msgr Pope recently suggested, ought to remind them of heaven in favor of a cobbled-together thee-thou liturgy and almost nothing else. (Don't give me that crap about Dan Schuette, either, you don't have to have that in a diocesan parish.)

Here are some tentative conclusions.

• Ordinariate priests have come to that vocation at the end of disappointing careers in other denominations, often not even Anglican. They're hanging onto paychecks they cobble together from outside diocesan jobs. These men are desperate. They can be manipulated. They aren't going to challenge parishioners to grow or sacrifice. This isn't a bug, it's a feature.
• The small groups can be dominated by people who are otherwise not going to rise to leadership in larger and more successful communities. One experience I continue to have in our large and successful diocesan parish is to say, "Boy, now I realize why X is on the Y committee. He listens, and he's flexible." I see results like that all over the parish. I'm not seeing results like that in the ordinariate.
• The low expectations of clergy and laity in the small groups are self-perpetuating. Nobody wants to be challenged, say, to give sacrificially. This requires clergy to address laity as adults and point out that they can drive a new car every couple of years and take expensive vacations, or they can send their children to Catholic schools. Instead, the small groups are apparently satisfied with jerks who talk down to them in singsong voices, as long as they don't challenge them to get serious.

I'm reminded of a woman talking on a TV show some time ago -- she apparently had some experience dealing with suicides. She noted how some people actually commit suicide by hanging themselves from the back of a chair, i.e., by fastening the noose to the chair back and just lying down on the floor so it'll choke them lying down. "All they need to do is get up," the lady said, "and they don't get up."

I've got to wonder if this is going on in the North American ordinariate, and whether Bp Lopes is complicit.