Well, I think the Holy Father very rightly, and this begins in my very first conversation with Pope Francis. I mean, obviously I was very involved with Pope Benedict in the work that led to Anglicanorum coetibus, so I'm very familiar with that. But in the very first conversation with Pope Francis, after he named me bishop, just a few days actually before it was publicly announced, when he and I were speaking, he directly mentioned the missionary aspect of the Ordinariate, that the Ordinariate if done well, can be a sign of not only ecclesiastical unity and communion, but the means of it. It's a way of welcoming people into full communion in a new way. Benedict opened a new way of entering full communion where all of those traditions, all of that history, all of that theology, that nurtured you to the point of seeking full communion, you don't have to leave at the door of the Catholic Church when you enter in, but you can bring these very same liturgical, pastoral, theological traditions with you in an enriching way. Yes, he doesn't stop there.Reminds me of a senior VP I had to work with who was constantly name-dropping what "Warren and Dick" had said to him in the last get-together of the CEO clique. When the big cuts came, he was the first on mahogany row to be eased out. Bp Lopes rambles on here for hundreds of words about exactly what the Holy Father said to him.
A number of other things pop out at me.
What would you say are the milestones the Ordinariate has accomplished in the past 10 years?Why, this guy must be the Bill Gates of the Catholic Church or something! All these fuddy-duddy bishops who want to be helpful, but they have no idea why they do what they do! So Young Tom Edison has to go out and reinvent it all from scratch! He'll be telling St Charles Borromeo a thing or to when he gets to heaven, mark my words!Well, you know, you're building a diocese from scratch. And I wouldn't want to begin with the practical realities of that. But the practical realities of that are so many, and so varied, as to be overwhelming. We don't build dioceses from scratch.
So when you're trying to build it from scratch, I'm reaching out to all sorts of bishops with questions about clergy retirement, pension, insurance, property and liability, safe environment procedures and personnel procedures. And it's not that bishops don't desire to be helpful — they do, but in a lot of cases, they weren't able to help because their own diocesan institutions by that point are so old that nobody remembers why the decisions were made initially in this way.
So the practical thing of trying to build this Ordinariate, build a diocesan structure with very few models. . .
This does confirm my impression that, unlike the normal promotion path for a bishop, where the candidate moves through positions like seminary rector and auxiliary, Lopes was made a bishop directly from being a bureaucrat in a Vatican dicastery. Cardinal Levada pulled him from a brief stint as a parish associate and took him to the CDF, where he served as Levada's secretary. So it sounds like he had nothing of the exposure to "retirement, pension, insurance, property and liability, safe environment procedures and personnel procedures" that he claims his brother bishops can't help him with, no matter how much they want to.
And my point has been that it shows. But let's look at another exchange:
So do you see a possibility that Divine Worship: the Missal will eventually be translated into Spanish and or other languages?He appears to be referring to the San Agustin group in Pinecrest, FL, which is one of about a dozen that have closed. These had used the OF Spanish-language mass -- is the Viennese professor who added the Elizabethan turns of phrase to the OF English mass going to crib style from Cervantes for the OF Spanish mass as well? And will this give Bp Lopes a chance now to poach Spanish-speakers from Abp Gómez? Interesting idea. If Fr Bartus is getting good results with Catholics who don't like going to mass with Mexicans, how can we expand this model? Maybe to Cubans who don't like Nicaraguans? The possibilities here are endless!There already is a proposal for that because we already have in Miami a Spanish-speaking Ordinariate community. That's not the first thing you think of when you think of the patrimony of English Christianity, right? But . . . . there are actually a whole lot of persons who are Spanish-speaking, who have been and their families have been Anglican for a long time, and are coming into the Catholic Church. So we already work with it. This is already a reality for us in Miami and a number of those folks are part of our parish in Orlando. So the priest in Miami and comes up quarterly to hear confessions in Spanish and celebrate with the people in Orlando.
But this reflects another tendency I've begun to see in Bp Lopes, a tendency to stretch the truth, often and a lot. Here he puts a failed effort that lasted only a brief time in Florida into the present tense with an implication that he's gonna re-evangelize the evangelized Anglicans, big time. For instance,
We are dealing with a number of converting clergy and certainly in this 10 years, the Ordinariate has 80 priests. We have 45 parish communities.Well, I guess it depends on what the meaning of "is" is, huh? These numbers clearly include retirees and even those who've had to be laicized, and about a dozen of the 45 communities have closed. And tellingly, I don't believe he mentions the actual membership number at any point. If it reflected well on him at all, even if he had to inflate it, he would.
