"Be England Thy Dowry"?

A visitor sent me a link to this piece in Crisis by Charles Coulombe that, contra my regular correspondent, is an illustration of what I think is a major problem with how Anglicanorum coetibus has been playing out. Let's just start with the swooning apostrophe of the title, an inflated style not even in literary use after roughly 1600, (Milton was more down to earth) briefly revived as self-consciously poetic diction by the likes of Keats and Shelley.

At best, like maple syrup flavored bacon, we must allow that this is not to everyone's taste, but the idea that this sort of highly sentimental, artsy-schmartsy introduction to the topic should be seen as appropriate by both Mr Coulombe and his editors serves as I think a confirmation that Roger Scruton's remarks about fantasy and sentimentality have some application to the ordinariates. What's going on here, as Scruton might recognize, is salesmanship.

I think the story the piece tells is incoherent, a kind of counterpoint within the Whig Interpretation.

The persecution of the English Church by Henry, Elizabeth, and company resulted in a small, secretive minority in England (and daughter colonies, such as Maryland and Kentucky). They were forced to forego a demonstrative liturgical life, instead focusing on personal piety and holiness. Living a sort of dry (and occasionally wet) martyrdom and—especially after the defeat of the last Jacobite attempt in 1746—having to forego any hope of influencing the external political order, English Catholicism became ever more secretive and inward-looking.

And nothing happened until John Henry Newman and Tract 90.

This dreary picture began to be illumined by the work of such Romantics as Sir Walter Scott in rediscovering the Middle Ages. Their work bore fruit at the birth of the Oxford Movement.

Famous amongst Catholics for the part played by converts like St. John Henry Newman in reviving the Church in England, the Oxford Movement also gave rise to Anglo-Catholicism. In time this movement would transform the externals of Anglicanism, if not its doctrines or ethos.

Note the apparently unwitting, but certainly accurate, attribution of Romanticism to Anglo-Catholicism. This completely skips over John Dryden (although Coulombe's essay owes an unacknowledged debt to Aidan Nichols's The Panther and the Hind), while Alexander Pope was a public Catholic, among other notable figures. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the army. Catholic priests functioned openly and established parishes after this period. Respectable scholarly opinion traces the Oxford Movement to the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and the Reform Act of 1832, which caused confusion in the Church of England about the unique status of the established faith.

And the Oxford Movement should not be confused with John Henry Newman, since Newman became Catholic, while the Oxford Movement took place within Anglicanism and, while it mimicked Catholic vestments and architecture, went its own way theologically and fully tolerated homosexuality from the start, as well as other practices not endorsed by Rome, including occultism. I think sales efforts like Mr Coulombe's take insufficient trouble to draw these distinctions, because what's being done here, as Mr Coulombe makes clear, is to bring a good deal of Anglicanism into the Church without much reflection:

But Anglo-Catholicism produced not only many of those same converts but a large number of clerical theologians and lay thinkers of the caliber of T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Arthur Machen, Dorothy Sayers, George Grant, and a host of others—all of whom can be re-examined for what insights they may offer.

Literary criticism tends to separate literary texts from the lives of authors, but Catholics revere saints for heroic virtue, and there's no requirement that we keep things separate in evaluating writers for moral or theological example. In the gospels, figs do not come from thistles, notwithstanding the English Department acts as if they do. T S Eliot was a highly manipulative, sexually ambiguous character throughout his life. He endorsed clothing (Langrock's in Princeton) as frequently as he endorsed religion. His practical views on marriage should be viewed skeptically by Catholics.

The same applies to Dorothy Sayers. If writers like these behave publicly in opposition to their stated support (however imprecise this may be) of Christian doctrine -- and indeed, unlike St Augustine or C S Lewis, don't own up to it or repent of it -- I think there's a great deal of reason to hesitate recommending them as Catholic examples, which Mr Coulombe, however naively, is doing here.

Given the criteria Roger Scruton has outlined, where fantasy and sentimentality act in the service of salesmanship, I think Mr Coulombe, perhaps naively, is doing a sales job and doing his readers no service. But I assume his editors are happy enough.

Scruton On Fantasy, Imagination, And The Salesman

Scruton follows his chapter on Romanticism, which is a clear thread in Anglo-Catholicism (although I think Scruton, an Anglican himself, misses this and consequently misreads Eliot) with a chapter on Fantasy, Imagination, and the Salesman.

[S]omething new seems to be at work in the contemporary world -- a process that is eating away at contemporary social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting verything -- virtue included -- on sale. . . . To understand this we need to make a distinction that was first hinted at by Coleridge: the distinction between fantasy and imagination. Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities, but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute the world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own. . . (p 55)

Fantasy for Scruton provides convenient surrogates for things that are at least practically unobtainable. He doesn't use video games as an example, but these are equivalent -- players can become superheroes, Navy SEALs, felons on a crime spree, or whatever else suits them.

The character of the fantasy object, moreover, is entirely dictated by the desire which seeks for it -- the object is tailor-made, the perfect dummy, the walking-talking Barbie doll who does what I want since my wanting and her doing are one and the same. (p 59)

Imagination, following Scruton's contrast based on Coleridge, is something different:

The emotions inspired by serious art belong to imagination, not to fantasy. . . . We might say that here there is neither real object nor real feeling, but a response in imagination to an imagined scene. In fantasy, by contrast, there is a real feeling which fixes upon an unreal object, in order to gratify vicariously what cannot be gratified in fact. (pp 58-59)

But then Scruton gets to the related question of sentimentality.

[S]entimentality plays a central role in modern culture -- it is the mask with which fantasy conceals its cynical self-regard. . . .Sentimental feeling is easy to confuse with the real thing, for, on the surface at least, they have the same object. . . . But. . . . The real focus of my sentimental love is not Judy but me.

On one hand, it's worth pointing out that ordinariate communities are simply not consistent in their liturgical observation, in their culture, or in how they represent themselves. On the other hand, there's a very visible use of expressions like "shared treasures", "precious treasures", "Anglican patrimony", and the like, that have a strong sentimental context, as do other phrases that keep popping up in comments and on forums like "Holy Mother Church". The tone of weepiness is in fact pervasive, and I think it's completely phony.

In addition, there's a heavy element of fantasy. I've already posted this screen shot from the Presentation Woodlands website:

This is nothing but sentimental fantasy being used to sell a project of very questionable benefit. A parish building like that will cost somewhere in eight figures or more. Unless there's a new Harriman or Rockefeller in the background, this is not going to happen, but given how modern culture works, someone like me will come off as churlish (which I'd be accused of, if the vocabulary of the commenters on ordinariate sites extended that far) to throw cold water on the fever dream.

The St John Fisher group in Orlando makes similar sentimental fantasy projections for a new parish on its site as well. And we're seeing recommendations from posters on the ordinariate Facebook forum on how to "sell" marginal ordinariate groups. I think the difficulty is that sales efforts are either going to be just generic "be enthusiastic and you'll succeed" exhortations -- themselves versions of salesmanship -- or continued appeals to sentimental fantasy, which are inauthentic at minimum.

My regular correspondent commented,

Of course, I have felt all along that the project is inauthentic and intellectually confused because whatever Anglican patrimony is or isn’t, it has no existence outside of Anglicanism. In the same way, indigenous North American culture can continue to evolve in indigenous communities—-forms and materials are adapted from settler cultures or other tribes but are nonetheless authentic—-but when a non-indigenous person dons a war bonnet or a button blanket, even in a spirit of admiration and appreciation, it’s just a costume. There is regular discussion on assorted fora about expressions such as “Anglican Use” and why the Ordinariate discourages them; people do not seem to grasp that those in the Church tasked with maintaining ecumenical relationships recognise how offensive the appropriation of the word “Anglican” is to actual Anglicans. It’s black-face. Drag. The tomahawk chop.

Anglicanorum Coetibus And The Whig Interpretation Of History

Edward Feser recommended some basic books by Roger Scruton at the time of his death, among which was An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. Although Scruton is identified as a conservative philosopher, he was on one hand fired by the American Enterprise Institute, and he certainly isn't Catholic -- I found a YouTube of a presentation he made in Norway in which he congratulates his audience for their Protestantism, which they share with the English. But Feser clearly respects him, so I went ahead with the Guide to Modern Culture.

And Scruton brought me back to the very frustrating time I spent studying Eng Lit in graduate school. I was exposed to views generally consistent with those outlined by Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History, which Wikipedia I think accurately summarizes as "a story of progress toward the present and specifically toward the British constitutional settlement".

Typical distortions thereby introduced are:

• Viewing the British parliamentary, constitutional monarchy as the apex of human political development;
• Assuming that the constitutional monarchy was in fact an ideal held throughout all ages of the past, despite the observed facts of British history and the several power struggles between monarchs and parliaments;
• Assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs (anachronism);
• Assuming that British history was a march of progress whose inevitable outcome was the constitutional monarchy; and
• Presenting political figures of the past as heroes who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.

During this time, I was further influenced by a derivative 1972 paper by the UCLA English professor Henry Knight Miller, The "Whig Interpretation" of Literary History. After I began to discern that an academic career wasn't in my future, these impressions receded into the background, and it wasn't until I started reading Scruton that I began seriously rehabilitating them in the context of Anglicanorum coetibus.

I don't believe Scruton himself endorses the Whig Interpretation, but I do think his outline of Romantic thought and its consequences in Chapters 5 and 6 is an accurate understanding of how the Whig Interpretation plays out in contemporary culture. The view of history I was taught in college and graduate school in the 1960s and 70s was heavily infused by either Protestantism or the Old Atheism of Marx and Freud, and it was definitely Whig. This carried over to literary and cultural history as well.

Scruton deconstructs the 19th-century Romantic view as one that on one hand accepts Enlightenment a priori rationalism while simultaneously finding it unendurable.

Romanticism was less a reaction to the Enlightenment than an attitude concealed within it. Only against the background of emancipation does the poetic Weltschmerz make sense. In the lasting monumnts of Romantic art we encounter the artist-hero, for whom freeedom is both an absolute value and an intolerable burden. . . . The course of Romantic art is one of ever-deeper mourning for the life of "natural piety" which Enlightenment destroyed. And from this mourning springs the Romantic hope -- the hope of recreating in imagination the community that will never again exist in fact. Hence the importance of folk poetry, folk traditions, and 'ancestral voices'. (pp 48-49)

I've previously noted here the influence of the Reform Act of 1832 and the insecurities fostered by the industrial revolution and the social upheaval created by railways as influences on the Oxford Movement and the viral popularity of Anglo-Catholicism. But I think Scruton points out an additional cultural influence here, the Romantic and Victorian longing for the idea of a community founded on natural piety, which is clearly connected with the Anglo-Catholic fantasy of a pre-Reformation English Catholicism that can, however, now be reconciled with a bourgeois culture of parliamentary progress.

But since this is a fantasy -- the Romantics at least saw the contradiction here -- this has never been a stable movement. Observers of the current debates, intellectually anemic as they are, within the ordinariates note that a basic question is never addressed, much less answered: is Anglicanorum coetibus trying to bring post-Reformation Anglicanism into the Church? What's the point, after all, of bringing Cranmerian prayers into a mass text derived from the Latin? Or is it trying to recreate (or more accurately, conjure de novo) a pre-Reformation community of natural piety, which we very briefly saw in the utterly inauthentic "Gilbertine" revival?

The measure of a good theory is its ability to make accurate predictions. The bourgeois Whig interpretation hasn't been an accurate explainer or predictor of historical trends. By the same token, the Romantic thread in modern bourgeois culture hasn't been a productive influence for use in evangelization. The minimal response to the ordinariates is simply a reflection of that. Everyone makes mistakes, look at the Edsel, New Coke, and PC Junior. Anglicanorum coetibus is based on flawed assumptions about modern culture.

Comments On Yesterday's Facebook Exchange

Several visitors have commented on the Facebook exchange I reported in yesterday's post. One visitor says,

Reading the exchange between Mr. Smith and Mr. Beeler it felt like they were talking past each other and drawing different pictures. Mr. Smith makes the point some of the issues with the Ordinariate brand have to do with unforced errors: not utilizing optimized search engines, keeping their messaging up to date and not so overly fussy nobody actually reads it. Mr. Beeler seems to think boutique Catholicism is the way to go. Neither one seems to grasp that theologically mature Catholics understand the mission of Christ’s Church AND that it can be promulgated from more than one Rite.

Real Catholics I know are not rabid, fanatical and obsessing over only attending one kind of Mass. This was a lesson Fr. Phillips couldn’t seem to learn. He counted on regular Diocesan Catholics but misunderstood why they attended his Parish. Most Catholics who make the time to attend Mass every Sunday understand the Mass is the Mass and the decision about which Mass to attend has more to do with the times offered, the distances involved and whether or not they have something pressing to do on that day.

I know plenty of folks who enjoy attending TLM about once a month or so but also attend and support their Novus Ordo parish the rest of the time. Plenty of regular folks “put up with” the DW version of Mass because their kids go to the school. Even run of the mill Catholics know they can attend Mass in another language and it still counts as Mass even if they don’t understand a single spoken word, and most of them have done it at least once! My experience: extremely rigid systems fail much sooner than systems with strength and flexibility. I find neither Mr. Smith or Mr. Beeler’s postulations very compelling but they both seem overly rigid.

I think this goes to the sense Mr Smith's remarks give me that he's continuing a collegiate quest for authenticity past its normal expiration date. He seems to want to see authenticity in "working class" Catholics without understanding how "working class" authenticity works. Tasks in the crafts and trades are learned in some part through muscle memory, so that the "work" often seems to be done in an offhand manner, and it's hard for an outsider to parse out what the actual purpose is, or to separate the individual pieces of each task.

But what's being done is highly deliberate, and "the rules are written in blood", as rail workers say. But the workers "just do it". This goes to what the visitor here says about "authentic" Catholics going to mass. They aren't overanalyzing things, and they certainly aren't getting weepy about precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony. Mr Smith's approach will gain respect mainly over high tea with Mrs Gyapong.

My regular correspondent has a take that's not all that far from this:

Mr Smith feels that “ordinary people” —- let’s leave aside how we define them —- are looking for certain things in a Catholic, or even just a Christian, community, and if they find them then the specifics of the liturgy are of secondary interest at best—-possibly of no interest. I find this a more appealing idea than that there is a big thirst for the superficial trappings of Anglo-Catholicism, which is the alternative hypothesis presented. Of course I am not sure that the latter is what Anglicanorum coetibus was talking about, although that is certainly how it is being generally interpreted. If it is about that, it seems far below the theological sophistication one generally expects from Benedict XVI. Bp Lopes has chosen to interpret it in the spirit of this account of the conversion of St Elizabeth Seton, i e, that in the Episcopal church, as in others, there are “many elements of sanctification and of truth” which, rightly perceived, already belong to the Church and impel one towards unity with it. So, nothing new here—-these are the sentiments expressed by Pope Paul VI in his homily at her canonisation in 1975.

The dumbed-down interpretation, as expressed by Mr Beeler and found widely elsewhere, is that elements familiar from Anglicanism will make former Anglicans feel at home and lessen the trauma of making a switch. This of course is vulnerable to the rejoinder that Anglicans are an endangered species and not worth the effort to attract (Fr Bartus’s point, before he disappeared from Facebook). So was Pope Benedict just echoing sentiments expressed thirty years previously? Was he somehow pressured into enlarging the “soft landing” which the Pastoral Provision provided for former Episcopalian clergy in the US to serve the agenda of interested parties? Or was he trying to make some new theological point about some “treasure to be shared” which Anglicanism could bring to the Church? Mr Smith clearly rejects this last interpretation. TLM, Melkite, DW, OF—-any congregation which followed his rules would grow and flourish and its liturgy would become as the “mother tongue” of the congregation. The fact that no one seems able to explain this “shared treasure” in any intellectually respectable way does lend support to his point.

The question of just what Benedict had in mind with Anglicanorum coetibus is a conundrum, and I'm not sure if we'll ever have a good answer. My own hunch is that this was a secondary agenda item that was somewhere on Bernard Law's overall plan to become pope. It was certainly not as high on the priority list as the Catechism, but he was pretty clearly pursuing it throughout the 1980s and 90s. The interpretation I've heard is that Law was wrong-footed in his strategy when John Paul lived half a dozen years longer than expected, while Law had to flee Boston in disgrace instead of leaving for the big conclave he expected before 2000.

So Law, I would think from this version, decided to push Anglicanorum coetibus as something to do when he got to Rome and another guy was pope instead of him. And Benedict may simply have credited Law for knowing what he was doing. This might explain the overall incoherence of the project. But I think both Mr Smith and Mr Beeler are taking this far, far too seriously.

So, What Are The Ordinariates Good For?

My regular correspondent sent me screen shots from a thread on the Anglican Ordinariate Informal Conversation forum. A dialogue between John Beeler and Peter Smith began with references to "hate" on this blog but moved on into the question of what Anglicanorum coetibus is good for, and what people might be expected to get out of it. The lack of any real focus in the opinions, and in fact the drift toward indifferentism, are somewhat troubling. Here's the first one (click on the image for a larger copy):

Peter Smith, who writes for the Register and should really know better, says the question is neither liturgy nor language, since Hispanics in Texas have grown fond of worshiping in Arabic at mosques, and we should admire their zeal. Well, shall we say, up to a point, huh? Smith says it's the "poor witness" of Catholic churches (and I'm just not sure what he means about that) that's driving people elsewhere in search of the Gospel. Well, you're not gonna find the Gospel in a mosque, Mr Smith.

So let's back up and ask him to explain what the "poor witness" in the Catholic Church consists of. I want to see concrete examples. How is the witness of, say, Bp Barron, Word on Fire, Ascension Presents, or Revevant Radio, just as a few examples, failing? Mr Smith himself writes for the Register. Is that poor witness? Where is poor witness specifically to be found? Just general references to holding hands around the altar or dancing in the aisles won't cut it. My e-mail is on the right.

Mr Smith suggests i have a "flawed interpretive framework with weak knowledge base". Hmm. My interpretive framework probably moves from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience to Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles to C S Lewis's Surprised by Joy to B C Butler's The Idea of the Church to Frederick Kinsman's Salve Mater to Douglas Bess' Divided We Stand, mediated by four years hard time in a graduate English department studying linguistics, the history of the English language, rhetoric, and English cultural history. I spent 30 years as an Episcopalian in parishes high, low, and broad, and another two as a "continuer". You? My e-mail is at right.

Here's a second screen shot: (Again, click on the image for a larger view):

What's puzzling is that Mr Smith here clearly thinks ordinariate parishes should be aiming at "a working class family with a high school education". But wait a moment. His interlocutor, Mr Beeler, insists he was "formed by and love the same kind of high church that the ordinariate does". There seems to be a basic misunderstanding of target audience here. Consider that many Novus Ordo parishes are in fact in working-class districts, and many continue to feature a working-class ethnic appeal even if they're in now-gentrified areas.

Is Mr Smith suggesting that ordinariate parishes somehow supplant the mission of Novus Ordo parishes outside the original, clearly expressed audience (in Anglicanorum coetibus itself and the Complementary Norms) of former Episcopalians? It seems to me that Mr Beeler is probably more correct in identifying himself as part of the ordinariates' target audience, and Mr Smith is making suggestions that aren't very clear.

Here's the third screen shot:

Mr Smith is still deeply confused here, I think. He keeps referring to the "working class" although if he writes for a living, he's sociologically speaking an intellectual, and not a member of the working class. (I would note that commentary that I think is incisive on the recent UK election suggests that Labour lost its vision when urban intellectuals felt entitled to speak for the working class, which inexplicably went Tory. I wonder if something like that is happening here.)

I would actual;y suggest that Mr Smith, who if anything is imprecise in this exchange, is expressing not so much a wish to appeal to a reified "working class" (he is probably not familiar with any actual working class people) as a more generalized wish for personal authenticity, which has been characteristic of middle-class younger people poorly educated in contemporary colleges. He seems to be longing for a situation in which people "eat, breathe, and drink Catholic" in some authentic way.

But how will affecting archaic and academicized English in liturgy bring authenticity? If you discover you like Trollope or TV films of Jane Austen novels, fine. But if you grew up in suburban Ohio, for instance, this won't be an authentic part of who you are. Trying to graft it onto idealized "working class" people won't work, either. And again, Mr Smith is not very precise in this exchange, and I'm not sure what he's aiming at.

Does he think the Divine Worship missal will bring the "working class" as he imagines it back to the Church where Novus Ordo has failed? I'm wondering who has the flawed interpretive framework here, to tell the truth.

Anglican Priest Wanted In Glamorous Hollywood!

A visitor alerted me to this help wanted posting on the Anglican Church in America site, "Priest Search -St. Mary of the Angels in Hollywood, CA". The most remarkable thing about it is the dog that isn't barking: the parish is under threat of foreclosure on its moneymaking property, which would directly threaten the job of whomever might be hired.

The listing dates from last October, when that litigation was well under way. "The first contact would be with the Rev'd Canon William Bower". Er, how long will it be before Canon Bower raises the delicate matter of the dodginess of the position and the impending foreclosure? Later rather than sooner, I would expect, if Canon Bower, who is quite elderly, has even been made aware of it. My wife, who used to work in employment law, suggests that to bring a new hire into California under false pretenses is a violation.

In 2020, a prudent part of the jobseeking process is to use web searches, on either the candidate or the potential employer. If a candidate has ordinary good sense, he'll do a web search on the parish, and if he does, he'll certainly come up with this blog. I can't imagine that anyone worth hiring for that position would seriously apply after looking at the circumstances outlined here and in plenty of other sources on line. On the other hand, the applicant pool in "continuing" denominations these days is likely well below second tier.

The listing goes on,

The ideal candidate would be a single man and a high church Anglo-Catholic. We will consider a married priest - the concern is with the high cost of living in the Hollywood area.

This raises two intriguing questions. The first is the "high cost of living in the Hollywood area" vis-a-vis what the parish is able to pay its priest. In late 2011, I briefly served as parish treasurer, and I had more or less full exposure to its finances. In the years prior to the 2012 round of litigation, the parish paid the rector $65,000 per year, plus health and pension benefits, plus a car, plus a housing allowance. This would certainly allow a family to live comfortably in the area.

But by 2020, the cost of litigation has clearly depleted parish resources, with the commercial property, previously owned free and clear, now subject to mortgage and potential foreclosure, and a new trial coming up in March. So there are major new lawyers' fees coming up on top of those already incurred.

And this is a result of continued reckless conduct on the part of the "Bush group" vestry, which seems to be living in an alternate universe where you can default on mortgage payments and not expect serious consequences. I've got to wonder how much money the parish has set aside to pay a priest, or even if it's capable of doing realistic planning in this area.

There is a small rectory on premises suitable for a single person or a married couple (not suitable for children).

An informed party tells me this rectory is termite-ridden and subject to the same maintenance issues as the rest of the property. And this goes to the issue of how the "Bush group" clique treats people. During the 2012-14 litigation, I heard numerous reports of Mrs Bush and the wardens shouting at their then attorneys in public. (Those attorneys withdrew from the case when they'd gone unpaid for more than a year.)

I think one dynamic in all these relationships is that the Bush clique selects people who have few alternatives in finding either clients or employers. Thus observers of the current litigation are puzzled that the "Bush group's" attorneys appear to be condoning actions like defaulting on a mortgage and coming up with unsupportable legal strategies to justify them.

I think any priest the vestry hires would be subject to the same dynamic -- he'd be a lower-tier candidate in an already lower-tier applicant pool in a bad job market, and once hired, he'd have little alternative to taking whatever the vestry handed out -- including maybe getting paid next month, maybe not. But they'll still let him stay in the rectory! His only options would be to pack up and leave or complain to the state, which would have the same effect.

But there's a bigger problem that I think even the visitor yesterday bypasses when he raised the question whether the parish could survive foreclosure of the commercial property by selling the Della Robbia. The church building is a small, aging property subject to repeated emergency repairs. Notwithstanding it received a complete new roof in 2011, the roof had major new leaks in 2017. Plumbing disasters are routine. This is compounded by the "Bush group's" history of disregarding contractors' advice, which results in new flooding, leaks, and the like.

And I'm still haunted by remarks that then Bp Moyer made in his early 2011 episcopal visit to the parish, that the facility is small and parking-constrained. He understood immediately that if the parish were to become the success that people envisioned as a result of the upcoming ordinariate, it would need serious expansion. As of now, parking alone will prevent it from growing much beyond its current size of several dozen. But even if it retains its commercial property income -- and multimillion-dollar lenders aren't going away -- the facility will require major renovation that even that income won't accommodate.

I really don't see any reason to have much sympathy for any priest that vestry hires. For that matter, I don't have much sympathy for that vestry, nor for its current bishop, nor its comic-opera "continuing" denomination.

"They Could Simply Sell The Della Robbia"

A visitor asks,

If the "Bush Group" loses, I would think that they could simply sell the della Robbia. That would likely fetch enough to satisfy the judgment and the remainder could be used to set up an endowment with seed money in the range of seven figures. The end result would be a parish financially secure far into the future.

If the parish dissolves, what would become of the church? I can't imagine any religious body, other than the Scientologists (to stretch the the term 'religious' almost to the limit ), interested in acquiring it. Demolition will be next to impossible because of the historic designation. Moreover, I see myriad difficulties in attempted alternative uses, e.g., restaurant, bar, condo/apartments, theatre, store, school, offices.

I reflected on these very thoughtful suggestions until I realized that in this context, I was trying to understand why something like what the visitor envisioned could not possibly happen. It wasn't until I had been with the parish for a year and was asked to take over as treasurer that I began to understand how things actually work there, and I'm sure this is still the case -- as it was in 1977, when Fr Barker thought it would be a great idea simply to rewrite the parish documents to omit any mention of The Episcopal Church. The Catholic Church would just step right in, right?

The visitor is assuming a parish laity and vestry made up of mature, and often accomplished and professionally successful adults, along the Episcopalian model. Yes, faced with a likely prospect of losing the parish moneymaking asset, the idea would be to develop a contingency plan, monetize the Della Robbia (worth somewhere in eight figures), and work out a practical Plan B.

However, this would require virtues like prudence and fortitude, perhaps with some temperance added, and a dash of humility. But recognize what brought this "Bush group" to its present crisis. Faced with a business decision made by a predecessor vestry on behalf of the corporation. it decided to renege on a $2.7 million loan. The assumption seemed to be that the lender, whose loan was secured by parish property, would simply go away. It s worth noting in contrast that the "Kelley group" vestry, faced with an equivalent $575,000 loan, realized that like it or not, it had to continue with payments and then refinance or lose that property.

The "Bush group" has simply proceeded recklessly throughout the time I've known the parish as a sometime member. They seem to seek out legal counsel who will advocate reckless courses, or at least will go along with their plans to retain them as clients.

So imagine what an Episcopalian style vestry would do, faced with the need to sell the Della Robbia. You can't just take it out of the wall and send it over to Sotheby's. You'd have to engage consultants and conservators to do things like confirm provenance and authenticity, ensure it's in good condition and can be moved safely, and bring the best price. And you can't just worship with an empty hole in the wall above the altar. Simultaneously you'd have to bring in a church architectural firm to redo the sanctuary at minimum, though the whole nave was, I believe, redone in the 1970s when the Della Robbia was placed inside, and there might need to be another full remodeling.

I can tell you this would not occur with the "Bush group". Perpetua, the junior warden, would insist that her gay friend Herb, who works at Michaels, would know exactly how to handle the whole thing. But another group headed by Felicity, the chair of the altar guild, would say this is crazy, and Fred, who is a UCLA art history assistant professor, could coordinate things much better. There would be months of inconclusive wrangling until Sotheby's insisted it was time for the van to arrive, but both Herb and Fred would drop the Della Robbia and shatter it while telling Sotheby's they were doing it wrong.

I'm afraid something like this would be the inevitable outcome. Recognize that the history over only the last eight years has been to dissipate millions in resources on fruitless litigation, appeals, relitigation, and more appeals. This will not have any reasonable resolution.

St Mary Of The Angels Litigation Update

Last Decemher I covered what I knew of a new round of litigation surrounding the St Mary of the Angels Hollywood parish. Recall that as of 1976-77, this then-Episcopalian parish was the epicenter of the dissent from developments at the 1976 Episcopalian General Convention that led to the formation, first, of the Pastoral Provision, and eventually of Anglicanorum coetibus.

Its then-rector, Fr Jack Barker, was seen as so central to this process that he was asked to keynote last November's Anglicanorum Coetibus Society conference in Toronto that celebrated the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus. (He did not actually attend due to health reasons.)

My own view, after exposure to the parish's history from the start of the 1977 crisis, has been that leaving The Episcopal Church fully four years before any personal prelature or other structure was established to receive the parish into the Roman Catholic Church was reckless and led inevitably to litigation, the end of which we'll not foreseeably encounter after more than 40 yeas, a Biblical span.

Thanks to a former vestry member, I've been provided with court documents that give more detail on the litigation, which is Los Angeles Superior Court case 18STCV04171. The case goes to trial on March 16, 2020. I'm still deciding whether I should attend.

The story involves two competing vestries and parish factions, which are identified in court documents as the "Bush group", which was appointed to a non-canonical vestry in mid-2012 by the ACA, and the "Kelley group", which was elected in a 2012 parish meeting by a parish majority that wished to enter the North American ordinariate.

One outcome of a prior round of litigation was that, following an appeal, the California state appeals court ruled in 2014 that the "Kelley group" was the legitimate vestry and ordered a new trial on other issues. The verdict of the new trial in December 2015 returned control of the parish and its property to the "Kelley group". However, in 2014, while still in control of the property, the "Bush group" borrowed $575,000 from lenders identified as the Kirkpatricks, The "Bush group" also pursued an appeal of the 2015 trial verdict.

While in control of the parish after 2015, the "Kelley group" was forced to continue payments on the Kirkpatrick loan. By 2018, circumstances, which aren't clear from court documents but may have involved a balloon payment, required the parish under control of the "Kelley group" to refinance the Kirkpatrick loan. The "Kelley group" took out a new loan, for $2.7 million, which was financed by Richard and Terrie Sommers. This was to cover the amount still owed on the Kirkpatrick loan, as well as payments to attorneys and other unspecified purposes.

However, in early 2018, the "Bush group", which had appealed the 2015 trial verdict that awarded the "Kelley group" control of the parish, succeeded in its appeal, and in July 2018, the "Bush group" regained control of the parish. The "Bush group" as of November 2018 had ceased payments on the Sommers loan, even though the loan was taken out by the then-legitimate vestry, in the name of the corporation, and using the corporation's commercial property as security. As a result, Richard and Terrie Sommers began legal action in November 2018 to foreclose on the commercial property.

According to the Sommers's pleading, although the $2.7 million was to provide for legitimate corporate expenses, including taxes, mortgage and insurance payments, and other legitimate purposes, the "Bush group" is refusing to pay any of the $2.7 million amount because it disputes $360,000 of the expenses.

The current dispute centers on the Sommers's December 2019 attempt to seize the commercial property of the parish at foreclosure. The court awarded the "Bush group" a temporary restraining order against this attempt. It appears that the Sommerses will argue at trial that

• The Sommers's loans were valid transactions for valid corporate purposes, undertaken in the name of the corporation
• The "Bush group" was fully aware of the loan transactions at the time they were made and did not try to stop them
• The "Bush group" benefited from the loans, which were taken out for the benefit of the corporation and its property and continues to benefit from them
• The "Bush group" has not objected to innumerable other transactions undertaken by the "Kelley group" while it controlled the parish, such as utilities, maintenance, mortgage, and so forth
• The canonical status of Fr Kelley has no bearing on the issue, since the property in dispute is the secular, taxable rental property only.

The "Bush group" has argued principally that Fr Kelley had been deposed as an ACA priest, and any actions by the vestry with him as rector were invalid. They also contend that the "Kelley group" vestry had "forged" the loan application. The Sommerses reply that the court under the US First Amendment cannot involve itself with canonical issues and must address only the legal questions around the loan, something the courts have consistently maintained in all the litigation surrounding the parish. When the "Kelley group" vestry secured the $2.7 million loan, it had the legal authority to do so and was not committing any fraud.

Neither Fr Kelley nor anyone else on the "Kelley group" vestry is a party to the suit, the dispute is only between the lenders of the 2018 $2.7 million loan and the "Bush group" that is in default on those loan payments.

However, if the Sommerses prevail, they would seize the commercial property which has been paying the overwhelming majority of the parish's expenses. The parish itself has a membership I would estimate in the low to mid double digits, and the history has been that, with the rental income paying the bills, nobody sees a need to pledge more than token amounts.

The loss of the commercial property would inevitably force the sale of the adjoining parish building and presumably the practical dissolution of the Anglican parish.

What's Become Of That Promising Group In Katy, TX?

Regular visitors have come to recognize that anecdotal happy talk is a staple of Bp Lopes's public utterances. Yesterday I quoted from a 2015 interview where he typically pointed to a "success story":

We had a new community in Texas that just had its first Mass on the Third Sunday of Advent. Thirty-five people participated in that celebration, so the new community of St. Margaret of Scotland is off and running.

My regular correspondent began to wonder how, with such an encouraging start, the group has managed to elude attention over the past five years.

[B]oth the website and Facebook page are hopelessly out of date: former shows mass times for Holy Week 2019 and latter info for Christmas 2018. Fr Mitchican, identified on the website as Parochial Vicar, has a robust social media presence but seems to say little about the St Margaret community; he is also chaplain at the host school (where he uses the OF) and assists at OLW, Houston.

I cannot find Fr Sellers’s name on the school website; perhaps he has retired as President. Most recent group picture is perhaps from 2018,

I will look further to see if I can be more specific. In any event, there are about fifty people, which, along with the lack of web presence, suggests that it failed to grow much beyond its formative group, which,by the look of it, consisted mostly of St John XXIII College Prep students and their families.

In fact, Fr Sellers sent an encouraging note to the now inactive Ordinariate Expats blog in February 2015, in which he pointed to "200 families' he'd recruited to the new group, although this had dwindled to 35 individuals by the time of Bp Lopes's statement. But further regarding Fr Sellers, my correspondent was able to find

The Winter 2018-19 edition of Parare, the St John XXIII College Prep magazine, has a “Message from the President” (Fr Sellers), as do previous issues. But the most recent issue (Fall 2019) has only a “Message from the Interim Principal.” I cannot find any reference to a “President” on the school website. So perhaps the administration of the school has been reorganised, with the elimination of Fr Sellers and his job.

This might explain why the St Margaret, Katy website and Facebook page have been left dangling. Is Fr Sellers returning to the school to celebrate Sunday mass? Hard to know.

Fr Mitchican is an odd duck; he continues to write for The Living Church, but also posted a thoughtful appreciation of the OF on the fiftieth anniversary of its debut on the Fist Sunday of Advent last year, a Sunday on which he was celebrating at Our Lady of Walsingham. In stark contrast to a wail of anguish elsewhere. So he is no Fr Bartus, in this as in many other ways.

The mass at St Margaret, in the school cafetorium, with Fr Sellers playing the guitar and Mrs Sellers on the electronic keyboard, seemed unlikely to attract disaffected Catholics of the TLM Lite school. Is it being allowed to wither away?

My correspsondent ventured further into the wilderness of social media:

I see on Fr Sellers’ Facebook “Timeline” that he left his job at St John XXIII last year. His Facebook page documents every performance of clerical duties, so I can affirm that he has been celebrating at St Margaret once or twice a month at least since last November.

For example, he was there on December 1, 2019, a date when Fr Mitchican was at OLW. He posts on Facebook at least daily, with videos of himself playing and singing, scripture meditations, and many other “features” as well as personal news.

The neglect of the St Margaret Facebook page and website suggests that these are no longer his responsibility. I can’t help noticing that 40 people have ever “checked in” to the St Margaret Facebook page. The comparable number at the St Bartholomew page, the diocesan parish where Fr Sellers assists, is over 22,000.

Seems like Fr Sellers's recent history has been one of leaving assignments, from Dean of the Fargo, ND Episcopalian cathedral, to Director of Communications in Houston, to President of St John XXIII College Prep. Now he seems to be a supply priest with time on his hands.

The bottom line with St Margaret Katy appears to be that enthusiasm has never grown much beyond the initial optimism of 2015, while the clergy there seem more focused on promoting their own social media presence than publicizing the parish.

In short, nothing new here. It started under Msgr Steenson, but it continues under Bp Lopes as a full-employment program for former Episcopalian mediocrities, for whom the laity are a distant secondary concern.

Ten Years On, And Nothing Has Changed

My regular correspondent sent me a link to a 2016 post at the inactive Ordinariate Expats blog, Two interviews from “Our Sunday Visitor” with Monsignor Steenson and Bishop-elect Lopes give some interesting insight into the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. The interesting thing is how little of the standard line has changed, big things are on the way, we're appreciating our shared treasures, we want beauty in worship, blah, blah, blah.

From Msgr Steenson,

The thing we want to avoid above all else is the ordinariate becoming a safe harbor of refuge for people who are disgruntled with their previous church experience. That’s what we absolutely don’t want.

How's that going? The main signs of life in the North American ordinariate seem to be with groups that consist of Catholics who in fact are disgruntled with their previous church experience -- at a time when, as the visitor yesterday points out, the true fruits of Vatican II are beginning to ripen in the diocesan Church. And,

Obviously in terms of the stability of the ordinariate, we need to strengthen our congregations. Hopefully we get to the point where many of the clergy will not have to work another job in order to make ends meet, that the congregations will have their own buildings and are able to support the clergy full time.

Six years after that 2014 interview, there's been absolutely no progress toward that goal.

From Bp Lopes at the time of his designation,

We had a new community in Texas that just had its first Mass on the Third Sunday of Advent. Thirty-five people participated in that celebration, so the new community of St. Margaret of Scotland is off and running. There is continual interest in other places. I do have a certain sense that the ordinariate is a growing reality. We could build six churches tomorrow if we had the money for it.

Five years later, where are the new buildings? Where are the new groups? My regular correspondent notes, "There were 43 OCSP communities four years ago. Today there are 41, according to the OCSP website." Also, "About 25% of the men ordained for the OCSP are currently working exclusively in military chaplaincy or diocesan parish ministry. Another 10% assist at (or lead) a diocesan parish in addition to their work with an Ordinariate group."

Compare this with a recent post at Fr Z's blog, where he asks if there's a web site that gives reliable statistics on locations and mass times for Latin masses. The consensus is that there's no single completely reliable site, but this one linked in a comment gives something like 52 parishes offering Latin masses in California alone, more than the entire North American ordinariate.

And the sense is that the Latin mass movement is continuing to grow, while the appeal for Anglicans seems to have peaked, with the ordinariate now seeing disgruntled Catholics as a more productive market. But even Catholics are apparently going elsewhere if they don't like the OF mass.

A Visitor Comments On The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society's Advice

A visitor sent this comment on yesterday's post:

After reading your blog today I was struck by how similar Mr. Lybrand’s advice was to the ideas promulgated by over-zealous post Vatican II folks who suffered under the impression that the reason Catholics were falling away from the Church was because it was too traditional and hadn’t changed with the times. Vatican II was just the update opportunity the people who disagreed with various social doctrines of the Church used as a catalyst to implement their social policy. These folks misunderstood the underlying causes for declining Church membership and Mr. Lybrand seems to have fallen into the same trap.

After Vatican II, no other Mass form but OF in the vernacular was allowed to be celebrated in America. None. TLM celebrations, if they occurred were considered seditious, underground and gave rise to the formerly schismatic, but now brought back into the fold, St. Pius X Society. Priests who could get the faithful in and out of the pews in less than an hour on Sunday and never gave offence in their homilies were the Holy Grail of searching Catholics (thus the overuse of EP II became acceptable and the fear of bringing up difficult doctrines became the norm).

Conventional wisdom: Do not talk about difficult subjects from the pulpit such as money, Church teaching on abortion, sex outside of marriage, heck- the definition of marriage, the sin of scandal when “Catholic” politicians openly defy or deny dogma or the flock would flee the pews (and take their money with them). Yes, a lot of Catholics left (or do continue to leave) the Church, but I would argue they were more akin to the wheat that fell on rocky soil or the grain among the thorns than the new-fangled idea, promulgated after Vatican II, that the wheat needed to be genetically modified because the old wheat could no longer be grown in regular soil.

The truth is the truth and people are hungry for it and gravitate toward it. In the 50 plus years since Vatican II, TLM has not only been re-affirmed as valid, it is even gaining popularity and attendance. OF Worship ad orientem not only started new, it also is growing. Whaaaat? Both such backward ideas-- how can that be? After full-throated defenses of Church dogma by St. Pope JP II, priests and Bishops began to slowly follow suit.

Now, in the Church in America, it is not unusual to find priests using EPs appropriately, talking about the sanctity of life, asking for money to support the parish and Church at large, and even denying communion to politicians who publicly defy Catholic teaching. Catholic schools have begun to enforce Catholic behavior standards(i.e. morality clauses) for their teachers and staff and the Church actually sued the government to keep Catholic nuns from having to purchase contraception. Yay, us!

Those things were not happening en masse in the 70’s, 80’s or even the 90’s and yet, it is happening now and becoming more and more the norm. Why? Not because the Catholic Church in America became more like the Protestants (nota bene, OCSP types) but because the Catholic Faithful began rejecting watered down theology and failed social engineering. Parishes that are successful and growing are those that embrace the hard teachings of Christ rather than down playing them.

Growing parishes have embraced the new evangelization and the ensuing personal responsibilities that come with that, and they are finding that devotion to Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament increases the holiness and spiritual growth of their flocks swelling their attendance rates even more. These seemingly outdated, “Catholic” ideas are not driving people away. Truth is truth. Protestant attempts to buoy their numbers by becoming social clubs not churches and watering down their teachings have resulted in mostly falling attendance, splintering denominations, openly contradicting values and practices, and general decline.

The fact that Mr. Lybrand espouses these ideas tells me he is not really sold on Catholic dogma (which means the Church cannot err in matters of Faith and morals), but thinks “flawed” dogma or even human nature’s flaws can be papered over, and thus, the folks won’t be turned off by those pesky flaws they can’t see. People of the Ordinariate, follow Mr. Lybrand’s advice at your own peril. History and human nature are not on his side.

The Anglicanorum Coetibus Society Endorses Stein's Law

Which, to recapitulate, is "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Actually, in Mrs Gyap0ng's post on the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog from this past Saturday, she approvingly cites what I believe is actually a corollary to Stein's Law:

TO CHANGE YOUR RESULTS YOU NEED TO CHANGE WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

This comes from Facebook posts from a visitor named Stephen Lybrand, who is a lay minister at the St John the Baptist ordinariate parish in Bridgeport, PA. He gives his background as

a Catholic layman, former non-denominational Pastor on staff at a growing contemporary megachurch, and Anglican Priest with experience taking a dying Anglo-Catholic parish and breathing new life into it, in addition to helping with a new church plant. My time at the megachurch was a two year anomaly in a lifetime of Anglicanism both as an Episcopalian and later the Anglican Church of North America before coming into full communion with the Holy Father Through the Ordinariate Chair of St Peter in 2016.

However, my regular correspondent found his Linkwdin profile, which is at variance with this account. It shows a Master's degree in Theology/Theological studies from Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Wikipedia says, "LTSP offers as first professional degrees the M.Div. (Master of Divinity), the M.A.R. (Master of Arts in Religion), and a new degree, the M.A.P.L. (Master of Arts in Public Leadership)."

It sounds as though Mr Lybrand spent some time as a Lutheran and in some type of formation for Lutheran ministry, although his degree is not an MDiv, which would be the normal professional degree for a pastor, and it sounds as if the degree in Theology/Theological studies would be equivalent to degrees in areas like pastoral studies in other denominations.

In any case, we can add a Lutheran background to Anglican and non-denominational, which suggests that, like many other ordinariate members, he's been on the denominational carousel, and the boutique parish in Bridgeport is perhaps just one more turn on it. But Mrs Gyapong clearly takes his advice seriously, since she's apparently planning to run a series of posts on it.

His advice, which is very general and more like motivational-speaker fare, is partly good, but partly puzzling. For instance,

Don’t talk about money from the pulpit except in a tangential way or if the daily lesson about tithing. Even in that case, don’t ask for money or set an expectation of giving from the pulpit. When the Priest teaches members to be disciples they will give. Plain and simple. If/when you need to speak about money do it in mail, email or at the coffee hour following Mass. And do it in such a way that those who are just getting by don’t have an inkling of guilt upon hearing the message.

This is in a parish, St John the Baptist Bridgeport, that we've seen has gone to the trouble of seeking a consultant's proposal on how to renovate the facility, but apparently hasn't developed the funding actually to follow through.

Is this perhaps because the clergy isn't raising funds from the pulpit? Diocesan parishes at least twice a year devote the time normally given to the homily to passing out pledge envelopes, either for the parish pledge or the bishop's appeal, and instructing parishioners to fill them out in the pew, bringing the completed results up to the altar. Perhaps Mr Lybrand could sit down with Abp Chaput and explain to him where the archdiocese has gone wrong and the ordinariate has it right, huh?

Our pastor doesn't hesitate to raise funds from the pulpit, and he responds to objections by reminding the parish how many times Our Lord Himself speaks of money in the gospels. We have a successful parish.

But other advice is probably better.

Another newcomer friendly characteristic which makes a big difference is having the Mass last about an hour. If they are coming from a Protestant church they are used to going about an hour. If they are coming from a Novus Ordo parish, they are probably used to 45-50 minutes. If you want people to come back, have your Mass last about an hour.

As we've seen by reviewing several ordinariate masses on YouTube, a typical length is 90 minutes, and considering the Divine Worship missal uses the Eucharistic Prayer 1 with additional Cranmerian prayers at the start, before distribution of the sacrament, and afterward, it's hard to imagine how this could be shortened, even with only a dozen at the communion rail. I would say that typical Novus Ordo Sunday masses I've attended last an hour (not 45 minutes), with at least a hundred but often multiples of that. That clergy are able to manage this feat speaks to their focus and respect for people's time.

So I'm wondering why Mrs Gyapong saw fit to publish this advice, especially in the context of Mr Lybrand's remarks on how difficult it is for parishes to change their ways -- yet if they want a different result, they'll in fact need to change. Are these parishes in fact not growing because, on one hand, they're perhaps reluctant to do serious fundraising, while on the other, a 90-minute mass is a turnoff?

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." -- Herbert Stein

Which Shared Treasure Is St Oliver Plunkett?

It was probably about ten years ago that Bp Kevin Vann, then Bishop of Fort Worth, received several former Episcopal priests as Catholics in the runup to the North American ordinariate. In his homily, he made a pointed reference to St Oliver Plunkett. This sent me to a web search. It's plain that Bp Vann, now delegate for the Pastoral Provision, wasn't going to utter bromides about precious treasures of any spiritual patrimonies.

Plunkett was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July 1681 (11 July NS), aged 55, the last Catholic martyr to die in England.

The rest of the story can be found at the link. His head is now at St Peter's Church in Drogheda, Ireland, while most of the rest of his body is at Downside Abbey in the UK, where the noted Catholic convert and theologian B C Butler was in residence. Butler has noting to say of shared treasures, by the way. To the contrary, he argued with force and erudition that Anglicanism is schismatic.

Bp Vann, it seems to me, spoke with some insight into the problem of somehow glossing over the important differences between an amorphous thing called "Anglicanism" and Roman Catholicism, which has an identifiable magisterium and a catechism. And what's beginning to puzzle me is the lack of insight in Bp Lopes's own public statements.

For instance, what I quoted yesterday from the Register contains absolutely nothing new:

[Bp Lopes] said Benedict XVI, when he established the ordinariates through the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, recognized the Anglican patrimony is a “treasure to be shared with the whole Church.”

“He is saying there is something about the way the faith was lived, celebrated and expressed in an English context that is actually an enrichment for the whole Church,” he said.

Well, how does the way the faith was lived, celebrated, and expressed in an English context" relate to St Oliver Plunkett? Bp Vann sees a certain irony there. Bp Lopes, not so much.

But this gets around to a more basic question that reminds me of a Beatles lyric

Neither, actually, does Bp Lopes. Is there any depth there? It's hard to avoid thinking he built his career, once Cardinal Levada was out of the picture, on this Divine Worship project, but having taken it about as far as anyone can, he's insisting that's pretty much the whole of Anglicanorum coetibus, and all he needs to do is cheerlead for it.

What Means "Ordinariate Catholic"?

I've noticed an increasing use of the term "Ordinariate Catholic" as part of the North American ordinariate's recent rebranding, which pretty clearly includes dropping the term "Anglican", except when it doesn't. A web search of the specific phrase brought up a good many hits, like this article in the Register from September 2018, "Passion to Evangelize Drives New Ordinariate Catholic Communities":

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter is one of three established dioceses under the Holy See that reintegrate the Anglican patrimony with the Catholic Church. In North America, the ordinariate began with a wave of Anglican and Episcopal communities that entered into full communion with the bishop of Rome. But the ordinariate is seeing its own communities grow, and new communities develop, through active evangelization built on common prayer, fellowship, hard work and perseverance.

But this description was actually out of date as of 2018. There was never much of a "wave of Anglican and Episcopal communities", and it had washed back off the beach within a couple of years. The communities aren't growing; their membership seems universally stagnant in double digits, while Our Lady of the Atonement is clearly shrinking. The best hope is a new model of groups that can find an angel donor who will fund a facility in hopes it will appeal to cradle Catholics.

The incoherence of the mission is apparent farther down. It first quotes Bp Lopes:

Bishop Lopes explained that the ordinariate “flows from the ecumenical vision of Benedict XVI,” who taught “the unity of faith allows for a diversity of expression of that faith.” He said Benedict XVI, when he established the ordinariates through the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, recognized the Anglican patrimony is a “treasure to be shared with the whole Church.”

“He is saying there is something about the way the faith was lived, celebrated and expressed in an English context that is actually an enrichment for the whole Church,” he said.

This illustrates a continuing question about the so-called "Anglican patrimony". Does Bp Lopes mean "the way the faith was lived, celebrated and expressed in an English context" before the Reformation or afterward? Certainly the most historically visible practice of the faith can be characterized much more accurately by Gavin Ashenden when he says, " Anglicanism in the 17th century tried to ride two horses at once, both -- both Catholic and Reformed, . . . now that was a real failure, they didn't manage that".

So culturally, which horse was the good horse? How do we tease the Catholic from Anglican? Bp Lopes never gets to this point. The Register piece thinks it has the answer, though:

One of the engines of the ordinariate’s development and growth is the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society (ACS), which has a mission to nourish and pass on the Anglican patrimony within the Catholic Church.

“There’s a great interest in the ordinariates and our Anglican patrimony that Pope Benedict described as a ‘precious gift’ and a ‘treasure to be shared,’” explained Deborah Gyapong, president of the ACS. “That passion animates the society, but our focus is also on evangelization and deeper conversion to the Catholic faith.”

. . . “Our interest is not in studying our patrimony as some kind of historical society, but in keeping it alive because of its beauty, its truth and its goodness,” she said. “Our liturgy, our daily offices, our high sacral language and our community life have helped us grow ever deeper in our Christian faith.”

So we aren't going to try to figure any of that historical stuff out. We're going to just sorta-kinda do the ordinariate thing, because Pope Benedict thought it was a good idea, or something like that.

Another issue continues to be the conflict in public statements about who the ordinariates are meant for. Father down:

Eric Waltemate, a chiropractic doctor in St. Louis, Missouri, is part of a similar effort called the Anglican Patrimony Community of St. Louis that hopes to attract enough eligible members, such as current or prospective Catholics from Anglican, Episcopal, Methodist, or African Methodist Episcopal churches (either a Catholic group with members from those English Church backgrounds, or an Anglican, Episcopal, Methodist or African Methodist Episcopal congregation) to form an eventual ordinariate Catholic community. Waltemate said he has already been in contact with “current Anglicans and former Anglicans and Episcopalians who are now Catholic” who have expressed an interest.

Well, this was 2018, and they were still talking about "eligible members" As of 2019 and Presentation, the Woodlands or St John Fisher Orlando, it's "We encourage all Catholics to join us for the Sacrifice of the Mass."

There's no clear leadership vision, either in Houston or at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society. "Ordinariate Catholic" is a meaningless term.

St John Fisher Orlando Update

My regular correspondent reports on the St John Fisher Orlando community:

This community, which has been worshipping in a local hospital chapel since 2016 and was formed, we conjectured, (cf your post of August 7, 2018) as an ordination opportunity for now-Fr McCrimmon has apparently outgrown the chapel and is moving to a cafetorium, As you can see from the new website, outreach to former Anglicans does not seem to be high on their agenda. Indeed, I have not found the word “Anglican” anywhere on the website, although it does appear on the (rarely updated) FB page. This has been a very publicity-shy community, but the hospital chapel has a capacity of 20-something, I estimate. Now they hope “very soon” to erect their own church.

I noticed on the website a reference to “gracious gifts” which have led to the plans to build a church. A familiar pattern. Yet Catholic churches do not seem to be in short supply in Orlando.

The home page simply says, "We encourage all Catholics to join us for the Sacrifice of the Mass." The About Us page says simply,

The Ordinariate exists for those who are and who will be coming into full communion with the Catholic Church. Through the reverence and beauty of our worship, study of sacred Scripture and charity for those in need, we desire to share the joy of being Roman Catholic!

So the group is following what appears to be a general post-2019 line, to ditch any reference to Anglicanorum coetibus or Complementary Norms in hopes basically of hooking anyone who wanders in the door. This is simply a tacit acknowledgement that the idea of recruiting disgruntled Episcopalians with a liturgy that sorta-kinda resembles Rite One (but is longer and stuffier) simply hasn't worked.

But as we've seen, this goes against the very positive trend of vernacular liturgy in contemporary language that's widely inspired Protestant denominations worldwide, and as my St Thomas Hollywood friend and I agree, has actually resulted in a steady trickle of converts without the need for personal prelatures.

The St John Fisher parish meets at the Andover Elementary School in zip code 32825. I went to the Diocese of Orlando parish finder and found four diocesan parishes within five miles of that zip, each with four Sunday masses plus the Saturday vigil. What need will a small group with no facility and minimal program beyond the heavy furniture mass fulfill?

I find it somewhat disturbing, too, that the website is loaded with stock photos of English country churches and similar countryside scenes, with no truth-in-advertising caution that "Scenery in central Florida does not resemble images shown". The draw seems to be people who to a greater or lesser extent are living lives of grandiose fantasy, which the ordinariate will somehow feed.

A final concern is how little publicity Houston gives to this sort of activity. A normal house organ would have upbeat features on every such move, with photos and anecdotes illustrating the growth and plans. In fact, Peter Jesserer Smith, who writes for the Register, is a member of the Rochester ordinariate community but either hasn't been approached or isn't in a position to volunteer such services.

Heck, I've done this kind of thing as a volunteer for parish newsletters in the past. It's not that hard. Mr Smith, why aren't you contributing your talents to this enterprise? Instead, people come here for ordinariate news, which they can't find anywhere else. Something's missing.

Vatican II And The Protestant Liturgical Reform Movement

When I began to ask myself who, besides the Episcopalians and the ELCA, had gone to a three-year liturgy after Vatican II, I was utterly taken aback to find the Wikipedia article I linked yesterday, which listed scores of Protestant denominations worldwide, including all the US main lines, plus others like the Church of the Nazarene, Disciples of Christ, and many more.

Almost as surprising is how little credit it gives to Vatican II for the change:

The Revised Common Lectionary is a lectionary of readings or pericopes from the Bible for use in Protestant Christian worship, making provision for the liturgical year with its pattern of observances of festivals and seasons. It was preceded by the Common Lectionary, assembled in 1983, itself preceded by the COCU Lectionary, published in 1974 by the Consultation on Church Union (COCU). This lectionary was derived from various Protestant lectionaries in current use, which in turn were based on the 1969 Ordo Lectionum Missae, a three-year lectionary produced by the Roman Catholic Church following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The Catholic part is just an oh-by-the-way. A fellow ex Episcopalian convert I know from St Thomas Hollywood days responded to yesterday's post:

In confirmation classes and other settings I was outspoken in acknowledging the Catholic origins of the Lectionary and the Vatican II influence on the contemporary BCP -- to the consternation of some. I would say that was part of what pointed me towards conversion. Naively, I thought there were many like me in the Episcopal Church who for those reasons, along with the various reasons there had always been a steady stream of converts, would welcome Anglicanorum coetibus.

But it goes beyond this. Via hobby connections, I'm getting to know an ELCA pastor who'll be retiring this year. When he appears on Facebook posts, he's fully vested in an alb and chasuble. I'd looked this up earlier, and vestment suppliers clearly see a Lutheran market for that style of vestments, which struck me as an innovation. I asked him about this in a different context, and he replied,

When I was growing up, most Lutheran pastors wore surplice, cassock, and stole for Sunday liturgies. "Cassock albs" (with built in amice) became almost universal in the late 1970s, and with the introduction of weekly communion in many parishes with the publication of the Lutheran Book of Worship in 1979, lots of us began wearing chasubles.

He followed up to say that Lutheranism had been Protestantized in the 18th century beyond Luther's intent and stressed with me Luther's belief in the Real Presence. (This is probably consonant with remarks by Bp Barron and Pope Francis that can be construed as Lutheran friendly.)

But what I'm seeing in exchanges like this is that Vatican II appears to have had an enormous, but largely unacknowledged, impact on Protestant thought, to the extent that not only did at least the ELCA revise its liturgy at the same time as TEC revised the BCP, but Lutheran pastors began to vest in alb and chasuble.

How did this occur? Why is so little said of it? If I were William James trying to update The Varieties of Religious Experience, I think I would argue from the effects of Vatican II, which Catholic critics seem to denigrate, but whose full impact may not be seen for many more generations.

Can Someone Help Me Figure This Out?

When I had my Episcopalian confirmation class in 1980-81, it covered quite a bit on the new 1979 prayer book, including a session on the three-year lectionary. Although it said the liturgy itself was modernized, patterned after Vatican II, and although it explained that the lectionary had a three-year cycle, nobody mentioned that this also came from Vatican II. From the start, I've been fascinated with the three-year lectionary, but I just assumed (always dangerous) that this was something Anglicans had taken from the pre-Reformation Church and had simply passed on as a good thing.

I learned much more recently that the three-year lectionary also comes from Vatican II, and the 1928 Book of Common Prayer had a one-year lectionary. I frankly can't imagine how anyone would think the three-year lectionary is a bad thing. As I pay more attention, for instance, I found the stress on the Lucan material that isn't in the other synoptics in the Year C just past was highly instructive. But nobody, Catholic or Anglican, mentions this as a good, and I've been reflecting on why the ELCA (and on research, a good many others) also went to the three-year lectionary at some point after Vatican II.

Hasn't this in fact been a great ecumenical step forward? How come nobody seems to notice?

But this brought me back to the issue Gavin Ashenden raised in the interview I quoted on Sunday. He sees the North American ordinariate as a liturgical movement based on Anglican "liturgical roots", by which he certainly means the 1928 BCP, although he makes it clear that the UK ordinariate is based on a clearer wish to become fully Catholic. But the more I look at Vatican II liturgical reforms, like mass in the vernacular with reveent but not archaic diction, choices in eucharistic prayers, and the three-year lectionary, the more I sense that the 1979 BCP was moving in a Catholic liturgical direction, on multiple fronts.

So what was the source of objection among Episcopalian fringe factions to the 1979 prayer book revisions? As we've seen here repeatedly, the size of the dissident factions has always been overrated, and the "continuing" movement has steadily shrunk as the actuarial tables do their work. Among Episcopalians, the 1979 prayer book revisions are no longer controversial, and even when the ACNA left TEC, although it objected to gay bishops, it retained the 1979 BCP. I'm among a small group of Catholic converts that remain fans of the 1979 prayer book as well.

So who on earth had the bright idea of trying to attract Episcopalians to the Church by coming up with not one, but two successive prayer books that mimicked the 1928 BCP, including its archaic language and one-size-fits-all liturgy, when the mainstream Catholic Church had moved away from it? And again, I think of Bp Barron, whose erudite, thoughtful, and carefully written Letter to a Suffering Church somehow inexplicably fails to mention either Anglicanorum coetibus or Summorum Pontificum as potential sources of renewal.

The 1928 BCP is a totem. A visitor pointed me to a link at a conservative forum to a discussion of David Virtue's The Seduction of the Episcopal Church, in which the first post on the thread was someone (almost certainly an octogenarian) saying flatly, "They need to go back to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer", clearly implying that that's where everything started to go wrong. And David Virtue would, I think, certainly claim that among the clear errors in the 1979 prayer book would have been its move toward Popery.

So I've got to continue to think Anglicanorum coetibus has sent an incoherent message from the start. Why is the Church trying to attract Anglicans, when the line it's taking is based on a misunderstanding of the Anglican audience, and in fact it represents an attempt to reverse, if not entirely the substance, at least the productive style of Vatican II? Can someone help me figure this out?

Another Disillusioned Former Atonement Parishioner Weighs In

One recurring theme here has been former parishioners at Our Lady of the Atonement, many of them deeply involved in parish life, who grew disillusioned with Fr Phillips and have moved on. Over the weekend, I heard from another. The most interesting perspective is the visitor's view that Fr Phillips was not so much a con artist as a leader with many cult-like characteristics.

I am another former OLOTA parishioner with some insight into some of your recent topics. . . . . I have found the ones with excerpts from other former parishioners to hit the nail on the head, particularly your entries from 9/22/19 and 10/29/19.

That being said, I may be able to offer some perspective. I was pretty much raised at the parish. My family started attending in the mid-90's when I was about 8 years old. I was confirmed there (in the early days - the walls of the church were still white!). I was involved in various choirs there over the years under a handful of choirmasters.

. . . Your post from 1/9/2020 talks about how Fr. Phillips believed in "fake it till you make it". I don't think this was so much of a malicious con-man scheme as it sounds; I think his interpretation of his mentor's words was more along the lines of "if you build it, they will come". I believe this theme was the line of thinking that led to the expansions of the church and of the school buildings, except for maybe the last one which is still unfinished. I think that one had to do with securing his legacy, perhaps before his retirement and/or before consequences of Deacon Orr's misdeeds caught up to him. At one point they were talking about adding an "Atonement university" so they would have a seamless education from pre-K all the way through college; perhaps this grandiose vision got the best of him.

However, he did not want his parish to behave like a mainstream "big parish". He frequently talked down about other parishes in the area - never by name, but I heard him say more than once that we should visit other parishes, just so we know how good we have it at Atonement. This elitist mentality was prevalent for the church as far as liturgy (they used to have bumper stickers that said, "Worship like you mean it"), but most especially anything to do with the school. Father always bragged about how "his" kids were doing, how many blue ribbon awards the school had won, etc. The announcements in the parish bulletin were becoming overrun with scholastic and athletic achievements of the school kids. I also have insider knowledge that Father ran the school at least for his last years as a proud grandfather, happy to share the kids' accomplishments but ignoring problems. I think it's safe to say now that with the case of Deacon Orr, this habit of sweeping problems under the rug was a running theme for the school and most likely why they're still having problems to this day (in addition to the fact that although there is new leadership, a good percentage of those who work at the school have been there 10-15 years at least).

As the focus shifted to the school and its seeming endless accolades, parish life became non-existent. I remember in the mid-to-late-90's when they would have annual picnics for parish families to enjoy. We would gather in the wooded area on the parish grounds and enjoy BBQ and fellowship. This was one of the few times one would ever see Fr. Phillips in "civilian" clothing, before he adopted the habit of wearing the cassock all the time. Over the years this event was eclipsed by the King's Fair, an annual fundraiser for the school. A group of people did get together for fellowship regularly, but this was held at a parishioner's house. Some parishioners did eventually revive coffee hour after Masses. In my opinion these attempts were too little, too late, and merely tolerated by Fr. Phillips. If it didn't involve the school, he simply wasn't interested. Somewhere along the way, it became less of a parish with a school and more of a school that happened to have a parish.

Unless it was a school Mass, children were best seen and not heard. The deacon at our current parish reassures us parents of young children who are less than well-behaved during Mass that the Church is either crying or it's dying...and we are definitely not dying! But at Atonement, Fr. Phillips used to stop the Mass and call out parents either from the altar or the pulpit to either get their not-so-silent kids under control or utilize the cry-room or the babysitting service offered in the kindergarten room of the school. It was not always so publicly humiliating, though. I remember one Mass I was sitting behind a friend of mine who was visiting from another state. Her baby was getting squirmy in the middle of Mass. The usher that day, who happens to be related to me by marriage, came up to her and told her to take the kid to the cry-room. I can still see the look of embarrassment on her face, that she was genuinely trying, and that perhaps that baby was actually a little better behaved that day than he normally would be in church. She was stunned at first, and then she did get up, probably out of fear of causing a scene. For a parish that is supposed to be breeding grounds to continue their school, "Let the little children come unto Me" was not high on their priority list.

There was little else offered at the parish for involvement. They had Boy and Girl Scouts (Boy Scouts have since been replaced by a similar type of group), rosary after the Saturday morning Mass (at the same time as confessions), various novenas and devotions throughout the year, and of course, Fr. Phillips' Bible Study. Adoration is offered from Friday morning after Mass until right before the first Mass on Sunday. I'm guessing the reason it is still limited to that time frame is that they have a hard enough time finding adorers for the hours it is currently available. Even glancing at the latest bulletin (now available on the parish website, a nice improvement), they are still campaigning for adorers for certain time slots. Since numbers are down all around, I wouldn't expect to see them offer perpetual adoration any time soon.

Back in the day, CCD used to be offered for kids who were homeschooled or attended public or other private schools. Either attendance of CCD or the school was a requirement to receive First Communion and confirmation. I received confirmation after one year of CCD, but I kept attending because I was homeschooled and enjoyed having a class to go to. (I went all way through high school, which was then taught by Deacon Orr.) I think the main reason it was offered was because the school did not initially offer pre-K-12th grades. For a while, they only had a few grades and progressively added a grade every year. Once the entire range of grades was offered at the school, they saw no reason to continue CCD. Parents who were interested were told that they should just enroll their kids in the school if they wanted them to have a religious education. This extended to all facets of life too - I know of a homeschooling family who wanted to use the gym and the athletic facilities at the school and were told they needed to enroll their kids in the school if they wanted to take advantage of these benefits, despite the fact that all their boys were altar servers and the entire family served the parish as much as they could.

. . . For all the hype, I was not impressed by what I saw at the school. By their fruits you shall know them, and the school kids were rude, elitist, and lacking in the piety that the pictures of smiling, reverent kids in red, white, and black plaid uniforms portrayed. There was an event that the adult choir, which I was part of, joined efforts with one of the school choirs. I was shocked when one of the music teachers had to collect cell phones from the kids...in church, in front of the Blessed Sacrament, moments before we started singing! I thought for sure they would have learned some reverence, or had the maturity of self-control. These were either middle school or high school students. How is this the fruit of the best school on earth, that kids who were old enough to know better and behave better, acted just as poorly as the kids up the street in a public school? The excuse that was offered was that the teachers could only do so much, and that it was up to the families themselves to fill in the gaps to improve their children's behavior. For a brief time I was particularly close to someone high up in the school. I learned more negative things about the internal workings of that school to convince me that my kids would never attend such a place.

The visitor goes on to compare many features of parish life at Atonement under Fr Phillips to a cult. It seems to me that the "long con" as opposed to the "short con" does require a certain level of belief in the con artist as a miracle worker of some sort -- look at Bernie Madoff. So I'm not sure if there's a clear line of demarcation between one and the other, and there's room to see both in Fr Phillips's long career.

But here's something I'm beginning to notice, not so much about Fr Phillips but about the growing number of parishioners who became disillusioned but who continued in the Catholic faith and in fact have been growing in it at other parishes. This goes to my current thinking about the Gifts of the Spirit that are infused at baptism, wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. These people who've grown have received the grace that allows them to develop these gifts and move forward.

It says a lot about these parishioners, of course, but I'm wondering if in the end Our Lady of the Atonement did do important work, perhaps in spite of some of the figures involved.

The Gavin Ashenden Problem

Gavin Ashenden, who had been a "continuing" bishop and an Anglican priest before that, was received into the Catholic Church in December 2019 and is characterized as "England’s highest-profile Catholic convert" (presumably meaning in recent years). My regular correspondent commented,

As I troll Ordinariate-themed websites etc Gavin Ashenden’s decision to join the Catholic church has been an over-reported topic. He was, of course, a “bishop” (of a “continuing” micro-denomination) and a former Queen’s chaplain (one of 33 honorary chaplains at the time) so this was very exciting news to some, leading to considerable speculation on his future relationship with the OOLW. So his decision to seek ordination in the Diocese of Shrewsbury has come as a big disappointment to Mrs G and others, coupled now with criticism of the Ordinariates in this interview . This has led to 31 mostly anguished comments on the Anglican Ordinariate Facebook page so far.

I went to the Patrick Coffin interview at the link. It's more than an hour long, but the subject in question is brief. At about 5:05, the interview turns to the ordinariate. The remarks run to about 6:50, and I transcribed them in full:

PC: Are you drawn to the ordinariate? It seems like a natural fit.

GA: No, I'm, I'm not, interesting the United Kingdom ordinariate and the American ordinariate are rather different ideas, I mean it's the same thing, but I think the difference is this, that in America, where the plan originally came from, the idea was that a number of Episcopalians who were very fond of their Anglican heritage wanted to be able to come over celebrating their -- their -- liturgical roots, really, and not lose some of the beauty of the Cranmerian liturgy. Interestingly, Anglicans in England haven't taken the same point of view; they've said basically if we're going to be Catholic, we're happy to shake the dust of Anglicanism off our feet and become fully and properly and entirely Catholic, and although there is some beauty in 17th century Anglican liturgy, it's a very mixed bag, and indeed for many of us, we've struggled with it for quite a long time, because as you know, Anglicanism in the 17th century tried to ride two horses at once, both -- both Catholic and Reformed, and one of the reasons you've become a Catholic is because you've come to the position that you think, now that was a real failure, they didn't manage that, so from an English point of view, few members of the ordinariate have wanted to bring in their -- the echoes of their Anglicanism, and I think I'm one of them, if I'm going to become a Catholic priest, which God willing maybe happen, then I'm very happy not to come with a slightly foreign cultural ethos attached to my baggage, but to throw myself into the family as a full member, drinking of the same culture.

PC: Mm-hmm, yes, that all coheres.

I think Ashenden's view is well-informed. Recall that the Anglican project began in the late 1970s surrounding the Episcopalians' 1976 General Convention, when they approved prayer book revisions that were in fact modeled on Vatican II, including multiple choices of liturgical style, multiple eucharistic prayers, and the three-year lectionary. The puzzling thing here, of course, is that the Episcopalians were moving their liturgy in a Catholic direction, while a fringe faction of hotheads, including Fr Jack Barker, insisted that this somehow deprived the liturgy of its Catholicity or something.

For reasons that aren't clear, then-Bp Bernard Law began treating with Barker and a few others, apparently well behind the scenes and through intermediaries. They came up with an incoherent plan for an Anglican personal prelature, though the strategy for its implementation led only to protracted litigation that destroyed half a dozen Episcopalian parishes, either gradually or all at once. The outcome of this phase was the Pastoral Provision, whose intent continued to be what Ashendrn correctly interprets as allowing a fringe group to "bring in the echoes of their Anglicanism".

Again for reasons that aren't clear, after the establishment of the Pastoral Provision in 1981, Law persisted in attempts to establish a personal prelature for Anglicans, via negotiations with Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, and finally via a push that resulted in Anglicanborum coetibus when Ratzinger rose to the papacy.

In 280 words, Ashenden has gotten to the heart of the matter: this is an American proposal that tries to enshrine Anglican liturgy within the Church, without any understanding of where that liturgy comes from and oblivious to the message that's being sent, which is correctly interpreted by people like Mrs Gyapong, who believe they're going to bring Anglicanism into the Catholic Church to the Church's benefit.

And he's having none of it. I'd be fascinated to hear Fr Longenecker's take on this, as he's also a former Anglican priest who cane into the Church outside the Pastoral Provision or Anglicanorum coetibus -- but I'm sure this would raise trouble Fr Longenecker sees no reason to stir up. In any case, I think Ashenden's view is the correct one.

More Context For Eucharistic Prayers And The Divine Worship Missal

With more comments from visitors on which eucharistic prayer is correct to use at Sunday mass, and which is consequently a fair comparison with the Roman Canon in the DW missal, I went looking on the web and found this explanation in the house organ of the Philadelphia archdiocese:

To answer your question, the choice of which one to use is left pretty much to the priest-celebrant’s discretion. There are, however, in No. 365 of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, some guidelines that help the priest decide which prayer might be most appropriate — with respect, at least, to the four basic options.

The Eucharistic Prayer 1 (sometimes referred to by its former title, the “Roman Canon”) is especially appropriate on major feasts, since it provides for references to that feast to be included in the prayer itself. It is also suitable on feast days of those saints who are mentioned by name in the prayer.

Eucharistic Prayer 2 is the briefest of the four options and for that reason is often used for weekday Masses.

Eucharistic Prayer 3 is “preferred on Sundays and festive days,” and Eucharistic Prayer 4, which is the lengthiest of the four, “gives a fuller summary of salvation history.” (I tend to use this one when I am celebrating with a congregation that is especially in touch with biblical theology or, sometimes, as a change of pace with a weekday congregation.)

Here's a post by Fr Barbour at Catholic Answers:

There is no strict rule regarding the choice of the eucharistic prayer at Mass, except for Eucharistic Prayer IV, which may be used only on days that do not have a strictly proper preface.

. . . Eucharistic Prayer III is suitable especially for Sundays, and, I add, it conveniently has a place for the commemoration of the saint of the day or of the patron of the place or community.

I m a fairly new Catholic, and my ear isn't trained for nuances, but I'd guess that very nearly every one of the 350 or so Sunday or day-of-obligation masses I've attended in three dioceses has been Eucharistic Prayer III. Certainly I've noticed no jarring differences among them. And this suggests that although visitors may disagree with the premises of Vatican II or its fallout and feel that the Roman Canon should be the one in normal use, given what seems to be a consensus in the real-world US Church, these dozens of priests are simply doing what's licit and generally practiced.

Also, as I've pointed out here, as a convert, it's not my role to fix the Church. If I thought there was something wrong with it, I could have remained a Protestant, after all.

Since I compared EP III to the Divine Worship canon, I was in fact comparing Sunday mass to Sunday mass. One thing that puzzles me is that for those who prefer EP I, why isn't there a much larger movement for parishes to celebrate EP I? There's a Latin mass movement, which has some traction -- certainly more than the ordinariates -- but although I haven't looked for one, nobody's been in my face with "our parish celebrates EP I every Sunday!" or even, like the Episcopalians, Rite Two at 10:30, Rite One at 8:00.

And that leaves open the question of why anyone would want EP I in emended archaic language plus the extra Cranmerian prayers.

I'm also told that Bp Lopes in his talk to the Toronto conference last November mentioned, as something of a joke, that he had a problem with priests who didn't understand that the multiple options in the DW mass were or, not and. Funny, huh? But that's what you get with all those ordinations that amount to 30 seconds in the microwave.