We are pleased to announce that Bishops Lopes and Schlert (of our Ordinariate and the Diocese of Allentown, respectively) have identified a new home for the congregation: the stunningly beautiful Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Bethlehem; moreover, worship will recommence with the Bishop’s visit at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 16, and will proceed thereafter every week at that time. What’s more, by that time the group will have prayerfully selected a new name for itself, and will also be under the new leadership of the newly ordained Fr. Matthew Hummel. Fr. Hummel hails from our sister Parish to the south, St. John the Baptist, Bridgeport, from which he will travel north to minister to the mission congregation in Bethlehem. All of these developments portend an exciting future for our outpost in the Lehigh Valley!All this effort to keep an apparently marginal group going. But there's no apparent interest in, say, northern New Jersey, the Pittsburgh area, or Harrisburg. It would be interesting to see insightful analysis from people familiar with Catholic evangelism on why this is, or isn't, the case.
The two identified markets are disgruntled conservative Anglicans and traditionalist cradle Catholics, but new groups in formation tend to be the projects of small families or cliques who in fact may not be in either group, and the projects never seem to grow beyond the small core group of founders.
Or is this wrong? And why is there so little growth even among the target markets, with many states and provinces having no ordinariate communities at all?
