The Ordinariates Have Different Roots And Different Preoccupations -- II

A visitor responded to my last post with,

In reference to your closing sentence I am tempted to respond "What 'Ordinariate interest in the UK'"? Granted there has been a lot of interest among CofE clergy, but. . . only a minority lead groups. And most of the groups are barely active. . . . There are exceptions, of course, but mostly it has been, as you like to put it, a damp squib.

Trying to characterize the UK Ordinariate leads to two problems, the first the difficulty with the law of small numbers and the second the issue of defining "Anglo-Catholicism" or "Anglo-Papalism". The law of small numbers means that variability is more prevalent in small populations. In some thinking about the UK Ordinariate, for instance, I've been tempted to think of Fr John Hunwicke as somehow representative.

From a perspective both transcontinental and transoceanic, I've tended to see him as something like Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, eccentric and basically out of control, and a visitor confirms this impression -- but suggests that his colleagues regard him as an outlier. But given the law of small numbers, everyone in such a small population is an outlier.

In a current series of posts, he insists that some Anglican bishops, including "the Bishop Harry Carpenter who ordained me", irrespective of "the papal condemnation of Anglican Orders in Apostolicae curae", have valid Catholic orders.

Apparently he enjoys pushing the limits. Some US Ordinariate clergy, like Fr Bartus, do the same, though with a different style. It does appear that he is a member of an "English Missal" or "uniate liturgy" faction among UK Anglo-Papalists, something I've already noted here. This is the problem with the second issue, trying to define "Anglo-Catholcism" or "Anglo-Papalism".

Fr Hunwicke, other key figures in the "corporate reunion" movement like Mr Murphy, and Prof Feulner (who, a Bavarian teaching at a Viennese university, wrote the current version of the mass) all clearly feel that "Anglican Patrimony" is primarily liturgical, and the liturgy is what we see in the Ordinariate mass, notwithstanding its earliest drafts date only from 1905. The difficulty is that the laity in the UK Ordinariate have rejected it and have moved to Novus Ordo masses in diocesan parishes.

I've previously noted the remarks of Msgr Lopes of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the UK Ordinariate laity:

He added that it was ironic that many Anglo-Catholics who have joined the Ordinariate did not use Anglican prayer books as Anglicans but the Roman rite.

“We have many people in the Ordinariate who are unfamiliar with some of that wider tradition, the depth of tradition, in Prayer Book forms and Anglican Missal forms of worship. In a certain sense it’s an irony because here’s this wonderful liturgical patrimony and we have Ordinariate communities saying ‘wait a minute, that’s actually quite new’,” he said .

Mgr Lopes added that if an Ordinariate community simply uses the Roman Rite it becomes “indistinguishable.”

It seems to me that the US Ordinariate, small as it is, has at least the cohesiveness that stems from resistance to the 1976 moves in The Episcopal Church. With no equivalent focus against similar moves in the Church of England, it seems as though Anglicanorum coetibus created a market in the UK for a “product” (a community of clergy and laity) for which a market did not previously exist, and various adventitious elements, such as the “uniate liturgy” enthusiasts and other eccentrics like Fr Hunwicke, have seen an opportunity to fill it.

The problem is that, as a knowledgeable informant tells me, the laity isn’t listening to Msgr Lopes and has continued to stay with Novus Ordo, moving to diocesan parishes and making the UK Ordinariate structure irrelevant. Thus my informant says the UK Ordinariate is primarily a creature of the small numbers of clergy there, who mainly don’t have parishes and are often doing diocesan work, if anything.

The Ordinariates Have Different Roots And Different Preoccupations -- I

Reading Fr Barker's Early History of the Anglican Use has helped me to clarify some of the puzzles I've had over the Ordinariates. It's plain from his first-hand account that the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision arose from the moves in the Episcopal Church's 1976 General Convention to ordain women and revise the Book of Common Prayer. The history of Anglican Use paralleled that of "continuing Anglicanism", including predictions of widespread acceptance followed by disappointing execution.

But there was never a parallel move in the Church of England to defect over the ordination of women. The Church of England's General Synod in 1987 voted to ordain women priests. However,

The Church of England took a decisive step towards women's ordination yesterday when the General Synod voted by 317 to 145 to prepare legislation for the reform.

The Bishop of London, Dr Graham Leonard, who had variously threatened to divide and to leave the Church if the synod voted for the measure, said later that he would, after all, do neither.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, who won a major tactical victory over the diehard traditionalists, had said in the debate that there had been 'premature panic' over the prospect of a schism.

'It is too early to be taking the tarpaulins off the lifeboats, and even signalling to other shipping,' he said.

That referred to Dr Leonard's declared intention to negotiate a 'special relationship' for dissident groups with Rome and other churches.

Dr Leonard smiled sadly at the archbishop's joke. Minutes after the vote Dr Leonard said he had no plans for negotiations with Rome or any other church . 'We shall now have to give thought to what to do. It will be a slow, exploratory process. I'll be talking with other Anglicans first,' he said.

Whatever the process may have been, if in fact there ever was one, there was never an equivalent set of defections to "continuing Anglicanism" at even the US rate from the Church of England. There were eventually only a minimal number of Traditional Anglican Communion parishes in the UK. Women were finally ordained as priests in the Church of England in 1994; the first woman bishop was not consecrated until 2015. There have never been equivalent moves of any size to form "continuing" denominations or other breakaways like the ACNA.

As we've seen here, Anglicanorum coetibus was drafted in 1993-94, apparently at the instigation of Cardinal Bernard Law, who had also been behind the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision. It appears to have been intended primarily as a way to bypass the unwillingness of US bishops like Cardinals Timothy Manning and Roger Mahony to accept Pastoral Provision parishes in their dioceses, and it appears to have been based on ideas mooted as early as 1980 to establish such a personal prelature.

The idea was clearly a holdover from post-1976 US dissidence from Episcopal Church actions, and in their 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Pope and then-Fr Steenson gave as reasons for proposing a personal prelature for dissident Episcopalians the ordination of women and the revision of the prayer book, neither of which had become equivalent issues in the Church of England.

So there was never an equivalent "continuing Anglican" or "corporate reunion" movement in the UK to serve as an equivalent recruiting ground for a personal prelature. The Guardian piece suggests that any idea of reconciliation with Rome from Dr Leonard was nothing but a bluff, which Dr Runcie successfully outmaneuvered. So whence arise the roots of Ordinariate interest in the UK?

What About The Current State Of The St Mary's Parish?

A visitor has asked me to bring things up to date on the current state of the people, the elected vestry, and Fr Kelley, expressing some frustration over my preoccupation with the Ordinariates!

The core parish and some friends continue to meet for Sunday mass in the apartment of an elected vestry member. As I understand it, there was a good group yesterday.

On Thursday, August 13, a bank robber hit the Citibank located on the property owned by the parish on the corner of Hillhurst. It was his third try at a robbery of a local bank within an hour, and oddly, the only one that was successful. (Apparently he went to the other two, offering a note saying he had a bomb, but neither took him seriously.) That, presumably, will be among the last whimpers of the bank's tenancy there.

The elected vestry promptly called LAPD and told them they were the owner of the property and gave permission for any necessary access. I don't know if Mrs Bush did the same, though I doubt if she had the presence of mind.

I don't believe the retrial has been specifically rescheduled on the court's calendar. The parish and Fr Kelley are fully aware of the task ahead of them when justice is finally done, but all appear to be in good spirits, and the group has been remarkably cohesive over the three-year period.

Let's Think Some More

about what we can know of the proposed merger of the Philadelphia Ordinariate groups. A commenter elsewhere makes the point

Perhaps disputes about how often the premises will have to be sprayed for termites are breaking out because of the paucity of other news to comment on. I would hold out the hope that a new issue of the OCSP Ordinariate Observer is due shortly, but that is never a sure thing. Garnering news from parish websites, bulletins, and Facebook pages requires the skills of Kremlin-watchers of old, the kind that scanned pictures of the May Day reviewing stand to note any changes in seating precedence.

Well, it is what it is. I've said that the reason the Philadelphia groups are important is simply that the Ordinariates are so small that nothing else is going on, and that in itself is important. But, like Edward G Robinson's claims manager Keyes, my little man keeps pestering me about this stuff.

When I itemized an annual nut for St Mary of the Angels at a little over $72,000 I forgot that, in trying to compare that parish to the ones in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia buildings must be heated in the winter, and their parking lots must be plowed after snowstorms. Via Google, I found an article in a Buffalo paper (unfortunately blocked) that puts the cost of heating Catholic parishes there at $30,000 to $60,000 each winter.

Buffalo is colder than Philadelphia, each building is different, and whether the heat is gas or oil are all factors -- but the average combined water and electricity bill for St Mary's, which would cover air conditioning in the summer (but also include lights year round), was $1200 per month or $14,400 per year in 2011. So winter costs of heat and snow removal in Philadelphia would be far greater than air conditioning costs in Los Angeles.

Why is this important? It seems to me that someone with any familiarity with running parishes must understand what the basic maintenance costs of older parish buildings actually are. An estimate of $72,000 in the US Northeast, I now recognize, is unrealistically lowball; the real cost in Philadelphia would probably be at least 50% more. Msgr Steenson, let's recall, was once Rector of the Good Shepherd Rosemont Episcopal parish from which the Strafford Newman group broke off. I would have to think he has some idea of how unrealistic it would be for a group with 56 members to take over an old Catholic parish building.

This brings us to the first question my little man is pestering me about: Whose idea was this in the first place? I don't think it came from Msgr Steenson: his leadership style is anything but vigorous; the man is practically invisible. Can't have been his idea. Fr Ousley? The tone in his newsletters verges on befuddled surprise. He avers that neither the Newman nor the St Michael's group have even met each other, and they would need to learn to work together. (Given the history of contention and litigiousness behind both groups, good luck.) One discerns a glimmer of realism behind Fr Ousley's statements, and he pretty clearly did not think this idea up himself.

So I think the idea of combining two Philadelphia Ordinariate groups in a redundant parish building came from the Philadelphia Archdiocese, and somehow the Archdiocese imagined that the two groups were larger and more prosperous than they actually are. In fact, I think someone in Philadelphia simply envisaged Ordinariate groups as roughly equivalent in size to diocesan parishes and decided that merging two was something the Archdiocese did all the time -- so someone in Philadelphia called someone in Houston, and the idea took off.

I can't imagine someone like Fr Hough III thinking very hard about anything, much less whether the idea was remotely workable. But beyond that, as a prebendary in what seems both a sedentary and collegial bunch, the last thing he'd want to do would be disabuse anyone in Philadelphia of the idea that the Ordinariate groups there were anything but prosperous, large, and growing. So he ran the idea past Jeff and told Philadelphia sure, we'll look it over, we'll put Ousley on the case. Like the centurion with the paralyzed servant, I'm taking my experience in a different field to impute how things work in ecclesiastical matters: this reminds me of corporate boondoggles that take off simply to create an impression of activity.

The best possible outcome for this would be for the Philadelphia Archdiocese to recognize fairly soon what they're really dealing with here and quietly drop the offer. It would be an embarrassment for Houston, but it would be the best possible outcome.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Visitors here know that I've tended to sympathize with the Cardinal Mahony view of the St Mary of the Angels parish and what it's said about either the Anglican Use or the Ordinariate flavors of the "corporate reunion" movement. I was reminded of one reason for this when I was running errands yesterday and drove past a Catholic parish in the San Fernando Valley.

Since before I became Catholic, I've tended to take a second look at Catholic church properties whenever I drive by. Often they're architecturally worthwhile, always well-maintained. Whatever they're named for, the sign always says CATHOLIC CHURCH. It's a brand, in other words. Somewhat like McDonald's, customers know they'll get a consistent experience there. The building will be clean and well-swept. The shrubbery will be trimmed, the lawn mowed.

This is an argument for the diocesan system. The bishop is local. Should a parish property not be well-maintained, the bishop will hear about it, and he'll see that the problem is fixed. More to the point, the parish priest has come through the corporate training system, in effect, starting with seminary and moving through subordinate jobs at parishes to learn how things are done, always within the Catholic way of doing things.

As I've given things more thought, I've come to think that Cardinal Mahony's stated reason for rejecting the St Mary's application for Anglican Use -- a characterization of the parish as constitutionally rebellious, accurate as it may have been, in my view -- was a pretext. It was hard enough to control the McDonald's franchise, in effect, without letting in random ex-mom and pop stores. Just changing the sign on the roof wasn't going to change the staff or the product. Cardinal Mahony had enough on his plate without that extra headache -- and I would guess that privately, most bishops would agree, then or now. Putting some new guy in Houston in charge of the extra stores is probably beside the point; the bishop, as regional manager, is the one who takes the heat if anything actually goes wrong.

The diocesan model, among other things, involves parishes that are large enough to sustain themselves. Our local diocesan parish, a medium-small by Catholic standards, has about 1500 families. Maintaining the building and trimming the shrubbery are among its priorities.

Archbishop of Philadelphia Chaput, for whatever reason (and it may be good, though I don't think Cardinal Mahony would understand it) has chosen to offer a potentially merged Ordinariate group its choice of redundant Catholic properties for its use, apparently free of cost. It's worth pointing out that the Diocese of Scranton sold the St Thomas More parish its building for $250,000. Nobody is doing anyone any favors by giving away things that have value for free. Mounted beggars spur their horses.

A visitor commented to me that Catholic parishioners are upset when their parish is shut down because its membership has declined to only hundreds of families, yet the Archdiocese is offering to give away buildings to an Ordinariate group with 56 members (families, of course, would be fewer). Of course, the buildings, as long as the Archdiocese owns them, must be heated and maintained at its expense, while the Ordinariate group will presumably relieve the diocese of that cost.

Except that these buildings were maintained based on plate and pledge from diocesan-sized parishes. When the parishes shrank to a size presumably larger than the largest Ordinariate parish, the Archdiocese saw the need to cut its losses. How can an Ordinariate parish of families in two digits maintain those buildings?

Nevertheless, let's say an Ordinariate group, St Swithin's of Bunbury, takes over one of the Philadelphia Archdiocese properties. Based on what I see here, which is completely consistent with what I know of human nature, some cost-cutting hero at St Swithin's is going to say, "Hey, we don't need to pay a gardener! Members of the parish can trim the shrubbery! And the ladies can volunteer to clean the toilets!"

The problem will be that the building or buildings will start to look terrible, visitors will find the toilets with rusty rings in the bowls and never return, but the sign will still say CATHOLIC CHURCH.

And the Archbishop won't be able to do much about it.

Are There Any Adults In The Room?

Out of a certain level of frustration, I joined the discussion over at Ordinariate News regarding the merger of the Philadelphia groups and the potential move to a new building. All we know, of course, is what Fr Ousley mentions in two monthly newsletters, but the take among the comments at Ordinariate News is simply not encouraging.

First, it seems as though Fr Ousley has things backward -- he's taking his groups house hunting, as far as I can tell without initially figuring out what they can afford. In the July newsletter, he raises the possibility of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Bridgeport, PA. He says, by the by,

The property has three buildings (church, school, rectory) and parking.

How on earth is a group of 56 people going to maintain church, school, and rectory buildings, occupied or not (not to mention periodically resurfacing the parking lot)? What are they going to do with the school? For that matter, what are they going to do with the rectory? What planet are these people from?

Someone finally pointed out in the comments at Ordinariate News

In the July newsletter Fr Ousley says that a discussion of the financial issues with the relevant parish committees will precede any decision about taking over either of these churches. He alludes to the experience of parishioners at St James and Good Shepherd, and how a church building for the combined groups would require a similar commitment, without the benefit of an endowment.

But if I go shopping for a car and stop by the Rolls-Royce dealer, aren't I wasting everyone's time if I haven't already realized that the insurance payment alone will be more than my paycheck? I'm not sure how worthwhile it might be for Fr Ousley even to get with various parishioners if none has had concrete experience with pledges, budgeting, or the realities of building maintenance. After all, the groups he's got are small breakaways from established and well-funded Episcopal parishes, and those parishes presumably kept their existing vestries as well as, most likely, the junior wardens and treasurers who knew how things really ran.

And Fr Ousley implies they're all in the brave new world of operating without an endowment. I get the impression he should have been talking seriously with grownups, whether in his groups or not, before he even raised the possibility of taking over a building.

None of this gives me a good feeling -- and the fact that nobody at Ordinariate News seems overbothered is troubling as well.

The Merger Of The Philadelphia Ordinariate Groups

Ordinariate News has been covering the proposed merger and acquisition of a building by the Philadelphia area Ordinariate groups. As far as I can see, their situation is unique: no other US metropolitan area has two established Ordinariate groups, and of course, there are many with none at all. The conundrum appears to be which building they might acquire, of several available, that would be most convenient to all members of the two existing groups. (At least, this is the visible controversy.)

A check of directions on Google maps indicates that the two groups now meet at existing diocesan churches that are from 13 to 18 miles apart depending on the route chosen, or about 30 minutes driving time. I am assuming that this would be an indicator of maximum inconvenience for one set of members: at worst, if both groups merged and met in one existing venue, some would need to drive something like 20 miles or half an hour on a Sunday morning.

If they were to choose a site in between among several available, we might assume that the majority would need to drive less than that. Location really doesn't seem to be an issue -- I would guess that the vast majority of Ordinariate members drives farther than 20 miles to get to mass anywhere on the continent. It's probably an indication of how small the Ordinariate is that anyone would pay attention to the Philadelphia problem at all.

Not mentioned in the discussion on Ordinariate News is the question of numbers and money. The review of Ordinariate parishes published here earlier this year gives 31 members for the Newman group in Strafford and 25 for the St Michael the Archangel group. If we add the two together, we get 56 members in a single venue. Let's say that 56 members might be good for about $60,000 a year in plate and pledge, assuming an average of $20 per member per week. Naturally, I don't know what this actually comes to, and Strafford is thought to be an affluent area, but then, so's our part of Hollywood, and $20 seems about right, based on the numbers at St Mary of the Angels.

Is this group going to have to pay the diocese anything for the building? But even if the building is free, is it going to have to heat the place, clean the restrooms, keep the lights on and the water running, buy insurance, maintain the organ, kill the termites, and trim the shrubbery? And of course, pay an organist if not a priest. (Forget the new furnace, the paint, and the new roof for now.) None of this is going to happen on $60,000 a year. An itemization of expenses without paying a priest I did in a comment at Ordinariate News comes to over $72,000.

Are these groups filing into the different naves after mass and diligently asking "gee, do we want contemporary or traditional? I sort of like the other crucifix better, but this one has a side chapel. . ." anything more than lookie-loos?

Or in other words, is this just a feckless exercise, and is it a feckless exercise for Mr Murphy and his regular commenters to discuss this at all? Mr Murphy and other knowledgeable people may have good answers to my questions, but so far, I don't see anything like this addressed at his site.