Last March, Fr Catania was removed as the pastor of Mt Calvary, Baltimore---the parish of which he had been rector while it was an Episcopal parish---and replaced with Fr Scharbach. He remained in the Baltimore area, however, until December 2014, when he came to Kitchener, ON to minister to the Sodality of St Edmund. He has subsequently begun travelling to Rochester NY twice a month to say mass for the St Alban's Fellowship there.Nor, I would add, is this sort of issue discussed on the Ordinariate News blog, which, though useful and informative, clearly aims to put the most positive spin on events.But meanwhile, another group in the Baltimore area, St Timothy's, Catonsville, has been without a priest since the reception of the group two years ago.
Fr Sly is leaving the St John Fisher group in Potomac Falls, VA, to become the parochial administrator of Our Lady Of Hope, Kansas City, MO, and no replacement has been announced. Yet a man associated with the St John Fisher group has just been ordained to lead the group in Collegeville, MN.
The communities in Kitchener and Collegeville both have about ten members.
Our Lady of Hope, Kansas City had an OCSP parish administrator. Do not know what he will be doing now; he is not at retirement age.
In the case of the communities in Kitchener and Collegeville, although they did not have an Ordinariate priest, they did have a local diocesan priest who said an Ordinariate rite mass for them every Sunday. The groups in Catonsville and Rochester have no such option, and in fact the group in Catonsville, about 45 strong originally, has been losing membership because of the unpredictability of the service schedule.
Now there may be excellent reasons for all of these staffing choices. But the changes themselves have not been officially posted by the OCSP, so we will not expect to see anything that might explain them. But I can imagine that there is a certain amount of frustration in many communities.
One of my favorite passages in the Gospels is the one about the centurion with the paralyzed servant (Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10). In it, the centurion draws on his experience in a different field to infer how things work in the Kingdom of Heaven: "For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, 'Go,' and he goes; and that one, 'Come,' and he comes. I say to my servant, 'Do this,' and he does it." The Roman legions after all, were at the time an organization that functioned quite well.
On the other hand, a lot of my own experience has been with less effective organizations -- but I sometimes find myself drawing similar parallels with how things seem to go down in Houston. For a while, I worked for a company several of whose officers wound up in prison for securities fraud. I'm not implying that anyone connected with Houston is stealing anything, but I see similar patterns of dysfunction.
For instance, my former employer had a policy of totally reassigning all personnel -- or at least, all those with significant responsibilities -- every two years. So I'd be sent, say, to work on a project in St Louis, and at the desk next to mine would be a former division vice president, working with me at the same level, although naturally I'd have to train him on his new duties de novo.
Late in the game, I caught on: the purpose of this was to be sure that only a small core group knew what was really going on, although eventually someone in accounting turned them in to the SEC anyhow. But you don't have to be a crook to run things this way. If you're at a loss, at least you can delay a reckoning by keeping the pot stirred.
For what it's worth, that's one possible interpretation.
