After Feb. 2, I’m looking at my calendar, and it’s an awful lot of time on an airplane. The 43 communities of the ordinariate are spread around 20-something states and five Canadian provinces. To go out and be with the people and meet the pastors, experiencing the life of the ordinariate means going to them, so I will be very often on the road moving to the different communities and back in Houston during the week where our offices and chancery are located.To start with, though, if there are 43 communities, there is a disparity between them and the number of pastors (or at least priests), who number more than 70, while many of the communities in fact have no pastor.
A visitor very kindly sent me a copy of John Shelton Reed's Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. I'm in the process of giving this book a careful reading.
Reed describes a "High and Dry" high-church faction that immediately preceded the Oxford Movement, consisting of younger sons of the entitled gentry who occupied sinecures and prebendaries. They presided over a church with sometimes empty parishes, or parishes with very small numbers. This has an unfortunate parallel with the US-Canadian Ordinariate, top-heavy with prebendaries and clergy literally without cures, parishes with members in single and double digits. If Victorian Anglo-Catholicism was almost exclusively a movement within the clergy, the Ordinariates seem to be exactly the same thing, the people being a very secondary factor.
I pray that Bp-Elect Lopes will look at his see with a new set of eyes.
