This is a mission of St Luke's, DC, under the leadership of Fr Sly, a former Charismatic Episcopal Church bishop who became a Catholic layman in 2006 and has since been ordained. A weekly mass is offered. Numbers and other details, except about Fr Sly, are sketchy; the website still refers to St Luke's, Bladensburg, although that parish moved to DC in September 2014, so it is clearly not well-maintained.At some time subsequent to this entry, Fr Sly had family issues that made it necessary for him to move to Kansas City, MO. He then took over vaguely defined administrative duties at the equally obscure Our Lady of Hope Ordinariate group there, while the St John Fisher group was allowed to fold. We simply don't have a clear picture of how many people the closure affected, or what they did in response to it -- how many continued as Catholics? Did any actually move to a nearby diocesan parish?
It's worth pointing out that celibate priests don't have wives, children or grandchildren, which reduces the likelihood of such family issues. Where a serious family illness does cause a celibate priest to address such an emergency in a distant place, my understanding is that he would be more likely to take a leave of absence from his diocese in order to deal with the emergency. Thus the need to relocate Fr Sly officially and provide him with a new parish is an issue almost unique to the Ordinariates.
One individual who had been associated with the St John Fisher group was Vaughn Treco, whose path into the US-Canadian Ordinariate has been a puzzle that I've already discussed here. My regular correspondent suggested that ordaining Treco in Virginia, since he had been studying for the Catholic priesthood for many years and was eventually ordained in Minnesota, might have been a logical solution to the problem raised by Fr Sly's departure for Kansas City.
I've recently learned a little more, though, about Treco's move to Minnesota and his ordination there. It appears that the Society of St Bede the Venerable Ordinariate group, then located in Collegeville, MN as of 2014, underwent some kind of a split in that year. Its membership had never been more than the low two digits, but a smaller number of this group (possibly five people) chose to move to St Louis Park, MN and maintained the name of Society of St Bede the Venerable, although it appears that other individuals remained associated with Collegeville, though that group was no longer part of the OCSP.
The smaller St Louis Park St Bede group then approached Andrew Cozzens, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Why they did this is a puzzle, since as an Ordinariate group, the responsible party would have been Msgr Steenson. However, then-Mr Treco had earlier applied to Bp Cozzens for a non-clerical job in that diocese, but Cozzens had turned down that application. In this event, though, Cozzens appears to have thought that Treco would be an appropriate candidate to serve as the administrator for the relocated St Bede group, and he discussed it with Msgr Steenson.
The upshot was that Treco was ordained a priest for this position in 2015, relocated to the Twin Cities, and was given diocesan duties as well. As best anyone can determine, now-Fr Treco says the BDW mass twice a month for the St Bede group, which has about five members.
It's hard to avoid the impression that the St John Fisher, Our Lady of Hope, and St Bede groups are all so small that they are practically nonexistent -- and the departure of Fr Sly from St John Fisher was an event of essentially no consequence, such that the group could disappear with no other discernible impact. In effect, these communities are ecclesiastical rotten boroughs, existing, as far as I can see, primarily as places to put priests to whom the ordinary owes a favor.
It's worth noting that, as soon as he was ordained in 2015, Fr Treco undertook an extensive campaign of self-promotion, via Mr Murphy's Ordinariate News site and elsewhere, although his actual priestly duties appear to be at a low level. I can't help but note that even a relatively conservative bishop like Matano of Rochester, NY is at best unsympathetic to the idea of an Ordinariate parish in his diocese. Can it be the prospect of having a newly-ordained schmendrick loudly tooting his horn outside the supervision of the vicar for communications in his diocese?
