More Insights Into A Successful Catholic Parish

Every few Sundays lately I get another reminder of why it was a good idea for us to go into the Catholic Church via RCIA rather than rely on they very iffy promises of Anglicanorum coetibus. Yesterday, the two priests who'd been ordained Saturday from our diocesan parish celebrated their first masses there. The one who celebrated at the mass we attended was quite impressive, and this was a profoundly happy event, with the nave overflowing and a dozen or so priests from the parish and elsewhere in the diocese concelebrating the mass.

What struck me again was that these vocations occurred in a context, the parish school, the prayers of the parish, families that had been in the parish for generations, and the support and encouragement of priests in the parish and the archdiocese. It was an organic and transparent process, and it was a happy one. And as the new priest said in his remarks at the end of the mass, it doesn't mark the end of the parish's work.

The contrast with how ordinations have taken place in the US-Canadian Ordinariate is, frankly, disturbing. The ordinations and subsequent clerical moves in the OCSP seem to stem all too often from this or that back-channel deal, the moves made to suit the priest, not the parish. The inceptioin of the Ordimariate here has been anything but organic or transparent, many of the events anything but happy.