Spin

From what I'm told, the meeting at OLA Tuesday night was so packed that what you heard depended on where you stood. Most heard that Fr Phillips was now Pastor Emeritus, though not everyone heard that a new pastor would be designated sometime in 2018. Whether Fr Phillips was now incardinated in the OCSP was not made entirely clear. The following has emerged:

• Nobody has specifically stated this, but various commentary strongly implies that both Fr Phillips and his parochial vicar have in fact been incardinated in the OCSP. My own view is that if Phillips were under the archbishop's authority, he would still have been forbidden to return to the property, so the clear implication is there.
• One effect of the incardination is that Fr Phillips, born in 1949, will be subject to retirement at age 70, rather than age 75. This adds weight to his designation as "Pastor Emeritus".
• Exactly what his current duties consist of is an interesting question. According to the link above,

  As pastor emeritus, Fr. Phillips will re-assume the exact same pastoral roles he previously had over the parish and the school, minus administrative roles. This is for very practical reasons. The process of transferring OLA from an Archdiocesan to an Ordinariate parish will be long and tedious. Financially untangling OLA from the Archdiocese will be no easy task. It's one of the Archdiocese' largest parishes, one of its more substantial financial contributors, and is undergoing a major construction project with loans currently guaranteed by the Archdiocese. So untangling OLA from the Archdiocese of San Antonio is going to be a full-time job in itself, for people with expert financial wisdom, who are used to handling this sort of thing. Responsibility for this has been given to Ordinariate priest Fr. Timothy Perkins, who will act as the parish administrator from afar -- at the Ordinariate chancery in Houston. For all practical purposes, on a pastoral level, Fr. Phillips is still the man in charge at OLA.

  However, Mr Schaetzel refers to Fr Perkins as an "Ordinariate priest" and leaves out his title, Vicar General. Fr Perkins is simply the bishop's enforcer, a non-trivial position. In addition, there is no disputing that Fr Perkins is the parish administrator, which is the same title given to Msgr Kurzaj. Canonically, Msgr Kurzaj's responsibility was to investigate the issues that led to Fr Phillips's removal by Abp Garcia-Siller. I can't imagine that the transfer of the parish to the OCSP will make those issues go away. Untangling fishhooks could well include untangling the legal liability that could stem from at least one potential lawsuit over Dcn Orr's conduct.
• Oddly, Mr Schaetzel expatiates on the idea that Abp Garcia-Siller has made a mistake and "has lost this battle". I'm not exactly sure how. He's lost the property and a potential income source to be sure, although the evidence we've seen is that Fr Phillips had set up the Our Lady's Dowry foundation, in his own reported words, to conceal or shield parish income from the archdiocese in any case and was using it to pay Dcn Orr's salary as some type of exception to policy. Solving this problem would be a continued headache and distraction, which is now up to Bp Lopes. (Putting Fr Perkins in as administrator, among other things, prevents Fr Phillips from shielding parish income from Bp Lopes as well.)
• Speculation I've heard is that Dcn Orr's retirement may have been forced by Bp Lopes as part of ongoing discussions with Fr Phillips, which seem to have dated from mid-2016, the same time as Orr's retirement. This all suggests to me that Bp Lopes and Abp Garcia-Siller may have been working not so much in competition over the property as to find a mutually satisfactory way to resolve an ongoing problem at the OLA parish.
• Fr Perkins's role as the new administrator involves, I believe Mr Schaetzel would acknowledge, financial issues. These could well involve unwinding Our Lady's Dowry or placing it on a different basis. Dcn Orr's 2016 retirement and his replacement by a business manager on the parish payroll may suggest that this was also an issue with which Bp Lopes was already familiar.

The bottom line continues to be for me that Fr Phillips, while returned to the parish in a titular role, is being eased on toward retirement at an accelerated rate. Discussion among non-Kool-Aid drinkers at OLA has suggested that Fr Phillips's replacement, if it's meant to take place in 2018, could be as soon as nine months away. His successor could be designated sooner yet. Not everyone heard the provision in the decree that Fr Phillips would be replaced in 2018 -- Mr Schaetzel rambled on for thousands of words but didn't mention it in his post.

Given Fr Phillips's past pattern of resisting authority by stirring up the parish, blogosphere, and media against his superiors, I still think this is a very skillful resolution of a difficult problem that had already given rise to scandal. I strongly suspect that, although Fr Phillips and his allies clearly meant to portray the issue as a conflict between OLA, the OCSP, and all right-thinking Catholics on one side and a near-heretical bishop on the other, this was a problem resolved by all parties with considerable finesse -- and a big part of the resolution was easing Fr Phillips out of the picture with minimum scandal.

Fr Phillips is out, completely, in less than a year most likely. Speculation is that part of the package will be sale of the Phillips rectory to the parish for the use of his successor. I'm betting that Msgr Kurzaj and Fr Perkins have each others' numbers on speed dial already.