Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Close To Two Years Under Bp Lopes -- What's Changed?

In response to my question in yesterday's post, my regular correspondent comments,
Bp Lopes has been a new broom to some degree. Fr Perkins appears to be a competent VG; Msgr Gipson was replaced as CFO, for which his qualifications were clearly nil; Fr Sellers was removed as Director of Communications (and subsequently as Director of Schools---I note that "Schools" has been excised from the OCSP website drop-down menu despite the fact that they actually have a school now); fundraising seems to be being undertaken in a fairly professional way.

However there are still big gaps. The website is hopeless: here is my favourite link, which comes up when you go to "About" and then drop down to "Cathedral" and click the link in the last sentence. News items are posted in very hit-or-miss fashion. And worst of all, the "Parish Finder" is a goldmine of misinformation. Two weeks ago groups were contacted and asked to forward any corrections to Head Office but I see no fruit of this effort to date. It would take maybe two hours to look at every parish website/FB page, identify mass times, ideally from a bulletin, and correct the info on the website directory. Another hour could tidy up all the other misinformation thereon.

In any event, this seems part of the Director of Communications function which has not improved since Fr Sellers left. The Ordinariate Observer was hopelessly amateurish under his leadership, but at least it occasionally appeared.

My wife and I, who love both cats and dogs, have a cat-people-oriented potholder rack in our kitchen that has pictures of two cats on it. One picture is labeled "good cat". The other picture is labeled "bad cat". The two cats, while cute, are identical.

I fear you could do something like have a picture of a sparsely-attended chapel group in a dismal worship space next to another picture of the same thing, one labeled "OCSP under Msgr Steenson", another labeled "OCSP under Bp Lopes". They would be the identical picture.

"OCSP with Director of Communications" or "OCSP Without Director of Communications". And so on.