a home school program to serve our many families who desire a traditional Catholic education. We will begin by offering daily Masses, weekly Confession, Adoration & Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, as well as space for students to work. We will grow into a full home school program in time.All, apparently, in the storefront. My regular correspondent observes,
A number of FB pages have posted three pictures of altar rails and a reredos being installed in the future Holy Martyrs. I assume it is a storefront at a mall, but the preparation implies a location expected to be in use for some time. One assumes it will take a while for the new community to build up membership, and presumably they will have to pay rent, and finance these renovations.There's a bigger mystery here: who is going to lead this group? As my regular correspondent pointed out, "Our Lady of Grace, Pasadena had no Holy Week or Easter services, but an ambitious program of Sunday and weekday masses, Sunday school, home school support, even KofC is planned for the Murrieta community." Fr Bartus can't celebrate masses at both BJHN and Murrieta; they're over an hour apart, and both have Sunday masses scheduled for 11:00 AM. Fr Jack Barker, retired from the Diocese of San Bernardino, is a possibility, although his association with the BJHN group has been unclear for some time, and as of a couple of years ago, he was reported to have had health issues.We have seen some grandiose plans in the past---the school, the Walsingham Chapel at the Santiago Retreat Center---that were quietly deleted from the BJHN website. I wonder if the Gianna Club/KofC meetings after a monthly parish dinner have proved a satisfactory replacement for the beer breakfasts and whiskey and cigar bonfires of BJHN's early days. It's difficult, I'm sure, when you have to reinvent the wheel.
Fr Bartus probably had less experience as a clergyman prior to his Catholic ordination than virtually any OCSP priest other than Fr Simington, the only celibate seminarian ordained to date. And he is working under supervision as parochial vicar at a diocesan parish while also priest at St Alban's, Rochester. Fr Bartus seems totally fine with creating a jackdaw's nest of attractive shiny fragments and calling it "patrimonial." And, as you have pointed out, the California groups may be gathering communities in which vulnerable misfits are over-represented.
The air of secrecy surrounding recent plans for ordination adds to the questions one might reasonably have about this, and the existing track record of grandiose plans not being carried out in California should be a matter of concern.
