Cuts In Houston?

My regular correspondent reports,

I note that the name/picture of Jenny Faber, formerly? COO and Vice-Chancellor of the OCSP, has disappeared from the "Staff" page of the OCSP website. The Business Manager of OLW is now shown as the Vice-Chancellor. I know that Bp Lopes is performing a number of confirmations in Ordinariate communities in the NE this month, so perhaps he is on the road. If Ms Faber has indeed left this would leave only Fr Perkins holding the fort, if indeed he is not on holiday.

Ms Faber did an excellent job of preparing material for the four annual appeals conducted by the OCSP, and one issue of the Ordinariate Observer, but in every other respect her performance in the area of "Communications" (her original title was Director of Communications) was quite inadequate. I'm not really familiar with the role of a COO but at the moment the OCSP apparently feels it can do without one.

When I noted again that the tithe from St Mary of the Angels would have been in the $25,000 range had it come in, it also occurred to me that $25,000 doesn't buy much. It certainly covers nobody's salary plus benefits. But I also figure that $25,000 would have been in the upper tier of contributions from any OCSP parish, quite possibly second only to OLW Houston.

And my guess is that OLW's business manager is paid by OLW, whatever the OCSP title, not the OCSP, and cutting whatever was paid to Ms Faber could have been a necessary move. A secondary question is that if your staff is incompetent -- a complaint Msgr Steenson is known to have made about the chancery when he was there -- any amount that's paid them is too much.

My understanding is that since the failure of the ParishSOFT implementation, Houston has struggled to identify the incomes of OCSP communities and collect the appropriate tithes, and as far as I'm aware, the project of making a census of OCSP communities, begun years ago, continues without much result.

None of this augurs well.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds,

The task of getting an accurate list of Ordinariate and parish membership has been delegated to Sr Amata Veritas, one of the Dominican nuns now in residence at OLW. I think she has been plugging away, but even the low-level paperwork required seems to be beyond the capacity of a number of parochial administrators.

As far as Ms Faber is concerned, perhaps now that the Chancery has a template for its annual appeals they feel her services are no longer needed. But her departure creates an added burden of correspondence for the bishop's PA. Soon it will be time to organise the annual clergy retreat. This is a year in which wives will be invited, involving more complicated arrangements, I would assume.