Looking For A Next Generation Of "Continuers"

My regular correspondent referred me to the most recent press effort by Bp Lopes, a piece in the National Catholic Register by the reliable Peter Jesserer Smith. (I don't mean to discount Mr Smith's efforts; a much better piece by him appears here. The Register needs to keep him on this kind of reporting.)

Two things strike me. At left is a photo I found on the website of St Luke's Episcopal, Evanston, IL. While this isn't a commission by Cram or Goodhue, it comes from the same pre-World War I era when the wealthy families of gilded-age industrialists were generously funding medieval-romantic edifices. Certainly if what you want is just dignified liturgy punctiliously observed in an over-the-top setting, go here, don't bother with cheap imitations. Go to St Thomas Fifth Avenue, St Thomas Hollywood, St Martin's Houston, or any number of others, which far outnumber OCSP groups that meet in shabby storefronts or basement chapels.

At right is a photo of Our Lady of Walsingham Houston from the Jesserer Smith article in the Register. All I can say is nice try. There's a cramped atmosphere and a budget reredos, and this is via a multimillion-dollar donation. The exterior is similar; it struggles to look like something more expensive than the gothic option for your prefab parish building, but it falls short even there.

In fact, when Bp Lopes invited the TEC bishop to attend a mass at OLW, I'm more and more convinced the TEC bishop was being polite when he said it was almost as good as All Saints Margaret Street. No, it wasn't. It was trying to do something with seven figures that past generations of Episcopalians were doing with eight, and it shows.

Let's go to the rationale for Anglicanorum coetibus that Bp Lopes makes in the latest Register piece:

Bishop Steven Lopes, the head of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, which covers North America, spoke about its mission and ministry at a Aug. 25 “Meet the Ordinariate Night,” a meet-and-greet event sponsored by the Fellowship of St. Alban, an ordinariate Catholic community based in Rochester, New York. Bishop Lopes explained that. . . . Benedict XVI. . . recognized the Anglican patrimony is a “treasure to be shared with the whole Church.”

But to the extent that the "Anglican patrimony" is an over-the-top, medieval-romantic style dating from early Victorian times that peaked a century ago, it's outdated and far too expensive to try to reproduce -- especially when there are plenty of Catholic church buildings that are just as opulent but can sustain themselves with far larger memberships. So what else is there? Bp Lopes goes on,

He also added the ordinariate serves the mutual enrichment of the Church in a pastoral sense. Ordinariate communities, he said, have “a sense of parish as family” by not only worshipping at Mass together, but spending extensive time with each other in fellowship over coffee hour.

“It is kind of expected that you stick around after Mass; no ducking out the side aisle,” he said.

The Catholic Church today, he said, has to figure out how to form “intentional communities” within a large parish setting, and the ordinariate helps contribute to that discussion.

“The feeling of anonymity in Church is the death knell of faith, particularly for millennials,” he said. Many feel that “if it doesn’t matter if I’m there [at Mass], then it doesn’t matter if I’m not there, and I have better things I can do on Sunday.”

Er, Bishop, you're suggesting diocesan parishes don't have a sense of parish as family? There's no coffee hour? Everyone's anonymous? Well, of course, Lopes spent only a couple of years in a parish; he was on the fast track, and he just had to get his pastoral ticket punched, so he wouldn't know. And maybe he thinks there's an advantage in going to a 5:00 PM evensong in a side chapel with a no-hope priest-wannabe who's taking his last ride on the denominational carousel.

It's significant that he's mentioning millennials, although as a group, these haven't had the best publicity. I find under the Urban Dictionary definition of dilettante:

The dilettante has reached its apotheosis in contemporary millennials, especially college-educated ones. They tend to feel alienated by corporate culture and spurned by the economic crisis, and postpone taking on family responsibility, which usually ends dilettantism, until later than previous generations.

The dilettante is an easy target for scorn, but essentially tragic, often overwrought, full of angst, sometimes tormented by the “grass is greener” fantasy. Most dilettantes eventually grow out of their dilettantism—making it a phase disease—and settle into something that provides constancy and direction to their lives.

Isn't this in fact a good definition of the target market for the OCSP? The problem is that the little group-in-formation in the basement chapel is going to be just another phase for these people, and only the largest of the existing OCSP parishes are going to give those who pass through them anything like the resources they need to find constancy and direction in their lives.

In fact, they'll find something much better if they look carefully at diocesan parishes a few blocks or a few miles away -- or in fact, maybe show up at the 9:30 OF mass rather than the 5:00 evensong.