San Diego Revisited

In the context of the ordinariate groups that don't grow beyond a few dozen, my regular correspondent notes,

I've been thinking about the very small OCSP groups which are still around but have not grown---or in some cases have shrunk. St Augustine, San Diego is an example of the latter situation, as I have discussed. I assume that part of the problem is that Fr Baaten, as well as his duties as Chaplain at the Santiago Retreat Center, has to be prepared to sub in as required by Fr Bartus at the various "SoCal Ordinariate" venues.

When Bp Lopes last visited the Irvine Newman group, Fr Bartus of course had to be on hand. As the former Pastor of St Martha, Murrieta it was probably impolitic for Fr Barker to celebrate at Holy Martyrs, Murrieta in Fr Bartus' absence, so Fr Baaten was thrown into the breach. Mass at St Augustine San Diego was cancelled. And as we know, Fr Baaten celebrated the Easter Vigil in Irvine while Fr Barker was in Covina. St Augustine didn't have a Vigil.

For whatever reason, the thirty-three St Augustine members received in 2012 seem to have shrunk to an ASA of ten, based on FaceBook pix from the last year or two. There were sixteen in the group picture taken on the occasion of Msgr Newton's visit in 2015, about a year before Fr Baaten took over as administrator (he is one of the laypeople in the picture). The website has recently been updated, which is a hopeful sign. For literally years it has remained essentially unchanged from the original days in Carlsbad under Fr Ortiz-Guzman.

I would credit the new permanent deacon, except that he has been a member of the congregation since at least 2015, where he can be seen in the picture with Msgr Newton. There seems to be no reason to suppose that under the existing leadership this group is going to regain even its initial size, let alone grow. Fr Baaten is 61. He was of course an archetypal "marginal candidate" for ordination

The episode that stays in my mind about the San Diego group is the one in December 2017, where a parishioner left the group in a huff due to complaints that she was nursing a baby in the back of the room while standing and singing lustily, the infant and her breast uncovered. Mrs Gyapong emphatically supported the lady on the basis that nursing in public without covering the process was part of the Anglican patrimony.

Why on earth would anyone at all, much less as many as a dozen, want to confront this sort of issue at mass? There are 48 other Catholic churches in San Diego, and in fact other mass times at that host parish. Even if some lady in those other places is nursing a baby that way, if there are 3-500 people in that mass, it might not even be noticed. A dozen at mass with Mrs Schmidlap running a peep show in back, calling attention to it with her piercing soprano, that's different. There's a reason for all the crowd scenes in Acts.

And once again, although it appears Fr Baaten did the right thing in asking Mrs Schmidlap to refrain from running the peep show at mass, I still question what these dozen or so are missing in opportunities, programs, leadership, and fellowship by staying in such a tiny Anglican ghetto. It almost seems as though priests and their bishop want them around to justify having Fr Baaten as an occasional supply priest to say DW mass at the other California groups -- when, let's face it, I'm not sure how many of the other groups could even pay a stipend to a diocesan supply priest.

It was an act of mercy to close the Minnesota group. How many acts of mercy must still be performed for the ordinariate faithful?

More On The Talent Pool And The Marginal Groups

My regular correspondent sent two e-mails responding to yesterday's post. The first covered primarily Houston's willingness actually to relocate members of the top tier, or those like Fr Chalmers who don't serve as ordinariate priests but still qualify as members of the club.

Fr Sellers moved from North Dakota to Texas, Fr Sly from Virginia to Missouri, Fr Chalmers from South Carolina to Alabama, Fr Duncan from Texas to South Carolina, Fr Lewis from Washington, DC to Texas, Fr Seraiah from Des Moines to Atlantic Iowa and then to Missouri, Fr Vidal from Baltimore to Corpus Christi to Washington DC---I could go on but you get the idea.

Fr Sellers was a member of the original Nashotah House club who appears to have been a disappointment. Fr Seraiah started out as a hardship case, since he was recruited to take an ACA parish into the ordinariate, but the parish changed its mind. Under Bp Lopes's authority, he was parish administrator at an Iowa diocesan parish until Bp Lopes seems to have found it possible to move him a relatively short distance to Missouri, where he could also serve a marginal ordinariate group along with several diocesan parishes.

But there's another interesting point:

At the moment St Margaret of Scotland, Katy, TX has three priests for a congregation of perhaps forty, one of whom is Fr Mitchicam about whom you posted June 19, 2018. What are his long-term plans? How soon will the three transitional deacons ordained this month be ordained to the priesthood? Who is being ordained priest on June 29? My point is that there are some new men, none bringing congregations, who could theoretically be sent to Calgary. Immigration not a problem, if the number of priests currently arriving in Canada from Africa, Viet Nam, and the Philippines is anything to go by.

However, although we don't know exactly why some marginal groups continue and others are closed, the picture we have is that those on the lower end of the scale are unstable.

The criteria for replacing the clerical leader of an OCSP group are unclear to me. St Edmund, Kitchener was allowed to fold when Fr Catania left. St Gilbert, Boerne likewise did not get a replacement when Fr Wagner went into full-time diocesan ministry, nor was there a replacement found in Savannah when Fr Lindsey died, or in Corpus Christi when Fr Vidal left for Washington. As I mentioned, some otherwise marginal groups have continued because lay people have taken initiative, either to find a local priest to say mass or at least to hold on and apply pressure to find an Ordinariate replacement.

But Fr Liias documented in some detail on the parish website the attempt to find a way for the St Gregory the Great, Stoneham, MA community to continue after his retirement. This was a considerably larger and more active group than the others I have mentioned, although not a full parish. Bp Lopes met with them personally, basically to tell them it wasn't going to happen. The best that could be done was to merge them, as a worshipping community, with St Athanasius, Chestnut Hill which as Norm explained at length on Ordinariate Expats was very inconveniently located for most members. The two groups have maintained separate web identities which suggests things aren't going well. So why did St Gregory not get a local version of Philip Mayer?

Well, even versions of Philip Mayer, men who failed to start careers as Protestants (and in Mayer's case, even in the Pastoral Provision) aren't common. Consider that Protestants serious enough to consider vocations as Protestants have solid reasons for not being Catholic, and many have started families. Going through additional formation and ordination in a new diocese under those circumstances isn't an attractive option, leaving aside the likely first assignment of starting an evensong group in someone's front parlor. So a new Philip Mayer in Peoria or wherever is hit-or-miss, and the diocesan bishops involved may prefer to see the groups close as well.

So we're still looking at a situation where:

• No pickup group that did not come in as a previous Protestant parish has grown to become a parish
• The front-parlor groups, and even those meeting in diocesan chapels and cafetoriums, don't have a good prognosis
• They're formed primarily as an excuse to ordain the marginal men who've failed in Protestant careers anyway
• These men require diocesan day jobs to support themselves and their families, and the situation never seems to improve.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds, "The attitude of the local bishop may be a bigger factor than we know. Maybe the Archbishop of Boston felt that the Pastoral Provision congregation in Chestnut Hill was enough, thanks." Certanily we know that Bp Lopes had to pay a visit to Bp Barnes of San Bernardino before Barnes would allow the Holy Martyrs parish to open. There seems to have been unusual interest in the situation in Calgary from the bishop there.

Priestly Formation And Small Communities

Following up on yesterday's post, a visitor asks,

Any idea if any of the Ordinariate priests have experience with parishes with congregations in the hundreds range? I assume the first Ordinary did, but I am concerned about how well small church experience scales to larger.

Well, some do, many don't. I think the question is complicated by the fact that groups in the North American ordinariate by and large aren't growing, and no matter what experience the priests have, the numbers overall are stagnant. It seems to me there are three groups of ordinariate priests, a top tier that had moderate success with Anglican or Pastoral Provision parishes, and they continue to be moderately successful where they are. A second tier that was at least partly successful with larger Protestant parishes, but now is in charge of stubbornly small OCSP communities; and a third tier of Protestant seminary graduates who never got a career footing in their prior denominations and is performing poorly with OCSP groups, often cobbled together exclusively as an excuse to ordain them.

Contrast this with the pattern for newly ordained diocesan seminarians. They're sent to larger parishes as new associates, where they're inundated with the actual conditions that surround pastoral work and are generally trained and mentored by more senior priests and chancery staff. In the OCSP, there are only a handful of parishes that justify associates at all, so this opportunity for training isn't generally available.

Another issue is that most OCSP priests are married, and their families are tied to communities by children's schools and wives' careers. The low performers are tied to diocesan make-work jobs themselves. They can't move around the way celibate priests do.

This brings me to the question of the Minnesota group recently closed. The removal of Vaughn Treco as priest opened up a unique opportunity, which was to have the ordinary emeritus, as the visitor today noted an experienced priest in a large-parish environment, make a considered assessment of the group's potential. I would guess that Msgr Steenson, if he'd in fact seen something there, would have been young enough at 67 to give things one more effort. I can only think that, after several months and prayerful reflection, he determined it wasn't worth his time or anyone else's.

Treco was in the third tier of low-performing priests I noted above. It sounds from occasional comments on blogs that even as a hospital chaplain, he set teeth on edge by celebrating daily mass ad orientem in the chapel. How many other third-tier OCSP priests are instead kept on in these hopeless situations, simply to maintain the appearance of success in Houston, or out of sympathy for men who've proven they don't actually have much of a vocation and their families? It was an act of mercy to laicize Treco,

I think the OCSP's experience is in fact bringing into the light difficulties that result with married priests:

• The priests' families become hostages that limit the flexibility of bishops in removing or reassigning priests
• Their families become obstacles to career mobility, where relocation is an essential ingredient.

This leaves aside the considerations Fr Longenecker, himself a married former Anglican, raised recently,

The main practical objection to married priests is simply that the infrastructure and hierarchy of the Catholic Church is not equipped for this change. They don’t know how to do it and don’t want to do it.

There is a darker side to this. The celibate priest is bound much more closely to the bishop and his fellow priests than a married man. It’s a guy’s club and it’s pretty tight. Furthermore, the celibate priest is in a dependent relationship with the diocese much more than a married man. His whole life and livelihood is dependent on the bishop’s whim. Without the bishop he has no visible means of support.

As I ruminate on these questions, I come back again and again to the fact that Anglicanorum coetibus was advanced with no serious consideration to the issue of how married priests would have careers in what would prove a stagnant backwater of the Church, quite possibly because it was thought that a first wave of Episcopalian priests, already middle-aged and eligible for TEC pensions, would come in with their parishes, retire in due course, and be promptly replaced by celibate seminarians.

The actual circumstances, with some of the best older candidates rejected from the start and few Anglican parishes of any size coming in anyhow, has been that the OCSP continues to be a last, desperate option for young Protestant seminary graduates -- this in part because even celibate candidates for Catholic seminary can probably find better opportunities within their local diocese. The're in a market shortage, while the Protestant also-rans are in surplus everywhere.

One thing I don't see is any sort of up-or-out provision for OCSP groups. Nobody's established a policy for the other groups like the Minnesota one that was closed, whereby if they continue for x years with fewer than y members, they're closed. Heck, keep the priests in their make-work diocesan jobs if you have to. Or I guess, that's if the bishops want them.

Maybe some of these guys should have spent more time reflecting on whether they actually had a vocation.

The Problem Of Ordinariate Formation

Seven years into the North American ordinariate, only a trickle of celibate priests are coming into it from Catholic seminary formation. The overwhelming majority have been formed in Protestant seminaries, and in fact many aren't from Anglican seminaries. I think back to remarks from a visitor, who no longer comments here, that date back several years now. He said that all seminaries cover pretty much the same stuff, so it doesn't matter if the candidate had, say, Catholic vs Reformed moral theology. The more I learn about Catholic priestly formation, the more obtuse this remark seems to me.

My current understanding is that when candidates go to seminary, they're carefully observed in and out of the classroom for qualities like emotional maturity, openness, and honesty. Faculties periodically evaluate candidates for suitability beyond their academic performance. The seminary rector reports to the bishop and the vocation director on the results of these evaluations. Beyond that, the impression I have is that even in seminaries that are alleged to be part of the "lavender mafia" (like the Archdiocese of Los Angeles's St John's Seminary), the day-to-day product is solid priests. The outstanding middle-aged priests at our parish were formed during Cardinal Mahony's time in the archdiocese, for instance.

Contrast this with the accounts I've heard from TEC priests of faculty scandals in the Episcopalian seminaries. Main line Protestant seminaries by and large won't have problems ordaining women or gays, when Catholic policy that I've cited recently continues to say that same-sex attraction is a disorder that can affect the maturity of a candidate, as well as his ability to relate to all parishioners equally. So based on policy, however imperfectly it may be applied (as all policies are imperfectly applied), Catholic candidates are evaluated and screened out if necessary based on same-sex attraction. This occurs as a matter of policy only in Catholic seminaries.

Beyond that, Bp Barron in a recent YouTube video mentions "dry run" practice confessions in seminary. Since no other denomination places the Catholic emphasis on confession as a sacrament (it's in desuetude among Anglicans), no other denomination's seminaries will provide this type of training, nor will they stress the implications in moral theology that are connected with the sacrament. Thus a Protestant priest who's come to the ordinariates after Protestant seminary formation won't have this training. The visitor who insisted there's no difference between Protestant and Catholic curricula didn't mention this, and seems to have minimized its importance. I can't understand why.

So far, I can't escape the impression that the priests who've been removed, laicized, or just treated as problems in the OCSP simply wouldn't have made it through a Catholic formation program. Allowing married priests is a lowering of normal standards that in fact conceals a much more serious deficiency in screening and formation, and the prevalence of scandal and problem priests in the OCSP isn't going to go away.

Yet once more, I wouldn't go anywhere near an OCSP parish. Prudence is a cardinal virtue.

The Ordinariate Conundrum

The most I've heard about last Saturday's meeting with Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins in Calgary is that it was contentious. If I learn more, I'll post it here.

But the idea of distant bishops flying in for townhalls with unruly parishes isn't really Catholic. It takes me back to the year or so I spent as a "continuing" Anglican, and it brings me to another puzzle I've run into with Anglicanorum coetibus, the prayer book problem.

Recall that one of the chief causes of the "continuing" revolt from The Episcopal Church was the modernized language in Rite Two of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The revision, however, was clearly inspired by Vatican II and the Novus Ordo mass. Another 1979 innovation, this one almost never acknowledged by "continuers", was the three-year lectionary, also brought over from Vatican II (and also never acknowledged as a good thing by Catholic traddies).

Clearly a thee-thou prayer book was thought to be a major selling point for Anglicans considering Anglicanorum coetibus, notwithstanding the 1979 BCP retained the 1928 language in its own Rite One. But Episcopalians in my generation or younger actually liked Rite Two and the rest of the 1979 BCP. A former TEC priest, before he left the priesthood, noted in a homily that saying the eucharist from the 1979 BCP was a big thing he'd miss. I've said I like the OF mass precisely because it's not that far from Rite Two.

The idea that Episcopalians and "continuers" would flock to the North American ordinariate because it offered something like the 1928 BCP was a major misreading of the market. In fact, what we're seeing as the disappointing first wave of Anglican converts recedes is that those still attracted to ordinariate parishes are traddie Catholics who want a whiff of archaism in their liturgy without the need to know Latin. But there aren't enough of those to establish or sustain any real parishes, even in the minimal numbers expected by Houston. The closing of the Minnesota group is an example.

In fact, if my experience at St Mary's Hollywood is any indication -- and I'm convinced it is -- "continuers" and traddie Catholics share an attitude whereby they want to get things out of the Church without putting much in. At St Mary's, many of the dissidents didn't even pledge. I suspect many of the traddies attracted to the ordinariate are just as cheap.

So I think the real-world outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus is to foster a form of "continuing Anglicanism" within the Catholic Church, and in fact it's brought more closet "continuers" out of the woodwork within the Church than it's attracted from outside.

St James St Augustine Moves To Jacksonville

My regular correspondent reports,

Fr Mayer has announced on the St James, St Augustine website that the congregation is moving to Jacksonville, FL. This is now announced as his original mandate although it has only recently been mooted on the website. I note that he currently lives in Jacksonville. In 2012, St James St Augustine began celebrating a 5 pm mass at a House of Prayer near the Nombre de Dios Mission in St Augustine. About two years later they moved to St Benedict the Moor, about five minutes away by car, as the former parish administrator describes here. At some point they were given what I would regard as the prime time of 10:30 Sunday morning, plus the use of meeting facilities at the St Benedict rectory (the church is a "mission" of the cathedral) as you can see on the calendar here.

So why move to Jacksonville after seven years? Of course as the name, the address (Martin Luther King Ave) and the local district (Lincolnville) indicate, St Benedict's is in the historically black part of St Augustine, a demographic not represented in the St James congregation as far as I can tell, but the church is attractive and seems to have met their needs for the last five years. Why move to an elementary school chapel thirty miles away? The idea that this was Fr Meyer's mandate in going to the community is news to me.

The announcement of the move on the website reads

On January 25, 2019 Fr. Philip Mayer was ordained and appointed as the parochial administrator of St. James Catholic Church and given a commission to move the community to Jacksonville, allowing a more central location for the community. The current discernment is pointing toward a move this summer or fall to the Mandarin area of Jacksonville.

The calendar on the website says holy day masses are in the St Joseph Catholic School auditorium, 11600 Old St Augustine Rd, Jacksonville, FL. According to Google Maps, this is 30 miles and 37 minutes up I-95 from the St Benedict the Moor parish, a non-trivial distance. We simply don't know how many members live in Jacksonville and commute to St Augustine for mass.

But it's hard to escape the impression that this group, like many in the North American ordinariate, is tiny, contingent, and unstable. The announced plans for the move itself are vague and uncertain. I hate to think that it distracts new Catholics who used to be Anglican from the worthwhile programs, opportunities, and fellowship at much larger, more stable, and more prosperous parishes nearer to them.

UPDATE: My correspondent adds:

You reported on St James, St Augustine on your post of August 28,2018. This was initially an Evensong group which was formed by Fr Marziani, then a Catholic layman who had left TEC ministry in 2006, as his ticket to ordination. It started with seven people and seems to have plateaued at about two dozen over its seven-year existence, but of course the composition of the group may not have been stable. These communities often attract the kind of person perennially on the lookout for the "perfect" church. Perhaps some new and influential folk turned up who suggested that Jacksonville was a greener pasture. Perhaps it's just that Fr Mayer's day job is there.

It does appear that relocations, new "branches", and the like are driven by very small groups with specific agendas.

St Bede's Minnesota Ordinariate Community Closes

As posted in this announcement from the Holy Family parish in St Louis Park, MN, which hosted the community:

The schedule of Sunday and weekday Masses celebrated by St Bede's at Holy Family has come to an end after their final 5 PM Mass on Sunday, May 19th. The community is reorganizing as the Ordinariate Community of Minnesota, with plans to host masses and services again in the future once preparations are in place. They are very grateful to have had a home at Holy Family these last four years.

It's hard to avoid thinking that this move took place after Msgr Steenson, the ordinary emeritus, took over the group following Vaughn Treco's removal and assessed the situation with some care. It's worth noting that most OCSP groups are in fact marginal operations, and a seasoned clerical observer might come to a similar conclusion about others.

My regular correspondent pointed me to this thread on The Stumbling Block blog that "implies that the original core of former Episcopalians which Br John-Bede assembled in Collegeville was latterly outnumbered by Trads attracted to Fr Treco's take on things."

This seems to be a circumstance that's repeated in other ordinariate groups as well.

St John The Evangelist Parish Meeting Saturday, May 25

It hasn't been announced on the parish website, but on May 20, a notice was sent to SJE parishioners that Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins would meet with the parishioners and Holy House school parents on Saturday, May 25, at 10:00 AM.

The OCSP At Fr Z's Blog

Fr Z has a post featuring a YouTube of the recent diaconal ordination at Our Lady of Walsingham. (link fixed.) My regular correspondent adds, "I suppose he is a chum of Dr Jenkins, who was one of the men ordained to the diaconate on Thursday."

It looks as though some conservative Catholic platforms still want to see the OCSP and Bp Lopes as good guys. I'm less and less of that view -- consider for instance that the whole idea from the start came from Bernard Law.

Ordinariate News

In addition to the general lack of press updates from Houston, my regular correspondent, whose identify "Paul" is striving to uncover, has felt called to report on developments himself. (Hint to "Paul": try looking for an Erasmus86@gmail.com.)

I was exploring the purchase of a new church building for St George, Republic and why this apparent piece of good news has not been shared more widely with Ordinariate well-wishers (short answer may be that Shane Schaetzel is no longer on the ACS board of directors). In the process I came upon this article from the local diocesan paper. Its definition of Anglican Patrimony, no doubt supplied by Shane Schaetzel and/or Fr Seraiah, amused me.

Of course, Mr Schaetzel, like Fr Treco, has been a Catholic for almost twenty years, the last few in the Ordinariate. In the case of Mr Schaetzel, he has had access to a regular Divine Worship mass only since July, 2016 when Fr Seraiah relocated to the Springfield, MO area. Before becoming a Catholic in 2000 Mr Schaetzel had been an Episcopalian only briefly. Fr Treco was never an Anglican of any kind.

Fr Seraiah's Anglican background is almost as shallow, although he became a Catholic more recently. Mr Schaetzel's advice for surviving the current crisis seems to involve looking for a Latin Mass parish, an Ordinariate parish, an Eastern Rite parish, or a liturgically conservative NO parish (in that order). So the "patrimony" aspect is clearly just a means to an end.

Meanwhile, in Fort Worth, it appears that the St Timothy non-parish has had a name change.

Three years ago the community's former Parochial Administrator, the man who brought them into the Ordinariate, was transferred to St John Vianney, Cleburne. The group was told that they would receive a new PA in January 2017, and that the goal was a new leader, a new location, and a new name. In April, 2017 they moved from a local diocesan parish to the chapel of the Fort Worth Diocesan Center. Fr Thomas Kennedy, who had been celebrating Sunday mass as a supply priest, was named PA in late 2018 while remaining Parochial Vicar at St Mary the Virgin, Arlington.

The new name is St Thomas Becket, but there is no indication of this on the website or the FB page . The website has not been kept up to date but the Facebook page has a picture of Bp Lopes's visit on May 5 of this year. Did he mention that they had a new name? The St Timothy, Fort Worth ACC parish from which they split is still a going concern so I can see the argument for a new name, but perhaps the congregation does not. On the OCSP website they are still St Timothy, Ft Worth. Who's minding the store?

St Timothy's Anglican appears to be a remnant of the former St Timothy Episcopal, so there's a great deal of confusion swirling around that particular name. It says a great deal about the OCSP that it's done so little to resolve it to date, and even with a new name finally decreed, no change has been made to its website or the OCSP Find a Parish page.

With the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog slowly going dark, it seems as though overall enthusiasm is flagging.

Married Priests And Deacons

Last night's Bible study reached Acts 6 and the establishment of the diaconate, which led in our group to animated discussion of married deacons and married clergy generally. This in turn led to an e-mail I received earlier in the day from a visitor:

I've been thinking about those priests that "come over" with their families & continue serving as priests. How do those wives cope? Who will be the dad to his kids while he is the father of a parish?

I had a chance to speak with a woman in another state whose husband was being ordained a permanent deacon for their diocese. Their children were grown & starting their own families. She was concerned about the bishop encouraging younger men with younger families to discern the permanent diaconate. After the formation her husband received & realizing that he would/should be at total service of whichever parish he was assigned, she felt that allowing such young dads to become deacons was a great disservice to the wives, children & even parishes.

I live in [redacted] diocese & in our confirmation class last night we talked about deacons. Bishop [redacted] won't allow men with young families to enter formation for the diaconate. As he gets ready to retire, I'm realizing that he's on the ball in ways that I wouldn't have considered. He was at our parish for confirmation & as he was exhorting the teens to live & know their faith, I felt bad that so many of those families in ordinariate parishes will miss out on that wisdom because ". . .new Ordinariate attendees are mostly conservative lifelong Catholics who aren't quite ready for Latin but want to pretend they are back at St Francis Academy with Hayley Mills."

In our Bible study, we talked about one of our own deacons, who basically runs the parish's programs and physical plant. He took early retirement from a secular job to do this. A group member who knows his family pointed out that in addition to his own intense formation program, his wife had to undergo formation nearly as intense. (As the visitor recommends, their children are grown, and in fact one son is a priest.)

The members frequently ask my wife and me how these things compare with Anglican and ordinariate practices. I mentioned that for starters, an issue that came up in the Luke Reese scandal is that the wives of married ordinariate priests receive no formation at all, and certainly nothing equivalent to what married deacons' wives receive.

But also, Anglican priests simply don't have the workload of Catholic priests. I checked the website of the Episcopalian parish that serves the same community as our current Catholic parish. It has an 8 AM Sunday low and a 10 AM Sunday sung high mass. There is a weekday morning prayer at 8 AM, except Wednesday, when there is a eucharist. There is a weekday noon prayer, nothing on Saturdays, no confessions ever. English only. A rector, an associate, and a deacon serve the parish. (We were parishioners there in the 1990s, when we remember having to lean over two rows of pews to exchange the peace.)

At our Catholic parish, not far away, weekday masses are 6:30, 8:00, and 5:30, with additional novenas and other seasonal events. Saturday masses are 8:00 and 5:30. Sunday masses are 6:30, 8:00, 9:30, 11:00, 12:30 Spanish, and 5:30 LifeTeen. Confessions are Monday, Thursday, and Saturday late afternoon. The parish is served by a pastor, two associates, two deacons, and an additional priest-in-residence. Every priest celebrates mass and hears confessions in Spanish as well as English.

At least for the associates, they have heavy schedules of visits to the sick and housebound on weekdays. While my regular correspondent says, "[T]he idea that ordained ministry is a 'total service' incompatible with marriage and parenthood is romantic, IMHO. Doctors, fire fighters, the military, not to mention Orthodox and Eastern Catholic priests, several hundred PP and Ordinariate clergy, and those in Protestant ministry, manage to exercise their vocations," just comparing the workload between an Episcopalian and Catholic parish serving the exact same community, one in the hundreds, the other in the thousands, I have a hard time thinking the workload for Protestants vs Catholics is anything like comparable.

Add to that the pattern we see in Episcopal priesthood that's carried over in part to the OCSP, what I would call the "Bishop Paul Moore Jr phenomenon": Moore, in the process of burnishing his career, had nine children with his wife. His daughter Honor Moore in her memoir, The Bishop's Daughter, wondered, as the babies kept coming, who they were trying to beat. It appears, in fact, that Moore quite callously exploited his wife. putting her in the position of caring for the family while Moore frequently absented himself furthering his career. Beyond that, especially early in that process, Moore encouraged the local poor to come into the rectories and bishop's residences for handouts, adding to his wife's burdens while Moore, naturally, occupied himself elsewhere.

This leaves aside Moore's closeted gay life. The nine children probably served as a beard here as well. Ultimately, when Moore left Washington for New York, his wife stayed behind. It's hard to blame her.

We're beginning to see celibate seminarians moving to ordination in the OCSP, but although there appears to be some intent eventually to switch to a celibate priesthood, Houston is still ordaining young married men with families, and it continues not to give their wives formation equivalent to what the Church provides for the wives of married deacons. Beyond that, we certainly still see a number of OCSP priests faithfully following the Paul Moore Jr model, with Stakhanovite broods of children likely serving as hostages in addition to whatever else they're used for.

I don't miss being an Episcopalian.

Edward Feser On The Heresy Letter

Based on occasional remarks by our pastor, I get the feeling he hears a lot of concerns from parishioners about Pope Francis and some of the bishops. His message is always some version of don't panic. Just this past Sunday, he spoke of the scene in that day's Gospel, where Peter, the first pope, recognizes the Risen Lord on the shore of the lake and jumps into the water in a rush to greet him. Our pastor said Peter has things in common with our current Holy Father, impulsive, transparent, and definitely inclined to put his foot in his mouth -- a man, said our pastor, after his own heart.

In that context, I've always been of the view that it's a bad look for a convert, a few years after becoming Catholic, to decide the Holy Father has things all wrong. So I was happy to see Edward Feser's latest blog post:

[I]t is true that a pope can fall into doctrinal error, even material heresy, when not speaking ex cathedra. However, whether and how a pope can be charged with formal heresy, and what the consequences would be if he were guilty of it, are simply much less clear-cut canonically and theologically than the letter implies.

Feser explains in some detail parts of the letter he simply sees as "rash", and he goes on to question what the letter adds that hasn't already been said, several times, when we already know Francis will simply ignore it. The solution he proposes is

Suppose that the open letter had alleged, not that the pope is guilty of the canonical delict of heresy, but rather that the pope’s words and actions have, even if inadvertently, encouraged doctrinal error, or perhaps that the pope has been negligent in his duty to uphold sound doctrine. It would be much harder to defend the pope against these milder charges, as the evidence adduced in the open letter clearly shows. These milder charges also would not raise the question of the loss of the papal office, with all of its unresolved canonical and theological difficulties and horrific practical implications.

Although a still easier way to resolve the issue, which I think Feser understands accurately here, is to recognize that popes don't live forever, and inevitably there will be a conclave. My regular correspondent has an interesting take on how this applies to Anglicanorum coetibus:

But the real appeal, reconciling communities to the inevitable compromise with their particular ideas of what constituted the essence of "Anglicanism," was meant to be the end of the endless bickering within the Anglican Communion, the imposition of authority and discipline. It is unsurprising that in North America and Australia the biggest uptake was among "continuing" parishes which had already given up on Canterbury's brand of leadership. The UK had "flying bishops" and a parallel "non serviam" structure within the official CofE that provided most of the OOLW incomers.

But at the moment the Church does not look like a very convincing solution to primarily institutional problems. When Fr Aidan Nichols, an early spokesperson for the Anglican Use Society, signs a letter accusing the Pope of heresy, what is an inquiring congregation supposed to think? Even a group concerned about their future in the Anglican Catholic Church Network of America or whatever may not see the barque of Peter as significantly less leaky right now. The AC blog is all but silent. I think the mood is dark. Meanwhile new Ordinariate attendees are mostly conservative lifelong Catholics who aren't quite ready for Latin but want to pretend they are back at St Francis Academy with Hayley Mills. The whole thing just diverts needed resources, IMHO.

A New Cohort of Ordinands

My regular correspondent has pointed me to Sunday's leaflet at Our Lady of Walsingham, which says on page 3 that on Thursday, May 16, four men will be ordained to the diaconate. These are Mr. Armando G. Alejandro, Mr. Nathan Davis, Mr. Jon C. Jenkins, and Mr. Keith E. Way.

My correspondent has researched their backgrounds in some detail. The first two are celibate seminarians. Mr Alejandro is a former OLA parishioner who had been part of the music program there. Mr Davis was a parishioner of Mt Calvary, Baltimore who entered the Church with that congregation. He was briefly at the local diocesan seminary but later transferred to St Mary's Seminary in Houston, where Mr Alejandro also completed his studies.

Mr Way is an older man, a parishioner of St Augustine, San Diego, who was formerly in the permanent diaconate program of the Diocese of San Diego. It isn't clear whether he will become a permanent or transitional deacon in the OCSP.

Jon C. Jenkins, was previously a TEC priest and and more recently at All Saints Anglican, Atlanta, an ACNA community which moved to the suburbs. He and his family were received into the Church in April 2017 in Atlanta, at which time he was telling his Facebook friends that he had started preparation for ordination. He has been working as a Family Life Director at a consortium of Catholic parishes in Wisconsin. He will be ordained a priest in June.

It's a shame that this blog has to provide information that should be in a press release from Houston, but as we've been seeing, Houston does not provide many other, more critical, services that are routine for a diocese. But I have other questions.

One is that the original Anglicanorum coetibus paradigm involved existing established Anglican or Episcopalian parishes coming in with their clergy. Once again, this is observed only in the breach, but on top of that, I simply question how many new members were received anywhere in the North American ordinariate this past Easter vigil, vs the new deacons that will be ordained next Thursday. Four new deacons vs optimistically a hundred more or less new lay people. Isn't something out of whack here? (If anyone can reassure me that at least 2500 former Anglicans were received last month, I'll be happy to celebrate.)

My regular correspondent comments,

In a few years many OCSP clergy will retire (again) or die. So even with little or no growth the Ordinariate will need more clergy. The problem is that the departing priests have been mostly self-supporting, and such men will not be available to replace them. Unless the OCSP is prepared to fold a significant number of communities it will have to find jobs, presumably with the local diocese, for most of its new priests, which is not an ideal situation. At least half a dozen men who were in this situation subsequently left their Ordinariate community to become full-time diocesan clergy. One suspects they were the the abler cohort.

In other words, as a practical matter, many of these men in their actual pastoral work won't in fact minister to many, or any, former Anglicans -- I'd guess that far greater numbers of ex Anglicans are productive members of Novus Ordo parishes, after all, than are members of the OCSP, and they're well used to the 1979 BCP Rite Two, which is an easy transition to the OF mass.

Mr Jenkins is a separate question. He's currently working at a diocesan lay pastoral job in Wisconsin, where there's no nearby ordinariate community. So why would he not go in via the Pastoral Provision, which is still available, rather than the OCSP, where he would have no connection? My regular correspondent speculates that the Pastoral Provision quota may be full in the local diocese, but at that point, we're playing jurisdictional games.

Jenkins as well has extensive Anglican experience as a rector in Texas and Atlanta, well beyond other recent ordinands. My correspondent speculates,

Maybe they have a spot for him at SMV, Arlington or maybe St Timothy, aka St Thomas Becket, Ft Worth is finally going to get a resident Parochial Administrator. Bp Lopes visited them last Sunday.

But we're still dealing with the impression that the OCSP has more priests than people, and it's continuing to operate at a point where collecting verges on hoarding.

Scranton Update

My regular correspondent reports,

By OCSP standards Fr Bergman is a fairly solid pastor; however his money management could benefit from the closer scrutiny which I'm sure would be available to him were he a priest of the Diocese of Scranton. The latest scheme is to buy a house which adjoins the St Thomas More property, to use as a facility for the home school support "academy" which the parish has run for the last two years. It is listed at about $70,000, and the parish will need to raise $20,000 as a down payment by the middle of this month. STM ended 2018 $20,000 short of its operating budget, plus $4,000 short of its Bishop's Appeal target. The church, rectory, school, and convent which the parish purchased from the local diocese in 2012 are in various states of disrepair and will be a continual drain on the community.

My memory is that on a visit to Scranton, Fr Phillips provided advice to Fr Bergman in effect on how to spoof the building inspector. If Fr Bergman continued as a diocesan priest, he'd be subject to the diocese's building and property department, which could well have different views on what is needed to maintain the facilities. Except that in leaving the diocese, he took the decrepit properties off the diocese's hands.

But here's another question: how comfortable would I feel as a parent about letting my kids go to a home school support "academy" where the building is in dubious condition? The nagging feeling I have, and it won't go away, is that the parents who club together on these home school co-ops are cheap, and they're cutting corners in hard-to-perceive but dangerous ways.

The organ was recently destroyed by lightning, although after protracted negotiations this wIll be covered by insurance.

Wait a second. Let's say the rest room floor in the "school" is rotten, and it collapses under someones child. What kind of protracted negotiations will be needed to get the parish's insurance to pay off then? How many corners are being cut here?

As we have discussed, Fr Bergman has acquired a transitional deacon who is employed locally as a prison chaplain and is available to assist him when not required at his paying job. Fr Bergman continues to celebrate mass biweekly for the mission he set up in Bath, PA as an ordination opportunity for now-Fr Riojas, who subsequently left to become a diocesan priest. Interesting to compare STM, Scranton and OLW, Houston---two former PP parishes with very different histories.

At least in our archdiocese, staff comes into each parish every three years for a pretty complete review. At our former parish, this review resulted in layoffs at the school and reduction of mass times. I have a feeling that an equivalent look at St Thomas More's budgetary and bishop's appeal shortfalls would result in similar adjustments, including raising the question of whether the parish should be closed.

It doesn't look like Houston exercises anything like normal diocesan supervision, and this concerns me. One reason parishioners may not be as concerned as they should be is that many come from "continuing" backgrounds where dioceses are also short of staff and short of money, so they see nothing unusual. And they're still in a ghetto in any case, where they don't get a good comparison with Catholic diocesan parish life.

If my Catholic experience is an indication, pastors have serious expectations for their money management. Good pastors who build their parishes and outperform on the bishop's appeal seem to get preferences, including extra staff, quick replacement of associates who move on, and so forth. Pastors who perform less well get visits from diocesan consultants. I don't see how Fr Bergman can be "fairly solid" but come so short on financial aspects of his job.

But St Thomas More is certainly one of those OCSP parishes I'd stay away from, if for no other reason than my physical safety.

Douglas Bess Resurfaces

Douglas Bess is the author of Divided We Stand, a history of "continuing" Anglicanism from its roots in the liberalizing Episcopal Church in the 1960s, through the 1976 General Convention and the ordination of women, the formation of the Anglican Catholic Church, and the re-schisms of the 1990s. It's by far the best book on the phenomenon, but Bess, having produced it for whatever reason, simply moved on. My most recent reflections on the book are here.

When I last sought him out, he was "Fr Bess", a priest in something called the Liberal Catholic Church and living in Los Angeles. At that time, his parish had lost its facility and appeared moribund. My regular correspondent has found a new reference:

Fr. Douglas Bess will be resuming work as a Liberal Catholic priest in the Los Angeles area (Pasadena) in 2019. The bishops of the Liberal Catholic Church will determine the nature of this work — i.e. whether the Church of St. Alban will be re-opened, whether a new group (a Center or Mission) will be established, or a combination of the two.

The LCC has Anglican roots. According to Wikipedia,

The founding bishops of the Liberal Catholic churches were J. I. Wedgwood of the Wedgwood China family and the Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater. Wedgwood was a former Anglican priest who left the Anglican church on becoming a theosophist in 1904. After serving in several high offices in the Theosophical Society, including being general secretary of the society in England and Wales from 1911 to 1913, he was ordained as a priest in the Old Catholic movement on July 22, 1913. . . . In 1915 Wedgwood visited Australia in his capacity as Grand Secretary of the Order of Universal CoMasonry (Co-Freemasonry a branch of liberal or adogmatic Freemasonry consisting of mixed-sex lodges), another of the organisations in which he was prominent. On his return to England, he learned that Frederick Samuel Willoughby, a bishop of the Old Catholic Church of Britain, had become enmeshed in a homosexuality scandal and as a result had been suspended by Archbishop Mathew. . . . Wedgwood started the organisation that would later become the Liberal Catholic Church, of which he became the first Presiding Bishop. At the same time he maintained his close connections with the Theosophical movement, and many of Wedgwood's priests and bishops were simultaneously Theosophists.

Well, this is woozy stuff, although frankly, if the CDF regards the Charismatic Episcopal Church as Anglican enough to qualify its priests for ordination as Catholics after a bit of distance learning, I don't see why it should turn away priests of the Liberal Catholic Church, and I'm not being entirely tongue in cheek here.

But as long as we're on Theosophy, this brings me to an episode in my undergraduate days, when I knew some real Theosophists. I never took them quite seriously, but the rural elite school where I was serving time was actually a pretty dull place, and they were at least more interesting than the average trust-fund preppie I ran into there.

Somewhat under their influence, I was taking courses in Eastern religion at the school's Religion department. One of them was on Hinduism, although it is to be understood that the subject was actually a sort of reified hInDUiSm as interpreted by Mircea Eliade, the mentor of the prof, which had little to do with anything in India or anywhere else.

Probably as a result of chats with the Theosophists, I started looking at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement of the late 19th century and began writing a paper on it for the Hinduism course. This, of course, had nothing to do with reified Eliade-style hInDUiSm that was the actual subject matter, and once I got into Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy and a promoter of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, the prof went into something of a rage.

I wasn't a convert, of course, but I was beginning to get an inkling that Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky were influential historical figures. The prof's reaction put the brakes on that, and in fact, not many people share this view. One of the very few serious discussions I've found is this one on YouTube by Dr David Campbell, a Catholic convert. Blavatsky is one source for the general theological nuttiness that's pervaded Western culture for a century and a half.

If I'd had a theoretical Jordan Peterson-style prof instead of the guy I had in the Hinduism course, I might have learned worthwhile stuff as an undergraduate. But, pace the Liberal Catholic Church, Hindu and other Eastern religious views are in opposition to Catholicism.

Jordan Peterson Interview With Bp Barron

Bp Barron now has a YouTube discussing a March interview he had with Jordan Peterson, "the long-awaited discussion":

Although he says Peterson intends to release the whole interview on his own podcast, so far, I haven't seen it. (If someone knows where it is, please let me know!)

Bp Barron calls Peterson a "bridge figure" from materialistic secularism to religion. I would say that Peterson goes somewhat farther than that -- I certainly wish I'd had him as an undergraduate professor, although I don't think he would have existed in the intellectual climate of that time. He is a leading figure in the so-called "intellectual dark web", which includes an unserious atheist, Sam Harris, but also other figures like Carl Benjamin who, although we might say they are sentimentally materialist, are sufficiently if unconsciously rationalist that they can approach Aristotelian and even Thomistic conclusions.

Prompted by Barron to outline his views on religious belief, Peterson says, starting at about 5:35

I didn't really feel that I had the moral right to make a claim about belief in God -- I mean, that's not a trivial thing to, to, let's say, proclaim, you know, because it's not really a matter of stating in some verbal manner that I am willing to agree semantically with a set of doctrines. It means that you have to live -- you have to commit to living a certain way, and the demand of that life is so stringent and so all-consuming, and you're so unlikely to live up to it, that to make the claim that you believe, I think is a -- to me, it smacks of a kind of -- I mean, I understand why people do it, and this isn't a criticism of people's statement of faith, but for me, the critical element of belief is the action and the requirements of Christianity are so incredibly demanding that I don't see how you can proclaim yourself a believer without being terrified of immediately being struck down by lightning or some cosmic. . .

This is somewhere at the threshold of Thomism, and in what I currently wish I might have had as an undergraduate curriculum, a Peterson-like figure would express a set of secularist dilemmas (like the one that's driven Peterson's career, the problem of 20th-century mass murder), with an Aristotelian-Thomistic rationalism gradually inserted.

The answer to the dilemma Peterson poses here, and it's a real dilemma, and something that remains a dilemma in a conventionally secularist academic environment like Peterson's (where he, let's face it, is not comfortable), is divine mercy and divine grace.

I would imagine that could be covered later in the undergraduate curriculum. But I often come back to Peterson's YouTubes.

Perfection!

My regular correspondent comments,

Our Lord saw fit to entrust his Church to human beings, and perfection is not one of our attributes. My experience of people who want perfection in a pastor is that they go from parish to parish, thinking for a while that Fr X is The One, then experiencing "betrayal" and disillusion before they move on. Some people also go from denomination to denomination, in the same spirit. It's the essence of Protestantism, really. The worst situation is when Fr X is weak and needy and allows such people to become an inner clique with inappropriate influence in the parish.

One advantage of a one-parish town is that the parishioners are loyal to the parish, first of all. The current pastor may have some uncongenial ways, but someday he will be gone and they will still be there at St Stephen's, hoping for better times. And ideally, working to make things better. A parish is not a one-man band.

Another visitor comments,

I have known a lot of Catholics and non-Catholics in my life, some bad, some good, some holy. Bad people are not always easy to spot. Good people are sometimes difficult to identify, too. Holiness on the other hand is an altogether different animal. False holiness can sometimes trick people but true holiness is unmistakable. It is difficult to describe but once you have met an heroically holy person, you know what it looks like and you never forget it. Truly holy people have an air of happiness, peace, courage, humility and some je ne sais quoi that is incredible and otherworldly. They foster a desire to become more holy yourself.

I have found that truly holy people attract and encourage other holy people and that if someone finds a truly holy person repugnant, there is usually some jealousy or darkness of their own heart involved. There are all kinds of people in the Church and out of it that pose as holy, think of themselves as holy, and want to point out those who are not holy enough. Unfortunately, those folks cause many good people to lose hope and/or faith and sometimes prevent otherwise curious people from joining the Church. Heroic holiness is not impossible, we are all called to it.

We must look for it, we must value it and we must strive to attain it ourselves. If we are doing that, I think we would find we are too busy fixing ourselves so that we do not have time to be fixing our less holy brethren. What does this have to do with your blog? The great exhortation of Our Lady of Atonement folks in their advertising was “Experience the beauty of Holiness.” Yes, holiness is beautiful. The ugliness of false holiness is most clearly illuminated when seen side-by-side with real, true holiness. Perhaps this is why holier-than-thou displays are so repugnant to all sides of the equation, because truth = holiness and holiness = truth.

When I've been tempted to dwell a little too much on the latest kerfuffle at the Vatican -- likely misunderstood and misreported in any case -- I remind myself that, like my local parish and diocese, the important thing is to focus on the day-to-day effort.

Were Ananias and Sapphira Nazi Zombies?

Last night at our Bible study (it uses the Jeff Cavins DVD classes), we got to the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. The exact circumstances of their sin aren't immediately clear, but I go along with Jeff Cavins's interpretation, that the couple, although whatever amount they donated was completely voluntary, represented that they had sold their land and donated the whole amount to the Church, when in fact they'd secretly withheld some amount.

When Peter exposed the truth, they each fell dead. The sin wasn't in withholding their donation, it was in being deceptive -- in other words, being in a certain way holier-than-thou and claiming to follow a higher standard than they actually did.

I suppose that since I'd been thinking about Nazi zombies earlier in the day, I would inevitably read Nazi zombies into the story. But insofar as Fr Longenecker sees Nazi zombies ignoring the First and Greatest Commandment, Nazi zombies would certainly be against the spirit of the early Church as elaborated in Acts. The penalty for being a Nazi zombie is severe.

A visitor familiar with Our Lady of the Atonement comments on Fr Longenecker's remarks yesterday,

Having enemies is the best way to bolster the group’s coherence. Having an enemy bolsters the ideologue’s self righteousness. Having an enemy helps build fear in the group and loyalty to the leader.

—> describes Atonement under you know who.

What I'm finding is that becoming Catholic after being for even a short time a "continuing" Anglican hasn't been an easy or seamless process, whatever the people in the CDF might have thought it could be. It isn't helped by representations in even the loyal-opposition Catholic press that Vatican II was a disaster, and the Church is run by a lavender mafia that promotes or looks the other way at abuse. Certainly this was a set of assumptions I had to work through when I made a decision to come in.

What I'm discovering in a successful diocesan parish -- which, admittedly, I had to seek out with at least minimal effort -- is that these issues don't dominate day-to-day life in a diocese or parish. I don't believe I would have come to recognize this if I'd been in a group that successfully went into the North American ordinariate. I would have stayed in a small ghetto that ran the serious risk of assuming the Church at large was the enemy.

The same visitor who commented above adds,

However, you can trust and work with a pastor, preacher, priest or principal who simply wants to serve and love God and love and serve other people.

There is a great deal of truth to what he says. But I have yet to come across that perfect balance in a pastor or priest, in or out of the Ordinariate. Whether they are showboats or have secret lives, the leader with pure love for others who also is a man with a zeal for building up the church - does he exist? I would go even farther to say that the church’s own selection method for bishops is not guided by pure intentions, but always seems to involve some internal politics.

Well, yeah, but as our pastor periodically reassures us in homilies, Judas, one of the first bishops in Christ's inner circle, betrayed Him, while Peter denied Him. Our pastor goes to confession, by his account, once a month, more often if necessary. (One of his hobbies is surfing. He told us of a situation where he became agitated and apparently angry and jealous of another surfer who seemed to be hot-dogging. He felt an urgent need to head for the confessional.)

He isn't perfect. He apparently has to go to confession with some frequency. The parish is successful and provides resources like the Jeff Cavins Bible study. It ought to be possible to find a diocesan parish like this just about anywhere, but it takes some initiative to go looking.

Fr Longenecker On Nazi Zombies

Anyone actually interested in the topic of Nazi zombies should check out a neglected 1966 British horror film The Frozen Dead, which can be found in its entirety on YouTube:

This is one of many that inspired parts or all of episodes in Fringe.

But back to the actual subject of this post, Fr Longenecker's take on Nazi zombies, not horror flicks about them.

What is the difference between real religion and Nazi zombies? It’s the difference between faith and an ideology. Here’s a clue: in The Imitation of Christ Thomas a Kempis wrote, “Why do you wish to change the world when you cannot change yourself?” An ideology tries to change the world. Real religion tries to change a person.

He's talking about religious ideologues, "people who are basically and fundamentally self righteous".

They believe in their ideology 100%. That’s okay. The sickness comes in when they see their group, their belief and code of behavior as a way to change the world (or create a utopia) not as a way to change themselves. At that point the focus shifts away from themselves to others. They’re okay. Others become the problem. Others need to fall into line. Other people need to get with the program. Other people need to conform. Other people need to help create the perfect world the ideologues envision.

It gets worse. The ideologue soon attracts other people who share his vision. They form a group, and that group is the elite. You are either in or out. If you are out you are considered as the enemy. Having enemies is the best way to bolster the group’s coherence. Having an enemy bolsters the ideologue’s self righteousness. Having an enemy helps build fear in the group and loyalty to the leader.

He concludes,

[B]eware of any religion that has as its main priority some sort of social agenda. It’s a false religion. Beware any preacher, pastor principal or priest who sets before you some great agenda to change the world, to bring about social justice, to create the perfect parish or the perfect religious community or the perfect school.

However, you can trust and work with a pastor, preacher, priest or principal who simply wants to serve and love God and love and serve other people.

Remember, “the first commandment is this: Love the Lord your God with all your soul, heart, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Do this and you will change yourself. Do this and you will change your community. Do this and you will change the world.

Don’t do this and you will mess up everything. . . and you might end up as a Nazi zombie.

It seems to me that Nazi zombification is a problem that's come to afflict the North American ordinariate. I think it's tacitly understood that the original model of Anglican parishes coming into the Church as groups with their clergy ran its course after only a couple of years. Since then, there have been two sources of such growth as it's had, either small made-up evensong groups that exist primarily to ordain newly recruited married candidates for the priesthood, or larger groups made up almost entirely of cradle Catholics intent on creating the perfect parish outside their diocese.

In other words, Nazi zombies. In some cases, there are factional disputes within ordinariate parishes where the former Anglicans fight the Nazi zombies. As Henry Kissinger said in a different context, it's a shame they both can't lose. I think Vaughn Treco was a Nazi zombie (and he may still be one). I would guess this is an indication that Houston has some awareness of the problem.

A visitor recently described the situation surrounding the building in which the Our Lady of Grace Covina group now meets as a "circle of weirdness" of some years' standing. It would appear that its current manifestation as a locus for cradle Catholics intent on creating the perfect parish is only the most recent version. It's interesting to me that Fr Barker, who did so much to establish the model of "continuing" Anglicanism and its own effort to create the perfect denomination, should now be at least unofficially shepherding this little group.

I know about little groups who intend to create the perfect parish. I might call what seems to be happening in Covina history repeating, or perhaps as Mark Twain put it, history rhyming. Or maybe it's karma, but that's not Catholic. Maybe it's generational demons.