A Closer Look At The Short-Lived Holy Rosary DW Mass

My regular correspondent reports,

I see here that the additional DW mass was added February 10, 2019. Lent began March 6. February 10 not even a pre-Lent purple Sunday in the Ordinariate calendar. So it seems a bit harsh to accuse Fr Chalmers of intending DW as a penance for anyone, especially as his usual parishioners could always attend the OF at the usual time if they so chose.

But it still leaves us with the mystery of why Fr Chalmers felt any need to celebrate DW for anyone, four years after leaving his OCSP community and two years after taking over Holy Rosary. And why such a short trial? Ms Welborn's post implies that the congregation on the third Sunday DW was offered was small, but not single digits small. Why quit after a dozen attempts? Of course, as I suggested he may simply have wanted to be able to say "I tried." Or was there diocesan push-back?

As you have often pointed out, a bishop would need a superabundance of Christian charity to sit happily by while another jurisdiction siphoned off longtime Catholics. No suggestion in the Holy Rosary bulletins that anyone was being prepared for baptism at Easter, or reception of First Communion/Confirmation at Pentecost. Just another option for current Birmingham Catholics, as Ms Welborn points out on her Instagram page.

Here's Holy Rosary's home page. It says of its community,

Gate City is among the poorest neighborhoods in Birmingham and thus brings us ample opportunities to minister with our neighbors and promote the common good. Throughout its history, Holy Rosary has been at the forefront of contemporary Catholic Social Teaching.

Anglicanorum coetibus was aimed at pulling in upscale Episcopalians disaffected with a liberal-leaning TEC, not Catholics at the forefront of contemporary social teaching. So I'm not sure if the parish, while it has a very traditional interior, is necessarily a good fit for Divine Worship congregants. My correspondent noted earlier,

Perhaps someone said to him one day ""You know, Jon, you've been in Birmingham for years and yet you've never even tried to get an Ordinariate group together. Why not?" and he felt put on the spot. Perhaps that person was Bp Lopes. As the blogger noted, the inaugural (?) mass was on the Solemnity of the Feast of the Chair of St Peter, which was appropriate. He doesn't seem to have given it much of a trial, which suggests that it wasn't his idea in the first place. Now he can say he made the effort.

As for who would come, I agree it's a mystery, but Fr Bartus seems to have tapped into a market. Whether such people can be the foundation of a healthy long-term parish community is another matter. The comments on Ms Welborn's post are revealing.

The comments are mostly from ordinariate members, who I suppose are welcome to appreciate the faux Anglican language with the schismatic artifacts -- though they're appreciating it from places like Mobile and Houston and presumably didn't travel to get it in Birmingham. One commenter made what from my perspective is an entirely reasonable observation:

As a former Anglican, I have been happier as a plain old Latin Rite/Ordinary Form Catholic than I ever thought would be possible — at least partly because we have a good parish with good liturgy. I have honestly not missed being Anglican.

But a better question would be why it took years for Fr Chalmers to try a DW mass at the Holy Rosary parish, and why the trial ended so quickly. And Fr Chalmers was the second Anglican priest ever to be ordained in the North American ordinariate, to considerable fanfare, and with a Birmingham connection from the start:

The Rev. Larry Gipson was dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham from 1982-94 and rector at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, where his parishioners included former President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, from 1994 to 2008.

. . . Gipson will be among 69 candidates for Catholic priesthood attending a formation retreat this weekend in Houston at the ordinariate's headquarters.

Among those leading seminars at the Formation Retreat in Houston will be Fr. Jon Chalmers, who was ordained a Catholic priest in June, the second former Episcopal cleric to be accepted as a priest under the ordinariate.

His wife, Margaret Chalmers, former canon lawyer for the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham and now chancellor of the ordinariate, will also be a presenter at the weekend retreat that runs Friday night through Sunday.

He and his wife were ordinariate aristocracy in 2012, a cover couple, but we've heard less and less from them as the years have passed (although Fr Chalmers has been on the governing council from the start), until the brief and unheralded effort at holding a DW mass in Birmingham earlier this year. I think it may be worth looking more closely at Fr Chalmers's career tomorrow.