Our Lady Of The Atonement Ends Latin Mass

A visitor sent me a copy of an e-mail from Fr Mark Lewis dated August 19 saying, once the two pages of flowery bloviation have been boiled down, that effective September 8, Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio will be ending the Ordinary Form Latin mass it had celebrated Sunday evenings pretty much since its founding. The visitor says

I am hearing that people are upset about this, Facebook exchanges, etc. With reduced enrollment and low church attendance, I struggle to see how this is a wise move.

I'll quote more from the letter, which is a waste of space to print in full, below. Actually, I don't really disagree with the motives behind the move, but I do agree that it poses a dilemma for the parsh and by extension the ordinariate. My regular correspondent comments,

I understand that the original reason for celebrating this mass was to satisfy the archbishop’s request that at least one OF mass be celebrated at OLA on Sundays. No doubt it has built up a constituency, but not one that is integral to the Ordinariate mission, as Fr Lewis explains pretty clearly.

I assume, by the way, that the archbishop was probably Flores here, not Garcia-Siller. But let's start by recognizing that OLA at the start of the Pastoral Provision intended to emulate Episcopalian parishes, which from the implementation of the 1979 BCP had themselves typically offered both Rite One and Rite Two masses on Sundays. The equivalent of Rite Two in the Catholic Anglican-style liturgy has always been the OF English mass, which inspired Rite Two in the first place.

So the motive for having a Latin OF mass at OLA always seems to have been to be not only more Catholic than the pope, but more Anglican than the Episcopalians, or something. So it seems to me there was always a certain level of confusion, and a certain passive-aggressive attitude toward whomever was archbishop. This no doubt attracted traddies, and passages from Fr Lewis's letter suggest Houston has now decided to cast off the traddies as their target market and focus on Anglicans. (But isn't this a little like Gillette deciding to cast off men as its target market and instead aim at intersectional feminists?)

Well, be that as it may, why now? Fr Lewis's letter cites the updated Complementary Norms for Anglcianorum coetibus dated last April, with quotes from Bp Lopes in a blog post at the Registar dated April 9 as well. The decision to end the Latin mass comes four months later, and nearly four years into Bp Lopes's tenure, when it could have been taken any time after OLA left the archdiocese. Why now?

Fr Lewis's letter says,

All of this is to say that we in the Ordinariates around the world have a specific mandate: to evangelize our separated brethren and lapsed Catholics, and bring them home to Holy Mother Church. And the primary tool at our disposal to fulfill this mandate is our Anglican Patrimony as it has been distilled in the Divine Worship Missal. In light of this missionary mandate from Rome and because of the gift of the Divine Worship Missal that we’ve been given, we must reconsider our celebration of the Latin Mass on Sundays.

My impression of Bp Lopes is that he doesn't display a whole lot of initiative. Every photo I've seen of him has a smile of self-satisfaction that he's made bishop, but he didn't make bishop by making bold moves. I would guess that the decision to end the Latin mass comes in the context of more general pressure from the CDF to drop the complacency that characterizes the North American ordinariate and go out and evangelize. This also means not catering to traddies. Certainly one question for me is how much the Latin mass fans contributed to the OLA parish in pledges -- I'll bet, not much.

But this goes to how much the traddies who fill the pews at other ordinariate parishes pledge. I get the impression these are the same people who've taken their kids out of diocesan schools to put them in home school co-ops connected with ordinariate groups, and this is another way of saying these folks are cheap. This is not a recipe for success.

So OK, Houston drops the traddies as a target market, fine. How well is it doing attracting the separated brethren? It doesn't help that Houston continues not to publish any sort of statistics. If it's serious about fine-tuning its mission, it needs to take a much more serious look at who's coming to mass at ordinariate communities, who isn't, and why -- and it needs to continue to look at the zero option, or perhaps the option of sending Bp Lopes to where the Navy finally sent Captain Queeg, a naval station in Iowa.