Garcia-Siller removed Fr Phillips from the parish, installed a diocesan priest, went to Rome and tried to stop the removal of the parish from the diocese. After all, this is a wealthy parish and I am told the value of the property and the buildings alone are worth something in the neighborhood of thirty million dollars. It appears that Garcia-Siller did not do very well in Rome and his last resort was to appeal to Cardinal Wuerl in Washington, DC.I asked the visitor what the attendance at the Sunday evening mass has been since the Latin mass was canceled a few weeks ago. He replied,I have been told that Archbishop Garcia-Siller and Cardinal Wuerl had a very heated exchange that could be heard all over the building. In the end, a cardinal trumps an archbishop. Garcia-Siller lost the battle. Or did he? Only time will tell. The Archbishop may end up with the parish for pennies on the dollar. The parish has had to extend the fifteen year loan to thirty years to try and lower the payment. And the archdiocese still has financial consideration in the parish. It is a mess.
Fr Phillips probably felt that coming over to the ordinariate he would be reinstalled as pastor of OLOTA. This was not to be. When OLOTA was turned over to the ordinariate Fr. Phillips returned. I was there that evening. When Fr Phillips walked into a packed St Anthony Hall there was thunderous applause that lasted for at least five minutes. Bishop Lopes and Fr Perkins greeted Fr Phillips in the front of the auditorium. One of the conditions set forth by Garcia-Siller was that Fr Phillips was not to be pastor. This apparently was agreed to by all concerned.
Enter Fr Lewis. Poor man! He had a nice small parish that apparently loved him. He had his family and his parents who are aged and sickly back east. I feel each and every night he must go to bed thinking what did I do? If only I could turn back the clock. I think the same thing for Bishop Lopes and how he thought he was getting a money producing jewel until the financial shenanigans of Fr Phillips started to unravel. What he has is a parish deep in debt with uncompleted construction, a school with a diminishing student body and a lot of unhappy parishioners.
One has to remember that OLOTA population has a few converts, but most of the congregation is made up of cradle Catholics who were looking for a parish that had a reverent mass with good sermons, good music and was not a party church. Most of the Catholic churches in the San Antonio area are not very good, my opinion. In the beginning Fr. Phillips needed money and he accommodated everybody, hence the Latin Mass. The Masses at OLOTA were so reverently done that it was not unusual to see priests, nuns and seminarians from other parishes in attendance.
I have learned from a reliable source that the Mass attendance at OLOTA for the 6 PM Sunday mass (Previously the Latin mass) is down to about half of what it was. [The visitor estimated to me previously that the Latin attendance was in the 350-400 range each Sunday.] My source told me that there are some new faces at this mass, which says that even more of the folks that normally attended the Latin Mass have left. One would assume that collections are down as well.I think this raises yet again the issue of whether the ordinariate's draw consists in some very important measure of conservative cradle Catholics who would not be eligible for "membership" in the ordinariate. And this isn't just an academic question: Fr Phillips was in fact an effective fundraiser, and insofar as this added to the income and assets of the archdiocese, the successive archbishops could look the other way over certain irregularities.
Once the ordinariate threatened to take the parish tithe and real estate assets away from the archdiocese, things changed. But by the same token, the "missions" in Murreita, CA and The Woodlands, TX (or Montgomery, if one chooses to be politically correct) threaten to poach cradle Catholics and siphon away potential donations from their respective dioceses. I would guess that the respective bishop and archbishop are currently biding their time to see how the winds blow at the CDF, given the response Abp Garcia-Siller had.
But I think the outcome in San Antonio has been to destroy a good part of the parish's value to either prelature as an ongoing asset, either for anyone's spiritual benefit or as an ongoing source of income. The visitor is probably correct that at some point, the parish will simply revert to the archdiocese for pennies on the dollar and be disposed of for its real estate value. I haven't checked to see if there's a Medieval Times restaurant franchise in San Antonio.
