Disinvestment And The Atonement Parish

As we learn more about the $12 million empty shell of the Atonement school, which would require a further $3 million to finish it out, the question naturally comes up what the options are for the Archdiocese of San Antonio, which as far as we know holds the paper on the project. The school's enrollment has been declining, as has "membership" in the parish. The discontinuance of the Latin mass has apparently lost another hundred or more Sunday massgoers, but ordinariate policy has been not to support Latin masses.

My regular correspondent wondered what the value of the property would be should the archdiocese have to foreclose and regain its investment. (I've said here already that the school would make a great location for a Medieval Times restaurant franchise.) However, a visitor from San Antonio is in the real estate business, so I passed the question on to him. He replied,

The location is ideally situated to be a church and school for the Archdiocese. It's in an exploding growth corridor, there is not another parish for several miles, in either direction. I believe this would be their first approach. That would have to be initiated by Bishop Lopes -- so many canonical strings attached, et. al.

Beyond that, it could easily be developed into a multiuse facility; office, residential, retail. It would be extremely valuable. It could probably bring 20M or more, if the right buyer were motivated. It's over 17 acres of land and the buildings are well maintained.

This, in other words, was probably what Abp Garcia-Siller had in mind when he placed Msgr Kurzaj at the parish in early 2017. Instead, the property is now intended for a boutique use with declining appeal. A charismatic figure who could credibly step into Fr Phillips's shoes might bring it off. Instead, there's Fr Lewis, whose track record even in areas like building maintenance hasn't been encouraging. My regular correspondent reacted,

I think the optics of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, having taken its case to the Vatican unsuccessfully and been required to turn over OLA to the OCSP, then forcing the parish into bankruptcy and repossessing it, would be pretty terrible. The archdiocese must have approved the new construction and agreed to finance it, however unwise a decision it was on the part of the parish to expand the school. This is not analogous to the Diocese of Orange taking over the Crystal Cathedral.

Of course if the OCSP ultimately fails, that is another matter. Or if it initiates the return voluntarily—-a humiliating turn of events which would mark the effective end of Lopes’s career, I would imagine. Fr Phillips was a priest of the Archdiocese of San Antonio for 34 years. What he got up to, he got up to on the watch of Archbishops Flores, Gomez, and Garcia-Siller, and that includes an apparently ill-advised construction project on the school. I wonder what Abp G-S’s long-term plan was for the parish, had he been successful in retaining it while getting rid of Fr Phillips.

I don't know if the archbishop meant Msgr Kurzaj to be just an interim placeholder at Atonement, but it appears that he's overseen an extensive restoration at the St Stanislaus parish along traditional lines. Since he came from Poland, he would have had little in common with the Texans in that parish, yet he seems to have been an effective leader nevertheless. The same might well have applied to Atonement, especially since the membership there was heavily cradle Catholic, not Anglican converts.

As an observer of clerical assignments in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles -- promising associates cycle through our parish, often as a last assignment before they go off to be administrators -- I have the impression that vicars for clergy look for well-formed priests with a certain level of confidence and poise and then trust that with those qualities, they can do well at a new parish.

The problem is that, coming from Episcopalian seminaries, or even a rag-tag collection of Reformed or Evangelical backgrounds, the clergy in the ordinariate are pretty much by definition not well formed as Catholic priests. Nor do they get much exposure to real Catholic priests, especially not the sort that associates get in a rectory. So they're basically making things up as they go along with their Anglican or other Protestant experience as a guide, though there's a contingent of young seminary graduates who couldn't even start careers as Protestants, so for them, there's almost no experience to draw on at all.

This is not a formula for success. But my correspondent's suggestion that there are career-ending contingencies possible here for Bp Lopes is ominous.