Anglicanorum Coetibus And Dilbert

I've been reflecting on the remarks by a visitor on how poorly the numbers for Anglican-style parishes compare with SSPX and FSSP, not to mention the Eastern rite parishes that also clearly attract cradle Catholics who want a reverent liturgy. I also began to think more about Dilbert, the popular comic strip by Scott Adams that often pokes fun at misguided business culture. I began to realize that Dilbert seems to be playing out in Houston and probably the CDF in Rome as well.

One of my favorite Dilbert stories involves a group of managers meeting in a conference room. Predictably, the meeting runs on after hours. A janitor mistakenly locks the door to the conference room from the outside, so that the managers can't get out. The managers realize they have to call out to get someone to open the door, but they can't decide on whether the prefix to call out is 8 or 9, so they decide to compromise on 8.5. However, they discover that the phone won't take a decimal value, so they all eventually starve to death in the conference room.

How does this apply to Anglicanorum coetibus? Let me count the ways. Let's just go to the question of married priests, which of course Bp Lopes says we're not gonna have, except he keeps hiring then, with little or nothing for them to do. In an exchange with my regular correspondent, I said,

There are two issues with married priests. One is how to compensate former Anglican married priests to encourage them to come to the ordinariates. This is an artificial question at best, since many who do come in are desperate cases who can’t make Protestant careers and can’t eke out especially favorable circumstances for themselves. The small number of favored candidates like Hough IV or Fletcher are a completely different question and point to the incoherence of the project. An entirely separate question is how to handle prospective future intake of married priests in the Church at large, for which I don’t think the ordinariates are a serious model – and I’m not sure if Francis will offer a consistent vision, either.

My regular correspondent replied,

As for the model going forward, in the UK virtually every OOLW priest below retirement age works full-time at a diocesan parish. A few host Ordinariate groups at their parish; most meet with them elsewhere on, say, the second Tuesday of the month. This has not been a recipe for growth, unsurprisingly. Most OCSP priests who are not receiving pension income have weekday jobs as chaplains, teachers, etc but serve on their Ordinariate group on Sunday. Some have diocesan parish assignments; this generally means no association with an Ordinariate group but one or two have a regular group with a Sunday mass at an off-time.

In the short term having an OCSP priest function as a diocesan pastor solves some problems: a stipend is provided, possibly housing, a worthy worship space is available, there is a critical mass of members for Christian education and service, and social events. Whether such priests will consider it worth while to maintain the Ordinariate community is another matter. I suppose it depends to what extent the Ordinariate project was just a means to ordination.

The exchange hinged partly on the question of the ostentatious McMansion provided as a rectory to Fr Fletcher in The Woodlands, which is a highly visible exception to the usual means of compensating ordinariate married priests. Challenged on this, I replied,

The big problem I see with the one in The Woodlands is that it is in fact a pretentious bourgeois home. Yet Catholics are called to a life of humility and sacrifice exemplified by the saints, and priests are also called to such lives as examples. Somewhere I read that the pay of secular priests is meant to enable them to live simply with dignity. I don’t see a McMansion fitting that. What any OCSP parish pays for a rectory is just a manifestation of the incoherence behind the project.

My correspondent replied,

Perhaps your issue with the McMansion in Montgomery is not just architectural snobbery after all. I think that there is much unexplained there: the significant? number of families that were commuting from Woodlands to OLW, and who it was put up Fr Fletcher’s stipend as a Parochial Vicar at OLW to minister to this alleged contingent. Presumably that person or persons had a major voice in the real estate plans.

Going forward, we're going to have celibate priests who live lives of humility and sacrifice, paid enough to live simply but with dignity. Unless an oil-rich angel in Houston can fund a country estate worthy of an Episcopalisn wannabe with Leave it to Beaver family, in which case we'll bend all the rules. What problem is Bp Lopes trying to solve?

What problem were the managers locked in the conference room trying to solve? I've got to say that I worked for several companies where that scene could credibly have taken place. I rode them down almost to their acquisitions or bankruptcies. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is, I think, just a special case of the Invisible Hand of the Almighty.