So The House At The Woodlands Isn't A Rectory, But

The newly established Catholic Church of the Presentation in The Woodlands, TX first appeared on the radar here this past June, when it was still meeting in a local diocesan facility. In October, this blog covered its purchase of what I referred to at the time as a McMansion, a 3,000 square foot, million-dollar residence. I speculated that it must have been for use as a rectory. A visitor attended mass there recently and had an opportunity to see more of the property and reports:

The house situated on the property in The Woodlands where this ordinariate mission has set up camp seemingly serves as something more akin to a parish hall from what I saw. As far as I could tell, nobody seems to reside in the home and Mass was celebrated in a relatively large steel barn located behind the property. [The visitor later suggested "barn" wasn't fully accurate as a description, although I think "garage" might also be correct.]

Confessions were heard in the house in an upstairs room which I believe was an office (whether this was +Fletchers or not, I could not tell you). The rest of the upstairs seemed to have been used for miscellaneous storage: liturgical objects, vestments, bankers boxes filled with files/paperwork, tables & chairs, etc. The downstairs was more or less setup as a parish hall, as I mentioned before. It was sparsely furnished and clearly designed to host laity after mass; folding tables/chairs, coffee urns, the usual suspects. The only bathrooms on the grounds were also located inside the house; I used two of the three bathrooms and they were clearly not anyone’s personal bathroom.

Nothing about the place gave me the impression that anyone was actually living there. However, I could certainly be wrong about that — perhaps +Fletcher and Co. have considerably lower requirements for their living situation than I would expect. Additionally, I was there around the first week of November, so it’s possible that the house is being utilized differently by now.

Additionally, I struck up a conversation with one of the parishioners who appeared to be very much in the know about Presentation’s future plans. He pointed out to what appeared to be a newly laid foundation quite a ways off in the distance that he claimed was the site that the chapel will be erected. However, if I recall correctly, this property is somewhere between 20-30 acres and the area he pointed out was no less than 500-600 feet away, and I didn’t care enough at the time to inspect it further.

The big thing that strikes both me and my regular correspondent is that the only mention of this project other than on the group's website has been on this blog. For an ordinariate group, quasi-parish, mission, or whatever it is to acquire its own property almost from the start is completely new, but there's been no mention in any official ordinariate publication, and my regular correspondent doesn't think an Ordinariate Observer is on the horizon any time soon. The report we've had from Bp Lopes's presentation in Toronto doesn't mention it.

Beyond that, what the visitor reported doesn't seem fully consistent with the plan outlined on the plans page of the parish website. The plan as outlined seems more and more vague as I try to compare it with the visitor's report. The Fall 2019 phase includes purchasing land, establishing a music program, and beginning a CCD program. (I've noted before that the CCD strategy seems to involve confirming pre-teen children as "anchor babies" to make their initiated Catholic parents eligible for canonical "membership" in the parish.)

But although we're still in Fall 2019, the parish seems to have entered Phase II of the plan, involving renovating existing facilities at minimum. But the visitor also reports that a knowledgeable parishioner pointed to "what appeared to be a newly laid foundation quite a ways off in the distance that he claimed was the site that the chapel will be erected". This suggests that further Phase II and Phase III activity is already under way, with a chapel under construction as a possible intermediate stage toward construction of a large gothic building.

However, the plan as published is too vague to allow anyone to place that in any context. Has the new gothic building already been designed, with the chapel eventually to be incorporated as a transept or something? Who knows? More importantly, the numbers on the plan -- low six figures -- simply do not account for the level of expenditure that already seems to be under way. From what I understand, a diocesan building department would not allow construction to start without a detailed and carefully approved plan, for which a substantial part of the funding has already been secured.

I suspect some sort of plan is in place, and I would think the same consulting and architectural firm that built the Houston chancery and did a proposal for St John the Baptist Bridgeport was involved. But if that's the case, the plans page on the Presentation website is not fully ingenuous about what's going on.

Beyond that, if the project seems to be moving past initial plans into a construction phase of some sort, this means the actual project is probably more comparable to the Walsingham cathedral and the chancery than the initial plans suggest. And I would have to surmise multimillions have been pledged and assured for it.

But this raises more questions. Why The Woodlands? Why fund a whole new project, when the St John Vianney parish also has land and could use money for a building? Or the St John the Baptist parish in Bridgeport, which has had a proposal and could use funding for that project? And where, in fact, are the multimillions that already seem to be behind the project coming from?

And last but not least, why the radio silence? Is incompetence in the ordinariate communications department the only explanation, or, for instance, might Bp Lopes want to keep this quiet for as long as he can to avoid any possible sit-down with Cardinal DiNardo over poaching initiated Catholic families?

I've been wrong about this once already, but I can excuse myself by saying there's no reliable information anywhere on what's clearly a major project underway here. Why not bypass the blogger and just make things clear and public?