I note that the community of Christ the King, Tyendinaga no longer appears on the “Parish Finder” section of the OCSP website. This was a small group (13 initially received in 2012 from the ACCC). Their former clergyman, Gerard Trinque, was not ordained owing to delict of schism but continued to lead them until forced to retire for health reasons. Their subsequent leader was due to be ordained a permanent deacon in 2018 but this was put on hold when he also developed a serious health problem.It's a reflection on both Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins that the information on the ordinariate website can be taken as neither authoritative nor reliable, although it's understandable that they might not wish to draw attention to yet another group's closure.The group advertised a weekly service in the monthly newsletter of the local reserve for years but has not done so for some time. I read somewhere recently that they had a monthly mass celebrated by a local diocesan priest. Perhaps that arrangement has had to come to an end. In any event they are no longer on the website “parish” list.
There was some interest in this community on the part of the “Royalist” faction in the OCSP because they worshipped in Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal of the Mohawks, an Anglican church on the reserve which dates back to 1843 in its present form and has special status making it one of six Chapels Royal outside the UK. Not my cup of Earl Grey, but very exciting to some. In any event there are doubtless better options available for Catholics living on the reserve and I hope the OCSP members are now taking advantage of them.
Nevertheless, this continues to be a reflection of the instability of the marginal groups in formation, of which there are more than a few. Someone, if not Bp Lopes or Fr Perkins, must understand that they are doing these Catholic converts no favors in providing such iffy environments to grow in their faith. It's more and more plain that many of the marginal groups depend on one priest, and if for any reason that one priest can't continue, the group closes.
This is because the group is a Potemkin village, existing primarily to swell numbers and to justify ordaining some marginal man with an uncertain vocation. When the marginal guy disappears, the group can't sustain any sort of replacement. It retained the guy in the first place because the project was a vanity exercise. The people who are hurt will be the dozen or so who were duped into thinking this was the Catholic Church, when far better options were available to them in the same area -- indeed, often just upstairs or down the hall.
How long was this group effectively inactive before Houston finally saw fit to pull the official plug?
UPDATE: My regular correspondent sent a link to a National Catholic Register piece on the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus that gives a much more detailed version of the Tyendinaga community:
But the ordinariate in Tyendinaga shows people that they can be fully Mohawk and fully Catholic with the Anglican traditions of their ancestors. The community sings Mohawk hymns and prays some of the Mass prayers, such as the Our Father, in Mohawk. While both the Book of Common Prayer and much of the pre-Vatican II (extraordinary form) Catholic Mass was translated into Kanienʼkehá, Maracle said the language is still being relearned and other challenges would have to be met first before translating Divine Worship: The Missal.The bottom line is that the group is no longer listed on the website, although how it ever qualified as "Catholic" in its freelance liturgy isn't fully clear.The main drawback is that while they can witness to the faith “by our good works,” they do not have the stability that comes with having a priest to regularly offer the Mass and sacraments.
