What's Become Of That Promising Group In Katy, TX?

Regular visitors have come to recognize that anecdotal happy talk is a staple of Bp Lopes's public utterances. Yesterday I quoted from a 2015 interview where he typically pointed to a "success story":

We had a new community in Texas that just had its first Mass on the Third Sunday of Advent. Thirty-five people participated in that celebration, so the new community of St. Margaret of Scotland is off and running.

My regular correspondent began to wonder how, with such an encouraging start, the group has managed to elude attention over the past five years.

[B]oth the website and Facebook page are hopelessly out of date: former shows mass times for Holy Week 2019 and latter info for Christmas 2018. Fr Mitchican, identified on the website as Parochial Vicar, has a robust social media presence but seems to say little about the St Margaret community; he is also chaplain at the host school (where he uses the OF) and assists at OLW, Houston.

I cannot find Fr Sellers’s name on the school website; perhaps he has retired as President. Most recent group picture is perhaps from 2018,

I will look further to see if I can be more specific. In any event, there are about fifty people, which, along with the lack of web presence, suggests that it failed to grow much beyond its formative group, which,by the look of it, consisted mostly of St John XXIII College Prep students and their families.

In fact, Fr Sellers sent an encouraging note to the now inactive Ordinariate Expats blog in February 2015, in which he pointed to "200 families' he'd recruited to the new group, although this had dwindled to 35 individuals by the time of Bp Lopes's statement. But further regarding Fr Sellers, my correspondent was able to find

The Winter 2018-19 edition of Parare, the St John XXIII College Prep magazine, has a “Message from the President” (Fr Sellers), as do previous issues. But the most recent issue (Fall 2019) has only a “Message from the Interim Principal.” I cannot find any reference to a “President” on the school website. So perhaps the administration of the school has been reorganised, with the elimination of Fr Sellers and his job.

This might explain why the St Margaret, Katy website and Facebook page have been left dangling. Is Fr Sellers returning to the school to celebrate Sunday mass? Hard to know.

Fr Mitchican is an odd duck; he continues to write for The Living Church, but also posted a thoughtful appreciation of the OF on the fiftieth anniversary of its debut on the Fist Sunday of Advent last year, a Sunday on which he was celebrating at Our Lady of Walsingham. In stark contrast to a wail of anguish elsewhere. So he is no Fr Bartus, in this as in many other ways.

The mass at St Margaret, in the school cafetorium, with Fr Sellers playing the guitar and Mrs Sellers on the electronic keyboard, seemed unlikely to attract disaffected Catholics of the TLM Lite school. Is it being allowed to wither away?

My correspsondent ventured further into the wilderness of social media:

I see on Fr Sellers’ Facebook “Timeline” that he left his job at St John XXIII last year. His Facebook page documents every performance of clerical duties, so I can affirm that he has been celebrating at St Margaret once or twice a month at least since last November.

For example, he was there on December 1, 2019, a date when Fr Mitchican was at OLW. He posts on Facebook at least daily, with videos of himself playing and singing, scripture meditations, and many other “features” as well as personal news.

The neglect of the St Margaret Facebook page and website suggests that these are no longer his responsibility. I can’t help noticing that 40 people have ever “checked in” to the St Margaret Facebook page. The comparable number at the St Bartholomew page, the diocesan parish where Fr Sellers assists, is over 22,000.

Seems like Fr Sellers's recent history has been one of leaving assignments, from Dean of the Fargo, ND Episcopalian cathedral, to Director of Communications in Houston, to President of St John XXIII College Prep. Now he seems to be a supply priest with time on his hands.

The bottom line with St Margaret Katy appears to be that enthusiasm has never grown much beyond the initial optimism of 2015, while the clergy there seem more focused on promoting their own social media presence than publicizing the parish.

In short, nothing new here. It started under Msgr Steenson, but it continues under Bp Lopes as a full-employment program for former Episcopalian mediocrities, for whom the laity are a distant secondary concern.