So, Who's In Charge In Houston? Does It Matter?

Serious enterprises have in place a succession plan to say, for instance, that if the CEO is suddenly unable to function because, for instance, he had a major fracture doing something or other at home and must spend weeks under medical care, then J Bradford Schmidlap, the Sr Vice President -- Finance is designated to carry out his duties until a new plan can be developed. Often the organization's auditors or its board of directors will insist on this.

This was one thing that came to mind when I heard of Bp Lopes's unfortunate accident. What's puzzling is that as far as I'm aware, the only official notice of the bishop's indisposition has come from his personal assistant, with no word from the vicar general. One would normally expect the vicar general to be the number two, and one would normally expect the person in authority under the exigent circumstance to make the requisite public announcement.

As far as I can tell, there's been no word from Fr Perkins, the vicar general, and nothing on the ordinariate website. A web search as I write this brings up no mention of this development elsewhere. Instead, I'm told that the bishop's personal assistant has privately asked that all inquiries be directed to him, which intentionally or not says something about the real chain of command in Houston.

My regular correspondent comments,

In charge of what, exactly? Apart from the travelling involved I don’t think being Ordinary of the OCSP is a very taxing job. There’s a finance person, and Sr Amata manages membership records and the Bishop’s Appeal. Fr Kramer handles the avalanche of ordination inquiries. The former assistant to Bp Lopes is now Fr Perkins’s assistant. Presumably Bp Lopes picks up the phone when a fellow bishop must be contacted re some request for the use of his diocesan facilities, and he chairs the monthly Governing Council meetings, but otherwise...?

Bp Lopes was supposed to officiate at Confirmation at Holy Martyrs, Murrieta last Sunday, then preside at Evensong at SJHN, Irvine on March 15.

So let me see. The vicar general, who seems to be in the process of being edged aside by the bishop's personal assistant, nevertheless now has a personal assistant himself, apparently due to an increasing press of responsibility.

Late in my career I was tasked with developing a change control program for a government agency's IT department. It had close to 100 people in that department. To do my job, I had to figure out what its whole IT operation looked like and then set up procedures to record and provide notice of any changes to that environment, which could potentially take place daily, and which could have a serious impact if the wrong people weren't notified in advance.

After some weeks work, I discovered that the whole function of this agency was to receive a single monthly payment from the government and forward wire transfer payments from that single payment to a limited number of other government agencies and contractors. The amount of work the agency did was trivial, and any changes to the IT environment were de minimis. The biggest threat to the organization was that the private contractors were angling, quite reasonably, to have the agency that forwarded the check (after deducting its cut) taken out of the loop and receive payments directly.

I was taken off that project. I did notice several years later that the agency, still in existence, had moved to larger, more prestigious, and more expensive offices.

Somehow the North American ordinariate takes me back to that experience.

The bishop is out of action for most of Lent at minimum, and it doesn't seem to make much difference. Maybe their IT operation needs a change control program.