What Were They Thinking?

The more I learn about Catholic dioceses, the more I think, among many other things, that Cardinal Roger Mahony is an underrated figure. At minimum, I've run into a lot of outstanding Catholic priests in late middle career who advanced to responsible positions under Mahony. This says to me that, whatever glitches may have taken place, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had been an operation that did in fact promote the right people. I continue to think that Mahony's 1986 decision not to accept St Mary of the Angels as a Pastoral Provision parish was correct and in fact foresighted.

This was a parish that seems to have had considerable promise, first under its founding rector, Fr Dodd, and then under his successor, Fr Jordan, who in the view of the former vestryman I quoted yesterday had considerable foresight, not least in acquiring adjoining property to expand the parking lot, something his successor, Fr Barker, neglected in favor of a seven-year plague of feckless litigation that left the parish with a pyrrhic victory but no denominational affiliation. (I assume I'll never have an opportunity to address Fr Barker about this in a townhall.)

But another program that had been neglected throughout the parish's later history was facility maintenance. The former vestryman told me,

When the [commercial] tenants, upstairs and down, were in place, there came a heatwave, which overloaded the air conditioning apparatus on the roof. We undertook to get this sorted out, and had an HVAC professional survey the problems of the antique system -- nearly original to 1984, by all appearances. He was servicing it, to make the rehab center temperatures get a bit lower than 85F. It was critical for their business that this be fixed. But about that point, we were ejected.

The parish had changed hands three times over the past decade, and maintenance wasn't a priority, even if the money had been there -- but it was going to continued litigation.

But another factor I see as I get to know Catholic dioceses better is that they spend a lot of time in property management. In part, this is simply because the ownership responsibility for parish facilities is much more clearly with the diocese, rather than among Episcopalians, where primary ownership is with the local parish corporation in the form of the rector, wardens, and vestry, who can maintain the facility or not as they choose. I would guess that among other things, a Catholic diocese self-insures, so that it's much more in the diocese's interest to pay attention to safety.

But let's turn to the example of Fr Mark Lewis, who clearly is now the lead pastor in the North American ordinariate, selected by Bp Lopes to take over from Fr Phillips at the most prestigious and visible parish in the ordinariate. As far as anyone can tell, Fr Lewis's skill set simply does not extend to facility maintenance, since his former Episcopalian parish allowed its building to deteriorate to the point that once it went into the ordinariate, it had to return the property to the Episcopalian diocese due to its condition, which the parish could not maintain.

How does this relate to Fr Lewis's potential ability to maintain the Our Lady of the Atonement property, which is aging with the additional burden of an unfinished school facility?

The parishes in Bridgeport and Scranton, PA have limited resources to maintain, and certainly not to upgrade, old and possibly dangerous facilities that had previously been closed by Catholic dioceses, at least in part due to the continued expense of maintaining them or bringing them up to standard. Other ordinariate parish facilities in Baltimore and Orlando appear to be aging, and my instinct is that neither has the resources to renew roofs or HVAC.

Yet for all Bp Lopes's talk of building a diocese from scratch, Houston has nobody on staff to supervise facilities, and the ordinariate does not have the resources to finance parish capital programs. This is going to show more with each passing winter and summer.

I think Cardinal Mahony, who did in fact know a thing or two about how to run a diocese, had a pretty good idea of what he'd be getting into by bringing St Mary of the Angels into his archdiocese under the Pstoral Provision. Certainly the public issue he stated was simply that if the parish had a problem with Episcopalian authority, it was going to have a bigger one under the Catholic Church. But there's a continuing but more subtle problem that constitutionally disgruntled, fractious, and pusillanimous parishes aren't set up to do the daily work of prudence, temperance, and fortitude of maintaining and upgrading their facilities.

That would be problem enough for an archdiocese that had such a parish under the Pastoral Provision. How much worse will this be for a scratch-built wannabe diocese with neither the staff nor the resources to make sure this is done?

I think this is a central defect in the thought processes that led to Anglicanorum coetibus.