A couple of sources have told me about pending personnel moves in the ordinariate. Actually, this is the sort of thing that's made me more and more uncomfortable, since Houston doesn't announce such things, which are normally routine for dioceses. As a result, visitors e-mail me to ask what's going on. So I find myself doing work myself that someone in the Houston chancery is theoretically being paid to do, but isn't. The foresight of the staff there in recognizing the need to be safer at home and stay away from work, long before there was ever a virus to hide from, is to be commended, i guess.
First, a visitor tells me that Fr Lewis, pastor of Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, announced that the longtime associate there, Fr Jeffrey Moore, is being reassigned to Indianapolis. A Fr. Jon Jenkins is to be taking his place. He asked me if I know anything about Fr Jenkins. (Should I be invoicing Bp Lopes for this work?)
Fr Jenkins is a former conservative Episcopalian priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, TX under Bp Iker. After an Anglican career seems to have petered out, he found himself in Wisconsin in lay Catholic jobs, apparently with Nashotah House contacts sponsoring him there, and in 2019, he was ordained a married Catholic priest by Bp Lopes, but he remained in diocesan parish work in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. According to the archdiocese web site, he had been a "shared associate, St. Robert Bellamine, Union Grove, St. Francis Xavier, Brighton, St. John the Baptist, Paris, and St. Mary, Kansasville.
However, according to the same website, he was scheduled to be moved "to shared associate, Immaculate Conception, St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Paul Parishes in Milwaukee and Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in St. Francis, effective August 4, 2020." So the announced move to San Antonio working for Fr Lewis is something quite new.
You're welcome, Bp Lopes.
That Fr Moore is to move to Indianapolis implies that he will apparently be trying to revive the St Joseph of Arimathea group that met at the at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis archdiocesan parish there. However, according to my regular correspondent, this group had been dropped from the “Parish Finder” on the ordinariate website two years ago following the removal of its priest, Fr Luke Reese, in the wake of his kidnapping and battery conviction.
A Divine Worship mass continued to be celebrated there by archdiocesan clergy. Presumably Fr Moore will be primarily on the archdiocesan payroll at Holy Rosary, but of course, absent any official word from Houston or even Indianapolis, this is speculation.
You're welcome, Bp Lopes.
In other personnel news, my regular correspondent reports,
Four men are being ordained to the diaconate in Houston on Ascension Day. David H. Delaney (graduated high school 1978) is an academic based in San Antonio. I see nothing Episcoplan/Anglican in his background, so I assume he is an OLA parishioner. Stephen Arthur Hilgendorf is the Director of Christian Formation at St Paul’s Cathedral in St Paul, MN. A Nashotah House graduate, he was previously the rector of an ACA parish in St Louis Pk, MN and was received at the St Bede Mission there led by Vaughn Treco, now inactive. Sam Keyes, also a Nashotah House graduate, lives in Murrieta, CA so one can at least predict how the Ordinariate plans to deploy him. Last is Scott Wooten Also Nashotah House. I might be tempted to suspect that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.Add to the Nashotah club members Fr Jenkins, of course. Looks like Nashotah House is back in favor big time in Houston, although as we've been seeing, the Anglicanorum is being dropped from the coetibus in favor of a more generically pre-Conciliar approach to boutique liturgy. So why the continued need for pedigreed Episcopalians? And, er, wasn't Houston supposed to be moving toward celibate clergy formed in Catholic seminary? My regular correspondent answers,
That has never been a stated policy—-realistically, it couldn’t be. It is Bp Lopes’ HOPE that celibate candidates become a larger percentage of OCSP clergy, and that any married candidates would gather a group as a condition of being ordained (that part might have been explicitly stated), but in the meantime he apparently has to take what he can get. He has stated that 55 is the cut-off age for being accepted as a candidate and that no one will be ordained for strictly diocesan work—-two policies that would be a departure from Msgr Steenson’s practice—-but I think we decided that Fr Robert Kirk at Christ the King, Towson was 63 when he was ordained in 2019. And Fr Jon Jenkins was as a pastoral associate at Kenosha-Racine County Line, WI Catholic Parishes since 2019, with no Ordinariate assignment until this upcoming transfer. Looks like this will also be the situation with Mr Hilgendorf in St Paul, MN. Not sure what the plan is for Mr Wooten in Ft Worth. Only Mr Keyes fills an obvious gap.I'll continue to cover ordinariate issues as they arise, but it's worth thinking about these particular events in the larger context of other institutions that aren't working. Bp Lopes is collecting pedigreed, married former Episcopalian priests for largely imaginary postings -- and the ones he can fill continue, with only a few exceptions like Our Lady of the Atonement, to be dependent on part-time diocesan parish work, if priest assignments can be found for them at all.
Yet even the focus of the North American ordinariate itself is moving past trying to be a clone of The Episcopal Church to an ad hoc refuge for traditionalist cradle Catholics who don't know Latin. But the bureaucratic rules still require that he ordain men with Anglican credentials -- and given the Nashotah House types, I guess he's gonna go big with that or go home.
For now, there are bigger and more compelling examples of political and bureaucratic rot on which I want to spend more of my time.
