Although Fr Baaten does not officially become parish administrator of Our Lady of Grace, Covina until July 1, he has already added it to his bio and is celebrating there this weekend. St Augustine, San Diego has announced that the school chapel in which they worshipped before the lockdown will remain unavailable until at least the fall (school website says school is being sanitized).Fr Baaten, the last I'm aware, lives in coastal Orange County, CA, which is about 40 miles from Covina but about 90 miles from San Diego. It's about 25 miles from his day job as facilities manager in Silverado. Based on the link above, he appears to have business interests in Orange, so I doubt if he'd move, and he'd travel to Our Lady of Grace only about twice a week.I assume Fr Baaten will not resume celebrating there, given the distance from Covina. Samuel Keyes, identified as a St Augustine’s parishioner, was ordained to the transitional diaconate last month. He is currently the acting parish administrator of Holy Martyrs, Murrieta during Fr Bartus’s sabbatical. I suppose he could be ordained to the priesthood later this summer and take over the group. But he lives in Murrieta. TBD.
Holy Hartyrs, Murrieta has had mass in the parking lot of the mall where it is located the last two Sundays but today will be conducting mass inside, with live-streaming/Communion in the parking lot. There is only one mass today, so this is probably to accommodate numbers greater than the socially-distanced capacity of the chapel.
St John Henry Newman, Irvine will be celebrating its first mass since the lockdown on July 12, when Fr Simington arrives.
The model of the SoCal Ordinariate as a franchised brand, with Frs Baaten, Bayles, Barker, and assorted Norbertines as anonymous franchisees answering to Fr Bartus appears to be ending. The St John Henry Newman Facebook page announced in October that it would be becoming a full parish upon the canonisation of Cardinal Newman but as we predicted that did not happen, and indeed seems highly unlikely in its current location.
Fr Bartus worked hard to get Frs Baaten and Bayles ordained but his larger scheme of local domination never quite came to fruition. His formal association with the Norbertines has ended and perhaps he will just focus on Holy Martyrs, Murrieta and its local demands.
Fr Bartus, as far as anyone is aware, is on some type of sabbatical until fall. The St Michael's Prep school run by the Norbertines in Silverado is closing as of this fall with the construction of their new abbey facility. Fr Bartus is now listed on the faculty of the Memoria Press Online Academy, which appears to be a distance learning extension of the Highlands Latin School in Louisville, KY.
The question continues whether any of the California groups can sustain a priest without the priest having an outside job -- and whether they can ever grow to the point where this might be possible.
Last year, St John Henry Newman held a choral evensong and English garden party with Bp Lopes on hand in hopes of attracting a wealthy angel to fund expansion efforts, but this seems to have had no result.
One wonders whether the lack of success in major fundraising had an impact on the lack of progress in erecting the group as a full parish, and indeed, the assignment of Fr Simington as a new priest outside the Bartus sphere. And in any case, Houston has been dropping the Anglicanorum from the coetibus, which suggests that its emphasis going forward will simply be on extreme liturgy without the cachet of Anglophilia.
UPDATE>My regular correspondent has discovered that Fr Simington will be assisting at St Timothy Laguna Niguel, a parish in the Diocese of Orange, in addition to his work at St John Henry Newman.
