Our Lady Of The Atonement And Catholic Parish Property

A visitor hundreds of miles from San Antonio took the trouble to look up the Bexar County, TX tax records connected with the Our Lady of the Atonement parish and came up with a patchwork of half a dozen parcels, all owned by "Our Lady of the Atonement Church" or "Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church", which brought up the intriguing question of who actually owns them now and the subsidiary question of how they were acquired. As an amateur and newcomer to this sort of thing, all I could surmise was that this isn't how Catholic parishes are normally set up.

As it happens, the ordinariate web site itself has a section that deal with this problem:

Canons 1254-1310 in canon law regulate the purchase, ownership, administration, and sale of temporal goods. The definition of “temporal goods” is all property both movable and immovable that is owned by juridic persons in the Church. Much like the civil law allows groups to form civil corporations, canon law allows groups to become public juridic persons. A public juridic person is similar to a canonical corporation. Dioceses are independent juridic persons, as are parishes, missions, Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, etc.

The Ordinariate will have parishes that will be independently incorporated in civil law. Though some dioceses in the United States are set up as civil “corporations sole”, this civil legal construct is not appropriate for the Ordinariate, nor does it accurately reflect the Church’s understanding that each individual parish is its own separate public juridic person. However, the Ordinariate will require that each public juridic person’s civil articles of incorporation reflect the canonical reality that parishes are required to administer their property (temporal goods) as governed by the requirements of canon law.

So basically, if the Atonement parish owns property in its name, that's something the ordinariate encompasses, though it's not necessarily how Catholic dioceses operate. There's a question, though, how the Atonement parish was able to do this when it was in the Pastoral Provision under the Archdiocese of San Antonio. Apparently Fr Phillips was able to shove this through at the time there as well.

I ran this by a knowledgeable visitor, whose reply reminded me that Fr Phillips seems like a very minor-league version of Milton's Satan or Ida Tarbell's John D Rockefeller:

I can't speak to this other then to say that I do know that the property now known as OLOTA was purchased from the Archdiocese back in the early eighties. The San Antonio Archdiocese, like most dioceses, purchase properties in outlying areas. This is done ostensibly for future growth of the diocese. Sometimes these properties sit vacant for many years until the area starts to populate enough to support a new parish church or school. This is what happened In the case of OLOTA property.

I do recall Fr. Phillips saying to me that the diocese didn't think this particular property was located very well for a new parish or school and that the diocese wanted to get it sold. If I recall correctly, Fr. Phillips said that he was able to purchase the property for a reduced price and had negotiated a good deal with the Archdiocese for repayment. As I understand it, this is a normal arrangement. The Archdiocese buys properties for future use, an area grows, and then the Archdiocese sells the property to create a new parish. A mortgage is secured for the new parish usually from commercial banks with the Archdiocese securing the mortgage.

A couple of thoughts come to mind here: If you will recall I mentioned to you a while back an incident where Fr. Phillips thought he was in trouble with the Archdiocese because of some trouble he was having with a teaching order of Franciscan Nuns that he had at OLOTA. This incident occurred in the late eighties or early nineties. Fr. Phillips won the battle by getting rid of the nuns, but his relationship with Archbishop Flores was soured to the point where the Archbishop never returned to OLOTA. Fr. Phillips was concerned enough about this falling out with the Archbishop that he decided to purchase a house of his own for his family just in case the Archbishop would remove him from the parish. He was, at the time, living in a small house on OLOTA property owned by the Archdiocese.

A second incident comes to mind regarding the OLOTA property. If you will recall I also mentioned to you that when Mother Angelica sent a group of nuns (six) to San Antonio to start a new foundation, Archbishop Gomez, the next Archbishop to take over the San Antonio diocese, housed the nuns in the small house previously lived in by Fr. Phillips and his family. How could Archbishop Gomez do this if the Archdiocese didn't own the property? As a last thought, one would have to ask why would the Archdiocese back or sign for the many loans in the many millions of dollars for a property that they didn't own? How is this even legal?

Why would Bishop Lopes have to negotiate with the Archdiocese for the turnover of the property to OCSP if the Archdiocese didn't own the property? We also know that that the Archdiocese Of San Antonio holds the paper on the loans in the millions of dollars for the next thirty years at OLOTA. I will leave you with this last thought. If it were remotely true that OLOTA is self owned, not Archdiocese/OCSP owned, Fr. Phillips would be a very rich man. If it were true that he purchased the property from the Archdiocese, paid the note off, built this enterprise and the property belonged to him, why would he leave and why would he allow his legacy to be torn apart? The last I heard is that the property and buildings were valued somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty million dollars. Fr. Phillips would indeed be a very rich man.

One problem I see with the Anglicanorum coetibus project is that it clearly encompasses cascading exceptions in the name of bringing unspecified whatever into the Catholic Church, exemplified in detail by Fr Moore's wearing an Anglican collar in the video I linked yesterday. The Atonement parish somehow got away with Fr Phillips purchasing what amounted to a personal rectory that was de facto on site, owned entirely by himself, as insurance against some bishop down the road deciding to reassign him.

We can see how that worked out, huh?