Katy is close to where Walsingham is in Houston. Why would there have been a group started there in the past if they could just drive 15 minutes?It seems pretty clear that this was nothing more than a half-baked effort to create jobs for Fr Sellers and one or two other favored priests. The others, of course, have been folded into the Our Lady of Walsingham staff. My regular correspondent commented,
The skeptics on the Facebook forum who refused to believe that the group has folded were informed by a Walsingham parishioner that two candidates from St Margaret’s were presented with the Walsingham candidates for confirmation on Pentecost, and it was announced that the congregations were merging.So I get the impression that there are something like half a dozen priests now connected with the Houston cathedral, including Bp Lopes, Fr Perkins, Fr Hough IV, Fr Michoacan, Fr Fletcher, and three deacons. Have I left anyone out? [Yes, Fr Kramer, vocation director.] This is for a parish numbering in the very low four figures, and a total "diocese" numbering still in four figures, the size of one normal Catholic parish. I can't see any of these men being overtaxed, either working for the parish or the "diocese". Yet they seem to live quite well.
My regular correspondent reflected on the overall question of the unstable and marginal ordinariate communities:
None of the North American ordinariate start-ups has achieved parish status in five years and a number (St Alban, Greenville. SC; St Bede, St Louis Pk, MN; St Gilbert, Boerne, TX; Our Lady of Mt Carmel, Savannah; St Margaret's Katy, TX) have folded. [St Augustine San Diego is on borrowed time as well.] The smallest of the former “continuing” Anglican groups which entered have remained small Ordinariate communities which will probably not outlast the clergyman who led them in, or, in a few cases, a committed lay leader. St Joseph of Arimathea, Indianapolis is atypical in that it is getting new clerical leadership after the departure of its founding priest, albeit two and a half years after that event.UPDATE: My correspondent knows of other communities that have been closed:
I omitted St Augustine’s from my list of endangered groups because I was just listing communities “gathered” as a condition of someone’s ordination. St Augustine was originally an ACA community in Oceanside, CA. If we include former “continuing” parishes now folded or on the brink, there are four or five more: San Agustin, Pinecrest, FL; St Anselm, Corpus Christi,TX; St Edmund, Kitchener, ON; St Gregory the Great—-both the one in Stoneham, MA and the one in Mobile, AL.My correspondent points to another, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Jacksonville, NC.
This group no longer has a website and its Facebook page is a stub, but it apparently continues to meet in a strip mall storefront (probably not right now, as the space is too small to allow for the social distancing required by the local diocese). This link is a YouTube video of Fr Waun, the parish administrator, preaching there in March of this year. I am assuming it is at OLGC because of the glimpse of the acoustic tile ceiling at the beginning and what appears to be a homemade altar to Fr Waun’s left. A clue to a possible motive for the continued existence of the group: Fr Waun has been awarded a renewed three year contract to provide RC chaplaincy services to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville.In other words, like so many of the arrangements in the North American ordinariate, the position exists to benefit the priest, not to perform any particular service for ordinariate laity. The problem continues to be that there are often just not enough laity on the ground to justify the priest, no matter how Houston tries to paint the picture.
This makes something like a dozen communities that have folded to date, while we don't know what the potential is from the COVID lockdowns.
