As of July 1, this community will be getting its fourth parish administrator since its creation in 2012. The founding members were former congregants of Fr Charles Hough III who followed him into the Church. Fr Hough III was appointed Vicar for Clergy of the OCSP in 2012 and then promoted to Vicar General while remaining Vicar for Clergy. At that point he relinquished leadership of SJV to Fr Jonathan Duncan.Cleburne has a population of 30,720, so it's not in fact large. But the account above covers a lot of territory, and a couple of other questions emerge. One is how a group that apparently numbers about 50 can handle a relatively major donation and a construction project. Even in Texas, a million bucks won't go far to build a church. There will need to be serious additional fundraising. Fr Wooten's Linkdin profile via the link above says he has some background in architecture and construction, but he's nevertheless going to be undertaking a project without supervision, in a new environment.In January 2016 Fr Duncan left Texas to take over Fr Chalmers’s congregation in Greenville, SC. Subsequently that community folded, and Fr Duncan is now incardinated in the local diocese. Meanwhile, Fr Christopher Stainbrook, who had led St Timothy, Ft Worth into the Ordinariate, was asked to take over SJV. At the time ai assumed this was because SJV was considered to have the more robust prospects for growth.
In May 2016 Fr Perkins was appointed Vicar-General of the OCSP and Fr Hough III seemed to disappear from the picture—-no longer Priest in Residence at OLW, no longer supplying at St Timothy, Ft Worth despite the fact that they had been left without a PA since Fr Stainbrook’s departure. I assumed that there was some health issue, so I was surprised to discover his name popping up at several recent events at St Bartholomew, Katy, (a diocesan parish) as here, where he is described as “one of our favorite visiting priests.” Presumably his abrupt departure from his position as V-G shortly after Bp Lopes took over was not on friendly terms.
Now Fr Stainbrook, whose departure left St Timothy, Ft Worth (now St Thomas Becket) without a PA for over two years, is becoming Pastor of SMV, Arlington as of July 1. It appears from this letter that the new PA, Mr Scott Wooten, ordained to the diaconate last month, is on the fast track to ordination as a priest. The congregation currently worships in an elementary school cafetorium and numbers about fifty, I would estimate. One hopes that Fr Wooten stays with them longer than their previous leaders.
If you can open this link you can see that Mr Wooten has quite a varied resumé Clearly the right person to supervise the construction of a new church. Ambitious, if not yet fully realised, blog plans. A new YouTube channel (this is the announcement of the $1,000,000 gift). Formerly in the Episcopal Diocese of Ft Worth with Fr Perkins, In the video Mr Wooten mentions that a “metal building” was in view with the previously available budget so this will clearly permit something a bit more impressive.
A bigger issue, for me, is how this mission parish fits in with the Catholic community in Cleburne. The donor is apparently interested in “small Catholic churches.” The other parish in Cleburne, St Joseph, does not seem particularly large I do note that two of its three Sunday masses are in Spanish.
Dioceses, of course, have building departments that parish priests can rely on. Not so here.
Another question is how this project is being branded. In the YouTube, Fr Wooten refers in a vague and folksy way to "some folks" referred to him by "friends of St John Vianney" who are "interested in donating to small Cathoic churches", or something like that. (The vagueness and the talking-down do not inspire confidence.)
This brings up the current contradiction in Houston. It's understood, reinforced by recent opinions from visitors, that Houston wants to airbrush the Anglicanorum from the coetibus and brand itself as Catholic, no hyphen. Nevertheless, even if we can't say "Anglican", Fr Wooten would not have been ordained without the special dispensation that recognizes his Anglican formation, and the authorized liturgy for his parish contains exclusively Anglican elements. To be "members" of the ordinariate, congregants must have some arguable Anglican connection.
And without all those exceptions, there would be no ordinariate, and it would not provide a billet for a bishop of Portuguese and Polish heritage. They'd have had to find something else for the former protégé of Cardinal Levada to do.
So how indeed does this strange creature fit into the diocesan world in the Fort Worth area? On the other hand, it does seem as though Fr Wooten's ties go back to the old boy network in the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth (that is, the not-TEC Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth), and maybe nobody was thinking that hard about the Catholic stuff after all. Was Fr Wooten's career in construction not working out, and he appealed to his former buddies to fast--track him into a clerical job? We'll have to see.
My money is on the old boy network. And given the fruits of that network, you don't get figs from thistles. I would not have given a million bucks for this project, frankly.
