explored the ways that sudden and unexpected wealth changed life, for better or for worse. It told the stories of people who were given one million dollars ($9.54 million in 2019 dollars) from a benefactor who insisted they must never know his identity, with one exception.My memories are so vague that it's taken me a couple of months, now and then waking up suddenly in the early morning hours, to realize how much this hokey plot line resembles the bill of goods that's being sold in Cleburne. (The city of Cleburne, TX for that matter is named after Patrick Cleburne, a Confederate general who died a glorious but futile death in an ill-concevied charge at the Battle of Franklin, TN, just for some context here.)
Around the time I was waking up with repressed memories of the TV show, I was also thinking about the corrupt bosses I'd had who maintained some semblance of control in their orgainizations by fostering the illusion that they were just one happy working family, like say on Mary Tyler Moore, where everyone is flawed but lovable, which covers up for the reality that everyne is screwing everyone else's wives or husbands, and the whole department will be downsized next month due to ubiquitous nonfeasance.
Thus did brain-dead TV pollute our culture. But this brings me back to the instant issue: I sat up in bed early this mornimg recognizing that John Beresford Tipton, the anonymous benefactor in The Millionaire, is still active, still handing out random million-dollar checks for each week's episode, this one featuing the lucky parish of St John Vianney Cleburne. And Fr Wooten cautions us that the donor must remain anonymous, true to the TV fantasies of 1957.
But I keep taking this strange fantasy puzzle piece and trying to fit it into a hole in reality. For starters, there's no such thing as a random million-dollar grant. The version Fr Wooten gives in his YouTube presentation -- and there's no reference to it anywhere else insofar as I can find one -- is that some version of the John Beresford Tipton Foundationi -- presumably the Catholic Charities Departmet -- goes looking for worthy small Catholic parishes that it wants to turn into big ones, with million-dollar grants.
Fr Wooten's version is that he sorta-kinda got a phone call, in response to which he sorta-kinda put together a "little proposal", and a few weeks later he sorta-kinda got another phone call telling him it was on. (I still want to see the wire transfer receipt or just the bank statement.)
But let's take the real-world example I mentioned in yesterday'a post, St John the Baptist Bridgeport. It received a matching donatoin much smaller than a million dollars to complete just a portioni of the existing plan that had been developed by Cram & Ferguson, the church consulting firm. That seems like a much more credible story.
A serious grant proposal would go to the John Beresford Tipton Foundaion with something that had already been developed by Cram & Ferguson or equivalent. What is the current size of the group? What is the potential? What is the potential use of the property? Where on the property should the initial church phase go? What are the potential later phases? More important, what's the fundrasing plan going forward? How does the group plan to grow and upport the new building?
Every indication from Fr Wooten's YouTube presentations is that absolutely nothing like this has been prepared. If an actual million-dollar grant had been approved, we would see at least portions of the proposal on the parish website -- indeed, we'd have seen them well before the specific application was made. None of this would violate the Tipton Foundation's confidentiality.
On one hand, the audience I'm addressing here, at least the formal one that I target rhetorically, is of lay interested parties who are, however, just distant observers. I suspect actual ordinariate members are not numerous among visitors here, nor I would expect many actual donors to ordinariate parishes or Houston itself.
But I'm starting to have questions that need to be addressed more specifically. Why is Bp Lopes alllowing Fr Wooten to make these strange blue-sky YouTube presentations that have more in common with 60 year old TV shows than modern reality? Is he even aware of them?
Second, if there's been a million-dollar grant to further the growth of the St John Vianney parish, even if the John Beresford Tipton Foundation wants to be anonymous, why isn't Houston publicizng it? Why hasn't it even reached the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog?
Has Bp Lopes met with the movers and shakers at the John Beresford Tipton Foundation? Has he possibly tried to steer them toward sending the million where it might be more effectively used, for instance toward the existing serious plan at St John the Baptist Bridgeport?
We already have a parallel case in Houston's history, where Fr Perkins and Bp Lopes were duped into buying the "Gilbertine" hoax in Calgary. I'm increasingly convinced the million-dollar grant in Cleburne is just another episode of this same TV show. But when adults begin to buy into brain-dead TV fantasies, reality does have a way of stepping in, sooner rather than later.
