The Marginal Ordinariate Groups And The Exit Plan

I haven't concealed my view that Anglicanorum coetibus is a deeply flawed concept, and the ordinariates have a limited prospective life. (My assessment is also that if I'm going to continue blogging, I need to branch out into areas other than the Anglican stuff, which I'm doing.) But a couple of recent e-mails from my regular correspondent raise the question of whether there's a realistic exit plan for the ordinariates.

Canada of course has only one full parish, St Jphn the Evangelist, Calgary. Neither of the nearest contenders: Annunciation, Ottawa, which started as an ACCC parish, nor St Thomas More, Toronto—-a gathered group, mostly of former ACC members who converted long before the proclamation of Anglicanorum coetibus —-has grown to parish size over the last eight years, and the other six communities, all formerly ACCC, remain in the low double digits, ministered to by men well past secular retirement age, with the exception of Fr Kenyon in Victoria. It is safe to predict that most will fold in the near future. St Bede, Halifax, while it remains on the OCSP website list, has not held its monthly mass since Fr Richard Harris’s retirement in July.

In the OCSP as a whole, the last group to attain parish status was St Barnabas, Omaha, in 2018.

We recall that Fr Bartus announced that St John Henry Newman, Irvine was going to become the first Catholic parish dedicated to Newman after his canonisation, but that did not happen. Presumably one obstacle to other groups’ attaining parish status is the requirement that they have 30 families/100+ individual members who are eligible for Ordinariate membership. Groups which have shown growth—-Holy Martyrs, Murrieta; St Aelred, Bishop; Presentation, Montgomery—-seem to be attracting lifelong Catholics rather than Anglican converts.

Parents of young children who receive Sacraments of Initiation in the Church will become eligible for membership, so there is a way forward for some of these groups, but in the meanwhile we must expect that, as in Canada, small groups led by retirees and stuck in mission status for a decade will simply cease to exist when their parish administrator departs.

The number of OCSP “parishes” is given as 42 in this 2016 article The latest community to be put on the OCSP website is Presentation, Montgomery, established in February, 2019. The current number on the site is 40. Meanwhile three communities on the list are not currently holding services. At two of these communities, mass was formerly celebrated once a month.

A second e-mail covers the most marginal groups:

Fr Mayer has just sent out a notice that St James, Jacksonville will be worshipping from this Sunday on at a new site, its fourth since he assumed leadership of the group in 2019. The new site, a retreat center chapel, is available Sunday morning, whereas the previous venue could only host a Vigil mass. This change of time was necessitated because the site before that, the chapel in St Joseph’s School, Jacksonville, ceased in March to be available to the the group, which had previously paid rent for its use.

Likewise, St Augustine of Canterbury, San Diego has not been able to use the chapel at Cathedral Catholic High School in that city since the lockdown despite the fact that the school reopened in August. In the case of this community, the group has not relocated.

Meanwhile, two other communities, St John Vianney, Cleburne and St John Fisher, Orlando, both closed temporarily during the lockdown, now continue to meet for mass in the cafetoria of local elementary schools. I am interested in why the Catholic schools have apparently evicted their previous OCSP tenants for the foreseeable future. In the case of St Augustine, already down to a handful and currently without a priest, its survival looks doubtful.

These circumstances raise the question that especially since the COVID lockdowns, the smallest groups have lost their ability to pay rent to their hosts from the weekly offerings, much less pay a normal stipend to the priest or even reimburse his travel expenses. It appears that already, some of these groups will never recover. And in Canada, there's the additional problem that most of the Canadian priests are over secular retirement age.

Of the groups that have already closed de facto, or of those likely to close in the foreseeable future due to retirement of their priests without an available replacemeent, what provision is Houston making to ensure their members continue as faithful Catholics?

Let's keep in mind that a fairly major selling point Houston makes, though often in whispers, is that novus ordo parishes aren't really Catholic, and if you want to be really Catholic, you go to your little ordinariate group and reassure each other about how Catholic you are.

What does Houston tell these people to do when their groups close? Or does Houston say anything at all? I'd be most interested to hear from people formerly in ordinariate groups that have closed. Do they still go to mass at novus ordo parishes? Do they go back to Anglican parishes? Do they go to church at all? Did Houston ever give them any guidance?