Bishop Lopes held an emergency meeting at St. Barnabas on Sunday [January 31]. Father Catania is being removed as pastor, and transferred to St. Luke’s in Washington, D.C. as an associate, effective March 1st. This is a result of his having completely spent the endowment totaling several millions of dollars. The parish has been broke for several months.Further information indicates that Deacon Patrick Simons has been appointed Parochial Administrator until then. A replacement pastor from the ordinariate will not arrive until July 1, and the visitor tells me that there will be supply priests from the Archdiocese of Omaha saying mass until then. The replacement priest from the ordinariate has not been named, but a rumor is that he'll be married with a family.
The St Barnabas parish is one of very few that were dissident Episcopalian or Anglican Church of Canada and came into the North American ordinariate as a corporate body with property and endowments. (However, the expectation in promulgating Anglicanorum coetibus was that there could be scores or even hundreds of these. This has beern a significant, if unacknowledged, disappointment in Benedict XVI's papacy.)
In additon to the property it brought over from The Episcopal Church, St Barnabas had received a multimillion-dollar bequest after becoming part of the Roman Catholic ordinariate. Over the past several years, I've heard variouis expressions of concern over the level of spending there. My regular correspondent sent me this screen shot of a 2017 Facebook post covering a dinner welcoming Bp Lopes on a visit (Click on the image for a larger copy):
Beef tenderloin stuffed with truffles and foie gras for at least twenty-four. Wine, probably not from a box. Hundreds of dollars worth of flowers. Upscale table settings, and those candelabra! Sometimes Bp Lopes is entertained with a potluck in the parish hall. Guess that’s not how things are or perhaps were done at St Barnabas, Omaha.I've also heard in recent weeks as well that there has been a significant lay staff reorganization, with cuts, at Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, following an audit from Houston. This may provide a context for the Omaha action, and Bp Lopes may be under pressure to exercise greater supervision over parishes.
One thing I've learned over doing this blog and after eight years as a Catholic is that the chancery plays an important role in finance, construction, and schooling and provides resources and supervision that generally don't exist in Protestant denominations. After all, Protestants focus much more exclusively at the parish level and doctrinally are much less inclined to recognize a higher church authority.
Ex-Protestant priests who come into the ordnariate are probably much less used to having effective supervision from a body other than a parish vestry, session, or similar committee. Fr Perkins, as ordinariate vicar general, is probably much less used to exercising it, though I've always questioned his interest in his job or his ability to fulfill it.
However, Bp Lopes was never a Protestant, and it seems to me that he has much less excuse for allowing this situation to develop.
