I Was Able To Order Another Book

that mentions the 1993 meeting between the Texas Episcopalians, including Jeffrey Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger, William Oddie's The Roman Option. (Luckily, I found mine for about $0.50 plus postage, which is what it's worth.) Beginning on page 178, it contains the most complete published account of the meeting. The book was published in 1997, so it naturally can't continue the story to Anglicanorum coetibus, although I don't believe subsequent developments support Oddie's optimism that the Catholic Church can play a major role in either Anglican realignment or continuing Anglicanism, overrated movements in any case.

It includes Bishop Clarence Pope's estimate of 250,000 Episcopalians likely to come into a US Catholic Anglican personal prelature, and I think this is important, because I simply can't imagine the Vatican troubling itself over the actual numbers we've seen. Let's keep in mind that the Ordinariates were implemented based almost entirely on the proposal drafted by Steenson via Pope in 1994, so we should reasonably expect them to meet the 250,000 estimated to come over from TEC -- and if the actuality is only 0.6% of that, we should be asking serious questions.

The account of the meeting is clearly based on the minutes authored by Dr Wayne Hankey, who was present. However, the book's account of the subsequent inaction by the Vatican is incomplete. Oddie presumably got his copy of the minutes from Bishop Pope, since Dr Hankey, following the book's publication, wrote a letter to the editor of The Tablet strongly disagreeing with Oddie's premise and also suggesting the record on which the account was based was incomplete.

Oddie's account of Pope's disillusionment with his reception by the Catholic Church stresses the unwillingness of the Catholic clergy in the Louisiana diocese to which Pope retired to agree to his ordination as a married Catholic priest. The book mentions, however, that Cardinal Law then offered to ordain Pope himself, but Pope, according to Oddie, complained that this would take place only in a chapel, not in a cathedral! Pope, by his own admission, had become unstable by this point due to cancer treatments.

Other accounts, which seem to stem at least in part from Pope as well, suggest that Pope's disillusionment also stemmed from the Vatican's unwillingness either to recognize his Anglican orders as a bishop, or to re-ordain him as a bishop, so Oddie's version isn't necessarily the only one, even from Pope, and it strikes me as more likely that Pope would have objected to not getting the bishop sweetener as part of the deal.

A final detail in Oddie's account concerns Jack Iker's reaction to Pope's announcement, on his retirement as an Episcopal bishop, that he would become a Catholic. Iker had become Pope's bishop coadjutor, and when Pope told Iker of the decision, Iker threw him out of his office! This lends additional perspective to Iker's own positions regarding Catholic realignment.

Our Beloved Dog Is A Rescue Mutt

The outcome of her genetic roulette produced a smallish German shepherd-looking creature with oversize paws. When we walk her, strangers who pass by often pause and ask, "What a beautiful dog! Is she a puppy?" We explain that she's a mutt, she's seven years old, and this is as big as she's going to get.

It occurred to me not long ago that these remarks might apply as well to the Ordinariates. As of last fall, for instance, the Ordinariate Expats blog had concluded that all the former TAC parishes that were going to go into the US Ordinariate had done so, and it seems to me that as of now, any further parishes or groups that come in from anywhere will be like the last few pops in a batch of popcorn: barring some major change, the Ordinariates are about as big as they're going to get.

So let's take a look. For the purposes of this post only, I'll grant the US Ordinariate's claim of 1,600 members. The UK Ordinariate entry on Wikipedia gives 1,500 members. The Australian Ordinariate doesn’t currently give statistics – let’s give them 500, based on the numbers I saw from the ACCA. So we’re talking, at best, 3,600 worldwide.

According to the National Catholic Reporter, the average size of a US Catholic parish of the non-Ordinariate persuasion is about 3,000 members. So we're talking, worldwide, not just in the US, of a group not much larger than a single US Catholic parish. A Wikipedia entry on the shortage of Catholic priests says

With the Catholic population formerly increasing steadily (according to some estimates) and the number of priests declining, the number of laypeople per priest has climbed from 875:1 in 1981 to 1,113:1 in 1991 and 1,429:1 in 2001 (a 63 percent increase).

This confirms my anecdotal observation as a new Catholic that an average-size parish with 3,000 members is lucky to have two priests.

But let's look at the Ordinariates: does the worldwide total justify 3 ordinaries, 3 vicars general, 3 chancellors, 3 principal churches, 3 chanceries, 3 governing councils, etc etc etc, when that average 3,000 member US parish is lucky to have 2 priests?

We can argue that many of the prebendaries, as well as the various support staff like secretaries, press reps, and so forth, are unpaid and working part-time. On the other hand, nothing is free: in the US, Msgr Steenson and Fr Hurd appear to travel with some frequency, appearing at conferences as well as making parish visits. I assume someone is picking up their expenses. The Ordinariate's press rep, from all I can gather, is a paid employee, but one searches in vain for updates to the Ordinariate's News page on its website.

Even functionaries who are unpaid, like the Ordinariate's Chancellor, must be looked at on the principle that nothing is free: she's a canon lawyer and licensed attorney; my wife, herself a retired attorney, has never been impressed with what she's seen of the Chancellor's work. Either the Ordinariate is getting what it's paying for, or the pro bono work isn't getting the attention it needs.

And the other day, we saw that there's been a donation of US$5 million toward an Ordinariate chancery. This is $5 million that might have found a better use in the Church at large -- the Ordinariate is clearly competing with other, probably more worthy, causes in the Catholic arena.

This is neither charity nor efficacious cure of souls.

As Long As We're Speaking Of The Holy Father,

we may as well deal with the informal remarks he made to Anglican Communion Archbishop of the Southern Cone Gregory Venables, a good friend:

In Bishop Venables' words as published by the Anglican Communion News Service, "he called me to have breakfast with him one morning and told me very clearly that the Ordinariate was quite unnecessary and that the Church needs us as Anglicans."

Bishop Venables told the BBC News website that the quotation of him was accurate, but had not been meant for publication and had appeared on the Anglican Communion website without his consent.

He said he had merely made some remarks to some friends which he had not circulated widely, and added that he did not believe the remarks would reflect the future position of the Catholic Church.

On the other hand, I'm not quite sure what to make of the reactions from either the UK or the US Ordinaries, which are similar. Msgr Steenson posted this on the Ordinariate website on March 15, though it's not linked from the News page:

We have received a number of inquiries from those who are concerned about what our new Pope’s attitude may be toward the Ordinariates, occasioned by an anecdotal report from an Anglican bishop in Argentina. It is important to remember that our Ordinariates were created by an apostolic constitution, thereby giving them real permanence and stability.

In other words, he's saying something to the effect of don't worry, he can't touch us! I'm not sure if this is the message I'd want to be sending here.

And it's definitely worth pointing out that the Ordinariates were a special project of Pope Benedict XVI, as was mentioned once again in the BBC article cited above. We've seen that the idea was shepherded by Cardinal Law, leading up to a meeting with Benedict as Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993; its implementation, however, was delayed until Ratzinger became Pope. Cardinal Law is, of course, a highly controversial figure, and I'm not sure if it's the best thing for the Ordinariates to have been so closely associated with him.

The record indicates, as I discussed the other week, that the estimate that Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope, with Steenson in the room, gave Cardinal Ratzinger for the number anticipated to come into the US Ordinariate was 250,000. It seems to me that if the most optimistic actual number of those coming in as of 2013, 1600, is only about one half of one percent of the estimate, the Vatican may have eventual reason to reassess its position.

In addition, if we look at the Anglican Ordinariates as a Vatican response to the perceived split in the Anglican Communion represented by "continuing Anglicanism", it seems to me that it may have fallen victim to the wild miscalculation and overestimate of how many disaffected Anglicans are actually out there that we've seen throughout the history of the "Continuum". The only people who benefit from this are the bishops and prebendaries who are able to make careers for themselves in the ecclesial entities they're able to create.

Isn't this precisely the sort of thing that Pope Francis has been speaking against? Time will tell. If I were attached to the Ordinariates in some inordinate way, though, I'd be nervous, too.

The Photo From Yesterday

showing the spelling skills of the stalwart dissidents at St Mary's expresses, I think, the dilemma in which the faithful parishioners there find themselves. The core group of 8-12 dissidents show themselves, quite simply, over and over as little more than a bunch of yahoos. The other side of the coin appears to be that the Ordinariate has decided that the parish as a whole has been tainted by the behavior of the nut jobs, and even if control of the property is eventually returned to the faithful parishioners on appeal, I'm not sure if they'll have anywhere to go.

Certainly they won't return to the ACA. Nor would they seek out the APA, which is on the verge of merging with the ACA. So, what are they going to do? Go in with any of the other tiny, corrupt "continuing Anglican" splinter groups? Indeed, the Ordinariate itself looks less and less like a good option, even assuming it would eventually accept the parish. I've been told, and not even in confidence, that any Ordinariate group that got started in Los Angeles would now be entirely new and separate from St Mary of the Angels, and it would be under the supervision of Andrew Bartus, pastor of his white people's group out in Orange County.

I believe this is largely because Bartus, despite his immaturity and lack of pastoral experience, is a member of the Fort Worth in-group that travels first class in Ordinariate circles, so he's assured preferment. On the other hand, the faithful St Mary's parishioners have made it clear that, given their history with Bartus and their knowledge of his character, they would never accept him as a pastor. So there you are, at least the Ordinariate in-group has a grasp of one reality -- whether they think they can find a whole new flock of docile Anglo-Catholics in Hollywood is something else.

This goes in turn to the question someone e-mailed me with a few weeks ago: why would people need the inducement of an Ordinariate to become Catholic? I've kept returning to this question, because a version of it pops out of the story of Episcopal Bishop Clarence Pope and the 13-year delay in Anglicanorum coetibus. Bishop Pope was going to become Catholic, but clearly only with a sweetener, which apparently included his appointment as Ordinary. When that fell through, he didn't even stay Catholic. Why indeed would people need the inducement of an Ordinariate to become Catholic, because that's clearly what some people need! Frankly, my opinion is that Steenson is cast from the same Clarence Pope mold, and he wouldn't have gone in without a sweetener, either.

As I said the other week, the message I'm beginning to get from how this journey is turning out is that Anglo-Catholicism in many of its forms is a dead end. "Continuing Anglicanism" is full of opportunists, charlatans, and con artists. The Roman Catholic Ordinariate is currently run by people who don't seem to be getting the message from the new Pontiff, who has been saying over and over words to this effect:

During an assembly in Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican on Thursday evening, Pope Francis asked the gathered bishops of Italy to heed to a new pastoral vision. . . .

“We are not the expression of a structure or Organizational necessity," Francis proclaimed. "[But] the sign of the presence and action the Risen Lord,” which requires a kind of “spiritual vigilance.”

“The lack of vigilance … makes the pastor lukewarm; he becomes distracted, forgetful and even impatient; it seduces him with the prospect of a career, the lure of money, and the compromises with the spirit of the world; it makes him lazy, turning him into a functionary, a cleric worried more about himself, about organizations and structures, than about the true good of the People of God,” Francis said.

No Comment Needed

Photo courtesy Kathleen Moon:

Here's A More Complete View Of The Ordinariate's Status

from the mouth of its vicar general, an article in the National Catholic Reporter from January of this year. It cites two matters we looked at yesterday:

As of late December, the ordinariate included 1,600 laypeople, 28 priests and 36 communities. There are 69 additional applications from men who hope to become Catholic priests of the ordinariate.

Deacon Ken Bolin, 38, a West Point graduate and military chaplain who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is among those candidates who have already completed their priestly formation and expect to be ordained as Catholic priests through the ordinariate this March.

Currently stationed in Anchorage, Alaska, he hopes to be ordained in March.

Again, I can find no basis for 36 communities. At best, after a couple of days' search and some input from knowledgeable parties, I think there may be two or three communities eligible for listing on the Ordinariate's web page, such as St Mary the Virgin Arlington, TX (though this would cancel out St Peter the Rock with no net change), the Potomac Falls, VA group, and the Charleston, SC group. But I can find nothing like 36, even being generous about other groups in formation. And if you include wannabes and sorta-kindas, I've got to ask if St Mary of the Angels is still on whatever list is out there.

Also, Fr Bolin is included as sort of a trophy ordination, though the article does not point out that he has no associated group of Ordinariate ex-Anglicans, and that he's unlikely to be saying the Anglican mass much as a military chaplain, if at all. In fact, the article mentions another trophy ordination, Fr Larry Gipson, who had retired as Rector of former President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara's Episcopal parish in Houston, and who is now 70 years old. So far, though, I don't find that he has pastoral responsibilities for any Catholic ex-Anglicans anywhere.

In other words, while there are capable and sincere priests who want to serve active groups of sincere Catholic ex-Anglicans, Fr Hurd and Msgr Steenson have been spending time and effort recruiting high-profile priests who will do those real Catholics little good -- and the priests who want to serve them are still waiting for Fr Hurd to return their calls. And Fr Gipson, along with Fr Bolin and Fr Seraiah, is one more exception to the stated policy that an Ordinariate priest must go in with a group. Exceptions are now more than 10% of the total, it would seem.

But there's a cherry on the sundae:

While the ordinariate has spent a lot of energy on establishing a secure foundation, it has been buoyed by many promising developments. Recently, it received an anonymous donation of land to build its first chancery. The donor spent $5 million to purchase five acres adjacent to the ordinariate’s principal church, Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston.

The ordinariate is seeking additional donors for construction of the chancery.

Seems as if a lot of energy is going to go into fundraising for a chancery, whose land alone (five acres?) has cost $5 million. We can argue whether there are 1,000 (my view after some study) or 1,600 (the Ordinariate's official total) souls in Msgr Steenson's see. It's hard for me to imagine how a building on a five-acre site will be needed, now or in the foreseeable future. And that goes to what appears to be Msgr Steenson's sense of priorities.

Something's not right here.

After Some More Checking,

I found several more possible Ordinariate entities that aren't listed on the Communities page of the Ordinariate web site. (Among other things, there's a slightly more complete list on the website of the Anglican Use Society than on the Ordinariate's own website. I should mention as well that I still haven't received a reply to my query from Thursday to the Ordinariate's press maven on which 11 of the 36 groups they claim aren't listed on their Communities page.) These include:

• St. John Fisher Ordinariate Community (Potomac Falls, VA)
• Holy Cross (Sydney, Nova Scotia) however, this may have sputtered out, its web site is for sale
• Charleston Ordinariate Group (Charleston, SC)
• Toronto Ordinariate Group (Toronto, Ontario)

One problem here is that some groups, like St Mary the Virgin in Arlington, TX, seem to be calling themselves "Ordinariate", but apparently are actually still Anglican Use and have not yet been formally received -- this may apply as well to the Toronto group listed above. Others, like Holy Cross Sydney, seem to be following the established "continuing Anglican" pattern of disappearing without fanfare. And being "in formation" or just voting to go in, like St Timothy's Catonsville mentioned yesterday, apparently may or may not qualify a group.

This in turn stems from what appears to be a general loosey-gooseyness about the Ordinariate. For example, I believe that several Anglican clergy who'd applied to become priests in the Ordinariate were told that they were ineligible, since they didn't have an established group going in with them. On the other hand, as I've mentioned here before, Fr Chori Seraiah, who'd taken the position of rector at St Aidan's Des Moines in anticipation of going into the Ordinariate with that group, was cut loose when that parish changed its mind -- but, without a group to go in with, he was still ordained an Ordinariate priest.

Earlier this year, in a largely unpublicized (outside of Anchorage Catholic circles) move, Msgr Steenson witnessed the ordination of former Anglican priest Ken Bolin to the Catholic priesthood in the Ordinariate in Anchorage, AK, a five hour flight from the nearest Ordinariate group.

In November, Msgr. Steenson asked if Archbishop Schwietz would ordain Bolin, first to the diaconate and then to the priesthood. Monsignor Steenson plans to be in Anchorage to witness the ordination.

Bolin only recently entered into full union with the Catholic Church on Nov. 24 at St. Patrick Church in Anchorage. His wife Sharon and their three kids will follow him at the Easter Vigil when Deacon Bolin — then as a new priest — will administer the sacraments as his family joins the Catholic Church. . . . Deacon Bolin is under the jurisdiction of Msgr. Steenson who has directed him to continue serving as a military chaplain after his ordination.

Once ordained to the priesthood Deacon Bolin will be authorized to celebrate both the standard Roman Missal Mass as well as the adapted Anglican Mass. Archbishop Schwietz said he is not opposed to there being a celebration of the Anglican Catholic liturgy in the archdiocese but so far he has not received any requests. [emphasis mine]

So let me see -- Bolin was on a fast track indeed, received only on November 24 of last year, ordained a deacon not long afterward, ordained a priest in March. (Fr Bolin's qualifications, by the way, appear to be outstanding, and I don't mean to disparage him personally in any way.) There are other former Anglican and Episcopal priests who are not, shall we say, exactly on that sort of schedule, and in fact whether they'll ever quite make it in isn't clear at all. And Bolin's going to be an Ordinariate priest in an archdiocese where, so far, there have been no requests for an Anglican Use mass, much less a sodality or whatever for him to go in with.

And of course, you will search in vain for coverage of this wonderful and blessed event on the Ordinariate's own news page. Something's not right.