Declare Victory In Anglican Outreach And Get Out -- II

The Anglican Use Pastoral Provision continues in effect, although all former Pastoral Provision parishes have been transferred to the OCSP, a situation acknowledged with the 2017 transfer of the Our Lady of the Atonement parish. Individual married clergy from designated Anglican backgrounds can still apply for ordination as Catholic priests via US dioceses. This creates a situation very similar to the one prevailing in the UK, where married Anglican priests who go into the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham are typically assigned to diocesan parishes and spend most of their time with them.

This in turn suggests that Anglican outreach has been successful at least in recruiting married priests from Anglican denominations, although practically speaking, US dioceses tend to limit their numbers and place them in less-visible roles. Even so, to the extent this side of the Pastoral Provision has been successful, it has been much more so than in bringing in full parishes, a practice discontinued in the Pastoral Provision. In his University of Vienna address, Bp Lopes in effect acknowledged that the Pastoral Provision had failed in this role, although the reasons for its failure have not been remedied by the changes brought about by Anglicanorum coetibus.

But let's look at two developments that have been far more successful than Anglican outreach. One is the dual phenomenon of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) and the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP). The historical and canonical issues are outlined here. Immediately pertinent to my purpose is their popularity as grassroots movements. A list of SSPX communities in the US is available here. I stopped counting at 60, but I would estimate there are about 200 total, in many places where no OCSP community is anywhere close. This is in spite of the fact that Catholics are mostly aware that sacraments in SSPX chapels are valid but not licit.

FSSP locations can be found here. The locator says, "We are active in 37 dioceses in the United States and 7 in Canada. We have over 93 priests working in 48 apostolates." However, there are Latin masses available outside the SSPX and FSSP. This site, which calls itself "A Catholic directory of approved traditional Latin Masses", notes a total of 759 Latin mass locations added since the site's 2015 launch. Should my wife and I choose, we can find a Latin mass 6.8 miles from our home, although Latin masses are available at about half a dozen locations in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

The other development is the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Contemporary with Anglicanorum coetibus, it was aimed at a generally similar market, Anglicans who want a more traditional theology in their denomination. Founded in 2009, its Wikipedia entry currently notes 1019 congregations and 134,000 members. Even allowing optimistic inflation in these numbers, there's simply no comparison with the numbers for the OCSP. We can find an ACNA congregation 6.1 miles from our home. One can argue that the ACNA appeals to a low-church market, but that indicates the sheer ignorance of Anglicanism among Catholics who proposed Anglican outreach.

The clear difference in interest between the OCSP and similar traditionalist movements indicates that the other movements attract much more widespread support, while the OCSP has probably reached a high water mark in the neighborhood of 40 communities and is in the process of struggling to stay afloat. My regular correspondent sent me a link to this post at a UK blog that covers the OOLW:

The essential issue for the [OOLW] is to find young men wishing to be priests. The present contingent ranges from a few younger men through to a top heavy decidedly elderly batch who will be dropping out of active ministry, if not directly into the grave, over the next five to ten years. The current handful of seminarians will need to double if not quadruple every year if the present numbers are to be maintained.

There is also a heavy dependence upon CofE clergy moving off the sinking ship and on to the barque of Peter. Clergy attracted to the Ordinariate are like a rare breed and fast running out. Those who have joined the CofE since the foundation of the Ordinariate are unlikely to leave and indeed, are unlikely to be accepted by Rome. So we are looking at an ever decreasing pool of ex Anglican clergy who are of retirement age or older. And from that pool many are opting for the direct route via the local diocese.

. . . . Nothing new there of course but it suggests that the present “steady as she goes approach” will need some serious revision unless, of course, we accept the “conspiracy theory” approach which goes something like this. The Bishops of Engkand and Wales never wanted the Ordinariate and have discovered that through acts of extreme kindness they can actually kill it. Offer posts to Ordinariate clergy, who have no income, to run diocesan parishes who thereby become dependent upon the good will of the local bishop. Running one or even two parishes leaves little time for the Ordinariate group which either dies off or is absorbed into the parish structure.

This, of course, is another reference to the problem Bp Lopes outlined in Vienna, that under the Pastoral Provision, priests could be co-opted into diocesan work and neglect Anglican ministry -- but this is a current problem under Anglicanorum coetibus as well, one that never arose in the UK before the erection of the OOLW.

Seems like there are better options for the CDF's time and resources.

Declare Victory In Anglican Outreach And Get Out -- I

I'm going to put on my William James hat here (he and his brother Henry were the sons of Henry James Sr, a Swedenborgian apologist, so this is a little tongue-in-cheek). I want to take a pragmatic look at the reasons for Anglicanorum coetibus and, somewhat as James did in The Varieties of Religious Experience, ask whether the effort has had pragmatic effectiveness. Another way of putting it is to ask what problem Anglicanorum coetibus is trying to solve. (This is a separate question from what problem broader Anglican ecumenism, as represented by the Pastoral Provision or ARCIC, is trying to solve.)

Last April I cited an address by Bp Lopes at the University of Vienna that amounts to a formal, if couched hypothetically, statement of the problems the CDF perceived needed to be solved in drafting the apostolic constitution.

Bp Lopes outlined two basic issues. The first:

if the Holy See worked with a group of Anglicans to elaborate a proposal, and if that proposal was then entrusted to an Episcopal Conference for implementation, and if that Episcopal Conference then simply killed the proposal in committee, then a new approach might involve consultation with local Episcopal Conferences but reserve the actual oversight and direction of the implementation to the Holy See itself.

Clearly the "if" is meant to conceal specific confidential circumstances, though this may refer to a situation that appears to have come up in Canada in late 2011 that resulted in the OCSP being given jurisdiction over both US and Canadian communities. More broadly, the issue comes to opposition to formation of Anglican-based parishes from diocesan bishops, which occurred in the 1980s with St Mary of the Angels. In Bp Lopes's view, Anglicanorum coetibus allows the Holy See to oversee implementation directly and bypass episcopal opposition.

The problem is that as a matter of policy, this may be correct, but as a matter of practice, bishops still have been able to oppose OCSP communities in detail. We saw the Bishop of Rochester, NY refuse to provide residence for an OCSP priest, which forced the Rochester area group to go inactive. More recently, the Bishop of St Petersburg, FL apparently refused to support establishment of a Tampa-area group, possibly by prohibiting use of diocesan parish facilities for a proposed OCSP group.

Assuming an OCSP group in formation had the resources to pay a full time priest and own its facility, this disadvantage could be overridden, but the typical small group of two dozen can't do this and must in fact rely on diocesan jobs to support OCSP clergy and use diocesan chapels. Thus local bishops still have a practical veto and in fact have exercised it. Here's the second issue Anglicanorum coetibus was meant to address, per Bp Lopes:

if a previous proposal for corporate reunion incardinated the converting clergy into local Dioceses, and if those priests were then reassigned or assimilated into the local Diocese so that they could not minister to their former communities and foster the particular identity of those communities, then a new approach might involve creating a juridical structure which would allow the incardination of priests and the canonical membership of laity so that their distinctiveness was not lost to assimilation into the much larger sea of Catholic life.

The problem again is that as a matter of practice, most OCSP communities can't support a full time priest, and those priests who can't be paid from the OCSP often need full- or part-time diocesan appointments. The typical demands of a small OCSP group are inevitably much smaller than the demands of a full diocesan parish, or indeed several parishes. Beyond that, Bp Lopes refers to such small groups as "former communities" to which these priests are theoretically ministering, but these groups are almost always assembled de novo, not as Anglicanorum coetibus envisioned, cohesive entities coming over as Anglican parishes. Indeed, calling these tiny groups "make-work projects" isn't far off the mark.

What we see after five years experience with implementation is that the situation Anglicanorum coetibus envisioned, cohesive groups coming over as full Anglican parishes with their clergy and with the resources to support themselves, have been by far the exception. The fewer than a dozen successful OCSP parishes are mostly former Pastoral Provision. The original paradigm simply hasn't worked, and the replacement, small gathered groups of random people only marginally qualified as canonical members, hasn't gathered momentum.

In effect, Bp Lopes's University of Vienna address acknowledged that the Pastoral Provision had failed and outlined the reasons for its failure, which Anglicanorum coetibus was intended to address. I would say that Bp Lopes's analysis doesn't seem to understand the reasons for the failure of Anglican ecumenism, but in any case, the remedies he outlines haven't been effective.

It seems to me that although William James's approach in The Varieties of Religious Experience is quirky, it works as a rough tool. In effect, he's taking the position that objections raised to religion by Hume and Kant are beside the point, because religion is successful and has good practical effects. But if we apply the rough frontier tool offered by James to Anglicanorum coetibus, it fails, because it doesn't solve the problems it defines for itself, it solves no other problems, and it has no good effects over and above those of the Church as a whole.

But as I said above, Anglicanorum coetibus is only a special case of the larger Anglican outreach project.

Yet More On The CDF

At just about the same time as the news of Cardinal Müller's non-renewal, we got other news of the CDF:

Vatican police have broken up a gay orgy at the home of the secretary to one of Pope Francis's key advisers, it has been reported.

The flat belonged to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is in charge of tackling clerical sexual abuse.

Reports in Italy claim the occupant of the apartment is allegedly the secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio - a key aide to the 80-year-old Pope.

Coccopalmerio heads the Pontifical Council for Legislative texts and was said to have once recommended his secretary for a promotion to bishop.

Although the apartment, per the reports, is owned by the CDF, the secretary who lives there is in a different dicastery, and it isn't clear if anyone at all from the CDF was at the party, though it can't be excluded, and I imagine that the people who work at the curia all socialize with each other.

At first I thought this might be a direct explanation for Cardinal Müller's non-renewal, but presumably Pope Francis made the decision well before this news. The only general conclusion I can draw is that if people at the CDF tend to party themselves blind, they can't be very effective at any real work they might be expected to do.

That in turn raises the question of what concrete things the CDF has accomplished under Cardinal Müller other than a rather indifferent implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus. A task one might set to the staff, assuming they aren't too bleary from last night's party, would be to re-examine the assumptions behind Anglican outreach and evaluate whether it's a project worth continuing.

I have some ideas that I'll outline tomorrow. If any party animals in Rome want to crib them, that's fine with me!

More Thoughts On The CDF

My regular correspondent comments,

The only niggling difficulty I have with your analysis is really my own inability to believe that this project is any big deal from the Vatican's perspective. As you also describe, the mention of Anglicanorum Coetibus or the Ordinariates draws a blank look from virtually everyone I know, and I move in circles that are interested in Church issues generally. I suppose that one could argue that the Anglican Communion is the #2 denomination worldwide, and successful outreach to Anglicans in (large) groups would have been a major achievement, with the added benefit of modelling a certain style of liturgy in the vernacular.

Bp Lopes often refers to the Ordinariates as "ecumenism in the front row" and although getting someone to leave one denomination for another is not my definition of "ecumenism" it is apparently his, and probably not uniquely so, and thus the Ordinariate project could be seen as an important ecumenical template. And if you had no knowledge or insight into how Anglican polity differs from the way the Church runs, I suppose you might have thought that there were Anglican leaders out there who could lead hundreds of thousands of their members into the Church. That fantasy, at least, was pretty much exploded fairly early on.

Msgr Steenson and his staff were not up to the job of launching the OCSP, and while Bp Lopes seems much more competent than his predecessor, and his Chancery staff at least qualified for their positions, it would take much, much more than this to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear that is the OCSP. The OOLW has its own, different problems and the OOLSC is silently slipping away, I would imagine. For Abp Ladaria's sake I can only hope that your take on the Vatican's response is somehow wrong.

I would say that for Pope Francis to replace Msgr Steenson (I assume this was with his approval) came as a surprise to just about everyone, as the assumption seemed to be that he would have no interest in it as a Benedict initiative, and if it fell into desuetude, so much the better. By the same token, to put Bp Lopes in as ordinary indicated a desire for a new and energetic direction. If this was the case in 2015, I don't see it changing.

When I met with Abp Hepworth, he was of the opinion that Pope Francis's gestures to the Lutherans in Sweden were part of a consistent view that included Anglicanorum coetibus, and if we suspect Bp Barron knows which way the wind is blowing, calling Luther a "mystic of grace" might be consistent with Francis's views as well. Or not.

I continue to think that the CDF is a small organization, and there are only so many projects it can undertake. If one of its most visible members, Bp Lopes, was on Anglicanorum coetibus, this suggests that project took up a great deal of the organization's time and effort. That in turn suggests Müller was replaced because expectations weren't being met.

The link I posted the other day continues to strike me as insightful. Here's more:

Second, while Müller undeniably has a more restrictive take on the implications of Amoris than many others, it’s hardly as if he’s an implacable foe of the pontiff. Recall, for instance, that the German-speaking bishops at the second Synod on the Family made a commitment in their language group to achieve unanimity on their recommendations, and Müller was part of that consensus. . . . . In other words, even if Francis truly were dividing the blues from the grays, it’s not clear on which side Müller would fall.

Abp Ladaria is seen as not much of a departure from Müller doctrinally, which suggests replacing Müller, not ready for retirement, was done for some other reason. And as my correspondent and I agree, since Anglicanorum coetibus is not well known among Catholics, it's not surprising that there would be mild puzzlement at the reasoning behind the move, and the theory that it was done over the OCSP seems a better explanation than some others.

But I don't present myself as a Vaticanologist here!

Looking At The CDF From A Corporate Paradigm

I've kept thinking along the lines I began in yesterday's post: let's say we're low-level cube denizens speculating in the coffee room about what's going on in Mahogany Row. The Vice President for Compliance, say, has announced he's leaving to spend more time with his family (the CEO also did this several years ago). For that matter, the VP of Finance just went on leave to address sexual harassment charges. People say things haven't seemed right in their division for quite a while. Sales are way down in the regional offices. The cube rats, of course, may or may not have any insights, but they're probably going to put out a number of competing theories, and some may ring truer than others.

I speculated late last year that Bp Lopes, having taken over the OCSP after Msgr Steenson's removal a year before, was acting as though he would be held accountable for the OCSP's performance on the anniversary. A glossy soft-focus brochure was put out to celebrate his achievements. Effort has clearly been made to create the appearance of new groups coming in. Problems like the inability to implement financial software or conduct a parish census are pushed into the shadows. Financial shortfalls, dire as they may be, are minimized.

Msgr Steenson and the key people around him were removed pretty clearly for unsatisfactory performance. This suggests that there were expectations in the CDF that things should have turned out better than they had. In the corporate accountability paradigm, which may apply here at least in part, if A doesn't perform, A-prime, his superior, is held accountable. If A-prime can't fix the problem caused by A, then A-double-prime, his superior, will hold him accountable.

In this reasoning, Bp Lopes was sent in to fix things in the new division, which Msgr Steenson had been unable to do. I suspect that someone in headquarters has been taking a close look at sales and revenue. But A hasn't done any better than his predecessor, as far as headquarters can see. So the ax falls on Cardinal Müller, who is A-prime. (Keep in mind that the six unnecessary months spent sorting things out for Our Lady of the Atonement was 10% of Cardinal Müller's tenure as Prefect of the CDF.) A corporate VP who was this feckless would in fact be let go.

In this model, which may or may not apply, we may surmise that the OCSP has been under major scrutiny. If true, resolving the OCSP issue will be near the top of Abp Ladaria's to-do list. In that case, we can expect further changes.

Cardinal Müller

Aside from a well-publicized assessment of Ms Brzezinski's IQ and facelift, the big news of the weekend has been Cardinal Müller's removal as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Now, I've only been Catholic for a little over four years, and I don't present myself as a Vaticanologist. I tend to lean toward the assessment we see here:

First, as of July 2, Müller reached the end of the five-year term to which he was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. Granted, such terms can be extended at a pope’s discretion, but the point is that it’s not really as if Müller has been “fired”. His service was up, and the pope decided to name someone else.

But from the perspective of someone who spent time in corporation environments, where such personnel moves aren't unusual and can be just as hard to parse, here's my take.

Müller's term at the CDF has matched almost precisely the time span for implementing Anglicanorum coetibus, which has been a key responsibility of the dicastery. My solid impression of diocesan Catholics, including clergy, is that if you mention Anglicanorum coetibus to them, you'll get a puzzled expression and "huh?" I don't even try, I just give a 100,000-foot version of that papal provision that didn't work out for us.

From what I understand, the CDF isn't all that big, with a staff of about 25. Its proceedings are confidential, so it's hard to assess exactly what it's been doing for the last five years, but recognize that now-Bp Lopes, an up-and-coming member, must have spent a good part of his time there on Anglicanorum coetibus and the ordinariates.

Certainly a bunch of people at the CDF must have been preoccupied for six months or so just with the issues surrounding Our Lady of the Atonement -- issues that had apparently been festering since Abp Flores's time, which ought to have been disposed of at the diocesan level. None of this is a picture of efficiency, I'm sorry to say. Think of all the other things the CDF might have been able to deal with had it not used up some level of time and energy on Anglicanorum coetibus, which has been a damp squib.

The mountain labored and brought us -- a fuzzy cell phone photo of Bp Lopes celebrating ad orientem on the windowsill of a hospital chapel.

I wish the new prefect better outcomes.

Time For Plan B?

Yesterday I talked about a robust job market that gave employees relative free agency, such that it was possible to balance the costs of remaining in a bad job situation against the benefits of updating a resume and seeking new employment. The point at which an employee potentially realized he had reached the balance point I called an "oh, bleep moment". The conditions that permit this include, in the individual, good situational awareness, both of the current work environment and the outside job market, a sense of one's own worth (both economically and in the eyes of the Almighty), and a sense of justice.

As I looked at pictures of the provisional and often shabby worship environments in the OCSP over the past couple of weeks, I couldn't help but think certain conditions were missing, certainly among the laity but even among some of the clergy -- these would include good situational awareness, both of the current worship environment and nearby parishes, a sense of one's own worth in the eyes of the Almighty, and a sense of justice. Now and then I've heard from people, including clergy, who've said the St Mary of the Angels parish suffered injustice at the hands of the Church, and I agree, but frankly, looking at all those sad worship environments in the OCSP, I've got to think a greater injustice is taking place there.

This includes allowing members to hold the illusion that things are going to get better. As my regular correspondent points out, within five years of its founding, Our Lady of the Atonement had acquired its property and commenced construction. Within five years of the erection of the OCSP, nearly all its communities are still in basement chapels or the equivalent. Sending Fr Phillips around isn't going to change things. The injustice includes appointing mediocrities to serve as clergy, many of whom had unsuccessful careers in fringe denominations and have shown no greater success in the Church -- while passing over better candidates. My regular correspondent asks whether Msgr Steenson has worshiped or had any involvement with the Minnesota OCSP community since his move there, for instance -- does this say something?

Indeed, my regular correspondent pointed out

Three men were ordained as priests in the OCSP [last Thursday]. Fr Martens will be taking over some of Fr Kenyon's pastoral responsibilities at SJE, Calgary, but this parish has gone from having a full-time pastor with a full-time associate, to having a full-time pastor with a part-time deacon, to having a part-time pastor. Who will be working with the Bros, which I predict will be a culture shock for both parties. Fr Erdman will be working to grow his community of Our Lady and St John, Louisville; I counted about 25 people at his diaconal ordination in April, and this may have included friends and parishioners of the host church. So only Fr Simington will be available to fill one of the gaps that exist in the OCSP or will appear in the next year (I understand he is going to Rochester). The pace of ordination will need to pick up, especially of priests who will be available to minister to more than a few dozen.

More than a few dozen or less, how much of a difference is there? The whole idea of a shortage is an abstraction created from the idea that the OCSP needs to minister to individual tiny stagnant or shrinking groups, so widely separated that there's no way to merge them. And since nobody irrespective of jurisdiction could countenance paying clergy under such circumstances, the OCSP and the laity are getting the marginal characters they can afford.

The question I have is whether OCSP laity, outside the handful of communities that can maintain a full parish program, has the situational awareness, the sense of their own worth, and the sense of justice to move on. (Indeed, I think of clergy, better candidates than those selected, who were passed over in the runup to the OCSP who themselves had the ability to reassess their mission in life and move on -- it would appear that some of the current marginal individuals serving as clergy in the OCSP, or who wish to, will also be called to do this at some point but are oblivious, at least so far.)

Maybe the "oh, bleep moment" that came most clearly for me was the photo of Bp Lopes celebrating mass ad orientem on the windowsill of the Orlando hospital chapel. Everyone, I think, can do better than this. Folks, look around, see what's available in the diocese and listen to the call.