San Diego Revisited

In the context of the ordinariate groups that don't grow beyond a few dozen, my regular correspondent notes,

I've been thinking about the very small OCSP groups which are still around but have not grown---or in some cases have shrunk. St Augustine, San Diego is an example of the latter situation, as I have discussed. I assume that part of the problem is that Fr Baaten, as well as his duties as Chaplain at the Santiago Retreat Center, has to be prepared to sub in as required by Fr Bartus at the various "SoCal Ordinariate" venues.

When Bp Lopes last visited the Irvine Newman group, Fr Bartus of course had to be on hand. As the former Pastor of St Martha, Murrieta it was probably impolitic for Fr Barker to celebrate at Holy Martyrs, Murrieta in Fr Bartus' absence, so Fr Baaten was thrown into the breach. Mass at St Augustine San Diego was cancelled. And as we know, Fr Baaten celebrated the Easter Vigil in Irvine while Fr Barker was in Covina. St Augustine didn't have a Vigil.

For whatever reason, the thirty-three St Augustine members received in 2012 seem to have shrunk to an ASA of ten, based on FaceBook pix from the last year or two. There were sixteen in the group picture taken on the occasion of Msgr Newton's visit in 2015, about a year before Fr Baaten took over as administrator (he is one of the laypeople in the picture). The website has recently been updated, which is a hopeful sign. For literally years it has remained essentially unchanged from the original days in Carlsbad under Fr Ortiz-Guzman.

I would credit the new permanent deacon, except that he has been a member of the congregation since at least 2015, where he can be seen in the picture with Msgr Newton. There seems to be no reason to suppose that under the existing leadership this group is going to regain even its initial size, let alone grow. Fr Baaten is 61. He was of course an archetypal "marginal candidate" for ordination

The episode that stays in my mind about the San Diego group is the one in December 2017, where a parishioner left the group in a huff due to complaints that she was nursing a baby in the back of the room while standing and singing lustily, the infant and her breast uncovered. Mrs Gyapong emphatically supported the lady on the basis that nursing in public without covering the process was part of the Anglican patrimony.

Why on earth would anyone at all, much less as many as a dozen, want to confront this sort of issue at mass? There are 48 other Catholic churches in San Diego, and in fact other mass times at that host parish. Even if some lady in those other places is nursing a baby that way, if there are 3-500 people in that mass, it might not even be noticed. A dozen at mass with Mrs Schmidlap running a peep show in back, calling attention to it with her piercing soprano, that's different. There's a reason for all the crowd scenes in Acts.

And once again, although it appears Fr Baaten did the right thing in asking Mrs Schmidlap to refrain from running the peep show at mass, I still question what these dozen or so are missing in opportunities, programs, leadership, and fellowship by staying in such a tiny Anglican ghetto. It almost seems as though priests and their bishop want them around to justify having Fr Baaten as an occasional supply priest to say DW mass at the other California groups -- when, let's face it, I'm not sure how many of the other groups could even pay a stipend to a diocesan supply priest.

It was an act of mercy to close the Minnesota group. How many acts of mercy must still be performed for the ordinariate faithful?

More On The Talent Pool And The Marginal Groups

My regular correspondent sent two e-mails responding to yesterday's post. The first covered primarily Houston's willingness actually to relocate members of the top tier, or those like Fr Chalmers who don't serve as ordinariate priests but still qualify as members of the club.

Fr Sellers moved from North Dakota to Texas, Fr Sly from Virginia to Missouri, Fr Chalmers from South Carolina to Alabama, Fr Duncan from Texas to South Carolina, Fr Lewis from Washington, DC to Texas, Fr Seraiah from Des Moines to Atlantic Iowa and then to Missouri, Fr Vidal from Baltimore to Corpus Christi to Washington DC---I could go on but you get the idea.

Fr Sellers was a member of the original Nashotah House club who appears to have been a disappointment. Fr Seraiah started out as a hardship case, since he was recruited to take an ACA parish into the ordinariate, but the parish changed its mind. Under Bp Lopes's authority, he was parish administrator at an Iowa diocesan parish until Bp Lopes seems to have found it possible to move him a relatively short distance to Missouri, where he could also serve a marginal ordinariate group along with several diocesan parishes.

But there's another interesting point:

At the moment St Margaret of Scotland, Katy, TX has three priests for a congregation of perhaps forty, one of whom is Fr Mitchicam about whom you posted June 19, 2018. What are his long-term plans? How soon will the three transitional deacons ordained this month be ordained to the priesthood? Who is being ordained priest on June 29? My point is that there are some new men, none bringing congregations, who could theoretically be sent to Calgary. Immigration not a problem, if the number of priests currently arriving in Canada from Africa, Viet Nam, and the Philippines is anything to go by.

However, although we don't know exactly why some marginal groups continue and others are closed, the picture we have is that those on the lower end of the scale are unstable.

The criteria for replacing the clerical leader of an OCSP group are unclear to me. St Edmund, Kitchener was allowed to fold when Fr Catania left. St Gilbert, Boerne likewise did not get a replacement when Fr Wagner went into full-time diocesan ministry, nor was there a replacement found in Savannah when Fr Lindsey died, or in Corpus Christi when Fr Vidal left for Washington. As I mentioned, some otherwise marginal groups have continued because lay people have taken initiative, either to find a local priest to say mass or at least to hold on and apply pressure to find an Ordinariate replacement.

But Fr Liias documented in some detail on the parish website the attempt to find a way for the St Gregory the Great, Stoneham, MA community to continue after his retirement. This was a considerably larger and more active group than the others I have mentioned, although not a full parish. Bp Lopes met with them personally, basically to tell them it wasn't going to happen. The best that could be done was to merge them, as a worshipping community, with St Athanasius, Chestnut Hill which as Norm explained at length on Ordinariate Expats was very inconveniently located for most members. The two groups have maintained separate web identities which suggests things aren't going well. So why did St Gregory not get a local version of Philip Mayer?

Well, even versions of Philip Mayer, men who failed to start careers as Protestants (and in Mayer's case, even in the Pastoral Provision) aren't common. Consider that Protestants serious enough to consider vocations as Protestants have solid reasons for not being Catholic, and many have started families. Going through additional formation and ordination in a new diocese under those circumstances isn't an attractive option, leaving aside the likely first assignment of starting an evensong group in someone's front parlor. So a new Philip Mayer in Peoria or wherever is hit-or-miss, and the diocesan bishops involved may prefer to see the groups close as well.

So we're still looking at a situation where:

• No pickup group that did not come in as a previous Protestant parish has grown to become a parish
• The front-parlor groups, and even those meeting in diocesan chapels and cafetoriums, don't have a good prognosis
• They're formed primarily as an excuse to ordain the marginal men who've failed in Protestant careers anyway
• These men require diocesan day jobs to support themselves and their families, and the situation never seems to improve.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds, "The attitude of the local bishop may be a bigger factor than we know. Maybe the Archbishop of Boston felt that the Pastoral Provision congregation in Chestnut Hill was enough, thanks." Certanily we know that Bp Lopes had to pay a visit to Bp Barnes of San Bernardino before Barnes would allow the Holy Martyrs parish to open. There seems to have been unusual interest in the situation in Calgary from the bishop there.

Priestly Formation And Small Communities

Following up on yesterday's post, a visitor asks,

Any idea if any of the Ordinariate priests have experience with parishes with congregations in the hundreds range? I assume the first Ordinary did, but I am concerned about how well small church experience scales to larger.

Well, some do, many don't. I think the question is complicated by the fact that groups in the North American ordinariate by and large aren't growing, and no matter what experience the priests have, the numbers overall are stagnant. It seems to me there are three groups of ordinariate priests, a top tier that had moderate success with Anglican or Pastoral Provision parishes, and they continue to be moderately successful where they are. A second tier that was at least partly successful with larger Protestant parishes, but now is in charge of stubbornly small OCSP communities; and a third tier of Protestant seminary graduates who never got a career footing in their prior denominations and is performing poorly with OCSP groups, often cobbled together exclusively as an excuse to ordain them.

Contrast this with the pattern for newly ordained diocesan seminarians. They're sent to larger parishes as new associates, where they're inundated with the actual conditions that surround pastoral work and are generally trained and mentored by more senior priests and chancery staff. In the OCSP, there are only a handful of parishes that justify associates at all, so this opportunity for training isn't generally available.

Another issue is that most OCSP priests are married, and their families are tied to communities by children's schools and wives' careers. The low performers are tied to diocesan make-work jobs themselves. They can't move around the way celibate priests do.

This brings me to the question of the Minnesota group recently closed. The removal of Vaughn Treco as priest opened up a unique opportunity, which was to have the ordinary emeritus, as the visitor today noted an experienced priest in a large-parish environment, make a considered assessment of the group's potential. I would guess that Msgr Steenson, if he'd in fact seen something there, would have been young enough at 67 to give things one more effort. I can only think that, after several months and prayerful reflection, he determined it wasn't worth his time or anyone else's.

Treco was in the third tier of low-performing priests I noted above. It sounds from occasional comments on blogs that even as a hospital chaplain, he set teeth on edge by celebrating daily mass ad orientem in the chapel. How many other third-tier OCSP priests are instead kept on in these hopeless situations, simply to maintain the appearance of success in Houston, or out of sympathy for men who've proven they don't actually have much of a vocation and their families? It was an act of mercy to laicize Treco,

I think the OCSP's experience is in fact bringing into the light difficulties that result with married priests:

• The priests' families become hostages that limit the flexibility of bishops in removing or reassigning priests
• Their families become obstacles to career mobility, where relocation is an essential ingredient.

This leaves aside the considerations Fr Longenecker, himself a married former Anglican, raised recently,

The main practical objection to married priests is simply that the infrastructure and hierarchy of the Catholic Church is not equipped for this change. They don’t know how to do it and don’t want to do it.

There is a darker side to this. The celibate priest is bound much more closely to the bishop and his fellow priests than a married man. It’s a guy’s club and it’s pretty tight. Furthermore, the celibate priest is in a dependent relationship with the diocese much more than a married man. His whole life and livelihood is dependent on the bishop’s whim. Without the bishop he has no visible means of support.

As I ruminate on these questions, I come back again and again to the fact that Anglicanorum coetibus was advanced with no serious consideration to the issue of how married priests would have careers in what would prove a stagnant backwater of the Church, quite possibly because it was thought that a first wave of Episcopalian priests, already middle-aged and eligible for TEC pensions, would come in with their parishes, retire in due course, and be promptly replaced by celibate seminarians.

The actual circumstances, with some of the best older candidates rejected from the start and few Anglican parishes of any size coming in anyhow, has been that the OCSP continues to be a last, desperate option for young Protestant seminary graduates -- this in part because even celibate candidates for Catholic seminary can probably find better opportunities within their local diocese. The're in a market shortage, while the Protestant also-rans are in surplus everywhere.

One thing I don't see is any sort of up-or-out provision for OCSP groups. Nobody's established a policy for the other groups like the Minnesota one that was closed, whereby if they continue for x years with fewer than y members, they're closed. Heck, keep the priests in their make-work diocesan jobs if you have to. Or I guess, that's if the bishops want them.

Maybe some of these guys should have spent more time reflecting on whether they actually had a vocation.

The Problem Of Ordinariate Formation

Seven years into the North American ordinariate, only a trickle of celibate priests are coming into it from Catholic seminary formation. The overwhelming majority have been formed in Protestant seminaries, and in fact many aren't from Anglican seminaries. I think back to remarks from a visitor, who no longer comments here, that date back several years now. He said that all seminaries cover pretty much the same stuff, so it doesn't matter if the candidate had, say, Catholic vs Reformed moral theology. The more I learn about Catholic priestly formation, the more obtuse this remark seems to me.

My current understanding is that when candidates go to seminary, they're carefully observed in and out of the classroom for qualities like emotional maturity, openness, and honesty. Faculties periodically evaluate candidates for suitability beyond their academic performance. The seminary rector reports to the bishop and the vocation director on the results of these evaluations. Beyond that, the impression I have is that even in seminaries that are alleged to be part of the "lavender mafia" (like the Archdiocese of Los Angeles's St John's Seminary), the day-to-day product is solid priests. The outstanding middle-aged priests at our parish were formed during Cardinal Mahony's time in the archdiocese, for instance.

Contrast this with the accounts I've heard from TEC priests of faculty scandals in the Episcopalian seminaries. Main line Protestant seminaries by and large won't have problems ordaining women or gays, when Catholic policy that I've cited recently continues to say that same-sex attraction is a disorder that can affect the maturity of a candidate, as well as his ability to relate to all parishioners equally. So based on policy, however imperfectly it may be applied (as all policies are imperfectly applied), Catholic candidates are evaluated and screened out if necessary based on same-sex attraction. This occurs as a matter of policy only in Catholic seminaries.

Beyond that, Bp Barron in a recent YouTube video mentions "dry run" practice confessions in seminary. Since no other denomination places the Catholic emphasis on confession as a sacrament (it's in desuetude among Anglicans), no other denomination's seminaries will provide this type of training, nor will they stress the implications in moral theology that are connected with the sacrament. Thus a Protestant priest who's come to the ordinariates after Protestant seminary formation won't have this training. The visitor who insisted there's no difference between Protestant and Catholic curricula didn't mention this, and seems to have minimized its importance. I can't understand why.

So far, I can't escape the impression that the priests who've been removed, laicized, or just treated as problems in the OCSP simply wouldn't have made it through a Catholic formation program. Allowing married priests is a lowering of normal standards that in fact conceals a much more serious deficiency in screening and formation, and the prevalence of scandal and problem priests in the OCSP isn't going to go away.

Yet once more, I wouldn't go anywhere near an OCSP parish. Prudence is a cardinal virtue.

The Ordinariate Conundrum

The most I've heard about last Saturday's meeting with Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins in Calgary is that it was contentious. If I learn more, I'll post it here.

But the idea of distant bishops flying in for townhalls with unruly parishes isn't really Catholic. It takes me back to the year or so I spent as a "continuing" Anglican, and it brings me to another puzzle I've run into with Anglicanorum coetibus, the prayer book problem.

Recall that one of the chief causes of the "continuing" revolt from The Episcopal Church was the modernized language in Rite Two of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The revision, however, was clearly inspired by Vatican II and the Novus Ordo mass. Another 1979 innovation, this one almost never acknowledged by "continuers", was the three-year lectionary, also brought over from Vatican II (and also never acknowledged as a good thing by Catholic traddies).

Clearly a thee-thou prayer book was thought to be a major selling point for Anglicans considering Anglicanorum coetibus, notwithstanding the 1979 BCP retained the 1928 language in its own Rite One. But Episcopalians in my generation or younger actually liked Rite Two and the rest of the 1979 BCP. A former TEC priest, before he left the priesthood, noted in a homily that saying the eucharist from the 1979 BCP was a big thing he'd miss. I've said I like the OF mass precisely because it's not that far from Rite Two.

The idea that Episcopalians and "continuers" would flock to the North American ordinariate because it offered something like the 1928 BCP was a major misreading of the market. In fact, what we're seeing as the disappointing first wave of Anglican converts recedes is that those still attracted to ordinariate parishes are traddie Catholics who want a whiff of archaism in their liturgy without the need to know Latin. But there aren't enough of those to establish or sustain any real parishes, even in the minimal numbers expected by Houston. The closing of the Minnesota group is an example.

In fact, if my experience at St Mary's Hollywood is any indication -- and I'm convinced it is -- "continuers" and traddie Catholics share an attitude whereby they want to get things out of the Church without putting much in. At St Mary's, many of the dissidents didn't even pledge. I suspect many of the traddies attracted to the ordinariate are just as cheap.

So I think the real-world outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus is to foster a form of "continuing Anglicanism" within the Catholic Church, and in fact it's brought more closet "continuers" out of the woodwork within the Church than it's attracted from outside.

St James St Augustine Moves To Jacksonville

My regular correspondent reports,

Fr Mayer has announced on the St James, St Augustine website that the congregation is moving to Jacksonville, FL. This is now announced as his original mandate although it has only recently been mooted on the website. I note that he currently lives in Jacksonville. In 2012, St James St Augustine began celebrating a 5 pm mass at a House of Prayer near the Nombre de Dios Mission in St Augustine. About two years later they moved to St Benedict the Moor, about five minutes away by car, as the former parish administrator describes here. At some point they were given what I would regard as the prime time of 10:30 Sunday morning, plus the use of meeting facilities at the St Benedict rectory (the church is a "mission" of the cathedral) as you can see on the calendar here.

So why move to Jacksonville after seven years? Of course as the name, the address (Martin Luther King Ave) and the local district (Lincolnville) indicate, St Benedict's is in the historically black part of St Augustine, a demographic not represented in the St James congregation as far as I can tell, but the church is attractive and seems to have met their needs for the last five years. Why move to an elementary school chapel thirty miles away? The idea that this was Fr Meyer's mandate in going to the community is news to me.

The announcement of the move on the website reads

On January 25, 2019 Fr. Philip Mayer was ordained and appointed as the parochial administrator of St. James Catholic Church and given a commission to move the community to Jacksonville, allowing a more central location for the community. The current discernment is pointing toward a move this summer or fall to the Mandarin area of Jacksonville.

The calendar on the website says holy day masses are in the St Joseph Catholic School auditorium, 11600 Old St Augustine Rd, Jacksonville, FL. According to Google Maps, this is 30 miles and 37 minutes up I-95 from the St Benedict the Moor parish, a non-trivial distance. We simply don't know how many members live in Jacksonville and commute to St Augustine for mass.

But it's hard to escape the impression that this group, like many in the North American ordinariate, is tiny, contingent, and unstable. The announced plans for the move itself are vague and uncertain. I hate to think that it distracts new Catholics who used to be Anglican from the worthwhile programs, opportunities, and fellowship at much larger, more stable, and more prosperous parishes nearer to them.

UPDATE: My correspondent adds:

You reported on St James, St Augustine on your post of August 28,2018. This was initially an Evensong group which was formed by Fr Marziani, then a Catholic layman who had left TEC ministry in 2006, as his ticket to ordination. It started with seven people and seems to have plateaued at about two dozen over its seven-year existence, but of course the composition of the group may not have been stable. These communities often attract the kind of person perennially on the lookout for the "perfect" church. Perhaps some new and influential folk turned up who suggested that Jacksonville was a greener pasture. Perhaps it's just that Fr Mayer's day job is there.

It does appear that relocations, new "branches", and the like are driven by very small groups with specific agendas.

St Bede's Minnesota Ordinariate Community Closes

As posted in this announcement from the Holy Family parish in St Louis Park, MN, which hosted the community:

The schedule of Sunday and weekday Masses celebrated by St Bede's at Holy Family has come to an end after their final 5 PM Mass on Sunday, May 19th. The community is reorganizing as the Ordinariate Community of Minnesota, with plans to host masses and services again in the future once preparations are in place. They are very grateful to have had a home at Holy Family these last four years.

It's hard to avoid thinking that this move took place after Msgr Steenson, the ordinary emeritus, took over the group following Vaughn Treco's removal and assessed the situation with some care. It's worth noting that most OCSP groups are in fact marginal operations, and a seasoned clerical observer might come to a similar conclusion about others.

My regular correspondent pointed me to this thread on The Stumbling Block blog that "implies that the original core of former Episcopalians which Br John-Bede assembled in Collegeville was latterly outnumbered by Trads attracted to Fr Treco's take on things."

This seems to be a circumstance that's repeated in other ordinariate groups as well.