Kenneth, What Is The Frequency?

Among the questions that have come to mind over the last few days is exactly why the Anglican project dropped the Book of Divine Worship in favor of an entirely new Divine Worship Missal, especially since, as it's been related to me, the BDW had a version of Eucharistic Prayer III, intended for general use in Sunday masses. while the DWM has none.

Some web searches, plus input from the angry visitor who's been my informant in these matters,. provide an answer. The shift from the BDW to the DWM reflected a major change in the focus behind the Anglican project, or maybe the frequency on which it transmits.

The Wikipedia entry for the Book of Divine Worship is informative:

The Book of Divine Worship (BDW) was an adaptation of the American Book of Common Prayer (BCP) by the Roman Catholic Church. It was used primarily by former members of the Episcopal Church within Anglican Use parishes of the Pastoral Provision and the Personal Ordinariates. It has been replaced by a new book to be used worldwide, titled Divine Worship: The Missal.

. . . When use of the revised English translation of the Novus Ordo Mass went into effect on 27 November 2011, use of the "Rite II" modern language version of the Holy Eucharist in the Book of Divine Worship was suppressed, and parishes had the option of using the "Rite I" traditional language Anglican Use liturgy or conforming to the Novus Ordo liturgy used in parishes not part of the Pastoral Provision.

. . . The Book of Divine Worship contained elements of the 1928 and 1979 American editions of the Book of Common Prayer as well as the 1970 Roman Missal, Missale Romanum.

The Book of Divine Worship was seen as US-centric and was not used in parishes of the Personal Ordinariates outside the USA, but was instrumental in the joint development of a new liturgy by the Interdicasterial Commission Anglicanae Traditiones. . . . Beginning in 2013, as Pastoral Provision aka Anglican Use parishes in the United States migrated from their geographic dioceses into the Ordinariate and as new parishes were established within the Ordinariate, any parishes using the Book of Divine Worship transitioned to the new ordinariate liturgy. As of November 2015 all but two Anglican Use parishes had migrated from their local diocese into the Ordinariate and use of the Book of Divine Worship for the Holy Eucharist had almost entirely ceased. As of 1 January 2016, the Vatican withdrew permission for use of the book in public worship.

The passages from Bp Lopes's 2017 address that I quoted yesterday provide a slightly different perspective:

When we speak of the “Anglican patrimony” preserved in the Ordinariates, certainly liturgical expression is the most tangible expression of patrimony and the most distinctive feature of Catholic life in the Ordinariates. . . . The search for the authentic faith of the Church within Anglican worship allows us to situate Divine Worship firmly within the shape and context of the Roman Rite so that it might be approached in a manner which respects its own integrity and authority.

I take this to imply, in a very roundabout and clumsy way, that Anglicanae Traditiones was going to move the whole focus of the Anglican Use project away from an effort to replicate The Episcopal Church without its controversial elements, such as ordination of women, openly gay bishops, and gay marriage, as a clone that was otherwise recognizably Episcopalian. This in fact was something at which the ACNA has been relatively successful. Instead, Anglicanae Traditiones was going to eliminate the most recognizably Episcopalian element of the Anglican Use project, a liturgy that resembled the US 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and replace it entirely with a 20th century English innovation, the Anglican Missal.

I raised this with the angry visitor who's been my most informative oracle on these issues, as he appears to vibrate on the relevant frequency. He answered,

Why would you think that the Ordinariate was going to basically use the 1979 BCP with the post conciliar Eucharistic prayers? That was clearly never the population that was going to respond to this offer. I have to assume the people who are happy with The 1979 BCP were also happy with the innovations in the Episcopal Church since 1976. Eventually some people got tired of the revisionist agenda and left for the African affiliated Anglican groups but they certainly weren’t looking for Catholic sacramental theology or ecclesiology.

But then he gets to the meat of the problem:

The fact that you continually ask the same question why is the Ordinariate not appealing to more people like you would suggest that there is a large population of people like you, people who like middle of the road liturgy but still expect To come into a separate Ordinariate structure. Why would you bother? Why would your children bother? The part you don’t seem to get is that the vast majority of people who were interested in the Ordinariate know the sort of liturgy that you think is completely esoteric and marginal. Moreover they would argue that that liturgy has formed them deeply and is not merely a small fraction of their day or their lives as Catholics. Prayer shapes belief. I’m sure it is the same case with you.

The question I'm asking is not why the Church doesn't have an ordinariate for 1979 BCP Episcopalians' the question I'm asking is why there is an ordinariate at all, when it's likely that far more Episcopalians already come to diocesan parishes via RCIA than come into the ordinariate in any given year. Those who are attracted to the Anglican Missal style of worship -- a 20th century innovation of highly dubious provenance -- are at best a boutique market.

More to the point, this market has never been able to sustain a diocese-like enterprise. Houston must rely on its bishop's appeal to sustain its own minimal chsncery operations, rather than use it to subsidize schools and parishes like real dioceses.

The only school in the ordinariate, established in a BDW, Anglican Use environment, appears to be on very shaky ground now that its corrupt administration has been purged. Uncertain economic conditions going forward make it unlikely that any but the strongest ordinariate communities can continue. It seems to me that it's hard to argue that the market for a boutique, missal style liturgy can support itself now. Those who support it so vocally, like the angry visitor, strike me as an entitled bunch who want to ride a liturgical first class but won't pay for it. At least the wealthy gilded-age Episcopalians paid for their preference.

My point simply isn't that there needs to be a prelature for middle-of-the-road Episcopalians. My point is that any prelature specifically for Anglicans of any flavor is a make-work project, a boondoggle, a career factory for mediocrities. I suspect the Church will be forced, given economic realities, to recognize this and reabsorb ordinariate communities, or at least the few that survive, into a diocesan structure similar to Latin mass. Or perhaps just drop the project altogether.

There Are Actually Two Threads To The Anglican Prelature Story

This blog, heavily influenced by the published accounts of figures like Fr Barker and Msgr Stetson, has dwelt on the administrative history for Anglicanorum coetibus, seeing its start with the 1976 Episcopalian General Convention, the secessionist movement that resulted, then-Bp Law's work to form the Pastoral Provision, its imperfect record, and the 1993 proposal for an Anglican personal prelature that came to fruition under Benedict.

However, the angry visitor who's been sending me e-mails over the past couple of weeks is helping me focus on a second, and I think probably older, thread in the story, the uniate mass that became the basis for the Divine Worship Missal, which I'll call the liturgical thread as opposed to the administrative thread.

One issue I'm working through is that we're Catholics 24/7/365. Even if we go to daily mass -- in fact, even if we're priests -- we spend only a small fraction of that total time in liturgy. The rest is occupied with developing habits of virtue, constructive labor, acts of charity, study and reflection, recreation, and so forth. If I'm traveling, I still need to find a Sunday mass, whether that new parish is happy-clappy or not. Celebrating just exactly the right liturgy is pretty far down on my list of daily priorities, even as a serious Catholic.

I think this points to the visitor whom I quoted yesterday, who found that a diocesan parish was preferable to an ordinariate parish if he was going to prioritize issues like stability or support for a family. That again leaves me shaking my head over what the priorities are for angry guys like the other correspondent I quoted in yesterday's post. He went beyond what I quoted then to ask

[T]he only person who seems to think he was sold a bill of goods is the one person who seems not to have understood any of the goods he apparently witnessed at St Mary. Did you actually attend Mass there? Were you paying attention at all?

I assume the "goods" he's referring to are the uniate liturgy that was celebrated there, which was very close to what emerged in the Divine Worship Missal. It was the same over-the-top mixture of 1928 BCP, Roman Canon, Last Gospel, and communion on the tongue. Like the DW Missal, it incorporated non-Anglican features in the name of Anglican patrimony. At this point in history, I don't think anyone knows exactly when this started at St Mary of the Angels. The best Fr Kelley could come up with was that former parishioners who remembered the time about 1960 said such a mass had been in use there at the time.

It was generally understood when I was at that parish that a high mass using that liturgy took two hours. A number of us thought that was too long, and we mentioned it to Fr Kelley as something to be addressed in our plans to enter the ordinariate. I recognize that other people claim a DW high mass can be done in 1:15 or so, but this will inevitably vary with the parish, and two hours in my own experience is realistic.

But the angry visitor is clearly puzzled that I don't see this as a feature rather than a bug, and he takes it for granted that I'm misunderstanding the whole program if I think the point of Anglicanorum coetibus is to make Episcopalians want to become Catholic. In an earlier angry e-mail, he said

Again, these arguments require a grounding in history. Fond du Lac and Eau Claire had a majority of Missal parishes, and not just Douglas's fastidious non-Romish version but the full SSPP Anglican Missal at the altars. This was done with the full approbation of their bishops. Talking about middle of the road, Broad Church, Howard Johnson Rite II as somehow "patrimonial" requires us to act like a rite promulgated in 1976 bears the weight of tradition. The vast majority of Anglicans who took the Ordinariate offer seriously came from parishes with a history of Missal use, and who continued to use either one of the Missals (as did your own parish!) or Rite I with Roman enrichments like the Orate Fratres, the Domine, non sum dignus, and horror of horrors the Prayers at the Foot and the Last Gospel. These were not all "campy" aberrations, these were fairly mainstream Anglo-Catholic parishes. Your own favorite AC priest, Fr Moyer, used many of these enrichments as found in the privately printed Anglican Service Book at GSR. You should get a copy after you read more about actual Anglo Catholicism.

This idea that middle of the road suburban Anglicans that were happy with the ipsissima verba of the 1979 BCP would have been in anything approaching the majority of Anglicans in the US who advocated for the Ordinariate is risible. The idea that current or aspiring Ordinariate members should be scandalized that Fr Ousley is putting on a rite clearly indebted to the long history of Missalized liturgy in Anglicanism is . . . misguided, to say the least.

Except that uniate liturgies like the ones he mentions date from the early 20th century and were never authorized by any denomination. This was a persistent problem with Anglicanism, equivalent in its day to New Age Catholic priests inviting the laity to hold hands around the altar.

The missalized liturgy movement itself is something that as far as I'm aware hasn't been well documented, and we know still less about how it found its way into the process that led to Anglicanorum coetibus. What makes me uncomfortable is that the Anglo-Catholic or Anglican Papalist movement in the UK, which is where the angry visitor clearly traces its origins, was a hothouse version of Anglicanism that fully incorporated non-Catholic features like occultism and intergalactic amounts of same-sex attraction.

Exactly what precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony are we actually bringing in here? My spidey sense says there's an agenda. Yeah, if you want to support a family in a Catholic context, the ordinariate may well not be your best option.

______orum Coetibus?

I had this e-mail from a visitor a few days ago:

I'm a former high-church Episcopalian-turned-RC via the Ordinariate, who now worships in my local diocesan parish. I'm very sympathetic to your questions about what problems the Ordinariate is trying to solve. That's. . . not really clear, which is part of why I'm at a diocesan parish with resources for families, stability, and a proper religious education program.

I couldn't help but notice a significant and perhaps revealing error in the excerpt you reprinted from the Mt Calvary website:

Why do you receive Communion on the tongue at Mount Calvary? Can I receive Communion in the hand?

We encourage communicants to consider the example of Masses celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, where the faithful receive the Host directly on the tongue. Reception on the tongue is an ancient and honored practice in both the Divine Worship and the Roman Rite. As with the Roman Rite, communicants have the right to receive the Host either on the tongue or in the hand.

As Bishop Lopes himself has stated, the Ordinariate Use is:

. . . the Roman Rite as it was taken up and developed within an Anglican context and now reintegrated into Catholic worship...It is understandable that the nuances and accents would perhaps be different, but the basic shape and structure of the Mass remains the same. The Holy See has given the name 'Divine Worship' to our liturgical and sacramental rites, so we worship according to the 'Divine Worship' form of the Roman Rite.

The Ordinariate web site reinforces this:

Is the Ordinariate a separate Rite within the Catholic Church? No. The Ordinariate exists entirely within the context of the Roman Catholic Church. Its worship, while distinctive, is a form of the Roman Rite. Ordinariate parishes celebrate Mass using Divine Worship: The Missal, a definitive book of liturgical texts promulgated by the Vatican in Advent 2015. This missal uses Prayer Book English — language derived from the classic books of the Anglican liturgical tradition — that is fully Catholic in content and expression.

Whether it's a careless mistake or something else, its just inaccurate as a factual matter to draw a distinction between the Roman Rite and the Ordinariate Use as though they are on par, instead of the latter being a subset of the former. At worst, this also risks reinforcing a boutique or ghetto mentality (we're this but not that), which is already present in some quarters.

Just my two cents.

An angry visitor asked me yesterday,

who among the Ordinariate's potential members is looking for Rite II with EP III, especially considering the fact that the revision of the English Mass in 2011 supersedes the ICEL translations used in the 1979? Do you really think there is a large group of potential TEC converts to the Ordinariate who are looking for a plain vanilla Rite II with EP III? Why would they bother?

But the first visitor characterizes himself as a high-church Episcopalian (I assume he at least tolerated Rite Two) who found, on balance, that an EP III diocesan parish had more to offer a Catholic family than the ordinariate, He questions whether the ordinariate is in fact setting itself up as something separate, and of course better than, the diocesan Church.

And this goes to the reports I periodically hear that the CDF has been carefully edging away from terms like "Anglican Use" or "Anglican Ordinariates", as the people in them are no longer (or have never been) Anglican, and it could be ecumenically touchy to use the term. So now we see people on Facebook and elsewhere describing themselves as "Ordinariate Catholics". But why not, like the visitor himself here, just say they're a "former high-church Episcopalian turned RC"?

Doesn't the angry visitor just above help make his point? He's saying a normal 1979 BCP Episcopalian won't be interested in the ordinariates, and he's basically calling me a dummy for thinking that was ever the case. He feels the ordinariates are for those select people who want over-the-top, not just high church Episcopalian, not just the Roman Canon, but something infinitely, sublimely better!

I'll leave aside the question of how many people will be, or are, attracted to this enterprise if we drop 1979 BCP Episcopalians.

But what do we do? Delete the Anglican from Anglicanorum coetibus? What happened to if you like your Anglican, you can keep your Anglican? What happened to the precious spiritual treasures of the Anglican patrimony? What do you replace the blank with in ______orum coetibus?

More On The Divine Worship Missal vs The Roman Canon

I'm going to postpone the post I'd originally intended to put up today until tomorrow, because I've had several thought-provoking comments on the Roman Canon as discussed in yesterday's post. I'm beginning to realize that we're in not fully explored territory when we try to compare the Roman Canon as a eucharistic prayer, one of four options in the OF English mass, with the Divine Worship Missal, which effectively contains the Roman Canon as the only option for Sunday mass. (I don't know what would happen if an ordinariate priest used the version of EP II in the DW Missal for a Sunday mass, but it would presumably create some type of problem.)

A visitor comments,

When you wrote "the pre-Conciliar Roman Canon took about an hour and a half on Sunday" I think you mean that the whole High Mass took about an hour and a half on Sunday, not the Roman Canon itself. That is, admittedly, a long prayer, whether you begin it, as was done in the Middle Ages, with the "Te igitur" after the Sanctus, or whether (in both pre-Medieval and post-Vatican II manner) with the dialogue, preface and Sanctus, and so on - but I doubt if it would take much more than 8 to 10 minutes (and possibly a bit less) if recited silently or sotto voce in Latin and maybe 10 to 11 minutes if recited aloud but briskly in English.

Yes, on reflection, there's a problem with pulling the Roman Canon out of its contexts, which I'll discuss below.

Another visitor comments,

In reality, the length of mass depends on how quickly the priest can get through it. I know priests who can say the Roman Canon reverently on a Sunday, but fly through the same Roman Canon on the weekday, in Latin. . . . Remember also "Eucharistic Prayer I" is a direct translation of the Roman Canon, they didn't add or subtract anything. The Post Conciliar reforms did make some parts "optional", but those options have fallen by the wayside and most priests include the optional parts. A quick read of the DW Roman Canon and it appears that they didn't add anything, they sprinkled it liberally with "thees" and "thous"

But the Divine Worship Roman canon can't be separated from the rest of the mass as presented in the DW Missal. A visitor does point out,

I decided to take up your challenge and compare the lengths of three Eucharistic Prayers: Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon, 2011 translation), Eucharistic Prayer II (the shortest), and the Roman Canon used in Divine Worship. The word counts begin immediately after the Preface and end at the Amen immediately prior to the Lord's Prayer.

The results:
EP I:2011 clocks in at 744 words.
II:2011 at 525 words.
I:DW at 831 words.

Summary:
I:DW has 87 (12%) more words than EP I:2011, and 306 (58%) more words than EP II
I:2011 has 250 (48%) more words than EP II.

EP III:2011 and EP IV:2011 doubtless fall somewhere between these extremes. I leave it to you as an exercise to work out how long it takes to read aloud 87, 219 or 306 words, but I think you will find all of them to be between one and three minutes, even at the deliberate pace of a Catholic priest saying Mass.

You can't just interchange the DW Roman canon into the rest of the OF mass, as you can with the OF eucharistic prayers. If you use the DW Roman Canon, you are also using the rest of the DW mass. So although they aren't in the part of the mass specifically designated the Roman Canon, which as the visitor says begins "immediately after the Preface and end[s] at the Amen immediately prior to the Lord's Prayer", if you want the thees and thous and the extra 87 words in the DW Roman Canon, you are inevitably stuck with the following other parts of a full DW mass:

• The Comfortable Words
• The Penitential Rite
• The Prayer of Humble Access
• The Prayer of Thanksgiving
• The Last Gospel (optional in the EF; I'm not sure if it's optional in DW.)

I may have left something out here; let me know if I have. It isn't possible to establish the exact length of any theoretical mass, since the readings vary from day to day, parts of the readings are optional, the collects and prefaces vary, the length of the homilies varies, the music varies, and the length of the announcements varies. So although as the visitor points out, the Roman Canon in the DW missal is 12% longer than that in the OF English mass, the use of the DW Roman Canon implies a considerable additional length for the rest of the DW mass -- leaving aside, as both visitors acknowledge, the individual speed or not of the priest.

But it's hard to avoid the extra pieces that are in the DW missal but not in either the OF English mass or Books of Common Prayer. I think most middle-of-the-road Episcopalians who've come into the Catholic Church are familiar with 1979 BCP masses that take about an hour, as they are with OF EP III English masses, reverent and with good music, that take about the same. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a DW mass conducted with music and ordinary purpose to take close to two hours.

It's a matter of taste. I like to ride trains, but I don't like it when a train is four hours late. I know people who like riding trains so much that if the train is four hours late, they're delighted that they got four extra hours on the train.

The Divine Worship Missal vs The Roman Canon

A visitor has been on my case for giving the Roman Canon too short shrift here. One issue that's come out in our exchange has been a question of terminology: the Divine Worship Missal has a section covering the Sunday eucharistic rite that it titles the Roman Canon, but it isn't the Roman Canon identified as Eucharistic Prayer I in the OF English missal. It is written in a made-up archaized English and includes Cranmerian prayers from Anglican liturgy that add to its tone of pompous formality and encourage dilly-dallying over words, leaving aside the basic question that it's simply longer than the OF Roman Canon.

So when I discuss "Roman Canon" on this blog, i'm talking specifically about the section of the Divine Worship Missal entitled Roman Canon, as opposed to OF Eucharistic Prayer I. This is a confusion that I didn't create, but it exists, so I need to be as clear about it as I can. I think the visitor and I agree on several key points. The OF Eucharistic Prayer I is always licit and may be used on any day for any mass, as may any of the other eucharistic prayers. Which one is used is up to the judgment of the individual priest, based on the pastoral situation on the ground.

For instance, the Sunday mass that Bp Barron celebrates on YouTube in the current crisis is based on eucharistic Prayer II, normally used for weekday masses. It is licit for Sunday and apparently judged to be most appropriate for situations where those hearing it are not physically present for the Sacrament. I assume the Sunday masses Bp Barron celebrates at parishes in his area are usually EP III. He's exercising pastoral judgment.

I think the visitor and I also agree that one pastoral issue is the question of time. The visitor says,

It seems to me that in the past you have been resistant to the idea that Vatican II and the Bishops attending never intended to entirely supplant the Roman Canon with EP III, only provide new options for pastoral reasons. Some of the issue has to do with the end of the High and Low Mass in the Catholic Church after Vatican II. High Mass was about an hour and a half long and only occurred once a week at the main Mass on Sunday (the smells and bells). All the other Masses were Low Masses and only lasted between 30-45 minutes. The Masses used the same Roman Canon. The High Mass was sung by the presbyter, usually involved a choir, and included using incense but the Low Mass was spoken with little to no singing and never incense, thus it was quite a bit shorter in duration.

So even in pre-Conciliar conditions, there was flexibility in how masses were celebrated, based among other things on how much time communicants could afford to spend. The Second Council, as the visitor agrees, simply extends these options.

After Vatican II, with so many parts of the new Mass becoming optional to sing or say, include or omit, the pastoral choice of almost all parishes became keep the singing (for the people, not necessarily the priest) because the folks seemed to really like that but also keep the Mass really short because the people really liked that, too. Hence, EP I fell out of usage for so long I would wager more than a donut that most everyday Catholics have no idea the Roman Canon is even an option in the Mass, so accustomed are they to only hearing EP II or EP III.

But note the visitor says above that the pre-Conciliar Roman Canon took about an hour and a half on Sundays. This would be without all the Cranmerian insertions in the Divine Worship Missal, leaving out all the incentives for pomposity mediocre men in fancy vestments can't resist. I may yet copy the text of the DW Roman Canon into MS Word, get a word count there, and compare it to the text of the OF and 1979 Rite One. I think a good ballpark estimate would be that the DW is 1000 words longer than the OF or Rite One. The Sunday mass at St Mary of the Angels, using a uniate liturgy not far from the DW Missal, took two hours, with just a few dozen communicants.

The visitor does recognize that the DW mass is not the same as the Roman Canon EP I. I'm not claiming that EP I in particular should never be used on Sunday, only that priests are expected to use good judgment, and it's likely that an EP I that routinely takes 90 minutes would not be popular in a parish where a reverent and inspiring, fully licit, EP III can be done in an hour. The bishop, looking at the weekly offerings, would probably weigh in on this matter himself.

There's another issue that a different visitor has brought up, which I'll go into more tomorrow. But let's recognize that I'm a convert. I came from The Episcopal Church, where I matured as a Christian for 30 years. The Catholic Church set up Anglicanorum coetibus specifically to appeal to potential Episcopalian converts like me. I took up the Church's offer in good faith but felt I had to go in via a different route only when it became plan that the ordinariate wasn't anything like what I'd been led to expect.

As just one example, the Divine Worship Missal bears no resemblance to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which in the spirit of Vatican II offered two versions of the eucharist, as well as different individual eucharistic prayers. Episcopalian parishes typically offer Rite One at 8:30, Rite Two at 10:30 or vice versa, or Rite One on the first Sunday of the month, Rite Two the rest of the month, or something similar. The Divine Worship Missal and ordinariate practice have been set up specifically to exclude such options, when in fact those options were inspired in The Episcopal Church specifically by Vatican II.

And Rite One can be very well done in an hour.

Money And Related Issues

A San Antonio observer comments,

I see in the OLOTA church bulletin for March 29, 2020, the parish is reminding folks to give financially for the support of the parish. We are told that donations are drastically down for this period and if the parish is to survive we need your generous support. We are told that there is no endowment fund for the parish to rely on. The parish provides for two ways of giving, online and lock-box in the chapel.

I thought about this and it occurred to me, that while their plight might be true, it is the same for not only OLOTA, but for all Catholic Churches throughout the world. I would think because of the suspension of Masses and other services usually performed during the Lenten/Easter season that a loss revenue that the church depends on for the year will not be available. This is all exacerbated by the possible loss of tuition monies from the schools being shut down.

But I think this provides some context to Fr Holiday's recent Facebook post for to the Incarnation Orlando parish, reproduced in a screen shot below courtesy of my regular correspondent (click on the image for a larger copy):

My regular correspondent observes,

You will see from the date of March 15 that this was a letter that went out before the local diocese (Orlando) cancelled public celebrations of Mass as of March 18. However, the defiant tone strikes me as similar to that of Fr Lewis’s letter of March 12. Of course things have moved quickly from week to week in this pandemic and one’s thinking takes a while to catch up. But Fr Holiday makes it clear in a follow-up message that masses have been cancelled at Incarnation, Orlando only because of Bp Lopes’ explicit order, that the schedule for Confession at the church continues as usual, and that he will be “resuming meetings as usual beginning later this week [of March 22}. Really?

Fr Holiday's tone is also pretty fierce on the matter of reception of the Blessed Sacrament on the tongue. Again, this is more than two weeks old, and I have no idea if Bp Lopes will modify this discipline, but reception on the hand is fully licit and endorsed in our diocesan parish during the current crisis. My understanding is that if any ordinariate priest refused to provide the Sacrament on the hand in the US, he would have no canonical ground to stand on, but out of charity, no communicant should drive a priest to that point.

Instead, the prudent step is simply to move to a parish where the option is recognized and let Fr Holiday or any other stubborn man fend for himself. I have no idea whether Bp Lopes will reflect at all on this. Although the ordinariate website now carries videos of stations of the cross and Sunday masses at the cathedral, there has been no other public announcement from Bp Lopes or Fr Perkins.

The general quarantine will certainly put churches in financial straits, especially as civil authorities begin to threaten penalties for any that continue to hold large-scale public meetings. That will inevitably reduce their income, and ordinariate communities, many of which are already in precarious condition, will inevitably be affected.

I tend to agree with commentators who predict that the COVID-19 crisis will have an ongoing impact on daily conditions that will go beyond those that resulted from the 9/11 attacks. If the small business brick-and-mortar model continues to be affected, as it certainly will when so many will lose months of income, the same will apply to small churches in any denomination.

I suspect that pastors like Fr Lewis and Fr Holiday, and Bp Lopes as well, are beginning to read the writing on the wall for the ordinariate, which is reflected on one hand in the defiant tones of the pastors' messages, as well as Bp Lopes's public silence.

Even though Fr Holiday refers to practices of the Church that have taken it through plagues and wars in past centuries, the examples stand out of figures like St Charles Borromeo and Pope Pius XII, who was active and visible with Catholics in Rome throughout its occupation, visiting communities affected by misdirected bombings, and he addressed US and British Empire troops at the liberation in English. Pius's secretary, Giovanni Montini, later Paul VI, visited poor communities and Jews in Rome incognito and was recognized by them only after he become pope.

Bp Lopes and Fr Perkins may wish to consider such examples. Instead, the key men are AWOL, while we avert our eyes from the narcissistic grandstanding of marginal ones. I hope the course of events will lead devout ordinariate members to better places of worship, which will inevitably continue as so many in the ordinariate will not.

Pray To Your Father In Secret

My regular correspondent sent me a screen shot of a video of Fr Bartus on the Holy Martyrs Murreita Facebook page:

By contrast, here is Pope Pius XII blessing the crowd in St Peter's square:

As far as I can see, the Holy Father is doing this all wrong. He's versus populum, which is not done, and he's nowhere near as well gotten up.

But I think there are other issues here. As of March 27, the huge Riverside County, CA as a whole had 185 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with eight deaths. Riverside County has a population of over 2.4 million. Temecula had 16 cases, Murrieta 11. Cases, not deaths. The overall US death rate, still relatively low, is well below projections, and there's a good chance there will be no COVID-19 deaths in those communities.

So why the grandstanding? Might it not be better to offer up prayers of hope and thanksgiving that so far, the plague has passed us over? In private?

After all, the public health advice we continue to have from civil authorities is to remain indoors and maintain six feet of separation, especially where vulnerable people like the elderly are concerned. Instead, Fr Bartus is conspicuously outdoors, standing right next to an elderly bearded gentleman, who is on a nonessential excursion enabling Fr Bartus's grandstanding.

I think there's some similarity here to Fr Lewis's March 12 letter, in which he conspicuously flouted prudent public health advice to prove some sort of obscure point, when US Bishops as a whole are advising Catholics to do the opposite, prayerfully absent themselves from public celebration and do what's best for their families and neighbors.

This is yet another example of the narcissism that's often visible in the North American ordinariate.

[But] take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father. When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. . . . When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.