Tuesday, February 27, 2018

OCSP Priest Charged In Bizarre Case

According to this blog,
The first married Catholic priest in the state of Indiana is facing prison time as he heads to trial on charges he kidnapped and assaulted his wife.

Rev. Luke W. Reese, 48, the parochial vicar at Holy Rosary parish in Indianapolis is charged with criminal confinement with bodily injury, criminal confinement where a vehicle is used, kidnapping, domestic battery, battery resulting in bodily injury, and intimidation following a Sept. 24 incident in which he allegedly beat his wife* inside his church, and then sexually assaulted her over the course of an 18-hour ordeal.

Reese is a married Anglican priest who entered the Catholic Church through the Personal Ordinariate established by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. Reese and his wife have been married for 25 years and have seven children. According to court documents, Reese’s superiors already knew that he reportedly provided alcohol to minors, got intoxicated with minors, and shared white supremacist material with young people. After seeing his wife’s bruised and swollen face, his superiors suspended him.

. . . . According to the probable cause affidavit filed in the Marion County Court, on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 24, Reese, wearing clerical garb, confronted his wife while she was in the backseat of a car with another man, Jay Stanley. According to the affidavit, Stanley was engaged in a romantic relationship with the wife.

Reese angrily demanded that his wife come with him. She instead got into her own car and agreed to drive to a specific location with Reese so they could get out and talk, according to the affidavit, written by Indianapolis Police Detective Erroll Malone. Before leaving with his wife, Reese opened the door to Stanley’s car and kicked him in the face. Stanley said Monday he’s not sure why he didn’t call police after he was assaulted and the wife went away with her angry and violent husband.

Additional scandalous material is omitted here.
Reese was arrested soon after the report was made, and was charged with felonies. He is currently free after posting $2,495 on a $25,000 Corporate Surety bond. His trial is scheduled for May. In December, Reese filed for divorce from his wife.

Holy Rosary placed Reese on six months leave in October. The archdiocesan website says only that Reese was “granted a six-month leave of absence.”

According to the affidavit, Reese’s superiors were already aware of other issues concerning Reese. The wife told police Reese was already in “hot water” over two incidents: One in which he reportedly supplied alcohol to minors and got intoxicated with them, and another in which he shared white supremacist materials with young people. Those incidents were reported by parents to church officials, according to the affidavit.

The wife also told police that Reese had been abusive to the family for quite some time before the Sept. 24 incident.

Greg Otolski, communications director for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis declined numerous requests for comment. We also reached out to officials in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, based in Houston, Texas. Bishop Steven Lopes of Houston is Reese’s bishop. The communications director in Houston has not returned our calls.

The only other information I've been able to find on Fr Reese on the web is this story covering his 2016 diaconal ordination.
On June 29, transitional Deacon Luke Reese, a former Anglican priest, will become the first married priest in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis when he is ordained in a liturgy witnessed by his wife Gina of 24 years and their seven children. . . . They and two other families were the first from an Anglican background in central and southern Indiana accepted as members of the Houston-based Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, which was established in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI. The ordinariate functions like a diocese for former Anglicans and Episcopalians in the United States and Canada.

Throughout nearly 25 years of marriage, Deacon Reese has sought to show Christ’s face to Gina and their children through his loving care and concern for them.

As a priest, he’ll also do this for a broader spiritual family.

“I think my experience as a father is going to be invaluable in thinking of my congregation as my spiritual children,” Deacon Reese said. “It’s not a one-time thing. Everybody is a project. We’re all saints in the making.”

Deacon Reese became a priest in the making shortly after he and his family were received into the Church in 2012.

He had been ordained a priest in the Anglican tradition about 10 years ago. To be properly formed for priestly life and ministry as a Catholic, he began commuting in the fall of 2012 from his family’s home in Indianapolis to Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad.

He also received assistance from the archdiocesan vicariate for clergy, religious and parish life coordinators in formation for pastoral ministry.

Although he has now been in formation for the priesthood for four years, when asked how he views his upcoming ordination he says with a laugh, “Scary.”

“I don’t know if you can ever really be ready for something as big as the priesthood,” Deacon Reese said. “There are a lot of expectations placed upon a man who is put up in front of a congregation. He needs to be a solid leader.

“He just doesn’t say Mass for people. He provides an example.”

My regular correspondent commented,
I have been following the career of this man since The Anglo-Catholic blog days. He had a small ACC parish at that time (since about 2006) and supported his family by among other things making Communion hosts. Lots of family pix, all the females in chapel veils as I recall. In 2012 he and his family entered the Church and he became the Music Director at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis. His degree was in music and he did full-time seminary study at St Meinrad before being ordained in 2016. Holy Rosary has a DW, EF, and OF mass every Sunday, and Fr Reese was involved with all three, which sounds to me like an interesting model. So this comes as quite a shock. Obviously a very large and opaque veil has been drawn over this in OCSP circles.
Both the blogger and the visitor who sent me the link expressed concern that the response from the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, and by implication the OCSP, appears to have been inadequate. It apears that there was no shortage of past history here, including providing alcohol to minors, a major, major red flag.

We'll probably never learn much more. On the other hand, Bp Lopes's colleagues must by now be fully aware of this situation, which was almost simultaneous with Fr Kenyon's disastrous tenure in Stockport, UK.

Monday, February 26, 2018

A Point Of Comparison

Next week, our diocesan parish will feature a three-day Lenten conference led by Fr Dwight Longenecker. Fr Longenecker, raised an Evangelical in Pennsylvania, went to Oxford, was ordained a priest in the Church of England, left the Anglican priesthood, and became Catholic. Eventually he returned to the US and became a married Catholic priest under the Pastoral Provision in 2006.

He is currently Pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Greenville, SC. Our parish has represented him to us only as a rare example of a married priest in the Latin Rite, and it has made no mention of anything like Anglican Use. As far as I can see, he doesn't normally celebrate mass using BDW or DWM, and he doesn't seem to represent himself as anything but a down-the-line Catholic priest. A photo on his website shows him celebrating mass at St Maximillian Kolbe’s altar at his friary in Poland. Nothing's there about Our Lady of Walsingham, though.

The audience he'll be addressing at our parish is heavily Latin and Filipino, with a good additional sampling of Irish, Italian, Slavic, and Other heritage as well. My wife and I may be the only former Episcopalians.

Fr Longenecker doesn't seem ever to have appeared in the Anglo-Catholic blogosphere. Yet he's far more prominent as a blogger, writer, and speaker than any other Pastoral Provision or ordinariate priest. This is yet another confirmation for me that Anglicanorum coetibus is a detour. Becoming Catholic is always an individual decision, as it pretty clearly was for Fr Longenecker, and the Church has far more resources for people from all backgrounds than the very limited options available for those who want to characterize themselves somehow just as former Anglicans.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Yet More On Our Lady Of The Atonement And The Archdiocese

A visitor remarks,
With respect to your post today, I’m not persuaded that relations between the Archbishop of San Antonio and the Parish of Our Lady of the Atonement are as “strained” as your post today implies. In the letter from Fr. Lewis to the parents of children enrolled in the parochial school, Fr. Lewis describes his meeting with Archbishop Garcia-Siller and Auxiliary Bishop Boulette in terms that clearly suggest a lack of animosity.
I would say that an archbishop and his auxiliary are nothing if not accomplished institutional actors. They would see no purpose in being other than very warm with Fr Lewis, while making their position on the age of confirmation for members of their flock eminently clear. Fr Lewis, in his job less than a year and no doubt eager to please, is not their problem. On the other hand, I've heard from various sources that there's been a history of bad relations between the chancery, Dcn Orr, and Fr Phillips that dates from well before the current archbishop's arrival.

It probably helps that Dcn Orr, having moved away and now banished from the property, is no longer an issue. But from what we've learned here, that Fr Phillips should own the rectory adjoining the parish property was an issue with Msgr Steenson and is almost certainly a factor in his continued involvement with the parish. Eventually this is a matter that Bp Lopes will probably need to resolve -- it seems as though Msgr Steenson recognized it would have been a problem for him as well.

The next question is whether it's Fr Phillips who's sending the press packages to Church Militant. My regular correspondent says,

When the bishop of Saint Petersburg, FL objected to an Ordinariate community-in-formation in his diocese, it was gone in a flash, and the would-be leader silenced. Holy Martyrs, Temecula seems to be on hold, presumably as a result of objections by the Diocese of San Bernardino, and there is radio silence on that subject as well. I cannot imagine that Bp Lopes is encouraging this pissing match between OLA and Abp G-S, and if he knew for a fact that Fr Phillips was behind the attacks on CM I'm sure he would put a stop to them.

He has nothing to gain and a lot to lose, long-term. Fr Lewis' approach, as I mentioned, is conciliatory and non-confrontational. I'm sure that was what was in the memo from Houston. Problem is that there appears to be no actual evidence to support our suspicions about the source of the hostile rhetoric, and my sense of Fr Phillips is that unless he were apprehended with a smoking gun he would deny everything. Bad scene for Bp Lopes.

Particularly in a US criminal court of law, naturally there's no evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. But on one hand, we aren't in criminal court, and nobody's up on criminal charges. We're talking about policy issues and administrative remedies. On the other, the Church Militant story says several times that the info is coming from "an insider", and the story keeps referring to OLA as Anglican Use, which it hasn't been for nearly a year. It looks as if someone is living in the past but has access to an extensive library of parish photos, which are being forwarded as part of the press packages that keep going to Mr Voris. A visitor says,
I don't think it is necessarily Fr. Phillips leaking to CM directly. It could be a parishioner with a misguided allegiance just as well. For some context, the sermons from Fr. Moore and Pastor Lewis since the new year have been interwoven with themes of forgiveness to the Archdiocese, as well as calls for a cessation of the murmuring by some parishioners who are apparently not happy with the changes in the parish.
Another visitor points out,
Isn’t it ironic the very people who wanted to be not just unique but also separate (meaning they wanted NOTHING to do with Archdiocese and in effect, picked up their toys and left) are now bent out of shape because they are demanding the Archbishop give them special consideration and he won’t. Here’s a novel idea, what if the Archbishop of San Antonio is not acting out of malice but actually fulfilling Fr. Phillips ultimate wish, he is simply leaving them alone.

The Archbishop owes the people who were his flock who have now joined the Ordinariate nothing, they are Bishop Lopes’ flock now. The people at OLA who still are his flock have access to Confirmation and Holy Communion through their home parishes just like every other Catholic who does not attend a Catholic school so where is their injury? (Yes, receiving First Communion/Confirmation with your classmates is very exciting but lots of children who do not attend Catholic schools do this in their own parishes ALL the time.)

What if Archbishop Gustavo is not actively looking for ways to thwart the Atonement crowd but simply saying ,”Meh, it is not worth the time, treasure and talent of the diocese to keep engaging with OLA. They wanted to do it on their own, I will let them.” In reality, Archbishop Gustavo having to play patty-cake and make nice with the openly hostile folks from OLA (who are not his responsibility) takes his and Archdiocesan staff’s time away from the people and myriad other issues that are his responsibility. I’m certain he has a lot of more important things on his plate to worry about than making life easier for the militant churchy folks.

To use a sports analogy, Archbishop Gustavo has no skin in that game.

I would say again what I said yesterday, that the OCSP's own policy statements require parishes "to act in communion in their relationship with the bishop, diocesan administration, and parishes of the territorial Catholic diocese," as well as to reject "prior forms of institutionalized animus". Every indication we have is that Fr Lewis is faithfully and conscientiously implementing these policies. On the other hand, the reports I have here, as well as reasonable surmise, suggest there is continued animus between at least some elements of the OLA parish, possibly including retired clergy, and the archdiocese.

The unavoidable fact is that, by sending anti-Gustavo material to Church Militant, the dissident elements of OLA are alienating much of the institutional Church in the US and creating a bad look for Bp Lopes. Remember that the Bishop of Scranton, who'd previously hosted the St Thomas More parish there when it was Anglican Use, clearly had no reason to oppose such things but did in fact ban Mr Voris from using any diocesan facility in 2011.

I see this only as an interested observer, but I think it's incumbent on Bp Lopes to assert better control over this matter than he so far has.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Other Views On Our Lady Of The Atonement vs The Archdiocese

A visitor notes,
I think your belief that OLA is trying to boost OCSP numbers by trying to include its schoolchildren (who are children of parents belonging to other parishes) in the rite of confirmation is not credible. I think this is simply something that was not thought through in the desire to leave the San Antonio archdiocese.

Initially Father Phillips offered the rite of confirmation in a separate mass for parishioners and school children who had already received their first communion. When the church sanctuary was expanded, he changed this and began to offer first communion and confirmation at the same time. Indeed, older adults who never had made their confirmation were included in this quite large celebration at the church, with various bishops of the archdiocese: Flanagan, Zurek, Cantu, Gomez, and of course, Garcia-Siller. Your research into the rite of confirmation within the United States Catholic church demonstrates the "problem" of the sacrament of confirmation--in laymen's terms we don't know quite how to do it or when to do it, as evidenced by the fact that SA archdiocese bishops willingly presided in the past.

It is very odd of you to fault parents of 2nd graders the desire of their children to participate in with other 2nd grade classmates. as if they are somehow lazy to not get sacramental preparation help at their own parish. These parents mostly come from parishes that do not have their own Catholic schools. They are greatly invested in the religious education of their kids, and it has been tradition in all Catholic schools always to have the class receive the sacrament together.

I read your blog and am (mostly) convinced of your general argument that the OCSP will not thrive, and is in fact, destined to fade away. However, you should acknowledge that the archdiocese's relations right now with OLA are very strained, with sometimes the archdiocese being the "villain." I think the archdiocese not allowing schoolchildren to make their First Communion there at OLA is mean-spirited.

My regular correspondent points out,
If Abp G-S in fact previously confirmed seven year olds at the Academy he has taken age off the table as a valid objection, it would seem to me. As I mentioned, age seven is the preferred choice of many traditionalists, and is still "on the books" despite the change in practice in most American dioceses. Having children confirmed before they receive first communion is consistent with traditional Anglican practice, although this usually takes place at age twelve or thirteen in the Anglican church. Most Catholic parents would not be prepared to have their child defer first communion to that age. I assume that your correspondent is correct in stating that regardless of who performed the confirmation, a seven year-old could/would not independently become a member of the Ordinariate. So Abp G-S's refusal does seem churlish, at least in the face of it.

Possibly relevant to this discussion, there have been several reported instances, before the OCSP had an Ordinary in bishop's orders, where a local diocesan came to an OCSP parish to confirm its young candidates. In other cases candidates from an OCSP parish took part in a diocesan confirmation service Since the OCSP has only been around for five years, many or most of these young people were probably also baptised in diocesan parishes. There did not seem to be any suggestion that they were putting their OCSP membership eligibility in danger by being confirmed by the local diocesan.

It isn't my intent to adjudicate precisely which side is more or less at fault. It does seem to me that all correspondents here agree that relations with the Archdiocese of San Antonio are not good, and I certainly agree with the OLA member who takes the view that by running to Church Militant, Fr Phillips is contributing to the problem. This is something Bp Lopes is fully capable of addressing. If he is not -- and so far, it appears he is not -- then Abp Garcia-Siller may possibly be excused for thinking Fr Phillips has Bp Lopes's tacit support.

I would note that the OCSP Guide to Parish Development has a category VITALITY: RELATIONSHIP WITH LOCAL DIOCESE. It is expected that an OCSP parish has a "Supportive" relaitonship with the diocese. A further comment adds,

Notes: A clear indication of an Ordinariate’s community to act in communion is their relationship with the bishop, diocesan administration, and parishes of the territorial Catholic diocese. Ordinariate clergy and communities are urged to participate in common endeavors, including especially penance services and social engagement projects.
A second category, VITALITY: DOCILITY TO ORDINARY & PEACE WITH ONE ANOTHER carries the note,
Notes: As St. Paul calls us to reconciliation, our communities must be authentic examples of the joy of communion with the Catholic Church and the Christian imperative to be at peace with one another as a witness to the Gospel. Rejecting prior forms of institutionalized animus and embracing Catholic communion is an ongoing mark of spiritual and community health and vitality
If I were up for an annual job performance appraisal, this is the sort of thing that would be on my appraisal form, and probably my boss's as well. We can certainly cite examples of inconsistency at the archdiocesan level, but the repeated press releases from a faction at OLA to Church Militant are poisoning the atmosphere, and someone in the OCSP ought to be receiving an "improvement needed", if not an "unsatisfactory" if a job-style appraisal were being conducted on those in OCSP responsible for interaction with the archdiocese -- whose ever precise fault is involved.

I recognize that Fr Lewis appears to be doing his best, although he probably doesn't have prior experience with this sort of thing. But he would be entitled to ask Bp Lopes for support in the matter of bringing Fr Phillips (or whoever is sending the press packages to Church Militant) to heel. It is probably Fr Lewis's responsibility to identify those involved and report to Bp Lopes, for that matter.

But from my experience in corporations, this is not a problem that can be resolved at the parish level, and I would say that inevitably, if there is in fact a problem higher in the organization, it will be resolved with a higher-level departure. That will not involve Abp Garcia-Siller. He is the big dog in this fight. I'm not sure if Bp Lopes understands this.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Reactions To Yesterday's Post

I've had a great deal of reaction to the news in yesterday's post. First, my wife asked, in reference to my view (and the view of at least one visitor) that Fr Phillips is behind the Church Militant "archbishop punishes children" story, "What purpose could Fr Phillips serve by leaking to Church Militant?" I think he's out for revenge against Abp Garcia-Siller, pure and simple. The archbishop ended his career, however one might interpret the face-saving "Pastor Emeritus" role he now has. Not many people other than Mr Voris take him seriously now, after all, and I'm still mooting whether I should tell Mr Voris about Dcn Orr, whether Voris listens or not.

This does raise an overall policy question. A visitor pointed out that, while Abp Garcia-Siller was still the OLA ordinary, he did in fact confirm children at the parish and school at age seven. Clearly there's been a change in the archbishop's policy regarding the parish. This says relations between the archdiocese and the OCSP are not as good as they might be. As the same visitor noted earlier, Fr Phillips's series of leaks to Church Militant -- and let's not forget that those leaks apparently include photos; they're practically press releases -- are not helping matters. Bp Lopes needs to address this, not least because of the impression it almost certainly gives Bp Lopes's colleagues, that allowing an OCSP community in their territories opens the door to this sort of disruption for them as well.

Two other visitors make a different point. One says,

It seems that if Fr. Lewis was informed of Abp. Garcia-Siller’s stance in October, the children and their parents could have had their expectations set accordingly, avoiding the need for a letter which unnecessarily bares a sense of contention between the dioceses. Second, I’ve never heard of confirmation as early as seven. But I believe waiting for high school is too late. Twelve should be the age and I thought that was what the OCSP was aiming for.
My tentative view continues to be that what the OCSP was aiming for at the school was giving the kids the final rites of initiation early to beat out the archdiocese and thus count the kids and their families as OCSP members, purely for the purpose of reporting a better number to the CDF. But a different visitor in passing suggests this may not be in accordance with canon law:
I had heard about the controversy at OLA regarding the sacraments of initiation and remembered this was known to Fr. Phillips & Company when the excardination and incardination of the parish took place. This is not necessarily the result of Archdiocesan capriciousness the people of OLA want to pretend. I read the letter on your blog from Fr. Lewis and it conspicuously states that the issue discussed with Archbishop Gustavo was for Confirmation (not Holy Communion), however at OLA and the Atonement Academy, the tradition is to administer First Communion and Confirmation concurrently in the same Mass when the children are in the second or third grade. The Archdiocese sees High School age as more appropriate for Confirmation and that is the rule in the diocese. First Communion and Confirmation are different animals in the eyes of the Church. They are different but are tied inexorably with the sacrament of Baptism as Rites of Initiation into the Catholic Church. The Church where you begin your Rites of Initiation are where you must normally complete them unless you formally transfer into another Rite. So in this case, people who are baptized in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church should receive the rest of their initiation sacraments in the Latin Rite unless they formally request transfer into another Rite (i.e. the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter).
My best understanding is that Anglicanorum coetibus does not create a new rite, and the ordinariates are still in the Latin rite, though someone may be able to correct or clarify this. But in that case, the parental consent mentioned below may not be needed. The visitor continues,
The children in question have all been baptized in the Latin Church and as minors are not eligible to transfer into the Ordinariate unless their parents also formally transfer into the Ordinariate and declare their children be transferred. That is canon law and the Archbishop cannot make an exception about their membership status in any Rite. (here is the link, read the whole page, the pertinent parts are in the beginning and towards the end). What is happening is a situation where lots of people seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. The parents of the Latin Rite kids want the ease of the school providing the sacraments but they don’t want to join the Ordinariate or leave their home parishes. The clergy of the Ordinariate want the Archbishop to make exceptions for their flock that he does not even make for his own sheep, all the while painting the Archbishop as the new-age antichrist (OK, maybe that’s a little too strong but some might actually agree…) This whole thing is a sad little mess. It makes me want to shake my head while exclaiming, “Really?”

It should be incumbent on the parents sending their children to the Atonement Academy to understand these differences when they enroll their kids. It should be incumbent on the faculty and clergy at OLA to be honest about these impediments BEFORE they cash those enrollment checks. Really.

As you can see, this really chaps my hide.

I do get the impression that the OCSP and the Atonement Academy aren't making some of these issues clear, and they apparently feel it's to their benefit not to clarify them. Regarding the wider issue of age of confirmation, a visitor points out,
The Orthodox view holds that confirmation, also called “chrismation,” is an integral part of baptism, so a priest who baptizes a child confirms the child at the same time, and I believe that some of the sui juris ritual churches also adhere to this practice. I’m not aware of advocates of that practice within the Roman Catholic Church, but canon law does require a priest who ministers to a child in extremis who has not reached the age of reason to confirm that child.

Many sacramental theologians advocate that the sacraments of initiation should occur in the proper order — baptism, confirmation, and first communion — for those baptized as infants as well as for those baptized through the RCIA. Generally, this means that those baptized as infants receive confirmation and first communion at the same mass, usually at the age of seven.

Many pastoral theologians, on the other hand, advocate that confirmation should be a time when those baptized as infants embrace Christian faith as their own and take on full responsibility to live as adult Christians, reflecting Protestant practice rooted in a radically different theology of the act. There unquestionably is a need for those baptized as infants to make this commitment of faith, but the question is whether it should be tied to confirmation.

The relevant provision of the Codex Juris Canonici (Code of Canon Law) is Canon 891, which gives the conference of bishops the authority to make the decision for each country.

Can. 891 The sacrament of confirmation is to be conferred on the faithful at about the age of discretion unless the conference of bishops has determined another age, or there is danger of death, or in the judgment of the minister a grave cause suggests otherwise.

The bishops of the United States have been divided between the second and third of these viewpoints for decades, and have yet to reach the 2/3 majority required to set a specific age. Thus, years ago, the former National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) compromised on a decree stating that confirmation of those baptized as infants should occur at an age of seven and sixteen years, to be further determined by the diocesan bishop — thus delegating to each bishop the right to regulate the age of confirmation in his own diocese. The Vatican has not been pleased with this and has been pressuring the present United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), but the most recent effort reached the same impasse, again resolved with a decree with different wording but similar effect that the Vatican ratified ad experimentum, undoubtedly out of frustration, for five years. Since the ordinary of an ordinariate is canonically equivalent to a diocesan bishop, he has the same authority to make that determination for his ordinariate.

This status quo obviously creates some issues when children who have domicile in one diocese go to a Catholic school or to catechetical classes at a parish in another diocese that has a lower age for confirmation than the diocese in which they reside. In such cases, their own pastor normally must give consent for their confirmation in another place — but such consent is rarely withheld if the pastor overseeing their formation states in writing that they have completed the required formation satisfactorily. I’m also aware of instances in which the abbots of a Benedictine abbeys that run boarding schools confirmed all of the students in the school — and this is legitimate because the canonical authority of the major superior of a religious order extends to “all who remain day and night in the houses of the order” (including resident students, retreatants, and sometimes lay staff) even if they are not members of the order.

The issues posed by children from diocesan parishes receiving religious instruction in an ordinariate congregation or school is no different from that posed by the above situations. Normally, the children’s proper pastors would give permission for their confirmations and the confirmations would then be deemed to occur within the jurisdiction of their diocese rather than within the jurisdiction of the ordinariate, even though celebrated within the ordinariate’s parish church and administered by the ordinary — and the diocesan bishop and his pastors would have no fear of losing parishioners to the ordinariate. Canons 111 and 112 suggest that a child who is fourteen years or older could freely choose to be confirmed in the jurisdiction of the ordinariate, and then join it, but a seven-year-old would not meet that qualification.

Now, do you want to know the real royal pastoral headache? In my archdiocese, like many others, our archbishop has decided to confirm those baptized in the Catholic Church as infants when they are in tenth grade. However…

  1. The Catholic sacramental rites explicitly require that baptism of children of catechetical age occur via the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, adapted to their age. There’s provision to celebrate the sacraments of initiation at a time other than the Easter Vigil in this situation, but there is no provision to baptize children of catechetical age without confirming them and admitting them to communion at the same service.
  2. The Rite of Reception of Baptized Christians into the Full Communion of the Catholic Church requires confirmation of children of catechetical age and admission to communion at the time of reception unless the candidate is already validly confirmed — and there is no provision whatsoever to receive baptized children who have not yet reached catechetical age into the full communion of the Catholic Church.
A couple decades ago, a friend who was (and still is) the “Administrator” of a small parish discovered that one of the girls in the parish’s “first communion” class had not been baptized. He indicated that he was planning to baptize her, so I pointed out to him that there was no provision to do so apart from the RCIA. His look of disbelief was priceless, but he also knew me well enough to decide that he better check with the chancery — where he got exactly the same answer. When I saw him a week later, he had the RCIA [book] out and was shaking his head saying that, in his view, she was not ready for confirmation.

But, when she completed the RCIA, how do you explain to the other parents why she is confirmed at the age of, say, eight or nine and their children have to wait to the age of sixteen for confirmation? Or, for that matter, how do you explain to the same parents why a peer who was baptized in another denomination is confirmed upon reception into full communion at the age of eight or nine, but their children have to wait until the age of sixteen for confirmation?

Among other things, this explains why, in our parish, there are adolescent kids in the current RCIA class!

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Abp Garcia-Siller Punishes Children!

I'm told that on February 13, a letter from Fr Lewis went out to Our Lady of the Atonement school parents (Click on the image for a larger version) explaining a problem with the OLA parish's intent to administer the final Sacraments of Initiation to students at Atonement Academy.

While the exact issue isn't clearly spelled out in the letter, it appears that Bp Lopes and the OLA parish had intended to administer First Communion and Confirmation to Academy students at the age of reason, about seven. Not stated at all in the letter is that, although these students had presumably been baptized in Catholic parishes and raised in more or less observant Catholic families, to administer the final sacraments of initiation would make them (and for that matter their families) members of the OCSP.

Interestingly, according to the letter, this seems to have been a contingency Abp Garcia-Siller had anticipated in a meeting with Fr Lewis last October. It seems to me that Abp Garcia-Siller perceived the potential problem here quite well. The school parents involved, for reasons neither Fr Lewis nor Bp Lopes should second-guess, send their children to Atonement Academy but prefer to attend mass and receive the sacraments at their home diocesan parish.

As a member of a diocesan parish, I see that in our case, both First Communion and Confirmation, at whatever age, are celebrated as family and community events. At minimum, to have these sacraments take place in the context of the school, rather than the parish and the family, usurps their usual purpose, and I can't avoid a sense that Abp Garcia-Siller is shepherding his faithful well in this case.

He points to his diocesan policy of withholding confirmation until teenage years. I've got to agree with this, too. Prof Feser in one of his Five Proofs points to the existence of absolutes, such as the laws of physics, geometry, and harmony; the behavior of numbers; and the existence of logic and reason, as proofs for natural religion. Children begin to be exposed to these in middle school, which I think is a much better time to catechize them.

At root of Abp Garcia-Siller's objection, though, is (in my opinion) a sense that Bp Lopes is poaching active cradle Catholics still in formation, using the excuse of giving the final sacraments of initiation, which (sneaky move!) just happens to make them and their families members of the OCSP -- although it seems to me that Pope Francis's extension of eligibility in this area was intended to reach cradle Catholics who'd fallen away from the Church for some significant period, not seven-year-olds who don't know what's going on (nor, of course, their families).

For the children and their families, of course, that, with a couple of bucks, will get them a bus ride. They stay registered at their home parishes. But for Bp Lopes, he can claim some dozens of new OCSP members, witting or not, each year, claiming growth that otherwise doesn't exist. I don't like this, and I don't blame Abp Garcia-Siller for being concerned about the "perception".

A visitor noted that the letter from Fr Lewis went out on Februaery 13, but by February 15, Church Militant had picked up the story: SAN ANTONIO PRELATE PUNISHING PARISH SCHOOLCHILDREN! Garcia-Siller denying students Confirmation at Anglican Use parish! Neither statement is correct: the schoolchildren in this case are specifically not members of the OLA parish, and the parish is no longer Anglican Use. The Anglican Use part suggests Fr Phillips is probably connected with the leak to Church Militant. The rest of the story is predictable.

Part of me wants to e-mail Mr Voris, with whom I'm often sympathetic, outlining the specifics of Dcn Orr's history with the parish, including the reports by parents to Fr Phillips of Orr's violations of guidelines, including kissing adolescent boys on the mouth, which Fr Phillips discounted and apparently never discouraged, culminating in the archdiocese's report of a credible allegation of abuse and the eventual banning of Dcn Orr from the OLA property -- but only after Fr Phillips's removal as pastor. I would hope Mr Voris could allow such circumstances to override his wish to prove a general point.

But as a visitor put it to me, it's hard to think anyone at OLA carrying the tale to Church Militant will help Bp Lopes's relationship with the Archdiocese of San Antonio, and considering how much time he spends at OLA, he must feel this is one of his few bright spots. It seems to me that Bp Lopes does have additional disciplinary options with Fr Phillips, retired or not, which he would be well-advised to pursue. But the appearance of poaching active diocesan Catholics still in formation is also a very bad look for him, which can't help his reputation with other colleagues in the USCCB.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Money And Lack Of Seriousness

After yesterday's post, I continued to think about what the 2018 Bishop's Appeal budget has to say about the OCSP's long-term problems. It seems to me that, in addition to money, it has the additional problem that the pool of community leaders, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and managers, in addition to the independently well-off, that make up Episcopal parishes, vestries, and key donors never came over with the smaller-than-expected contingent who went into the OCSP.

This had almost immediate practical results in the failed ParishSOFT implementation, which would have relied on lay volunteers in each community who had some experience in implementing business software, as well as individuals at the chancery level who could offer planning and policy guidance. So far, my understanding is that Houston is still having difficulties on one hand figuring out how much the individual communities get in income, and on the other collecting its tithe on these amounts.

Leaving everything else aside, if the laity can't carry its weight in time, talent, and treasure, the enterprise is not going to survive. If the people who are attracted to Anglicanorum coetibus are limited to the perennially dissatisfied, or misfits who didn't work out at a succession of Anglican parishes (or who indeed came to Anglicanism only after multiple turns on the denominational carousel), there will never be the pool of capable laity the prelature will need.

My regular correspondent points out,

As we discovered, the Davises' funding of Msgr Steenson's academic appointment at St Thomas University and the construction of the Chancery, as well as financial contributions to OLW, were of major importance in getting the OCSP off the ground. Are they still being as generous? If not, the OCSP is probably feeling the pinch. It is crucial that they ensure that Houston is not being stiffed in regard to the cathedraticum, but even if the uttermost farthing is forthcoming we are looking at a total congregational membership equivalent to a large diocesan parish, but with many more expenses.

Most of their clergy require an additional source of income beyond any stipend the group can offer, and as the older clergy, with their TEC, military, and other pensions retire and have to be replaced by younger men who need (week)day jobs this will be a bigger headache. I think the Ordinariate will be much more selective in who it ordains going forward, if only for this reason.

Of course, as we have seen, often an abler man discovers that his diocesan assignment offers better prospects and a more satisfying ministry than the OCSP, and he seeks excardination, leaving the Ordinariate with the marginal players. And of course down the line the Ordinariate will be responsible for them in their retirement.

If the clergy themselves are mediocrities who've reached the OCSP only after multiple turns on the denominational carousel, I'm not sure how anyone can expect them to attract or inspire the sort of laity who can keep the enterprise going. But also, if the laity don't support the community to the extent that they can't offer their priest a reasonable opportunity, it will be precisely the better-qualified man who can move on.

Monday, February 12, 2018

OCSP 2018 Bishop's Appeal

A visitor sent me a picture of the recently-released brochure for the 2018 OCSP Bishop's Appeal, in hopes that I might be able to pass it on for more informed opinion. I've cropped it to focus on the amounts and percentages -- many visitors probably have received a copy in the mail. You can get a larger version by clicking on the image.

The visitor's view is, "The budget allocations strike me as a quite administration-heavy, and the category definitions are pretty interesting, too." I passed this on to my regular correspondent, who said,
In a typical diocese seminarians get student loans to cover their tuition, etc which their diocese assume if/when they are ordained. Presumably this is the OCSP practice. Not sure how it funds the on-line instruction and semi-annual residential seminars for former clergy or its candidates for the permanent diaconate. "Parish Development" clearly the ongoing attempt to get a handle on membership files and other record-keeping tasks like Safe Environment, which are all a mess. "Communication Outreach" has also been a weak link from Day One. Hard to believe anyone has put five cents into it up till now.
My first reaction is that $253,125 isn't much, no matter what. How much of an impact any expenditure of this size can have on the OCSP's problem areas is going to be hard to discern. A bigger question is that $30,075 is going for the bishop's travel expenses, and I'm assuming that overnight accommodations will be in Church facilities. Normally, a diocesan bishop doesn't need to fly hundreds or thousands of miles to make episcopal visits, and this is just the most visible indication that maintaining cohesiveness in such a scattered prelature will be difficult. Regarding other areas, my regular correspondent added,
"Evangelization" a bit of a stretch for the Ordinary's travel expenses, and I would put production of an annual Pastoral Letter down as an office expense. Going back to "Communication," as you have probably noticed I am constantly puzzled as to why the OOLW can produce a monthly magazine, on-line and in print, and maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date, if not particularly exciting, website, while the OCSP fails to report anything, including ordinations, unless someone outside the Chancery takes the initiative to submit a news item, manages one "infomercial" magazine a year, and cannot maintain even an up-to-date list of parishes on its website, let alone accurate service times and contact details.
And again, given the relatively small amounts allocated to these areas, regardless of intent, I'm not sure how much of an impact any measures can really have, if the current direction and level of effort has been so unavailing.

Regarding the allocation for clergy and vocations, I'm struck yet again by what continues to be a two-tier approach. An upper tier of parishes and more successful groups is apparently eligible to receive seminarians once they complete their formation. A much larger lower tier gets the Protestant retreads, whose quality has been steadily diminishing over the life of the OCSP.

I think this is important, because the lectionaries for the TEC 1979 BCP and the Roman Catholic missal are the same. I went through ten three-year cycles in 30 years as an Episcopalian, and since 2013, I've been through more than one cycle as a Catholic. I've got to say that the homilies I hear on significant readings -- let's say the raising of Lazarus, the woman at the well, if you forgive the sins of any -- are night and day between TEC and Catholic. They go to what Bp Barron calls the physics of salvation, and as far as I can see, whether this is at Nashotah House or Yale, the interpretations Anglican seminarians learn are at best pale imitations of what we hear from priests infused from the start with Augustine and Aquinas. Let's not even mention the substantial number of OCSP priests who went to Reformed seminaries.

We hear, or surmise, that some diocesan bishops are pushing back over allowing OCSP groups-in-formation in their territories. Given in particular the poor formation of the lower-tier priests and their quickie ordinations, I've got to say I have a lot of sympathy with these bishops, and I don't see that Bp Lopes's apparent direction for the OCSP will do much to solve this problem, or for that matter, any other. The overall spending levels don't strike me as enough to make any real changes.

In contrast, my wife and I have been increasing our financial support of our diocesan parish and related charities year by year. The reason for this is twofold: the effective preaching by parish clergy about the need for sacrificial giving, and the visible good use to which the parish and the archdiocese put our money. If any OCSP members find the 2018 bishop's appeal budget troubling from this perspective -- I would guess that if a visitor sent me a copy hoping to get outside input, this may be the case -- I would suggest they investigate possible alternatives if strong diocesan parishes are available nearby.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

Abp Hepworth And The Titanic

Mr Chadwick has replied to yesterday's post, and it appears that he has moderated his positions on Abp Hepworth to some degree, so I'm disinclined to argue with him. His opinion on the St Mary of the Angels parish, while realistic, doesn't seem entirely consistent.
The “correspondent” speaks of his uneasiness about being under Hepworth’s oversight on account of his no longer being the primate of an institutional ecclesial body. St Mary’s is not my problem. Even lovely ships like the Titanic had to be abandoned when they were sinking. A building, however beautiful, is not worth that amount of litigation.
My correspondent had this comment on Chadwick's view:
I concur in seeing no long-term benefit from being associated with Hepworth, someone regarded, and not just by the "RC bureaucracy", as a "toxic apostate priest." . . . What does maintaining a connection with him say about St Mary's view of its way forward?
I think the comparison with the Titanic is apt. From Fr Kelley's informal comments, I believe he is in a process of discernment, but exactly where this will lead him, we don't know. But that someone would use the example of the Titanic also has serious implications. The souls aboard the Titanic were in a desperate situation. While lives aren't threatened at Hillhurst and Finley, people are at least having to make serious decisions about their way forward, and for some, becoming Catholic may be an extended and difficult journey.

But let's keep in mind that a laicized Catholic priest is still a priest and may hear the confessions of those in danger of death, e.g., on the Titanic. Abp Hepworth has apparently not been formally laicized, and St Mary's parishioners are not in literal danger of death, but we're still in a spiritually desperate situation. Certainly several people, including my wife and me, underwent spiritual crises after the events of 2012 and saw the need to cut their losses and become Catholic outside the very dodgy OCSP process of acceptance. That would be a sign of the spiritual desperation still occurring there.

Let's consider too that a number of former Catholic priests have become Anglican bishops -- the move isn't unidirectional. This includes ACA Bishop of the Eastern US John Vaughan. It's not unusual for former Catholic priests to become TEC priests, including Alberto Cutié, "Father Oprah". None of these has presumably been properly laicized, since a laicized Catholic priest is not entitled to wear clericals or call himself a priest in any denomination, to avoid misleading the faithful. But in the case of Abp Hepworth, we're in for a penny, in for a pound.

St Mary of the Angels is currently an Anglican parish. It is probably even more correct to call it an Anglican Papalist parish, since it has aspirations, however unrealistic, of one day resolving litigation in its favor and going into the OCSP. We may exercise our own judgment on eventual outcomes, but given its current circumstances, it has a bishop, who as far as I can see is no more and no less legitimate in Roman Catholic eyes than any other "continuing Anglican" bishop. Let's keep in mind that Louis Falk was deposed as a TEC priest for apparently good reasons -- nobody's without sin here.

If, as at least some observers seem to concur, the St Mary of the Angels parish doesn't have much of a long term, I'm not sure why my correspondent questions the "long term benefit from being associated with Hepworth". My view as consistently expressed here is an Aristotelian argument from circumstance, which as R M Weaver puts it, is the most desperate argument. If the sea is on three sides, and we can’t swim for it, but the enemy is bottling us up on the fourth, we have no choice but to fight our way out. St Mary’s is a sinking Titanic, I generally agree. Even a laicized Catholic priest can hear confessions from those in danger of death. Given the much more flexible circumstances that apply among Anglicans, I'm not sure what the problems are in seeing Abp Hepworth functioning as a bishop.

Let's say, for instance, that everyone at St Mary's wakes up tomorrow and decides the best step is to close things out and turn the keys over to the ACA. How long would that take? Months? Years? Who knows? Wouldn't this small group of people be entitled to the best leadership and spiritual counsel they could find under the circumstances? Recognize that they would have a number of options -- renew an application to the OCSP as a different entity, go individually into the Church via RCIA at other parishes, return to TEC, find another "continuing" parish, or none of the above.

Wouldn't it be best for them to have someone who can give them spiritual comfort and assistance with discernment? How many others would be willing to apply for that job?

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

So, What's Really Going On At St Mary's?

My regular correspndent has some reasonable questions in response to my latest couple of posts:
Where does John Hepworth go on a regular Sunday? A home chapel? Does anyone join him? Not my business, really, but his relationship with St Mary's strikes me as an odd note in a situation which already has enough of them. I was re-reading Anthony Chadwick's account here. At one time he and Mrs Gyapong had a (largely amiable) on-line debate about Hepworth's role in the AC process; although she remains a fan and Chadwick is quite over him there were many points of agreement about how he oversold what was on offer and TAC's role therein. Their main disagreement was about his motivation, a subject on which Mrs G puts a charitable spin while Chadwick is ready to entertain terms like psychopath and narcissist. Or perhaps "put." At the time she was confidently predicting that he would be reconciled with the Church sooner rather than later.

The fact that he attracted, indeed mesmerised, two such highly influential people as Chadwick and Christian Campbell, only to be equally strongly repudiated, says a lot to me. They are, of course, both crazy, and Mrs G, a not uninfluential figure herself, only seems sane by contrast. Even if he were an obviously benign and uncontroversial figure I have problems with the idea of being under the episcopal oversight of a man with no other constituency whatsoever. But the fact that this person is John Hepworth really puts the icing on the cake. Of course St Mary's is in a terrible situation, with good outcomes hard to identify at this point. As you have pointed out, the seeds were sown in its protracted legal battle to leave TEC and the harvest was probably inevitable.

At one time I did a lot of online research on episcopi vagantes. There was a site which gathered a lot of links and I used to marvel at the many pictures of men in their basement cathedrals, mitres scraping the low ceilings. Pre-selfie days, but the same aesthetic. But at least their jurisdictions were pretty much confined to the basement. No one was inviting them to travel halfway round the world to preside at anything. It's a funny old world.

On the most serious question, whether Abp Hepworth is a narcissist or psychopath, I don't think so. Characteristics that would make one think someone is a psychopath would include a solid history of reckless, even criminal, behavior, lying, drug or alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, cruelty to animals, and the like. The most I can see with Abp Hepworth is sometimes seriously flawed judgment, but this is something that he often admits to. "Narcissist" is a more difficult term that I try to avoid, simply because it's imprecise but has a certain "scientific"-sounding validity. But if pressed, I would call James Pike a "narcissist", and that would be due to a clear history of hamartically abusive and manipulative behavior, to the point that he drove both his son and a mistress to suicide. This is a question of degree, and while all people are sinners, I don't see Hepworth rising to an egregious or notorious level. (Where does "sumbitch" leave off and "narcissist" begin anyhow?)

Having met with and listened to him a few times by now, I can say that he's very engaging, charming, and even gifted with blarney, although these are also Australian qualities not necessarily indicative of any sort of abnormality. If you dress someone like this in clericals and call him "his grace", it will have an effect. I would say that it's incumbent on everyone to make independent analyses of character. I don't get a sense that Abp Hepworth has any intention of misleading people, but by his own admission he himself tends to give optimistic interpretations. He's a glass-half-full sort of guy, but in his case, the glass may not necessarily be all the way half full. I think people need to factor this in, but I don't see it as pathology.

I think it's also important to put Hepworth, the St Mary of the Angels parish, the TAC, and the "continuing" movement in context. Anglo-Catholicism simply attracts eccentrics and outliers, as does "continuing" Anglicanism. This has been an issue with more than a few leaders in the movement, as well as a good many followers. Somewhere in the mix are also very sincere people like Fr Kelley, but others, sincere or not, strike me as driven by unhappy forces and not necessarily stable. This probably applies as well to the fringes of the "traditionalist" Catholic movement, people who aren't going to be happy anywhere but who will move from place to place in hopes something might change.

I actually wonder what Abp Hepworth might say if pressed on questions like this. That he so willingly describes his outlook as optimistic suggests his actual answers might be surprisingly down-to-earth. He seems sincerely motivated, not just to play archbishop, but to give real counsel to those at the St Mary of the Angels parish who seek him out on a one-on-one basis during his visits. Even ousted or retired, he's still an Anglican bishop, and he can do things like confirmations if they're needed. I can't imagine this is harmful. I like the guy -- in my book, anyone who likes trains isn't all bad anyhow -- and considering the cards he's been dealt over his lifetime, he's playing them well. He seems to have been treated with courtesy by Catholic authorities throughout this story, especially in the events surrounding the Portsmouth Letter.

I'm not really optimistic about the outcome for St Mary of the Angels, and I question how suitable any Anglo-Catholic parish is for transition to Catholicism, but in my view, he's providing sincere leadership that's certainly better than they might otherwise expect to have.

Monday, February 5, 2018

Evensong At St Mary Of The Angels Yesterday

Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I attended an evensong at St Mary of the Angels, which was part of its 100th anniversary celebration. Abp Hepworth presided. He is well over six feet tall, and vested, he is an imposing figure with an outstanding liturgical voice. In many ways, he is the picture of an Anglican bishop. In his homily, he mentioned what may have been a re-consecration of the parish building, which would have involved an exorcism, which in my view it definitely needs. But one exorcism isn't always enough.

One thing struck me about the whole very well-done service: it was high-church Anglican, not Catholic. Among the odd notes were prayers to Mary, who of course is the parish patron, but they referred to the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, which are specifically Catholic doctrines. If I go to mass on the Catholic holy days of obligation for those feasts, the homilies that explain them are actually matter-of-fact, as if the priest were explaining something as obvious as gravity or the weather. At St Mary's, which is not Catholic but from a denomination that more or less does not recognize them (depending on who you talk to), the prayers are oddly adventitious.

Another odd perspective came from diocesan mass that morning, where the advice in the homily, often repeated by all our priests, was pretty down-to-earth. Come to mass. In fact, come to mass on time. Set aside time in your day for prayers. And that was about all. No thees or thous, except in the Our Father. Then I began to think about advice I've gotten in my private devotions. Think about memorizing the common prayers in Latin. Latin is the language of the Church. Prayers in Latin are efficacious. One effect of becoming Catholic for me is having to dust off my high school and college Latin, and I seem to be moving farther in that direction.

The English of the 1662 BCP is a detour and something adventitious. And I'm still not sure how you get from high-church Anglican to Catholic. Not saying it can't be done, but these are different things, and I don't see it yet.

Sunday, February 4, 2018

It Depends On What The Meaning Of "Corporate Reunion" Is

My regular correspondent has reacted to my two most recent posts in a way that provokes me to further thought.Regarding the "corporate reunion" question:
I think that a turning point came for many when it became clear that the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus was precisely not a "corporate reunion," but required the individual reception of every member on precisely the same basis as would have been the case had he or she sought membership in the Church through the RCIA process in a local parish. His or her former clergyman might or might not get ordained and lead the community down the road; his or her former bishop would not be exercising any episcopal role, with the exception of Keith Newton. This was a complete non-starter for most of the UK Anglo-Papalist parishes and even in the North American "continuum" turned off many groups and individuals, earlier and in some cases a fair bit later, as we read here.
I agree that the 30,000-foot version of Anglicanorum coetibus that was promoted in the media just after its promulgation was that entire parishes with their clergy would become Catholic, with little other change. This itself was a somewhat stricter version of the notion that seems to have taken hold in the TAC after the Portsmouth Letter, that the Holy Father would simply declare that Rome and the TAC were "in communion" (i.e., that each denomination recognized the episcopal actions of the other).

It's clear in hindsight that anything short of "in communion" quickly becomes impossibly complicated, but even the truncated version of "corporate reunion" we saw with Anglicanorum coetibus has a serious downside. My regular correspondent moves on:

One might point out that proximity of episcopal oversight does not in and of itself guarantee anything---otherwise there wouldn't have been a problem to start with at OLA. I know you believe that Fr Phillips had a protector in high places, but I think a bigger problem was the fact that he was starting everything from scratch with lay people who either didn't know better or were prepared to accept uncritically everything Fr Phillips did. Fr Bartus has, fortunately IMHO, not built his empire as rapidly as Fr Phillips but I am concerned that he has gathered a similarly smitten community around him, made up both of people whose idea of Catholicism has been formed by him and of people who had a negative previous experience of the Church and are looking to the Ordinariate as a fresh start. Let us remind ourselves of the many projects he has blue-skyed and the work he has put in to advance Fr Baaten and Mr Bales towards ordination. Not to mention Holy Martyrs, Temecula, which he has been trying to get together since last August, although that seems to have run into a bit of a buzz saw. But the point is that presumably his parishioners think that this is what a Catholic priest is like. So whatever he says, goes. The strength of an established parish is the knowledge that pastors come and pastors go, but St Lucy's goes on with its mission.
I keep coming back to Fr David Miller's observation in my 1981 TEC confirmation class, that Anglo-Catholics are people who want the prestige of calling themselves Catholic without paying the dues real Catholics have to pay. Rome and the OCSP need to guard against enabling this attitude, although it seems to me that Abp Garcia-Siller, in his remarks about OLA being not just unique but separate, was driving at something very similar, and it seems to me that Bp Lopes is also now trying to address the same problem there.

But this doesn't change the real problem that even my correspondent raises, that the farther you get from Houston, the more likely it's going to be that clergy are going to freelance "Catholicism", and some people -- not all that many, though -- will buy into it.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

More Changes At Our Lady Of The Atonement

A visitor reports,
CCD is returning

Addition of Saturday vigil Mass

When the bishop came to visit the last few times Fr Phillips was not present at the altar when all the other clergy was.

It appears that the entire school and church is being reorganized. The Phillips family members, wife and daughter, are no longer heads of departments.

My regular correspondent confirms,
Bp Lopes made an episcopal visitation to the school last week, presumably to put the official stamp on a new regime there.
"CCD", Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, is commonly referred to by its abbreviation, or simply as "Catechism," and provides religious education to Catholic children attending secular schools. The visitor who reported this says it had been absent from OLA for at least ten years. This would be another indication that the "corporate reunion" movement, left to itself, pays only lip service to mainstream Catholicism and must be closely monitored.

The emerging picture of the changes that have been reported here is that, had the parish remained in the archdiocese, Abp Garcia-Siller would likely have made very similar moves. His removal of Fr Phillips appears to have been fully justified, and Phillips's replacement as "pastor emeritus" has been largely cosmetic, meant to assuage a pro-Phillips faction in the parish, but Bp Lopes and Fr Lewis have made it increasingly clear that Fr Phillips is no longer in charge.

This in turn suggests that if an OCSP parish is close enough to be effectively supervised from Houston, and if it's big enough to make the supervision worthwhile, Bp Lopes is able to give it his attention. However, communities thousands of miles away are not as likely to be in this position and represent real vulnerabilities for the OCSP.

Friday, February 2, 2018

Abp Hepworth On Corporate Reunion

I attended Abp Hepworth's presentation at St Mary of the Angels last night on Anglicanorum coetibus and corporate reunion. I had been expecting something a little more specific on where he saw the current status of the OCSP and the direction of the St Mary's parish, but he had very little to say (and nothing really new) on that. What he did give was a broad-brush, and by his admission optimistic, history of the "corporate reunion" movement, with particular attention to the period after Vatican II.

Those in attendance filled the choir room, with its capacity of a dozen or so, but I recognized only one new face -- all the others were from the original core pro-ordinariate members as of 2010-11. The archbishop's history helped me to clarify my own views on "corporate reunion".

He mentioned several names, including Pierre Duprey, whom Paul VI named under-secretary (third in command) of the recently created Secretariat for Christian Unity, later becoming Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. However, Abp Hepworth pointed out that the council's mission was more abstract, and the actual task of implementing reunion went to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Another figure was Msgr Peter Wilkinson, an Anglican priest ordained in the OCSP in 2012. According to Hepworth, he corresponded with Cardinal Ratzinger on liturgical issues for 20 years. It's worth noting, though, that these figures represent two themes in the presentation, general ecumenism and liturgy, that didn't actually seem to have borne much fruit until Cardinal Law began to work toward the Pastoral Provision. Hepworth didn't mention Law at all, and he mentioned the Pastoral Provision only in passing.

Just a few days ago, I heard from another visitor who brought up another name among earlier figures in the "corporate reunion" movement, not mentioned by Hepworth:

I read Mark Vickers' Reunion Revisited: 1930s Ecumenism Exposed last week and, having awakened with insomnia about an hour ago, have begun to write my review of for Shared Treasure. The book is well worth reading, and the story it tells is fascinating. It is interesting how Fr. Vickers subtlely, in a between-the-lines sort of way, depicts the French Catholic ecumenical enthusiast, Fr. Paul Couturier, as having had, unintentionally, an unfortunate effect, in the longer run, on these conversations, as the substitution of his "Week of Prayer for Church Unity" for the Anglo-Papalist "Church Unity Octave" allowed, from the 1960s onward, the "warm feelings" of "an ageing and diminishing constituency sitting in church halls sipping tea and coffee, telling one another that they are 'all the same really'" (Vickers, p. 258) to supersede aspirations for the concrete and specific goal of "corporate reunion" based on complete doctrinal agreement - and how he portrays the Ordinariates as a reversion to, and realization of, that earlier goal.
But let's look at "corporate reunion" in a larger context. By the 1920s, we had a remarkable series of Anglicans converting individually to Catholicism, without the need for any corporate prompting. These include Frederick Kinsman, Ronald Knox, G K Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Leaving aside C S Lewis, who as an Anglican ranks well above the others, the only comparable figure who remained an observant Anglican is Dorothy Sayers. (Agatha Christie was raised an occultist; T S Eliot, an American expatriate Anglophile, belongs more in the category of Henry James and Ezra Pound.) These converts had far more influence on culture and contemporary opinion than anyone working at the margins on "corporate reunion".

Abp Hepworth sees Anglicanorum coetibus as a result of this "corporate reunion" movement, although my impression is that, as he was felt to do in the runup to the Portsmouth Petition, he tends to exaggerate the numbers, strength, and prospects for it. By his own admission, he couldn't hold the TAC bishops to their promises.

I think there are actually two threads to "corporate reunion", a US thread and a UK-Canadian thread. The UK-Canadian thread, Anglican Papalist, a late outgrowth of the Oxford Movement, seems largely to have been driven by "warm feelings" and nostalgia, and as far as any actual reunion was concerned, had no practical result. The US thread, coming more than a generation later, was driven by Cardinal Law as he observed the "continuing Anglican" movement leading up to the 1977 Congress of St Louis. This, however, was marked by false starts and only modest success in scattered instances, mostly in Texas.

Abp Hepworth did mention resistance by diocesan bishops to the Anglicanorum coetibus project. He cited the conflicts between Fr Phillips and Abp Garcia-Siller as his best example, but my view here continues to be that Abp Garcia-Siller was enforcing reasonable diocese-wide policies on matters like finance, school management, and protection of children, and Fr Phillips's retirement, simultaneous with the parish's entry to the OCSP, was a face-saving gesture.

Liturgy is just one aspect of Catholicism. If ordinariates stress liturgy as a main justification for their existence, they won't serve the full set of purposes for which the Church exists. As I continue to say here, only a handful of OCSP parishes offer anything like the range of fellowship, education, and devotional activities available at many diocesan parishes. In addition, it can only help Catholics to encounter the different cultural perspectives they can find at diocesan parishes where Asian. Latin, African, central and southern European, and Middle Eastern people can easily be found.

I still keep asking myself what problem the "corporate reunion" movement is trying to solve. Certainly, considering the overall lack of progress over what is now a century, it can't have been important.