The Ordinariate Refuses To Confront Its Systemic Racism

A visitor sent me the above screen shot from a Facebook thread on one of the ordinariate groups there. The backstory appears to be this, according to the Black Catholic Messenger blog:

A planned council of the Knights of Peter Claver & Ladies Auxiliary at an Ordinariate parish in California has been quashed—and likely due to racism, according to the prospective council head.

It would have made history both as the first KPC unit at an Ordinariate parish, and also as the first in Orange County (an affluent region in Southern California that is only ~2% Black).

Last year, Gunnar Gundersen led the effort at Irvine's St John Henry Newman Catholic Church, a parish of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter. The plan was initially approved in December by the parish administrator, Fr Evan Simington, after the POCSP bishop Steven J. Lopes gave the green light in August.

The visitor suiggests that Fr Simington's apparent turnaround came about because Mr Gundersen is an angry guy, to say the least. In one post attacking Bp Barron, he says

Having specialized in building an online presence tackling the challenges presented by mostly White and angry atheists, he has sought to be equally relevant in the social-justice-movement debate that is growing in the United States and around the world.

He has done this by writing a series of essays on Word on Fire, and in other outlets and formats (including interviews). That effort has involved framing most modern social-justice activism as “woke” and rejecting “wokeness” as “vile"—an adjective he used in an interview with the Babylon Bee podcast.

. . . His definition and criticism are premised on the notion that those who are woke are not Christian, do not believe in objective morals, and do not seek to develop cooperative social structures.

The visitor comments on the controversy:

The young black Ordinariate member from Cincinnati [Jordan Arnold in the Facebook thread above] accused the KofSPC of embracing Critical Race Theory and promoting Marxism, which seems unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that the chapter or whatever it’s called was “gathered” and really has little connection with SJHN, Irvine. This is of course the danger with these little Ordinariate groups, as we saw at St Bede, St Louis Pk. They are easily hi-jacked by a few potential trouble-makers who have wandered in from other Catholic parishes where they did not have the influence they feel they deserve.

I am not accusing the KofSPC group of being such, but these small communities are always vulnerable. It was mentioned that the Knights of Columbus group at SJHN is inactive. Of course the KofC has no connection to “Anglican Patrimony” and is part of the post-Anglican cultural mix of the Ordinariate.

Well, one issue I keep returning to here is that Critical Race Theory, which is closely aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement, isn't Marxist, because it represents an alliance of the Lumpenproletariat, the petty criminal class and street rabble, with the wealthy elites. Both are opposed to the working class broadly considered, but Marx also understood that the Lumpenproletariat is not a reliable ally for anyone. The alliance, however temporary, feeds the narcissism of the elites and is momentarily convenient for the lumpenproles.

I think narcissism is key to understanding the larger phenomenon we've been seeing for nearly a decade with the North American ordinariate: it's attracted fewer of the disgruntled high-church Anglicans it was meant to reach than it has the tiny wandering cliques of fringe cradle Catholics of many different stripes, who've been frustrated at the unwillingness of larger novus ordo parishes to nurture their particular rage. Thus we see the odd alliance in the Facebook thread above between Peter Smith, a prominent white cradle trad who's drifted into the ordinariate, with Mr Gundersen, who self-identifies as black and woke, against Mr Arnold, who strikes me as a black member of the down-to-earth class that works for a living. Narcissism, I hate to say it, is a dominant feature in this thread; the putative class alliance here is purely for show and transitory.

But this goes to the question of Fr Simington, who in my view made the correct call. Althogh he is a graduate of the Episcopalian high-church Nashotah House seminary, he opted to spend additional time in Roman Catholic seminary formation. In his assignments since ordination, I believe he's had part-time positions as an associate in diocesan parishes and also, I believe, has lived in diocesan rectories. (I'm open to correction here.) He's celibate.

This means he has probably developed friendships with celibate, working diocesan clergy, and maybe just as important, networking contacts. He's much closer to what I see every day with real Catholic priests, which means he's far better equipped to make the kind of call he made. A priest who just recently left residence at our rectory to resume a position as a pastor said in his farewell homily, "I realize that sometimes I'll need to say 'no' in my new assignment." Looks like Fr Simington has developed this necessary priestly faculty, and I take it as a sign of maturity.

I've got to think better work will emerge for Fr Simington. He shouldn't be wasting his abilities in nickel-and-dime situations like this.