More Thoughts On The Ordinariates' Limited Appeal

As I said yesterday, something struck me about Mr Paul Roland's essay at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society site explaining his very hesitant journey to the North American ordinariate, about which he concludes,

It was recommended to me by a Catholic friend that I join the Ordinariate because of how homeless I felt in the Catholic Church. I did not seriously consider it initially because there were no Ordinariate parishes near me, but after giving it more thought, I decided that I would join. I made that decision because I believed in the Ordinariate’s mission, in the hopes that one day I would be able to have a Catholic community or parish that I could call home, and, if nothing else, as an excuse to let myself be a little different from other Catholics in the meantime.

It isn't entirely clear what sort of Catholic he is now. He says he hopes "that one day I would be able to have a Catholic community or parish that I could call home" -- but is he attending any nearby Catholic parish now? CCC 2179 says,

"A parish is a definite community of the Christian faithful established on a stable basis within a particular church; the pastoral care of the parish is entrusted to a pastor as its own shepherd under the authority of the diocesan bishop." It is the place where all the faithful can be gathered together for the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist. The parish initiates the Christian people into the ordinary expression of the liturgical life: it gathers them together in this celebration; it teaches Christ's saving doctrine; it practices the charity of the Lord in good works and brotherly love:

You cannot pray at home as at church, where there is a great multitude, where exclamations are cried out to God as from one great heart, and where there is something more: the union of minds, the accord of souls, the bond of charity, the prayers of the priests.

Every indication in Mr Roland's essay is that he finds Catholic parish life unfulfilling, and in fact he says he much prefers his earlier background in Methodism and Pentecostalism. As I quoted him yesterday,

I made escapes to my family’s Pentecostal church, to Methodist churches, and to Catholic Charismatic Renewal services to try to get my fix of something missing.

I'm told that some North American ordinariate parishes experienced a certain amount of growth during the COVID epidemic, when they continued to celebrate public masses while the local diocesan parishes remained closed, and apparently some diocesan Catholics who went to them for mass found something they liked there and stayed. However, ordinariate policy at the time was for parishes to observe the practice of the local Catholic diocese regarding whether and how to open for public mass, so I'm not sure how this discrepancy could have occurred -- one would have to conclude that ordinariate policy was actually to look the other way about being "a little different" (as indeed it has in certain notorious cases).

I'm not sure if Mr Roland will ever see this, but if he does, I would be very interested in his explanation of how he deals with being Catholic if he finds so much missing in normal parish life. His implication is that before he found the ordinariate, he needed to escape to Methodist, Pentecostal, or Catholic Charismatic services -- has the ordinariate replaced this need? If so, how, if as he acknowledges, there is no ordinariate parish near him? If he watches web broadcasts of the Divine Worship liturgy, how does he receive the sacraments?

And this leads to another question that he doesn't cover in his essay, how many Catholic parishes has he visited? He mentions in his thumbnail that he writes from Oklahoma. There are two Catholic dioceses in that state; the Diocese of Tulsa alone has 78 parishes (I haven't found the equivalent number for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City). I've found that Catholic parishes differ widely in character and celebration. I've also found that there are enough of them that if you don't like one, there's likely another nearby that will suit you better. How many did Mr Roland visit before he found a need to escape?

I get a sense that either there was something missing in his RCIA class, if that's what he attended to come into the Church, or he possibly wasn't listening closely. On one hand, the Anglican parish with which I originally planned to join the ordinariate had a streamlined catechism that assumed that Anglicans already knew most of this stuff, but when that didn't work out, I started over with RCIA at a diocesan parish. They gave us copies of the CCC, and we covered a great deal of it in one way or another.

There's a great deal Protestants have to relearn or acknowledge fresh when they become Catholic, starting with the authority of the Holy See and working on down to things like the number, nature, and efficacy of the sacraments. I don't have any sense from Mr Roland's essay that he saw any importance to this. Instead, he's disappointed that it isn't more like his own background:

Once, I was having dinner with a group of Catholics that included several Protestant converts. As they were sharing things they fell in love with about Catholicism, they asked me what I fell in love with that converted me. The question rather shocked me and I had to admit disappointingly, “nothing… I just felt like there was nowhere else I could go.”

While I disagree with the idea that you need to "fall in love" with Catholicism -- its appeal is to reason -- I'm puzzled that he's found so little positive about it overall. Indeed, the one appealing thing is the ordinariate, of which he seems to have had no concrete experience. I'd be interested to know if he's ever attended a Divine Worship mass in person, for instance; it certainly sounds as if he's never attended an ordinariate group or parish with any regularity. How can he be so sure it's what he wants if so little else in Catholicism has turned out that way for him?

Unless you're on a desert island, this is simply not how you practice Catholicism. At best, he goes to Sunday mass at a local diocesan parish with a sense of distaste, feeling it's not Methodist enough to suit him. If someone were to ask him why he bothered to become Catholic, his answer would have to be that if the UMC was going over to the gays, he had nowhere else to go. But even that is hard to follow, the UMC has a "continuing" spinoff in the form of the Global Methodist Church, which seems to be pretty close to the UMC-without-the-gays that he wants.

Indeed, I see that at least one Oklahoma UMC church is in the process of disaffiliating. Surely there must be others. Why not seek out one of those? Instead, he seems to have a fantasy that one day, there will be an ordinariate parish in Oklahoma that he can attend, and it will be exactly what he has in mind -- and meanwhile, he can dream.

As I say, the Catholic appeal is to reason. I can't help but think that so far, Mr Roland has missed the point.