Southwest Circles The Wagons

Yesterday I noted that in the wake of Southwest Airlines's Christmas meltdown, Mahogany Row gave themselves promotions and almost certainly bonuses. And over the recent long weekend, CEO Bob Jordan backed off the airline's own mea culpas at the time of the crisis:

Southwest Airlines' CEO said aircraft engines froze and jetways wouldn't move after a storm caused an operational meltdown that led to thousands of flights being canceled, The New York Times reported.

. . . The CEO's comments come a day after a group of shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against Jordan, its CFO, executive chairman and the airline, claiming that it hid problems that caused its meltdown.

. . . Jordan denied that its technology failed and told the Times it had just experienced an "overwhelming volume." He added that it hired Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, to independently investigate the event, per the report, and reiterated that he was responsible for what happened.

We may assume that Oliver Wyman will echo those views in its final report. But this is a turnaround from Southwest's own version of events as the meltdown happened last month. As of December 27, this was the story:

Southwest Airlines has blamed its operational meltdown on the busy holiday weekend and the powerful winter storm but said on Tuesday its antiquated scheduling system also played a role.

. . . Since its original statement last updated on Tuesday, Southwest has added to its reasoning for the chaos, telling Insider, "we have had issues with our scheduling tools, causing a scheduling issue."

"We were fully staffed and prepared for the approaching holiday weekend when the severe weather swept across the continent, where Southwest is the largest carrier in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the US," the carrier said in a statement. "These operational conditions forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity."

Reports at the time noted that the delays and cancellations at Southwest were far worse than those at other airlines. The December 27 story at the link continues,

Other airlines, like United Airlines and American Airlines, largely avoided this. This is because their systems are more modern and can handle the workload quicker than Southwest's can. The latter's systems failed to keep up because flight attendants use a system largely reliant on phone lines, [Southwest flight attendant union president Lyn] Montgomery told KHOU. That system can get clogged up, forcing crews to wait on hold for hours waiting for a new assignment.

Since the meltdown, Southwest has worked on restoring customer and employee loyalty by offering credits for future travel. The story linked in yesterday's post pointed out,

The airline has also given customers some free frequent flyer points to make them feel better about daring to fly Southwest again. I even received an email from Southwest this week that announced: "Big Sale, itty bitty fares."

I wonder whether any customers were ittily bittily annoyed by the enticement of $49 flights from an airline that has so let them down.

Please, though, let's not forget Southwest's employees. The airline gave them $400 worth of bonus points to compensate for the "physical and emotional toll" of a mess caused by management's refusal to invest in crew scheduling software from this century.

From the start of this whole episode, I couldn't help but be reminded of the "courtship" or "honeymoon phase" in the cycle of abusive relationships.

In many cases, the person who committed the abuse will try to make things right by offering gifts and being overly kind and loving. The reconciliation period is often referred to as a "honeymoon stage" because it mimics the beginning of a relationship when people are on their best behavior.

When the person who experienced the abuse is in this phase, the extra love and kindness from their partner triggers a reaction in their brain that releases feel-good and love hormones known as dopamine and oxytocin. This release of hormones makes them feel closer to their partner and as if things are back to normal.

What's intriguing here is that Southwest grew by relying on employee cooperation and goodwill to build a unique corporate culture that customers found appealing, especially in the days of peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. Those days ended a decade ago and more, but customers stayed due to low fares and a generous rewards program, while employees had built up seniority and benefits and were reluctant to leave.

Business Insider as of last Friday, before CEO Jordan''s New York Times interview over the weekend, quoted him as follows:

Last week the airline's CEO, Bob Jordan, took responsibility in an interview with Reuters, saying that there were a lot of reasons that this happened "but it's on me at the end of the day."

He added that "it just can't happen again."

But that was apparently still back in the honeymoon phase. Of course it's going to happen again. The question is whether it will happen again and again and again.

Southwest Update

In covering Southwest's holiday-seasom meltdown, I've got to say I expected at least some management heads to roll. So far, not a bit of it.

[I]n an announcement that flirts with humor and attempts to defy it, the airline this week promoted five of its senior executives to even more senior roles.

Why, the vice president of Network Planning, Adam Decaire, was promoted to senior vice president of Network Planning and Network Operations Control. He's going to need a wider business card, isn't he? And please don't worry, he went to Ohio State and didn't study accountancy.

Then there was Tony Roach. He was promoted from vice president of Customer Experience & Engagement to senior vice president of Marketing & Customer Experience. He's going to have some fun over the next few months. And no, he didn't go to the University of Texas. His alma mater is Abilene Christian University.

All hail, too, Whitney Eichinger, ascending from vice president of Culture & Engagement to senior vice president of Culture & Communications. She was at TCU and, oh, the University of Texas. But wait, it's OK. She studied "communications, journalism, and related programs."

The references to educational background refer to a letter from the Southwest pilots' union that traced the airline's problems to an in-group of executives who had accounting degrees from the University of Texas. The article suggests, though,

I feel entirely sure these are extremely competent people. By my rough calculations they have, between them, a total of 100 years working for Southwest. But is that actually a good thing? Or does it reflect the pilots' view that Southwest management is a rather closed cabal?

So now, dear Southwest customer, you must decide how you feel. Is it really a good look to react to an act of utter incompetence by promoting five longtime executives in the aftermath?

. . . Might you be slightly skeptical when Southwest insists these promotions "will strengthen our operational execution and better serve our People and Customers"?

What intrigues me is what the new executive titles reveal about current corporate culture. They all contain gaseous, jargony, interchangeable words like "Experience", "Culture", "Communications", and "Engagement", which suggests none of them is actulally in charge of anything at all. I assume that their position descriptions all read something to the effect of "maximize effective corporate cultural engagement with key stakeholder experience" or some such, and they're all paid upwards of half a million plus bonus to do it, whatever it might be.

Meanwhile, there doesn't appear to have been any change in the status of Chris Johnson, the Vice President of Ground Operations, whose memo to the Denver ramp workers telling them that if they claimed frostbite in the job, they'd need a doctor's note or be fired, started the whole meltdown. There may be some justice here, since he's clearly well below the various senior VPs of Communications Engagement and Cultural Experience in the food chain and no doubt did nothing other than he was told.

But the whole set of circumstances does provide, like what we saw at Starbuck's last week, a vignette of the new corporate gentry, farther and farther isolated from people who actually do the work or buy the product, and indeed, the current state of standardized corporate language that conceals resposibility while trivializing and even infantilizing both customers and employees.

Whew!

I'm astonished at how quickly, during a holiday weekend, the Biden classified documents story has metastasized -- and that following the Christmas holiday break, from which reporters had already been reluctant to resume even the token appearance of doing work. Several commentators, even on the normally obtuse and lackadaisical right, have made worthwhile points. Bonchie at Red State notes,

After initially framing the incident as a one-off resulting from hurried packing after Biden’s vice presidency, more documents were “found” in the president’s garage at his Delaware residence. Then, weeks later, yet another document was found in an adjacent room.

In reality, almost all of this had already taken place by the time the public was informed, with the second batch of documents being secretly reported to the DOJ on December 20th, 2022.

. . . Perhaps it was all over? Surely, Biden could blame the illegal possession of all those classified documents on careless staffers who “accidentally” swept up SCI material into packing boxes. Of course, SCI material isn’t supposed to ever legally leave a SCIF, so how it even got to Biden’s vice presidential office is an issue, but hey, details, right? And yeah, the documents ended up separated out into three different unsecured locations, clearly having been moved multiple times.

. . . Of course, on Saturday, that narrative took another beating with the discovery of a fourth trove of classified documents. This time, they were found in Biden’s filing cabinet at his home office. To say that it belabors belief that they ended up there without the president’s knowledge is to severely understate the situation.

He then moves to a related queation, although I'm not sure he recognizes all the implications:

Yet, somehow, as big of a scandal as the possession of those classified documents is, they’ve actually served as a useful tool in revealing a possibly bigger scandal. Namely, how the Biden family garners and handles money. For example, isn’t it a little concerning that Joe Biden was paid nearly $1,000,000 as part of the Penn Biden Center, a university arm that allegedly received $61 million from the Chinese? Given he never actually taught a class, what exactly was he getting paid to do?

I noted on Friday that the Penn Biden Center looks to have been a major operation, a very well-funded administration-in-exile that not only paid Biden himself handsomely, but hired at least 10 people who became high-level administration figures after the 2020 election, inclulding Secretary of State Blinken and and White House counselor Steven Richetti. Where did all this money come from? Bonchie goes on,

Things get a lot worse when Hunter Biden enters the picture, and with this classified documents scandal, he has now entered the picture like the Kool-Aid man.

He links to a tweet from Miranda Devine citing a form on which Hunter claimed to live at the Biden Wilmington residence where some of the classified documents were found.

But when you look at the form, things go from bad to worse.

For some reason, Hunter Biden claimed that he was paying $49,910 in rent for Joe Biden’s Delaware residence. The house itself is only worth $2,000,000 in today’s market (and was built for a fraction of that). Why was Hunter Biden paying $49,910 in rent to his father? Where did all that money go?

But I think it's important to go back to one of my Friday points, that much of this had been anticipated by Biden operatives last spring, when the White House brought Richard Sauber over as special counsel for the specific purpose of scrubbing Biden's Penn Biden and home offices. The best we can say is that although Sauber had uncovered a few things by last November, he didn't get nearly as much as he should have. And indeed, what must clearly have been a Biden decision to approve a raid on Mar-a-Lago for Trump's classified documents looks especially incongruous in light of the fact that Biden had tasked Sauber to scrub just such material from his own home and previous workplaces.

Of course, had Sauber been able to do that before the August raid on Mar-a-Lago, noody would have been the wiser, but all those pesky documents have been turning up over the months since the Mar-a-Lago raid. And now that Attorney General Garland has announced a special prosecutor for the Biden documents, Biden has had to engage a personal attorney to handle the case.

President Joe Biden has hired Democrat lawyer Bob Bauer to represent him in the ongoing special counsel investigation over classified documents found in his possession at his home and at a private office in Washington, DC.

Ed Morrissey makes the worthwhile point at Hot Air:

Either [Special Counsel Sauber's team] incompetently conducted their initial searches of Biden properties and offices, or they didn’t actually complete them at all.

I like to study incompetence, wherever we find it. I think this will be an especially delicious example. This may well end Sauber's career. Morrissey goes on,

This raises another question, too. The spread of these materials in the Wilmington home makes it clear that someone was making use of them at some point. Otherwise, the classified material would have remained in the boxes in which they were initially packaged from Biden’s vice-presidential term. That’s not “inadvertently misplacing” material, but intentional retention and unauthorized uses of classified material.

And that makes the obvious questions even more acute. What did the classified information contain, and what was Biden’s interest in it? Who else accessed this material, and for what purpose? How much more is there to find?

That reporters are working on this over a holiday weekend suggests they think careers are to be made from it. So far, what we've been learning has been the result of overall incompetence, starting with how Biden's post-vice presidential operation was run, extending to the incompetent effort to clean up that mess once he was in the White House. As they say, handsome is as handsome does.

Starbucks Doesn't Just Sell Coffee, It Sells Kool-Aid

A piece in Fortune two days ago caught my eye: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is annoyed employees didn’t listen to his back-to-office request—and now he’s ordering a return. This echoes policy changes by figures like Elon Musk at his companies: the COVID panic is over, and it's time to drop all the charades. Although this is behind a paywall, this site carries a version from Starbucks's CEO, Howard Schultz, himself "Message to Starbucks support partners: Returning to each other and to the office" ["support partners" are headquarters management employees in Starbucks-speak]:

I want to share a change in our policy about hybrid work consistent with our past, but boldly about our future. Before I do, let me share context.

The pandemic was a full-out attack on the ideas that make Starbucks, Starbucks. It disrupted human connection. It made the world harder for so many. And it threatened our ability to be a safe haven and a Third Place.

At the SSC ["SSC" is Starbucks-speak for "headquarters"] and across our regional offices, we had the privilege and the ability to pivot to virtual work. Most of us stopped coming into the office—at first, because of safety, and to protect ourselves and our loved ones. As days stretched into weeks, many of us claimed new freedoms, pioneered new ways of working, achieved new productivity.

Notice how the corporate culture is described in saccharine terms -- the work environment is "a safe haven and a Third Place". And note how the headquarters employees are flattered -- even forced to work from home away from the headquarters safe environment and Third Place (whatever that means), they've "claimed new freedoms, pioneered new ways of working, achieved new productivity". How gloriously wonderful! But there are snakes even in the Garden of Eden!

But many partners [in Starbucks-speak, non-headquarters employees] didn’t have that privilege. They had to keep coming into their workplace—our stores, our plants, our distribution centers—day after day. They faced the hardship. They faced the challenges in their communities—deeply, passionately and often with great heroics.

Today, when we talk with our store partners, we hear how much they need us. As the nation comes out of the pandemic, they want to thrive, not just survive. We need to support them better. We need to simplify their jobs. We need to dive even deeper into each store and every store to support partners the way they need us to, now.

Note the overall weepiness of the tone. The actual line workers faced hardship. They faced challenges. And now they need us! We need to support them better! And thus we must change!

Effective Jan. 30, all SSC partners within commuting distance are expected to work in the SSC a minimum of three days per week. To rebuild our connection to each other and synchronize teams and efforts, two of your days will be Tuesday and Wednesday—and the third day will be aligned on in partnership with your leader and team. The other two days of the week are work from anywhere—home, office, a Starbucks store, or beyond.

But this isn't done for the reason someone like Elon Musk might do it. Not at all!

We are a company rooted in human connection. We must have authentic and deep human connection everywhere we work—in stores, the SSC, roasting plants, coffee farms—everywhere. While we have built transactive connection and on-screen skills through COVID, we have lost a true human connection at the SSC. We need to rebuild that. Failing to do so as we emerge from the pandemic puts us at a great loss, depriving us of vital relationships and the impromptu connections and idea generation that comes from convening in person. In a real sense, the more we lose human connection with each other and within our stores and the vital relationships that define who we are, we put our brand into peril.

It's not that nobody's showing up and work isn't gettsing done, nothing like that. It's juist that we're losing deep, authentic, human connection and vital relationships! Who can object to that? Beyond that,

Our culture depends on rituals—from coffee tastings to storytelling to seeing how our design experiences look end-to-end by putting the work up on a wall, and on and on. We will revive and reinvent these rituals to build our culture. And we will use in-person time to spend on our Reinvention efforts, forging the deeper hard choices, trade-offs, and integration, so we succeed.

This is the gaseous, jardon-laden patter the liberal arts-educated, feminized "support partners" learned at their colleges and universities. In fact, this is the preferred day-to-day style of the new gentry, and Mr Schultz even refers indirectly to the class bias inherent in the Starbucks environment. As he said, the line workers, the store managers, the baristas, the people who actually produced the coffee, never got to work from home. But oddly, when he brings up "fairness", he doesn't even mention those:

I applaud the hard work from all of us. But it’s time to right something that has been inherently not fair. Partners in our offices have had the privilege of not coming into the workplace and when we embarked on hybrid work last year, each of us made a promise to each other to be in the office between one to two days a week. From our badging data, it’s clear that a good number of SSC partners are not meeting their minimum promise of one day a week. This is why I am also announcing that this policy—three days in the SSC and regional offices—is a requirement, and we expect every partner to respect it like we do every other workplace policy. It’s that critical to our business success.

This is an internal issue specific only to the headquarters gentry. The only unfairness is that some of those aren't even spending one day a week at the office. So instead, to make this fair, everyone has to spend three days a week at the office, no exceptions, unless you can find one, of course. (If I were an employee, er, partner, I'd raise my hand and ask why they can't just make the one day a week compulsory instead of changing it to three, but I guess that's why I don't work at Starbucks, or at least not as a "support partner".)

I have a couple of takeaways. One is that the former Twitter culture portrayed in the "My Day at Work" TikTok video isn't limited to Twitter, even though Musk seems to have eliminated it there within days of its appearance on TikTok. There's an extraordinarily pampered new gentry class everywhere, it seems. And Schultz says this will continue:

Additionally, our Modern Workplace team has spent the past two years tirelessly redesigning a workplace of the future with countless amenities to support an inspiring and uplifting environment. We are providing those resources in support of enabling your very best contributions.

The smoothie bars, the free breakfast and lunch, the yoga rooms, and more will continue, to enable the best contributions of the "support partners". But as this site says,

Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse restaurant in the world with over 20,000 locations in more than 60 countries worldwide. The restaurant is very trendy today and has a perception of providing quality coffee products. Because of that, Starbucks menu prices are higher than what you would expect to pay for a coffee at other fast-food restaurants.

Starbucks, much like pre-Musk Twitter, is selling a gentrified, in some measure class-based, world view, not just a cup of coffee. And there's clearly, as with pre-Musk Twitter, an expectation that a certain class of headquarters employees is entitled to live out the full benefits of this world view, irrespective of any actual contribution.

My other takeaway is that corporate Kool-Aid is nothing new.

Dum-Da-Dum-Dum

Cue the Dragnet theme:

I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate, start to finish. I was young enough at the time to have supported McGovern in 1972, and I thirstily drank up every detail of Nixon's subsequent downfall. The appointment of Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the matter in May, 1973 was a big event, since it was forced on the Nixon administration as a condition of Eliot Richardson's Senate confirmation as attorney general. In fact, for those of us who followed the story closely, this was the key sign that Nixon was on his way out.

The odd thing is that Attorney General Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate former President Trump just this past November. It's hard to avoid thinking this was a deeply unserious act intended to drive a stake through the potential for a 2024 Trump run, while Trump steadily fades as a prospect even without it. Garland's problem now, though, with the opposing party in control of the House, is that he's much more in Eliot Richardson's position, with the appointment of another special prosectuor forced on him to appoint an investigator to undermine his own administration.

A problem that won't go away is that lawyers appear to have been involved in the discovery of classified documents at Biden home and office locations from the start. According to NPR,

President Biden's lawyer have [sic] found additional classified documents at his Wilmington, Del., residence, according to his counsel Richard Sauber, who said "all but one" of the new documents were found in storage in Biden's garage, and one document was in stored materials in "an adjacent room."

Richard Sauber turns up on a web search as of last May 22:

The White House has hired Richard Sauber to assist in the Biden administration’s response to potential future investigations should Republicans win back majorities in Congress in the midterm elections, officials confirm to CNN.

Sauber, currently the top lawyer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and [sic]is expected to begin at the White House in the next few weeks with the title “special counsel to the president.”

He was previously a partner at Washington law firm Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP. The NPR story continues,

"Following the discovery of government documents at the Penn Biden Center in November 2022, and coordinating closely with the Department of Justice, the President's lawyers have searched the President's Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, residences — the other locations where files from his Vice-Presidential office might have been shipped in the course of the 2017 transition. The lawyers completed that review last night," Sauber's statement said.

A complication in the timeline is that Biden, while he is thought to have had an office at the Penn Biden center following its opening in 2018, was involved in setting an operation up there even before he left the vice presidency in January 2017.

On April 25, 2016, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Craig Gering emailed Hunter with "confidential notes from our meeting," in which Gering listed apparent plans that were discussed for the vice president upon leaving office.

One of those plans included "wealth creation," with no further explanation, and another included an apparent reference to the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., with a possible job opportunity for Hunter.

"The Biden Institute of Foreign Relations at the University of Pennsylvania," Gering's email read. "Focus on foreign policy. In addition to the institute at U of Penn, the school has an existing office in DC that will be expanded to house a DC office for VP Biden (and Mike, Hunter and Steve?). Operates like The Clinton Global Initiative without the money raise."

Hunter then confirmed Gering's notes but emphasized that they needed to be "very confidential" because they were not set in stone.

It appears that what became the Penn Biden Center was a shadow Biden administration while Biden himself was temporarily out of office:

At least 10 senior Biden administration officials were hired to their current or former positions after stints at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the president's think tank where a trove of classified documents was recently found.

The Washington, D.C.-based Penn Biden Center — a foreign policy think tank President Biden opened in 2018 — previously employed current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and White House counselor Steven Richetti. Blinken and Richetti both served as managing directors while Kahl was a strategic consultant at the center.

At minimum, it looks like the Biden administration was resigned to the likelihood that Republicans would return to some type of congressional control in November 2022, which in fact they narrowly did. Based on that expectation, the White Houae hired Richard Sauber to scrub the Biden Center records (coincidentally, sauber in German means "clean"). Mr Sauber has presumably been working on this since last spring, but by November, he was in a position where he was forced to disclose the classified records. Further searches turned up more documents at Biden's residences. (I imagine that Mr Sauber found these papers well before they were officially reported, and it wouldn't surprise me if more revelations are to come.)

It seems to me that there are differences between Trump's documents at Mar-a-Lago and Biden's at the Biden Center. In Trump's case, these apparently were random paper detritus scooped up from the White House residence at the last minute, boxed willy-nilly by domestic staff, and shipped directly to storage rooms at Mar-a-Lago; Trump was unaware of their specific contents and presumably hadn't looked at any of them. In Biden's case, it appears that they had somehow left government locations, possibly in the vice presidential residence or elsewhere, been shipped to another intermediate location where Biden was aware of them, and then identified as such and shipped again from that location, his Wilmington home or elsewhere, to his offices at the Penn Biden Center, where they were in active use without any declassification, as part of a "wealth creation" exercise involving Hunter. Biden has far less of a defense that it was inadvertent, and beyond that, as only the former vice president at the time, he never had Trump's declassification authority.

At least, that's one way to see it. Speculation is that maybe this is an effort by Democrat insiders to derail a Biden run in 2024. But no Democrat wants the sort of scandal this could well become, especially if Hunter is involved. I doubt if we've seen anything like the full story up to now.

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.

The United Methodist Schism And Anglicanorum coetibus

The United Methodist Church is belatedly coming to the same crisis of division that most mainline Protestant denominations have already met, the question of same-sex marriage and ordaining actively and avowedly same-sex-attracted clergy, although this has never been the exclusive issue dividing any of the denominations. In recent weeks, legacy media have begun to notice, and The Week, for example, explains,

United Methodists have been more-or-less civilly disagreeing about gay rights since the 1970s, but the issue came to a head in 2019. At a UMC General Conference that year, the theologically conservative camp, aided by socially conservative United Methodists from Africa, outflanked the moderates and liberals and pushed through a resolution affirming existing UMC bans on same-sex weddings and the ordination of "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" as clergy.

The UMC conservatives appear to have drawn lessons from the experience of Episcopalians in particular, recognizing that disagreements will likely manifest themselves in parishes attempting to disaffiliate as bodies and take their property, which results in lengthy and unpredictable legal action.

The General Conference also approved a new church law, Paragraph 2553 of the Book of Discipline, offering UMC churches a path out of the United Methodist Church with their church buildings and property — if they get approval from two-thirds of their congregation, sign-off from their regional governing body, and pay their fair share of clergy pension liabilities and two years of "apportionments" for the larger denomination. That temporary exit strategy expires at the end of 2023.

This YouTube presentation outlines the strategy of the liberals, who want to retain a majority in the next General Conference by claiming that the currently scheduled 2024 conference is actually just the one postponed due to COVID in 2020, and the representatives to the 2024 meeting will remain those who'd been designated to attend in 2020 -- this despite the thousands of parishes that had disaffiliated from the UMC since 2019.

As someone who's lived through and studied the recombinant schisms within Episcopalianism and Anglicanism since the 1970s, I can empathize. But as someone who, in response to my own experience with those schisms, was at first optimistic about Pope Benedict's constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, I have questions. The Methodists are going to have to work out their own destiny, but if only as a footnote, it's worth pointing out that Methodists are included in the definition of Anglican for the purposes of Anglicanorum coetibus. Wikipedia cites an archived entry on the US ordinariate website:

A person is eligible for membership if they, their spouse, or any member of their family is or ever has been Anglican, Episcopalian, Methodist, or AME. This applies even if the person or their spouse has already become a Roman Catholic.

Although the current leadership of the ordinariate has effectively dropped the original intent of Anglicanorum coetibus to receive whole parishes from former Anglican denominations with their clergy in a body, that original intent certainly would have included Methodist parishes as well. However, as might be predicted, of the thousands of Methodist parishes currently disaffiliating from UMC, the overwhelming majority are simply moving to newly constituted but nominal Methodist denominations. As far as I'm aware, no UMC parish has proposed joining the ordinariate as a body with its property and clergy, although the mechanisms are in place, both within the UMC Paragraph 2553 and within the ordinariate, for them to do this.

In fact, the number of priests or laity who've entered the North American ordinariate from the UMC approaches zero. Fr Robert Kirk, who had been pastor of a UMC parish in the San Francisco Bay area, was ordained a Catholic priest in the ordinariate and now works as an associate at two ordinariate parishes in the Baltimore area. Mr Paul Roland, a layman who by his account at the link was raised Methodist but became Roman Catholic outside the ordinariate out of frustration with UMC policy on gays, joined the ordinariate looking for a congenial environment even though, in Oklahoma, he has no ordinariate community nearby.

As he put it, "Thanks primarily to Word on Fire and then Fr. (now Bishop) Robert Barron, I began to accept Catholic theology as sound and consistent." Now we're coming to the point here, I think. Almost no Methodists, and indeed, very few Anglicans of any sort, have been drawn to the Church by Anglicanorum coetibus. But by Bp Barron's own account, many thousands have come in via Word on Fire and related ministries like Ascension Presents.

In fact, Mr Roland's story of his path to the ordinariate is oddly equivocal:

However, I was not particularly drawn to Catholicism in such a way that I felt like I had to leave the UMC and my local community.

. . . The reality was that I struggled with Catholicism and all that I felt forced to leave behind. I left a small community for a large parish, left behind Sunday School and fellowship, good music that spoke to me, biblical literacy, and traditional language like that of the King James Version. I had to leave behind more than that too, but it was all enough to leave me still feeling homeless in the Catholic Church. 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.

My experience of leaving mainline Protestantism and becoming Catholic has been in many ways the opposite. In a "continuing Anglican" parish that proposed to follow the prescribed path into the ordinariate, I saw that path disintegrate amid broken promises from both the Anglican denomination and the ordinariate. Forced to fall back on Plan B and enter via diocesan RCIA, amid fears that I'd be forced to make do with beige Catholicism, wishy-washy liturgy, and bad music, I discovered the opposite, a large, prosperous, spiritually vibrant, welcoming diocesan parish that I continue to find with some astonishment does a better job at being Episcopalian than any Episcopal parish I ever attended.

I'm still ruminating on why my experience has been near opposite Mr Roland's. But one factor may well be that he left the UMC in disagreement over its policy on gays, when let's face it, gay policy is just a couple of paragraphs in the CCC -- being Catholic involves a lifetime of formation in a much, much broader set of criteria. A strategy of Catholic evangelization that seeks to present Catholicism as UMC-without-the-gays won't work. The Anglicanism-without-the-gays doesn't seem to be working, either. I don't have answers, but I'm wondering if the idea of evangelizing Protestants by offering them a just-without-the-gays alternative isn't the way to go.