The Lead

A former Episcopalian tells fellow conservative Roman Catholics that they should take the Ordinariate seriously in North America. To prove his point, he plays with numbers and even made a Google map.

Randy Sly, writing on Catholic Online, says that Roman Catholics should take the ordinariate seriously in North America because there are so many of them...the implication being that there lots and lots of former Episcopalians just itching to become Roman Catholics (who keep their prayer books and their married male priests). He quotes the work of a former Episcopalian, now a Cistercian monk:

Br. Stephen Treat, O.Cist., a monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank in Wisconsin provided an interesting statistical comparison of American Ordinariate parishes with the current Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States.
A frequent contributor for The Anglo-Catholic which is moderated by Christian Campbell, Brother Stephen posted the following observations based on the number of parishes remaining stable at 36 with an Average Sunday attendance (ASA) of 2500 - a very modest estimate.

The average parish attendance would be 69, three larger than the 2009 Episcopal Church parochial ASA of 66. (67% of Episcopal parishes had an ASA of 100 or fewer in 2009. Only 5% had an ASA of 300 or more.)

Sly then compares the relative ASA to some of our smaller dioceses. He says that there are more Anglican-style Roman Catholics in all North America than there are Episcopalians in Northern Michigan. This, he says, is a force to be reckoned with.

There are a few other things he forgets to mention (besides the dozen or so Roman Catholic clergy who are received into the Episcopal Church every year): first, Brother Stephen's map includes congregations that are already Roman Catholic using an Anglican-style rite under the old Pastoral Provision. It also includes members of the Traditional Anglican Communion, who were never Episcopalian to begin with, and those who have joined up but apparently have no connection to either the TAC or TEC. So there are some new former-Episcopal groups who would come under the ordinariate, but not as many as Br. Stephen indicates.

Does this sound familiar? Remember ACNA's numbers game a few years back? Sly follows the same argument (and appears to use the same numbers) that appeared on the breakaway Diocese of Fort Worth's web site in 2009.

Back then, when they were first counting up members of ACNA, they lumped together defecting Episcopalians, members of the Reformed Episcopal Church and other groups who were never Episcopalian in the first place. By itself, that's okay. Just stop claiming that the whole group is made up of disgruntled Episcopalians. Same game. Different board.

Comments (4)

I think you're missing both the audience and the intent of Br. Stephen's piece. He's writing primarily for Roman Catholics, not Anglicans, and his point was to justify the numbers of the Ordinate to Roman Catholics who have parishes the size of some of our smaller diocese. His point was not to say anything about people who have left the Episcopal Church; rather, he was describing the potential future size of the Ordinariate. Since the Anglican Use congregations will be part of the Ordinariate and much of the TAC (which is largely overseas anyway) will be joining the Ordinariate (let's not forget that it was the TAC's petition to B16 to be received en masse that provided the ostensible motive for the scheme), then he's entirely correct to count them.

Let's not assume what's not being said or intended...

Posted by Derek Olsen | February 18, 2011 10:51 PM

FYI, Brother Stephen has his own blog, here.

JC Fisher

Posted by tgflux | February 18, 2011 11:28 PM

Cist actually confuses the average with the median. 66 is the median average Sunday attendance. The actual average Sunday attendance for TEC is 99.

In addition, of the 36 groups that he mentions that are ready to enter the Ordinariate, 15 are Anglican Use, virtually all of which are would be very small, 1 parish meets at the Vicar's house, 2 are missions, 1 is a Benedictine Community which meets at a very modest home, 2 obviously have few members judging by photos on their websites, 1, in a newspaper report, claims to have 28 members, and numerous others have no website, which probably means they are tiny. The median size of the group of 36 is probably between 15 and 25. Hardly impressive.

Posted by Doug | February 22, 2011 6:10 PM

Among the traditionalists I know, there is a great deal of hope that the ordinariate represents an opening wedge of liturgical reform. Numerically I think this is as implausible as everyone else sees it: if nothing else, as Doug says, a lot of the dots on the map don't represent parishes. But it also seems to me that part of the reasoning behind the oridinariate as an administrative structure is to protect it from the very many anti-trads in the RC hierarchy, a party which in the USA dominates the liturgical style at most English-speaking parishes. They seem fated to be "that odd church" like the Melkites or Maronites. Things may be different of course in England, where the Catholic Church is a lot smalelr and the A-C party is quite a bit larger.

Posted by C. Wingate | February 23, 2011 11:16 AM

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