Does Kansas City Need Another Catholic Church? 3

Does Kansas City Need Another Catholic Church? 3

            Everybody needs to know that Our Lady of Hope Catholic Church is really small.  Even by Episcopalian standards, where Sunday attendance in an average parish has declined to 65, we are very small.  On a good Sunday we have about half that many. If we are content to join the slow decline of Episcopalian, Anglican, mainline Protestant and Evangelical parishes (last one to leave, please turn out the light) then no, Kansas City does not need us. If our goal is to preserve a liturgy as a museum piece and to serve the religious sentiments of club members, then no, Kansas City does not need us for that, either.

            A few weeks ago I asked one of our original members, Jodeen, how she came up with the suggestion of Our Lady of Hope for our name.  She told me, “I didn’t know anything about the name.  I believe it was a direct inspiration from God.”  Our name calls us to be people of hope.  This whole Christian enterprise started with one person.  Luke does not record that anyone was with Mary when Gabriel visited her. And from the one person who dared to believe that the hopes of her people would be fulfilled, everything began.  One is not none, and small is not nothing.

            Back when I was working in the Episcopal Diocese of West Missouri with my good friend, Fr. Jim Carlyle, our jobs were to start or restart parishes.  We knew that new parishes have a much better chance of growing than old ones, because when everyone is new, all start from the same place.  There are no established power structures that newcomers have to break into and people can start belonging right away.  We both had small groups to start with, but our goal was to open new churches with 200 in attendance on our first Sunday. We used telemarketing, mailings, and personal invitations.  He worked to launch St. Anne’s Episcopal in Lee’s Summit, and I worked to re-launch St. Michael’s Episcopal in Independence. Twenty years ago, we both worked to remove perceived “barriers.”  That meant making the liturgy user-friendly, the music contemporary, denominational identification invisible, and to a certain extent, the faith non-challenging.

            Things have changed a lot in twenty years.  Our Lady of Hope is no more than what we used to call a “core group.”  We don’t have any plans to do any telemarketing. If anything, Our Lady of Hope is doing a slow launch.  I don’t have the luxury of devoting myself to this project full time, and we don’t have the financial resources that the Episcopal diocese devoted to our projects.  But we have something that is much more important – the Catholic faith, the inexorable work of the Holy Spirit and the prayers of Mary and of all the saints.

            Our Lady of Hope has a potential that our previous work in the Episcopal diocese never had.  And we have a potential that no other Catholic parish can match.  The Holy Spirit is our telemarketing campaign.  And the Holy Spirit is calling evangelicals into the Catholic Church.  Can you imagine what a Catholic parish would be like if it fully embraced and empowered their evangelical skills and zeal instead of keeping them at arm’s length?  The Holy Spirit is calling Anglicans, Episcopalians and Methodists who love their tradition, but even more love Christ and his call to be one in him as he is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is calling Catholics who want to celebrate the liturgy in the beauty of holiness, and who are eager to share the depth of their faith with others.

            Are you being called?  Do you know others who may be called?  Do you hope to be part of a Catholic parish like this?  Are you willing to give of yourself, your time, your energy, and your faith, and to be a person of hope?

More to come!

Does Kansas City need another Catholic Church? 2

Four or five years ago it seemed that having an "Anglican Use" community as part of St. Therese Little Flower Parish could be a long-term mutually beneficial solution.  I was thinking that I could remain at St. Therese until retirement.  The Anglican Use community added resources to the struggling inner-city parish, and the parish provided space to worship, a link to the wider Catholic community, and assistance with pastoral programming.  We began some projects that assumed we would have a long-term home at St. Therese.

When I was thinking that I could remain at St. Therese long-term, I didn't realize was that St. Therese Parish and the Anglican Use community had a deep and basic conflict.  St. Therese Parish depends on attracting people who feel like they don't fit in a regular parish.  St. Therese Parish can be very warm and welcoming and some neighborhood parishes can be very cold.  But some of our key parishioners had a deep animosity toward the church hierarchy and Catholic dogma and discipline.  On the other hand, I and the other former Anglican converts who joined me at St. Therese had made an adult choice to enter the Catholic faith.  And to enter the full communion of the Church we had affirmed that we believe what the Catholic Church believes.  This was a rift that simply could not be bridged, and it continued to feed the suspicions of some parishioners that our presence and my pastoral leadership could not be trusted.  It became clear to me that I would not be able to remain at St. Therese long-term, and it also became clear that one person could not be pastor of both communities.

The Anglican Use community at St. Therese never discussed this.  Instead our discussion focused on our future.  Our study of Anglicanorum Coetibus and the mission of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter convinced us that we needed to take charge of our own future and find a way to enter the Ordinariate.

Now that we are Our Lady of Hope Catholic Church we can embrace our Catholic identity in a way that would never have been possible at St. Therese Little Flower.  Converts make joyful Catholics, and that should make us good evangelists.  I am convinced that this is our fundamental mission, more important than anything else, that we put Christ first.  We are taking steps to put our money and our program where our mission is, and to keep from getting diverted into things that will take lots of energy but aren't directly related to our mission.

More to come!

Does Kansas City need a new Catholic Church?

Does Kansas City need a new Catholic Church? Only if the new one does something the others cannot do.

Just a couple of years ago it appeared that Kansas City might actually get two or three new Catholic Churches.  There was some excitement that Kansas City's two Traditional Anglican Communion parishes might enter the Catholic Church along with the whole TAC.  The bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion had asked for a way that they and their churches could enter the full communion of the Catholic Church while retaining some of their Anglican traditions and retain some responsibility for their own governance.  "United, not absorbed" was the goal of Anglican reunion with Catholicism as the early 20th Century Malines Conversations had described it.  Pope Benedict offered Anglicanorum Coetibus. Based on that Apostolic Constitution, Ordinariates were established in Great Britain, the United States and Canada, and Australia.  There was a lot of excitement prior to the Coming Home conference sponsored by the Anglican Use Community at St. Therese Little Flower and a number of Anglican priests participated.  The former Anglicans at St. Therese believed that they could help facilitate the project of healing church divisions by sharing their experience in becoming Catholic.  They were open to the possibility that they could cease to exist as a separate community and that they themselves could be absorbed into one of the existing Anglican soon-to-be-Catholic parishes when they entered the Catholic Church. But by then, the original excitement of the TAC was fading.  Rome had made a very generous offer.  But most of the Anglican parishioners in the pew didn't want to be Catholic, and the TAC bishops apparently weren't terribly enthusiastic about actually entering the Catholic Church.  Several of the Anglican bishops and many of the Anglican priests did not meet the required educational standards for ordination in the Catholic Church, and several had marriage issues.  A few TAC Anglican parishes around the country entered the new Ordinariate, but none of the local ones did.  That meant the former Anglicans at St. Therese Little Flower had to mull over their own reason for being.  What did it mean for them to be "United, not Absorbed"?  What was their reason for being?  Did they have a permanent future at St. Therese?  How could they enter the Ordinariate when the parish they had joined would always be part of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph?

More soon!

"What child is this? What mother is this?

What Child is this? What Mother is this?

I grew up in an Episcopal parish. In some ways we prided ourselves at being catholic, or maybe even a little bit better. We liked to say that the English reformation simply purified the Catholic Church in England, and that we kept everything that was authentically catholic. We could point out things about our church building, about our liturgy, and about our faith that made us catholic. You might think that we considered Mary to be a corruption, because her image was absent from the church, devotions and prayers were absent from the liturgy, and all of her days on the church calendar were absent – except one.

The Catholic Church’s devotion to Mary developed because of a long meditation on Jesus, her son. Convinced that Christ born in Bethlehem is already Son of God as we sing at Christmas in “O Come all Ye Faithful” – “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb; Only begotten, Son of God the Father, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord.”

If Christ is worthy of our adoration as God, then how did he come to dwell among us as a person? How powerful was it when Mary told Gabriel, “Let it be to me according to your word.” How full of grace and sinless did she have to be to carry God the Son of God in her womb and give birth to him? How full of love did she have to be to raise, with Joseph, a child, a teenager, a young adult like Jesus? How much did she understand him when she told the people at the wedding, “Do whatever he tells you.” How much according to God’s plan was it that the same Holy Spirit that overshadowed her so that Christ could be conceived in her, was the Holy Spirit that fell upon her and the disciples at Pentecost, giving birth to the Church?

It does seem to be true that to truly know Christ is to know his mother, and to tuly know his mother is to know Christ. May we know them and love them better and better.

"And Mary Bore Sweet Jesus Christ"

I grew up in a family with a long tradition of making a living from the northeast Florida pine forests and my father still had access to the land his family had owned for generations. So it was perfectly natural, when it was time to put up a Christmas tree, to go out to the forest to an area my father had previously scouted as a likely spot to find a good one. We always had a freshly cut red cedar, and because they grew naturally, they had all the quirks and faults of real trees. They had bare spots, were never quite symmetrical, and sometimes sported an old bird's nest tucked back into the branches. I have to admit I always wished we could get a beautifully shaped if not quite fresh blue spruce shipped from somewhere up north.

One year, while riding down one of the forest roads looking for a red cedar, we drove through an area that had recently been clear-cut. All the mature pines had been hauled off to the paper mill and only the scraggly pines, black-jack oaks and palmettos were left. And standing off by itself was a holly tree. My father had a particular reverence for hollies. Perhaps it was a feeling that went all the way back to ancient British respect for holly, mistletoe and ivy. We were never allowed to cut down a holly tree. But this particular holly tree had the bad luck to be growing in an area that would soon be bulldozed prior to replanting new pines.

The holly tree had a beautiful shape and dark green color. But holly leaves, even though they are evergreen, do not lend themselves to being decorated. They have defensive spines around the outside, just like a cactus. Would it make a Christmas tree? We kids were consulted. Would our mother like it? Because it would be bulldozed anyway, could the rule against cutting down hollies be relaxed just this one time?

We never did get a blue spruce. But that one year, we did have a unique holly Christmas tree. If I remember right, it never did get decorated to the extent that we decorated our regular cedars. We probably got pricked enough times that we quit the decorating and just let the tree itself shine through with its own beauty. That was one of the best Christmas trees we ever had.

Sometimes things mean more than we realize at the time. It was only later that I heard this old Christmas Carol that finds parallels between the holly tree and Mary the Mother of Christ:

The holly and the ivy,

When they are both full grown

Of all the trees that are in the wood

The holly bears the crown

O the rising of the sun

And the running of the deer

The playing of the merry organ

Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a blossom

As white as lily flower

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

To be our sweet Saviour

Refrain

The holly bears a berry

As red as any blood

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

To do poor sinners good

Refrain

The holly bears a prickle

As sharp as any thorn;

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

On Christmas Day in the morn.

Refrain

The holly bears a bark

As bitter as any gall;

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

For to redeem us all.

Refrain

The holly and the ivy

Now both are full well grown,

Of all the trees that are in the wood,

The holly bears the crown.

Refrain