Anglican Ordinariate Needs to be Taken Seriously in America

The response to the invitation from the Holy Father is continuing to grow

Br. Stephen Treat, O.Cist., a monk of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank in Wisconsin provides an interesting comparison of American Ordinariate parishes with the current Episcopal Church (TEC) in the United States.

WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - Did you know there is a Google Map that is tracking Anglican parishes entering the Ordinariate? You can visit it the Ordinariate Google Map [] anytime to look at the latest statistics.

According to the recent count, the United States leads with 36 groups, Canada has 30 and the United Kingdom has 18. The originator, Shane Schaetzel, is currently looking for collaborators in Australia and the United Kingdom to help him keep track of those coming in.

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.)
    * The average Sunday attendance of the American Ordinariate would be approximately 15% larger than that of the combined ASA of the three Episcopal Dioceses of North Dakota, Northern Michigan, and Western Kansas.
    * It would be 25% larger than the combined ASA of the two old Biretta Belt dioceses of Eau Claire and the portion of the Diocese of Quincy that remained in the Episcopal Church.
    * The Ordinariate ASA would be more than one-third larger than the TEC Dioceses of Montana, Eastern Oregon, and San Joaquin.
    * The American Ordinariate would be one-quarter larger than the Dioceses of Northwestern Pennsylvania, the Utah, Idaho, and Alaska
    * It would be at least ten percent larger than the Dioceses of Springfield, Spokane, Northwest Texas, Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Fond du Lac.
    * It would be slightly larger than the TEC Dioceses of Pittsburgh and Northern Indiana.

This would make the current Ordinariate larger than 21 of the domestic dioceses in The Episcopal Church. Should the American Ordinariate were to grow to an ASA of 5000, it would be either larger than or roughly the same size as 59 of the domestic dioceses of The Episcopal Church.

While this may seem like small numbers when compared to Catholic parishes, these figures are significant with regard to the Anglican world.

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Like many others, Brother Stephen Treat found his path leading from evangelicalism to Anglicanism and and finally into the Roman Catholic Church, where he became a Cistercian monk. Our Lady of Spring Bank is a small Abbey of the Order of Cistercians, generally known as the Common Cistercians, located on 600 acres near La Crosse, Wisconsin.

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