Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast celebrated a Traditional Latin Mass at the FSSP parish here that recently moved into a beautifully-renovated heritage church.
The original St. Anne’s was a French-language parish and four or five years ago, a big chunk of ceiling collapsed. Thankfully there were no injuries. Parish members then went to worship in other churches in the area and when the building was refurbished, the old parish group did not reassemble. So, St. Clement’s asked to take it over. It’s a big step for them and much more expensive to maintain than their former building. But I understand the parish is growing, attracting more families all the time.
It was great to see so many young families with lots of children. The Mass was beautiful and thanks to our Anglican Use liturgy, I could follow what was going on even though I had a booklet with a Latin/French translation. I wouldn’t mind a tutorial some time, though! A nice young lady named Amanda offered to help me next time I come. There was a choir that did most of the singing. I loved seeing all the altar boys and the little children, some barely older than toddlers, solemnly genuflecting or approaching Holy Communion with their hands together, prayer-like fashion. 
I think it is wonderful that Archbishop Prendergast extends such generosity to the TLM community that is similar to that he gives to us—with a willingness to do the different liturgies. He grew up with the TLM and had some familiarity with it as an altar server, but did not celebrate it, as far as I know, after becoming a priest until relatively recently, when on coming to Ottawa as archbishop, he made his visit to the TLM/FSSP parish and decided to do a rehearsal with them so he could celebrate the Extraordinary Form with them. Since then he has been invited to celebrate elsewhere, including some FSSP ordinations in the United States and at the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. It helps that he is a Scripture scholar and fluent in Latin!
Foolishness to the world 
Did the Anglican Use Choral Mass take place in Toronto as posted on Peregrinations, or was it felt that the Una Voce Toronto EF Missa Solemnis on the same date would draw too many potential attendees? I recall that the rector of the Ordinariate parish of St. Michael’s Philadelphia recently noted some “friendly rivalry” with the local EF parish for former Anglicans.
Many of my former Anglican friends are now EF parish members or members of other parishes and not planning to change any time soon.
I was rereading your AngloCatholic post of 2 years ago “Yes We are Small, But We Will Grow Like Mustard Seeds “. If former Anglicans are not likely to switch parishes, where do you see potential for growth? Current Anglicans? The unchurched? The example of Our Lady of the Atonement is often cited, as you did in this post. One assumes that Fr Phillips had an evangelistic plan in place that enabled this parish to succeed where others failed.
Pingback: The Traditional Latin Mass in Ottawa on the Feast of the Assumption | Catholic Canada
I’d be interested to know if Fr. Phillips had an evangelistic plan. I did assume it would be easier to lure former Anglicans to us once we were Catholic. I had assumed when my novel The Defilers was published that it would be easy to sell books. Sad to say I have not been able to retire on my earnings, even though Fr. Aidan Nichols enjoyed reading it. EPMS, you have to remember we are only about four months old as a Catholic parish-in-waiting and right now I do not know what plans God has for us and where, if anywhere, our future growth or lack thereof will come from. Right now our parish members are building bridges with other Catholic communities in the diocese. The Companions of the Cross priests who have been coming in to celebrate our Mass for us on their Sunday afternoon time off enjoy being with us so much that several will be attending our parish picnic on Sunday. I’m counting our blessings and they are overflowing. We’ll see the plans God has for us. I think it is too early to say what they are.
My bias, of course, is information and outreach and I do think that your parish is in good shape there. The website is not exactly visually cutting-edge but it is always up to date and the newsletter has actual news, not “Bulletin Bloopers” and such. And of course your efforts in this regard are indefatigable. I am constantly amazed at the feeble excuses for electronic publicity I see on my travels around the web. Don’t they realize the underlying message is “We only care about you if you are a) already one of us b) over sixty”?
EPMS,
You wrote: I am constantly amazed at the feeble excuses for electronic publicity I see on my travels around the web. Don’t they realize the underlying message is “We only care about you if you are a) already one of us b) over sixty”?
Unfortunately, developing a quality web site takes considerable time even with the best of tools. Many congregations cannot afford to hire professional developers, so they depend upon volunteer webmasters who can give only a couple hours per week of their time. This does not leave much time to dig up relevant material to add to the web site, so they often must depend upon others — often also volunteers with limited time — to feed information and digital photographs to them. Thus, I think that our expectations need to be realistic.
That said, there clearly is a minimum standard for an acceptable parish web site. It should have a decent home page with a picture of the parish church, church and rectory addresses and telephone numbers, the names and e-mail addresses of the parish staff, times of services (including additional services for upcoming holy days), and links to a page on the parish history, the church building (with detail photographs of significant features) if it is architecturally significant or contains significant artwork, the parish mission statement, directions to the church, information on parish organizations (including contact information and schedules of events), the (separate) web site of its parochial school if it has one, the most recent bulletin, an archive of recent past bulletins, and the web site of the “particular church” (diocese or equivalent) to which the parish belongs, and, if Catholic, the web sites of the national or regional conference of bishops and of the Vatican. It certainly can provide additional features, such as a photo gallery (which should include a description that would allow a total stranger to understand the content and the significance of each photograph), an archive of recent homilies, and various blogs, but these features are not essential.
Norm.
Apropos of marketing, perhaps you saw the recent article in the NYT on the effectiveness of “consumer” reviews on the web, to the point where it is estimated that 60% of them are planted and/or paid for. While I would not suggest encouraging those who have never actually attended your parish to “rate” it somewhere anyway, the phenomenon does tell us a lot about how people decide that something is worth the time to investigate personally.
BTW, if we had two of our former Anglican families join us, our church would be packed, standing room only, because of the numbers of children.
Deborah,
You wrote: EPMS, you have to remember we are only about four months old as a Catholic parish-in-waiting and right now I do not know what plans God has for us and where, if anywhere, our future growth or lack thereof will come from. Right now our parish members are building bridges with other Catholic communities in the diocese. The Companions of the Cross priests who have been coming in to celebrate our Mass for us on their Sunday afternoon time off enjoy being with us so much that several will be attending our parish picnic on Sunday. I’m counting our blessings and they are overflowing. We’ll see the plans God has for us. I think it is too early to say what they are.
This is indeed very positive, but the other reality is that you all are in a sort of “holding pattern” pending the Catholic ordination of your former Anglican clergy. It will be difficult to move forward in a big way until that happens.
But perhaps the ties to the Archdiocese of Ottawa that are now forming are also a major part of the picture. Each congregation of the ordinarate obviously will need to tap the resources and programs of its local diocese to realize its full potential.
You wrote: BTW, if we had two of our former Anglican families join us, our church would be packed, standing room only, because of the numbers of children.
That would be a good problem to have.
Realistically, I would not be surprised if your congregation has to move to a larger church building within two or three years. The question is whether you will have the resources to purchase new land and to build a new building or whether you will have to use the church of a local diocesan parish for some period of time.
Of course, the fact that you will abandon (and sell) your present church building so soon after coming into the ordinariate does not necessarily mean that bringing it with you was in vain. The sense continuity provided by continuing to worship in the same setting for some period of time as members of the Catholic Church may well be very important for your congregation’s sense of identity and future growth.
Norm.
Your checklist above, Norm, is very helpful. I would only add that, at the very least, content which is clearly out of date should be removed. How would you feel about a church which still had its Nativity scene on the front lawn in July? That’s the impression some websites give.