Now that you've had a bit of time to digest the Birmingham Three Recap you are ready to read the latest press release on the subject from the Catholic Communications Office of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales...

Fr Ignatius Harrison has been appointed Provost of the Birmingham Oratory by the Holy See, following the resignation of Fr Richard Duffield.

Fr Duffield has resigned for reasons of ill-health, at his own request.

Fr Harrison will also be actor and vice-postulator for the cause of Cardinal Newman, who was beatified in 2010.

The most significant thing about this press release is not what it says but who is saying it. The pretence of having a "spokesman for the Birmingham Oratory" has been dropped. This press release comes directly from the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales.

I also hear that Fr Gareth/Sebastian Jones will be made Vice-Provost of the Birmingham Oratory. When I first heard that I thought it was a joke, but it turns out it's for real! No wonder they left that part out of the press release.

More on this next week when I've had a bit more time to digest it myself...

It's strange enough that three men from the Birmingham Oratory who have done nothing wrong (we know they have done nothing wrong, it's official) would be ordered away indefinitely without a word of explanation.

But the more things go on, the stranger they get.

I understand that Fr Gareth Jones was personal secretary to Archbishop John Aloysius Ward of Cardiff. I realise this is just speculation, but it seems to me that anybody who wants to be an Archbishop's personal secretary had better be, well, diplomatic.

Several comments on this blog have reported that Fr Jones was a "failed novice" at the Birmingham Oratory. These may be fake names and I have no way of verifying their accuracy but they raise serious questions...

Basil Robertson writes...

The conspiracy theory is certainly given more weight by the inclusion of Gareth Jones with the exile of the Birmigham fathers and brother. My understanding is that Jones left the novitiate of the Birmingham Oratory of his own free will. Later, desprite being a 'failed' novice he was asked by Ignatius Harrison to be an 'expert' on canonical matters relating to the unjyst exile of the good men.

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May Wadham said...

Has anyone mentioned the fact the Fr Fenlon was actually Fr Gareth Jones's novice master during the latter's failed noviciate(s)at the Birmingham Oratory? And when Frs Selden and Harrison turned up in Birmingham like thieves in the night to expel Fr Fenlon and the other two, it was in the company of the same ex-novice Gareth Jones, who had been chosen as the "canonical advisor" to back up the expulsion? This is most sinister, and could easily be interpreted as a failed novice getting his revenge on someone who had questioned his suitability to be an Oratorian.

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I don't know Fr Gareth Jones and I want to be fair - a couple of people at the Oratory have told me he is a really good guy who has always been good to them and their families.

But.

If it is true that Fr Gareth Jones was a "failed" novice under Fr Dermot Fenlon and if it is true that he was involved in Fr Fenlon's expulsion then that is very fishy.

It's the clerical equivalent of an employee who leaves his job and then goes back to sack his boss. He might be a good guy, but there's no way to be sure he's impartial. In fact, I'm fairly sure there are rules against this sort of thing in canon law.

Finally, people local to the Oratory tell me that Fr Jones is being seen in the area remarkably often. Has he moved in? That would be strange - why would somebody serving as an expert in canonical matters stick around so long after the event?

Is it a "conspiracy theory" to wonder if maybe he has a bigger role than just advising Fr Harrison?

What on earth is going on?

Update:

From what I'm hearing it sounds like Fr Gareth Jones did not "fail" his novitiate in the sense of being so rubbish they threw him out - it sounds more like he learned form his novitiate that he didn't want to be an Oratorian and left.

You might have thought the recent events at the Birmingham Oratory were bad enough but it turns out the situation is about to get a lot worse.

Fr Felix Selden and Fr Ignatius Harrison (the visitors to the Birmingham Oratory responsible for the eviction of the Birmingham Three) are managing their visitation using an outdated version of Microsoft Visitation Manager 2006.

This software has a bug similar to the well known Millennium Bug - at the beginning of the year 2000 there was much concern that computers which stored the year as the last two digits (97,98,99...) would think the year was 1900.

The programmers never thought such a high number of Oratorians would ever be evicted so they stored the number of extraneous Oratorians as a single digit (0,1,2...) If the visitors continue to evict Oratorians at the current rate it is quite likely that the number of evicted Oratorians will reach 10 before the Papal visit.

At this point the software will crash forcing Fr Ignatious Harrison to start his game of Solitaire over from the beginning. What else is he doing? He certainly isn't spending his time replying to letters.

Meanwhile the cost of the Papal Visit is set to increase further as Eccleston Square announce that extra cash is needed for the purchase of new calculators.

The old calculators which were used during the organisation of the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1982 were found to be unsuitable after it was discovered they were unable to display amounts greater than £99,999,999 meaning that the Bishops Conference actually had to borrow a calculator in order to calculate how much buying the calculators would cause the visit to cost.

A spokesman for the Bishop's conference explained that it was not clear when the borrowed calculator would be returned "We are not sure if it's going to be a week, a month or two months" he said. Adding that there was definitely no falling out and the calculator would be back "soon".