Pittsburgh, USA - An ultra-inclusive splinter church led by an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest has moved from a hotel banquet room to a vacant Episcopal Church, where the 300-member group will celebrate its first Masses in a church building this weekend.
The Rev. William Hausen formed his Christ Hope Ecumenical Catholic Church last May, and has offered Mass at a suburban hotel since.
Hausen's church now has a one-year lease with the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh for the former Epiphany Episcopal Church in Avalon, just outside Pittsburgh.
"We need some smells and bells," Hausen quipped when asked to explain the move Tuesday. "Now I have to get a stained-glass voice."
Hausen said "a lot of people like that stuff and they think it's really important" to be in a church.
"I think the church is the people, not the building, but having an appropriate setting can be uplifting to people," Hausen said. "Also, there's an artificial barrier about meeting in a hotel that I think keeps some people away."
Peter Frank, spokesman for the Episcopal diocese, confirmed the lease. He said the church building has been vacant since at least 2003, but that at least one other ministry rents space in the church's rectory.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh hasn't commented on Hausen's church in months. "We don't monitor other churches, we monitor our own," the Rev. Ronald Lengwin said late last summer.
Diocesan spokesman Bob Lockwood declined comment Tuesday.
"I think we'll probably have a comment when that church opens," Lockwood said. The diocese also plans to publish a statement about Hausen's church in Thursday's issue of the Pittsburgh Catholic, a weekly diocesan newspaper.
When Hausen formed the church, the diocese said anyone who attended risked excommunication. Within days, the diocese softened that to say those who attended Hausen's church couldn't consider themselves in "good standing" with the Roman Catholic church.
Hausen's church stresses "agapic" or self-sacrificial love, but doesn't assert the deity of Jesus Christ or a belief in the Holy Trinity - the orthodox Christian view that God is one being revealed in three divine persons. Hausen also favors ordaining women priests - though his church has yet to ordain anyone - and doesn't view homosexual acts as sinful, among its most obvious differences with the Roman Catholic Church.
Hausen's congregation will hold Masses at 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday at the former Epiphany Episcopal Church.
Hausen announced plans for his new church after he split with the church over issues including discipline he had faced for alcoholism. Hausen said he's sober and that the church was too controlling.
His disagreements with the Catholic diocese first became public after an Easter 2002 sermon in which he told his Pittsburgh parishioners that they should be angry about the Roman Catholic pedophilia scandal, and he advocated women priests.
Associate Professor William Dinges, an expert on splinter groups at the Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., said the move to a church building doesn't signal a major change for a sect like Hausen's.
"It means they have some stability, but I wouldn't read too much into that. Now, if membership had shot up by 5,000 and they had bought a huge corporate complex, that type of thing, that would be different," Dinges said.
"But the long-term durability in my mind would be much more directly related to (Hausen's) persona, his charisma," Dinges said. "That's the factor that's going to speak to their long-term survival."