A religious order approved on an “ad experimentum” basis by Bishop Sam Brown of the Diocese of Virginia Beach may be suppressed by the Vatican, according to an IIT source in the Dicastery for Consecrated Life. The rather unique charism of the “Friars of the Open Road” founded by Prior Bowser (Maurice “Sonny” Dobbin) and a related order for women founded by his sister, Mother Iron Joan (Perpetua “Mom” Dobbin), the “Black Scapulars” certainly does present itself as a daring new way to “engage with the modern world” and “reach out to and evangelize the margins” as Prior Bowser argued in making his case for the new order to Bishop Brown. Yet the fact that his order, once put into practice, looks and, sometimes, almost seems to behave like a biker gang has given pause to the universal appeal of the Dobbin siblings’ project.
The “Friars of the Open Road” and the “Black Scapulars” originally presented themselves as a combination of a motorized charity order, an updated version of mendicant preachers and missionaries on horseback (now on motorcycles), and a military order, doing battle against the brigands, bandits, and fraudsters along the highways. Both parts of the order certainly do charity work, helping stranded motorists, preaching at highway rest areas, patrolling for victims of human trafficking, and breaking up meetups of outlaw biker gangs.
Yet the fact that the order’s members ride around nearly all the time on motorcycles in large bands themselves has made the order appear to many Catholics to itself be a (possibly aggressive) biker gang.
“They all came screeching down the highway and then crowded into my parish one day, wearing their pesky, rigid robes and disrupting our pre-Mass yoga session,” commented one concerned Jesuit priest, Parent Ryan S.J., who filed a formal complaint to Rome after the “order” made off with his previous Pachamama statues and then threw them into a nearby river. “I felt no kindness, compassion, or journeying together with this crowd, but merely a travelling rag-tag band of traditionalists mucking around and looking to cause trouble,” he added.
Attacks on the “Friars of the Open Road” have come from other parts of the Church as well, with some traditionalists questioning when the friars have time to pray the Divine Office, while others have pondered that the friars are merely a joke thought up by some homeschooler looking to have the adventures and excitement proffered by the secular world but having put a thin Catholic veneer on their desire to merely jet around on wheels endlessly.
Andrew Abbate of the Leaving Babylon podcast put his critique more succintly, calling the friars, in their absence of having priests of their own or a clearly defined rule of life, “crusader bros who haven’t grown up and need guidance from people like me. I get the evangelical counsels as a reason for why they amble around and live in random campsites, but seriously, is it really poverty for them to be riding fancy motorcycles around all day?”
Jackson Christopherson of Wistful in Exile concurs, questioning, even leaving aside safety concerns, whether it’s morally ok for women to ride motorcycles in the first place, while Catholic commentator Dr. Maylor Tarshall, suspected by some of being a major donor to the order and of having prompted their “raid” on Parent Ryan’s parish, has also criticized them for a sometimes “freewheeling” approach to Church authority, as the order’s members constantly cross diocesan lines without seeking local mission, permission, or communicating at all with the local hierarchy.
The Friars and the “Black Scapulars” have their supporters, surely, and have had strong growth in numbers in their four years of existence so far, with eleven men currently in some stage of formation and ten women, but with many of these critiques having reached Rome, it’s very likely that the order will be suppressed within the next few months according to several sources IIT has placed within the Vatican.
“The order is too traditionalist in some of their actions for the liberals, too freewheeling and loose for traditionalists, and just way too weird and awkward and close to being a biker gang for most other people,” commented IIT European correspondent Spoons McGee.
But the final nail in the coffin for their survival could be the fact that, on a pass through Tulsa, Oklaholma, that the order started behaving a bit like a gang, reportedly, according to Andrew Parker of TradNewsDaily “literally keeping members of other religious orders out from what it considered to be ‘its territory’ whilst its also supposedly been engaged in ‘smuggling priests in and out of towns across the country to perform clandestine home TLM masses. This is definitely stuff that won’t go over well on their annual report,” commented Parker.
While the Vatican has not yet issued a formal, public statement, the negative attention received by the Friars of the Open Road and the Black Scapulars likely hurts the chances of other creative concepts for religious life. The so-called “SpaceX Benedictines” have less of a chance now, it seems, of getting formal approval to launch a space monastery, nor does Wyoming Catholic College have a chance of turning its “COR Missionary” program for the outdoor adventures and retreats offered by its COR Expeditions affiliate into a full religious order.
IIT, meanwhile, is also personally disappointed as it means that we can’t require our staff to take vows and oaths of personal loyalty and fealty to Everett Polinski and use our fleet of ice trucks to retake Constantinople and then… Wait… No, we never had any intentions of doing anything like that. Don’t listen to the fake news created by our enemies.
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