There is a new hotel in downtown Phoenix with two hundred and thirty-six rooms, a rooftop bar, a hammam-inspired spa, and a room the management has named 3:16, which is a chapel dedicated to St. John the Evangelist. Bookings for priests opened on the twenty-ninth of October. A priest pays nothing for the room. The rate is one Mass a day.

The hotel is the Denū Hotel & Spa, which opened in September and is the fourth property currently carrying a chapel in the Meritage Collection, the hotel group run by Pacific Hospitality Group, which Tim Busch founded and still leads. The news has been going round Catholic social media in the usual compressed form: rich Catholic businessman gives priests free rooms. That framing is accurate and it is also useless, because it invites exactly two reactions, applause or suspicion, and supplies grounds for neither.

Three things the compressed version leaves out. The programme is twenty years old. It is not a private kindness but a joint work with the Napa Institute, which matters and which we will come to. And its sacristy in Napa is stocked for the 1962 Missal, which is the detail this site was always going to care about, and which raises a question the programme does not answer.

The Terms

The offer is published and it is specific. A Catholic priest in good standing books at least a week in advance through the programme’s portal. Asked on its own FAQ page whether there are hidden fees, the programme answers “Nope! The room, resort fee, parking waiver, and other discounts are 100% free!” and then, in the same breath, lists what is not covered: food, incidentals billed to the room, and any further rooms. Food carries a twenty percent discount, alcohol excluded. The priest pays his own way there; the programme covers no transport.

What is asked in return is one Mass on each day of the stay, said with intentions the programme provides. Not the day he arrives; yes on the day he leaves, and on any vigil. Priests who can are asked to stay through Sunday so that guests have a Sunday Mass on site. Stays run to seven nights and two visits a year per location. At the Hawaii property, where demand is heaviest, it is one visit a year, and local priests are asked to keep to five nights.

Before he may say a word at the altar, the priest must send a letter of good standing to the diocese he is travelling into as well as to the programme. The page is blunt about what happens if it does not arrive: “If we do not receive a letter of suitability by your arrival date, you may not celebrate Mass.” He may be billed for the room as well. The letters go to named officials: the chancellor of Santa Rosa, the bishop’s office in Honolulu, the vicar for clergy in Austin, the vicar for clergy in Phoenix, with a hard copy to Bishop Dolan by post.

He may bring one guest to share his room, subject to availability: a brother priest, a parent or a sibling, though an immediate sister needs approval, or another male guest. Byzantine and Ordinariate priests may bring their wives, with approval. The chapels are stocked; he is told to bring an alb and a stole.

That is not an open door. It is a conditional offer, routed through four chanceries, with a document requirement that can cost a man both his room and his Mass.

What Is in the Sacristy

The sentence worth the whole article is on the FAQ page, under the heading What forms of the Mass are allowed?

All of our chapels are stocked with supplies for the ordinary form of the Mass in English. Other forms and rites are welcome, though they may require different supplies. The Meritage Resort has a fully stocked permanent chapel. It can easily accommodate the ordinary form in English, Spanish, or Latin. It is also equipped for the Tridentine and Divine Worship Missals. Vestments are Gothic.Clergy Hospitality, FAQ, retrieved 31 October 2026

A sacristy is a statement of intent. You stock it for the Masses you expect to be asked for, and Napa expects to be asked for three: the reformed Missal, the Missal of 1962, and Divine Worship, the Ordinariate’s book. The other three properties carry the reformed rite in English, and the page says plainly that anything else “may require different supplies,” which is a courteous way of saying bring it yourself.

Read the last line of that answer twice, because it qualifies the rest. Gothic vestments are lawful for the older Missal and some priests prefer them, but a Gothic set is not the Roman cut most priests who ask for 1962 have in mind, and the maniple is the item most likely to be absent. A priest planning on the older rite should write and ask rather than assume. The honest version is still a good version: this is a sacristy that treats three missals as normal rather than as a special case.

There is a larger gap, and the programme does not address it. Stock is not permission. Under Traditionis Custodes, art. 2, it is the diocesan bishop’s “exclusive competence to authorize the use of the 1962 Roman Missal in his diocese, according to the guidelines of the Apostolic See.” A visiting priest’s faculty does not travel with him to Santa Rosa, Honolulu, Austin or Phoenix. The programme has built the one pipeline that could resolve this, since every priest already writes to the vicar for clergy of the diocese he is visiting; but nothing published says whether any of those four ordinaries permits the older Missal on the property, or whether such a Mass has been offered at any of them since 2021. A priest who wants the older rite should ask the chancery, not the concierge.

Four Chapels

• Our Lady of the Grapes Chapel, at The Meritage Resort and Spa in Napa, California, Diocese of Santa Rosa. The motto on its page is the line from Cana, “And the Mother of Jesus was there.”
• St. Damien of Molokai Chapel, at the Ko’a Kea Resort on Poipu Beach, Kauai, Diocese of Honolulu. Its page carries the psalm of the God one cannot outrun, in a modern rendering: “If I take the wings of the dawn / Or dwell at the sea’s furthest end, / Even there your hand would lead me.” The Douay has it at Psalm 138:9–10 as If I take my wings early in the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea: even there also shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me.
• Immaculate Conception Chapel, at Hotel Viata in West Lake Hills, outside Austin, Diocese of Austin. Named, the page says, for “our nation’s Patroness.”
• St. John the Evangelist Chapel, at the Denū Hotel in Phoenix, Diocese of Phoenix, less than half a mile, according to the hotel, from St. Mary’s Basilica, the oldest Catholic parish in the city.

Napa is the real one, and the programme says so. The chapel went into the resort when the resort was built in 2006, approved by the then bishop of Santa Rosa, and the Napa Institute dates the whole Clergy Hospitality programme from it. By 2022 the Institute’s summer conference was putting more than a hundred Masses through it in four days out of what the Institute calls “our small broom closet sacristy,” so the sacristy was enlarged and the chapel reworked, and Bishop Robert Vasa blessed the new altar on 9 June 2023. It keeps a published schedule under a sacristan: 8 a.m. on weekdays, a Saturday vigil, a Sunday morning Mass.

At the other three, a qualification the programme itself makes. Mass at Ko’a Kea is said in the Koa Room, at Viata in the Olive Room, at Denū in Room 3:16, and the FAQ distinguishes the Meritage as the one with “a fully stocked permanent chapel.” One further wrinkle for anyone who clicks through: the Meritage page gives the chapel’s name twice and not identically, as Our Lady of the Grapes in the gallery and Queen of Life in the Mass notice, while the Napa Institute and the Register both write Our Lady of Grapes. We follow the gallery heading and flag the rest.

Where the law puts them

Canon law on where Mass may be offered is restrictive with an exception, and it is worth stating accurately rather than cheerfully. There are tiers.

A sacred place is the norm. Canon 932 §1: the Eucharist “is to be carried out in a sacred place unless in a particular case necessity requires otherwise; in such a case the celebration must be done in a decent place.” Canon 932 §2 governs what you put the Host on: outside a sacred place “a suitable table can be used, always with a cloth and a corporal.”

An oratory is the next tier: by canon 1223, a place for divine worship designated by permission of the ordinary for a community or group of the faithful. Canon 1224 forbids him to grant that permission until the place has been visited and found properly prepared, and canon 1229 requires that oratories and private chapels “be reserved for divine worship alone and free from all domestic uses.” That last clause is what decides the question inside a hotel. A private chapel, canons 1226 and 1228, is the parallel category for one or more individuals, and it too needs the local ordinary’s permission for Mass.

Napa has cleared that bar. In 2015 the National Catholic Register reported the Meritage chapel authorised as an oratory under Bishop Vasa, along with a second chapel at the Bacara resort in Santa Barbara which the group has since sold, with the Blessed Sacrament reserved while a priest was on the property. That is an eleven-year-old report and we have found no later confirmation, so take it as of then. Reservation is in any case not a liberty anyone takes on his own: canon 934 §1 requires the local ordinary’s permission outside the places where the law itself mandates it.

For the Koa Room, the Olive Room and Room 3:16, no source states any canonical designation at all. The fair description is one oratory and three rooms, and whether a given stay satisfies canon 932’s “necessity” is a judgement that belongs to the local ordinary, who is precisely the man the letter of suitability goes to. That is a distinction, not a scandal, and it is better drawn out loud than left for a critic.

One Mass a day, and the law on offerings

A canonist reading “the rate is one Mass a day” will reach for canons 945 to 951, and he should. Canon 945 §1 permits a priest to receive an offering to apply the Mass for a specific intention. Canon 947 excludes entirely any appearance of trafficking or trading from the offering for Masses. Canon 951 §1 lets a priest who says several Masses in a day apply each to its intention but keep the offering for only one.

Does a free room for a Mass look like trading? The structure says no, and it is worth saying why rather than hoping nobody asks. What the priest receives is hospitality, not a stipend; it is not scaled per Mass, and the room is the same whether he says one Mass or seven. The intentions are supplied by the programme and are the guests’, not a donor’s private list. The Mass is public, announced on a calendar, and open to anyone staying in the building. Nothing touches the diocesan stipend regime, and nothing is asked of the priest afterwards. The arrangement is closer to a parish housing a visiting confessor than to a transaction, and the people who built it plainly knew which side of canon 947 they wanted to be on. It would still be better if they said so on the page.

The Man

Timothy R. Busch grew up in Clinton, Michigan, the second of six children, five boys and a girl, in a family that belonged to St. Dominic parish. His father, Joseph, a cradle Catholic, founded the family supermarket business that today runs sixteen stores across the state. His mother, Marcheta, came over from Methodism and stayed. “She was a devout Catholic until the day she died at 91 years old,” he told the Diocese of Lansing’s magazine last December, “she was anointed, had the Apostolic Pardon, and died two minutes later.”

He delivered papers, painted houses, mowed lawns and worked in his father’s stores. He also took care of the parish cemetery, cleaned the church and ran off the bulletins. At St. Elizabeth’s school in Tecumseh he became a daily communicant as a boy, taught by the Dominican Sisters of Adrian, from whom, he says, he “actually gained a lot of spirituality.” People in the parish assumed he would be a priest. He was not.

Instead there was a B.B.A. from Western Michigan University, a law degree from Wayne State, a move to southern California in 1982, and a marriage to Steph that passed its fortieth year in 2025. They have two children and eleven grandchildren. He founded the Busch Firm, which does high-net-worth estate planning along with real estate and business work. He founded Pacific Hospitality Group, which develops and runs hotels and which he still leads; the Denū is held with partners rather than outright, which is worth knowing when weighing what is being given away. He and Steph founded a winery, Trinitas Cellars. He and his brothers own the stores their father started.

The Prayer Behind It

Asked how he fits prayer into a working life of that shape, Busch gave the Diocese of Lansing an inventory rather than a sentiment:

I pray the Liturgy of the Hours, I’ve been doing that for about 20 years; I go to Mass every single day, I’ve been doing that for 36 years; and then I pray a rosary every day and the Divine Chaplet every day — so I’m probably spending an hour to an hour-and-a-half in prayer every day.Tim Busch, FAITH Magazine, December 2025

Add an hour of adoration a week, usually with his staff. Asked whether the regimen costs him time, he said: “I tell people that eucharistic adoration is a time-creator not a time-eater …”

He told Catholic World Report in 2016 that Legatus, the association of Catholic chief executives founded by Tom Monaghan, which he joined in 1990, had been “a game-changer in my life.” He credits a small Eucharistic procession at St. Dominic’s, out the front door and once around a very small church, with teaching him what he now organises on a different scale in midtown Manhattan. “A eucharistic procession is the most powerful evangelical tool we have in the Church,” he says, “and we need to continue to resurrect it.”

All of that is self-reported, in an interview with his own diocese’s magazine, and a reader is entitled to discount it accordingly. Thirty-six years is still a long time to keep a habit for the sake of a profile nobody had yet written.

What He Has Built

He and Steph started St. Anne School in Laguna Niguel in 1992, and JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano, which opened in 2003. With Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., the physicist-philosopher, he co-founded the Magis Institute on faith and reason, and in 2011 the Napa Institute, which he calls his “calling,” and which runs the New York Eucharistic procession; a sister organisation, the Napa Legal Institute, advises faith-based nonprofits. In 2016 the Busch Family Foundation gave fifteen million dollars to the Catholic University of America, the largest single gift in its history, and the business school was renamed for Tim and Steph Busch. He has served on the board of the Papal Foundation.

Clergy Hospitality sits inside that list and is the item fewest people have heard of. The Register was writing about it in 2015, when roughly sixty priests had come through in six months and another thirty were booked, and a visiting priest from the Archdiocese of Washington told the paper that “the hospitality he offers priests is amazing. It’s above and beyond.” The origin the Register gave was unglamorous. Busch kept travelling to Napa with a chaplain, kept having to find somewhere for the man to say Mass, and decided to stop improvising and build a chapel.

Three Objections, Taken Seriously

For the avoidance of doubt: this site has no relationship with Mr. Busch, the Napa Institute or Pacific Hospitality Group, was not approached by any of them, and received nothing for this piece.

“Resorts. This is the Church of the comfortable.” The better version of the objection is that hospitality on this scale flows along the networks of the wealthy, and that priests are resting in places their parishioners could not book. That is true and worth keeping in view. But look at what is actually given: the priest pays his own airfare, and what he receives is an empty room on a Tuesday night, which is the one thing a hotelier holds in surplus and the form in which he can give most. And the tiredness is measured. Gallup surveyed 1,164 American priests for the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America in mid-2025, re-interviewing men who had answered the same questions in 2022. It found that “most priests (61%) do not exhibit any symptoms; many (39%) exhibited at least one symptom; and only a small minority (5%) exhibited all three,” with diocesan priests worse off than religious, 44 percent against 31, and younger priests reporting burnout and loneliness at higher rates. Those are better numbers than 2022 and they still describe two diocesan priests in five. Our Lord’s instruction to exhausted apostles was not a programme of further exertion. It was, in the Douay-Rheims, Come apart into a desert place, and rest a little. It is also worth reading the next three verses, where the rest is cut short by a crowd and he teaches them anyway. A seven-night cap and a Mass every morning is about that shape of rest.

“Mass in a hotel function room is not reverent.” Sometimes it is not, and the complaint is not idle; most of us have endured a conference Mass. But the question is how a thing is done. At Napa the chapel was approved by a bishop, its altar was blessed by a bishop, and it runs to a schedule under a sacristan. Everywhere, the rule is that no priest goes to the altar until the destination diocese holds a letter saying he may, and the programme enforces it with the only sanction it has, the bill. The honest worry is not the room. It is whether a Mass becomes an amenity, filed between the spa and the rooftop bar. That is settled by the priest who says it.

“This launders a donor.” The weak form of this complaint is about economics, and it is the form usually argued. The strong form is about patronage, and it deserves stating in the critic’s own terms. Clergy Hospitality is not a private act of charity: every page of it reads “An Initiative of the Napa Institute in partnership with the Pacific Hospitality Group’s Meritage Collection.” The Napa Institute convenes bishops and donors, the Koch Foundation’s funding of the business school that bears Busch’s name has drawn years of criticism in the Catholic press, and into that structure the same principal places an offer under which clergy of four dioceses receive a free stay at a resort. Nobody need allege a bargain. The claim is that hospitality at this scale, run by an organisation with a politics, builds a clientele, and that a priest who has accepted it is a little less likely to criticise the network that gave it.

That is the real objection, and it is answerable on the facts. The offer is published, not extended by invitation. Its only test is a letter of suitability from a man’s own bishop, which is a canonical check and not a loyalty screen. Four chanceries, none of them under Busch’s authority, can refuse any priest at any time. The Mass intentions are the hotel’s guests, not a donor’s causes. Nothing is asked of the priest after he checks out, and there is no list to join. A patronage network that wanted leverage would be built differently, and more quietly. What remains is an argument about the Napa Institute’s politics, which is a real argument and not this one. Catholic judgement runs to acts, and this act is four rooms kept for the Holy Sacrifice, open to any priest in good standing who can produce a letter from his bishop, free.

A Hotelier’s Charism Is a Room

The Council said something about laymen that gets quoted at them and rarely cashed out. The laity, Lumen Gentium says, “by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations.” Their task is to order those affairs so that they increase “according to Christ to the praise of the Creator and the Redeemer.”

Most of the time that is taken to mean a layman should be generous with the money his trade produces, which is true and much too easy. The harder reading is that the trade itself is the matter to be offered. A lawyer’s charism is not his cheque, it is counsel. A grocer’s is food. A hotelier’s is a room with the curtains drawn and nobody knocking, and somewhere with an altar in it down the corridor.

The best illustration is not in Napa or Kauai at all. The same Register story records that Busch built a diocese-approved chapel, Queen of Life, in his office building in Irvine, where forty to fifty people who work in the area come to an 11.50 a.m. Mass on a weekday. No vineyard, no ocean, no conference. An office block, a lunch hour, and fifty people who can get to Mass because somebody who owned the building thought to put a chapel in it. That is the same instinct as the hotels, with none of the scenery to argue about.