Whether the Ordinariate would then look favorably on the parish's renewed application if the appeal went in its favor is still an open question. The opinion has been expressed that the Ordinariate might no longer be interested in St Mary's, and that position strikes me as at least realistic.
My wife and I began regularly attending St Mary of the Angels during 2011 entirely on the basis that it would go into the Ordinariate. Fr Kelley is an erudite and inspiring priest, but the likelihood that the parish would not be just a Continuum offshoot was the deciding factor for us. During 2011, several Anglo-Catholic blogs looked forward enthusiastically to the Ordinariate's erection, and a list of parishes that had expressed interest in going in grew to more than 60.
Frankly, the Ordinariate hasn't turned out that way. The enthusiastic Anglo-Catholic blogs first began to express reservations about the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth in-group that was running the show, then, apparently on orders from above, went completely silent. The Ordinariate stopped returning phone calls from good and sincere priests who'd expected to be ordained as Catholics, with no rhyme or reason: Fr Seraiah was ordained a Catholic priest in the Ordinariate despite having no parish; others were not, with no explanation. (While vocations are up, there continues to be a shortage of Catholic priests; I'm sure bishops could find a use for additional supply priests in any diocese.)
The current list of parishes on the Ordinariate web site numbers 25 in the US and Canada, far from the 60-plus that had been envisioned in just the US. My own view is that, had St Mary's been received into the Ordinariate in early 2012, we would have gone into a Catholic backwater that would almost immediately have grown stagnant. My wife and I decided that for ourselves, it was important not to delay becoming Catholic, and we took the alternate route of the RCIA program at our local Catholic parish.
Given the continuing uncertainty surrounding St Mary's and the picture we're increasingly getting of the Ordinariate, this turns out to have been the best decision for us. I look back on an adult forum conducted by the then-Curate at St Mary's during the spring of 2011, in which he was explaining the intent of the Ordinariate (the Curate was in fact a favored member of the Fort Worth in-group and is now a Catholic priest with an Ordinariate parish): he said, with no apology (and apparently no sense of shame) that the Ordinariate was meant for "white people". (Yup.)
At Our Mother of Good Counsel, we exchange the peace during mass with all of God's people; in Hollywood, that's just about everyone. Andrew Bartus can have the Ordinariate.
