So Who's An Anglican, And Why Do They Weasel-Word It? -- II

It seems to me that there are two separate but related questions here. The first is who is eligible to become a married Catholic priest under the provisions of Anglicanorum coetibus, and the second is who is eligible to become a "member" of an Ordinariate parish. (A third is why a distinction as to membership exists, and this is a puzzling question as well.) Clearly the most pressing issue is the first, since in Latin Catholicism, married priests are a rare and carefully circumscribed exception, never to be regarded as a precedent.

Let's take Fr Randy Sly, who was in an early wave of US-Canadian Ordinariate ordinations in June 2012. The announcement in the Catholic press, "Local man ordained to Anglican ordinariate", carries the subhead, "Former Anglican Archbishop Randy Sly enters into the Catholic priesthood." Phew! Would he be an intimate of Rowan Williams, say? Well, no. Instead,

A former Anglican archbishop, Father Sly, 63, was raised in the Episcopal Church. For more than 30 years, he worked in parish and denominational ministry in the Wesleyan Methodist Church and in an Anglican jurisdiction serving churches in Michigan, Oklahoma, Kansas and Virginia. In 2006, while serving as an archbishop for the Eastern Province of the Charismatic Episcopal Church, he entered into the Catholic Church, along with his wife of 39 years.

As we saw yesterday, the Charismatic Episcopal Church is not an Anglican denomination, since it is not and never was a member of the Anglican Communion, and it is not a splinter group from any current or former member of the communion. So why the need to weasel-word Fr Sly's background? This might be due to the possible insecurity Houston might feel over the ineligibility of CEC priests for the Pastoral Provision. I'm also puzzled at the reference to the Wesleyan Methodist Church, otherwise unexplained -- according to Wikipedia,

The Wesleyan Methodist Church was a Methodist denomination in the United States organized on May 13, 1841. It was composed of ministers and laypeople who withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church because of disagreements regarding slavery, church government, and the doctrine of holiness according to the Discipline of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (1841). . . . The Wesleyan Methodist Church merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and became known as the Wesleyan Church. Several conferences in both merging denominations refused to be a part of the merged church over differences about modesty and worldliness (some of the conferences did not permit their members to have television sets, and required the women to have uncut hair).

Well, if I'd had anything to do with vocations in the US-Canadian Ordinariate, I think I'd want to probe carefully into Archbishop Sly's formation. I assume this was done.

In May 2015, Fr Sly was appointed Parochial Vicar for St. Therese Parish in Kansas City, Missouri and Parochial Administrator for the Ordinariate Community of Our Lady of Hope, which meets at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Kansas City, replacing a Pastoral Provision priest already there. The Potomac Falls, VA group he had led was merged with the St Luke's group in the District of Columbia.

If this is all copacetic, why the need to weasel-word? Why not tell it like it is? I'm not sure if his holy orders were ever in an Anglican denomination, though naturally I'll be happy to defer to clarifications and corrections. But why the apparent need to overcompensate and make him an Anglican archbishop? Just asking.

But this case isn't all that unusual. More tomorrow.