Without rehearsing the details, I now recognize that, say, a nominal Mormon could be attracted to an Ordinariate parish or group, be catechized, baptized, receive first communion and be confirmed in that group, and become a member. Praise be. A baptized Episcopalian can be attracted to an Ordinariate group, but must still be catechized, receive first communion, and be confirmed in that group to become a member. Neither the prospective Mormon nor the prospective Episcopalian, however, would be eligible to receive communion in that group's mass until he or she is confirmed. A former Episcopalian who'd previously become Catholic via RCIA is eligible both to receive communion with the group and to become a member, although exactly what benefits accrue to "membership" is simply unclear to me. A cradle Catholic who had already been confirmed, or a former Lutheran who'd already been confirmed Catholic, would be eligible to receive communion but would not be eligible to become a "member", for whatever that's worth. (If someone can explain what it's worth, I'll be most interested.)
I have a feeling that the basis for all these fine distinctions stems from the need to circumscribe the presence of married clergy in the Ordinariates. My concern is not whether some of the cases that have come to light are licit or illicit, but what they say about how the Ordinariates (especially the one in North America) have actually developed. If the Ordinariates were prospering, these instances would be minimally visible and unimportant.
One indication of this problem is how quickly statements of policy from the Holy See or Houston appear to have been overtaken by realities on the ground. So we see in Anglcianorum coetibus itself:
§4 The Ordinariate is composed of lay faithful, clerics and members of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, originally belonging to the Anglican Communion and now in full communion with the Catholic Church, or those who receive the Sacraments of Initiation within the jurisdiction of the Ordinariate.This can be read to mean what it seems to say -- the Ordinariate contains former Anglicans, broadly defined, who come into the Church -- but, at least according to the discussion at Ordinariate Expats, it can also cover anyone else who's been given the sacraments of initiation by an Ordinariate priest. (My own view as a grammarian is that the reference for the pronoun "those" is clearly to the faithful, etc "originally belonging to the Anglican Communion", but I'll let it go.) So, in the liberal reading, if a Buddhist wanders into an Ordinariate parish and discovers that chapel veils, threefold Lord-I-am-not-worthies, the Last Gospel, and the Angelus all fill an unmet need, then by all means, he soon enough becomes a "member", whatever that actually means (other than that he's a good, confirmed Catholic who can receive the sacrament anywhere, of course).
Or the Q&A page of the US Ordinariate site says,
[T]he Ordinariate was formed in response to repeated and persistent inquiries from Anglican groups who were seeking to become Catholic, and is intended for those coming from an Anglican tradition.and
[B]ecause we maintain our own distinct heritage and traditions, we are Catholics who maintain our distinct Anglican Tradition within the Roman Catholic Church.Except, of course, that an essentially Tridentine mass with some Cranmerian prayers and faux "Tudor" usage grafted on isn't all that Anglican.
This all came up because Ordinariate Expats linked to the June 2015 Ordinariate house organ, the Ordinariate Observer, which reported that the St John Vianney group in Cleburne, TX confirmed one teenage cradle Catholic, two former Baptists, and three former Episcopalians. It's good news when anyone becomes Catholic, and it's licit that the two former Baptists were confirmed -- though given the fairly plain language in the policy statements above, this doesn't seem to be what Ordinariates were necessarily intended to do.
The issue, as far as I can see, is that in practice, there's been so little interest in Ordinariates nationally that the occasional Baptist outlier is enough to bulk up statistics, which badly need bulking up. To put this in context, in the US, excluding Canada, there were 39,654 catechumens and 66,831 candidates in 2013, mostly entering the Church via RCIA. Even the former Anglicans received among these must surely outnumber by orders of magnitude those received as "members" in the Ordinariate during the same period.
Whether or not a few Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Nazarenes, or whatever find their way in shouldn't have made much difference as things were originally thought through. Now, though, the outliers are needed just to keep the numbers somewhere above zero.
