I too wondered why Mr Simington had to do two further years of seminary training when Andrew Bartus, with identical academic qualifications and minimal pastoral experience, was ordained after a few webinars. But Mr Simington was also given major publicity as the "first seminarian" even though Luke Reese, a former ACA clergyman with no M.Div, was taking courses at St Meinrad seminary for three years before his ordination for the OCSP this spring.I disagree over the importance of the heterodox, not to say heretical, Nashotah House alum. His example goes to the dilemma of the elite school, and make no mistake, its alumni regard Nashotah House, and by inference themselves, as the crème de la crème. I got into the college admissions rat race as a teen, and my parents and counselors represented to me that with a degree from _______, many doors would be opened that might otherwise remain closed.Several older ACCC clergy with no divinity degrees were ordained in the "first wave;" Fr Carl Reid did not even have to do the distance education program. I feel the thinking was "Let's get something going for these retired clergy and their groups while they're still active; then we can begin to set up the ordination training we actually want, for the celibate candidates we will be seeking going forward." I think it is perhaps unfair to keep citing the Episcopalian clergyman who had no use for the Seven Deadlies as completely typical, but in any event that is not the sort of person who will be recruited in the future. Bp Lopes mentioned recently that there are 78 members of the OLW Servers'Guild, boys and youth who have never been anything other than Catholics. That is where the Ordinariate will be looking for future vocations. I personally feel that this will mean that the "Anglican Use" becomes to Anglicanism as General Tso's chicken is to Chinese food, but presumably no one will care.
Never mind the fact that all manner of claptrap was, and still is, taught in every department of every elite school, that students are coddled and flattered into thinking that if they're at _______, they must be learning stuff that's worthwhile and important, especially since they don't need to work very hard at it. This pervades the atmosphere on campus. It's drilled into them that a degree in art history from ________ is worth far more than a degree in engineering from Podunk State. After all, at _______ they learn to think!
The Great Gatsby is misunderstood in English departments I think primarily because a central theme is the criticism of elite school education (Fitzgerald attended Princeton but didn't graduate). The fact that Tom Buchanan, a Yale graduate, is a white supremacist who believes the eugenics conventional wisdom that was common in the 1920s is a statement about the education he got there. My father always thought it was significant that a neighbor, a Princeton grad, once told him, "I really like sales. It has so many faucets." (This didn't keep Dad from giving me what everyone else was about the need to get into ________.)
About 15 years ago, I naively got involved in a movement by ________ alumni to elect more representative members of the board of trustees, with an aim in part to enact curriculum reform. This movement failed spectacularly for a number of reasons, but in part it was because both alumni and parents of current students objected that any controversy there would reduce the value of a ________ degree vis-a-vis one from other elite schools, where there was no controversy.
So the status quo remained, and all elite-school alums continue to believe what they're told, although the value of any four-year degree is in gradual decline. I would say, though, that the value of any Episcopal seminary degree is plummeting much more quickly, due in large part to a decreased demand for what's taught there.
It seems to me that between 2012 and 2016, the OCSP has had plenty of experience with the value of a Nashotah House MDiv, such that it finds a need to reteach what was taught there in a fundamental way. Insofar as a Nashotah House alum learns to be the best possible Anglican, it's plain that this skill set is simply much less transferrable to the Catholic priesthood than had been thought. I suspect the signals the CDF received over this wouldn't have been much different than the signals my father's Princeton neighbor sent about faucets. You don't need too many anecdotal cases to pick up that signal loud and clear.
I think my correspondent raises an important point in suggesting that Anglicanorum coetibus is going to be faced, if it continues, with the need to develop a new form of Anglicanism that can exist within Catholicism, a little like General Tso's chicken. But isn't this multiplying entities without necessity?
