More On Delict Of Schism

A visitor comments,

Regarding your post on "delict of schism" as of last Friday, such delicts are curable -- but there are more than a few nuances.

First, anybody who was ordained in the Catholic Church normally would be expected to return to the diocese for which he was ordained, if he returns to ordained ministry at all. This principle is the basis of the first sentence of Article 6, Section 3, of the Complementary Norms to the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, which states: "Those who have been previously ordained in the Catholic Church and subsequently have become Anglicans, may not exercise sacred ministry in the Ordinariate." Note that this prohibition does not apply to somebody who left the Catholic Church as a lay man or woman.

Second, the cure would depend highly upon the circumstances of the individual's departure. At one extreme, you have an individual who was baptized in the Catholic Church as an infant but never catechized, and later introduced to Christian faith by members of another denomination -- who would be welcomed back into the full communion of the Catholic Church, and subsequently allowed to seek ordination, with nothing more than a profession of faith. The next step would be somebody who, in his or her youth, was brought to another denomination due to a change in family situation (adoption, foster care, etc.), and had virtually no say in the matter. Next, one can consider an individual who married a Christian of another denomination and decided to join the spouse's denomination for the sake of family unity -- certainly a mitigating circumstance that would diminish the gravity of the act.

Third, the usual conditions for any canonical penalty to apply here as well: the offender must know that the act is egregiously wrong and freely choose to do the act anyway, with full awareness of the nature of the act and its consequences.

The records of prospective clergy are not public, so none of us -- not even your "correspondent" have any way to find out which factors might or might not have been present in any of the cases. The result is that the process may seem to be arbitrary precisely because we don't know the differences among the various situations.

Regarding your post of Saturday, there were a significant number of clergy of The Episcopal Church (TEC) who put the transition into the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter on hold because there was no way to close the financial gap: they were not coming with congregations large enough to pay stipends and efforts to identify other assignments came up short. It is likely that at least some of these individuals will make the transition when they qualify for retirement from TEC, and thus will be able to subsist on their pensions.

Information on these last cases is of course anecdotal, and the specific circumstances are also confidential. Given that, I'm simply not aware of any current TEC priests whose transitions are on hold until they retire. I am, on the other hand, aware of TEC priests who have been eased out of the transition process. It doesn't appear to me, in any case, that given the current oversupply of OCSP priests and the diminishing number of groups, there would be any openings for new priests of TEC retirement age.