This set me on a train of thought that led through the New Evangelization, to which the Youtube speaker also objected on the basis that it flirted with syncretism and indifferentism, and I began thinking about the sacraments a little closer to home as a diocesan Catholic. It being Advent, I went to confession this past week, and I encountered a genuinely compassionate and insightful confessor who reminded me that in giving me absolution, he was standing in the place of God Himself.
This in turn brought me back to Msgr Steenson's statement in the interview I linked yesterday: "In the first two years, the emphasis has been on clergy formation. . ." Excuse me? The first cohorts of OCSP priests were ordained after only the most cursory "distance learning". But it didn't stop there.
Earlier this year, Bp Lopes ordained a former Presbyterian who'd attended a Protestant seminary and then spent 20 years in a denomination that doesn't even recognize confession and does communion with grape juice and little cubes of bakery bread. His ordination as a low-church Anglican was pro forma, lasted only a few months, and apparently involved no actual pastoral duties. He was then allowed to hang around and watch in Irvine for a year or two until Fr Bartus figured he knew where to read from in the prayer book. Sounds more like the ACA than the Catholic Church to me.
Is anyone at his current parish going to him for confession? Why? I recognize that, once ordained, he can give absolution as if he were the holiest saint. But Catholics do more than recite an act of contrition and make the sign of the cross in the confessional -- they're supposed to get some sort of insightful encouragement that will point them in the right direction as well. I've got to assume that a good confessor is the result of years in (real) formation and then years of practical experience on the other side of the confessional.
As far as I can see, the "clergy formation" that has taken place in the OCSP, up to and including that of Fr Baaten, is a joke. As I've said before, I would only consider going to an OCSP priest for confession if the big asteroid were about to hit the planet and I had no other option. Msgr Steenson and Bp Lopes will be held accountable for this at their judgment.
My regular correspondent thinks Bp Lopes is now requiring greater formation in Catholic environments from upcoming OCSP postulants and candidates. Fine -- but, er, I can go to confession with a priest who's had even more than that, just down the street (figuratively speaking), anywhere, pretty much any time. Why would I go out of my way to find one who's sorta-kinda Anglican, when he may well not be what I need in my spiritual life?
Later in his interview, Msgr Steenson referred to OCSP parishes as ". . . places that will function for the purpose they were created, to bring people into full communion." At best, in the five years since the OCSP was erected, there have been a few thousand brought into full communion, although I have a troubling idea that they haven't been well catechized, and I also have the nagging suspicion that the Anglican hinky-jinky goes to class bias. Indeed, if their shaky parishes and groups fold in the future, will they even move to diocesan parishes? I'm just not sure what's meant by "full communion" here. Meanwhile, millions who were raised in full communion have left the Church.
I'm less and less in sympathy with this whole project.
