One visitor cited 2011 remarks by Cardinal Wuerl to the USCCB in how candidates for ordination would be evaluated:
[H}e said that the applications were divided into three categories: (1) those who had completed a full program of formation in a "legit" Anglican seminary and thus would require relatively little additional formation, (2) those who had little formal preparation for ministry and thus would need essentially a full program of formation in a Catholic seminary, and (3) those who were somewhere in between, who would need individually tailored programs of formation to fill the gaps in the formation that they had received.
But even in the light of Cardinal Wuerl's statement, his criteria do not appear to have been followed with any consistency. I assume in context that a "legit" Anglican seminary is in the US an Episcopal seminary. Fr Holliday of the Church of the Incarnation attended Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando), which by Cardinal Wuerl's criteria would not appear to be a "legit" Anglican seminary.
Yet Fr Holliday was ordained both a deacon and a priest in December 2012 following the parish's reception in September, so wherever Fr Holliday lay "in between", it doesn't seem to have taken him long at all to remedy any deficiencies -- and this in contrast to Mr Simington, with a Nashotah House MDiv, still in formation. In fact, it sounds like the 90% rule was at least selectively in place as of 2012, and our kitten could have figured it out as well as I could.
But this leaves out a clear category (4), those whose applications would be either directly denied or conveniently lost or ignored -- which appears not to have been an inconsequential category. I refer again to the Anglican Ink post from August 2012:
Some former TAC clergy who have applied for ordination in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter tell Anglican Ink that they have been treated brusquely. Others report that a year after contacting the Ordinariate’ s Washington office, they are still waiting to hear what the future holds. . . . A second aspirant said he had been pressed to explain why he had not come to Rome when he left the Episcopal Church some twenty five years ago. If he accepted papal supremacy and the dogmas of the Catholic Church, why had he delayed a quarter century in making his submission, he was asked, the clergyman told AI.Clearly there was never an expressed policy on who would be denied ordination, irrespective of whether successful candidates took just a webinar or something else. But even among the latter group, policy is unclear. My regular correspondent points out,
Mr Simington, the Nashotah House graduate, is in his second year of full-time seminary so standards seem to have been raised.But Fr Baaten, the former Presbyterian who never had a program of formation in a "legit" Anglican seminary, was ordained just this year (at the same time that Mr Simington was undergoing more extensive formation) without much problem after doing little more than going to mass in Irvine for a year or two, and certainly not studying full-time in a Catholic seminary. So standards here, in contrast to Mr Simington, seem to have been lowered.
In 2012, I heard from several unsuccessful candidates who said they'd been told that Houston's policy (that word again) was not to ordain men who were not coming in with groups -- but this has clearly not been consistent.
Also in 2012, an applicant, who had left an Anglican-rite Orthodox group for the ACA and had been deposed by the Orthodox on that account, was told that the policy (that word yet again) of the OCSP was not to ordain applicants who were under discipline in a former denomination. Yet my understanding is that Louis Falk, who had been deposed by TEC for a very serious indiscretion, was granted a nulla osta and would have been ordained if St Aidan's Des Moines hadn't reversed its decision. And Andrew Bartus was inhibited by his ACA-DOW bishop, who was refusing to ordain him a priest. This became moot when St Mary's left the ACA for the Patrimony, but as far as I'm aware, the inhibition was never lifted, and this never stood in the way of his ordination.
A regular visitor noted this:
Popes going back at least to Pius XII (March 1939 - September 1958) have been granting dispensations from the norm of celibacy to permit ordination of former Anglican and former Protestant clergy in the Catholic Church very routinely, though each case historically was processed individually because the numbers were generally small.My own view, if I were to have had the opportunity to interview Fr Baaten, would have been to ask what efforts he made, after leaving the Presbyterian Church, to investigate the avenues that might have been open to him for ordination as a married Catholic priest. Beyond that, why did he settle for Anglican ordination at that time -- and, after he was ordained in the ACNA, would he simply have been content to remain a low-church Anglican if his ACNA parish hadn't been thrown out of its property and a job opening had appeared for him there? But probing questions appear to be only selectively asked.
In the absence of policy, we're left with Kremlinology, trying to figure things out based on who's standing next to whom on top of Lenin's tomb. But this was a worthwhile exercise when the fate of civilization depended on knowing this sort of thing. The OCSP is not in that league, and it would appear that many Anglicans have figured that out already.
UPDATE: My regular correspondent replies:
Certainly there were no consistent criteria. Fr Tilley, priest at Good Shepherd, Oshawa, is a retired firefighter and might not hold a bachelor's degree. He certainly does not have an M.Div or equivalent. But he was a longtime ACCC clergyman and had a small congregation with its own building. He was ordained in the first wave. Fr Reid of BJHN, Victoria does not have an M.Div. He was ordained without being required to do even the webinars. Fr Randall Fogle is a graduate of the St Michael and All Angels (uanccredited) seminary described here, but he apparently had to do several further years of preparation at St Mary's Seminary, Cleveland, unlike his fellow St Michael's alumnus and OCSP colleague, Fr Sherborne, a military chaplain, ordained two years previously. I think the first idea was to get something up and running. Now the emphasis is on young celibate candidates. Married former clergy, going forward, will be under 55 and have a "ministry plan" ie an existing group or intent to gather one. Ordaining men for exclusively local diocesan ministry will be phased out.But these new "policy" statements are unattributed and unpublished (other than here), and we have no assurance that they will be followed any more than any previous statements of "policy". And as to getting something up and running, the ordinations in the first waves were far in excess of even optimistic anticipated needs, with many priests ordained without any possible duties in connection with groups.
But things are gonna change! Sure.
