What will be the fate of this community, I wonder? It came into the Anglican Use of the Pastoral Provision in 1992 under the leadership of Fr Gene Hart, as you can read in two links. Fr Hart passed away in June 2013 and Fr Vidal took over as administrator of the group, which in 2015 transferred to the OCSP. Under his leadership they began worshipping at Our Lady of Guadalupe [in the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi], an arrangement whose disadvantages seem obvious, but as you see from the last comment here it was not necessarily a going concern even before.The other thing that strikes me is that Frs Lewis, Vieira, and Vidal come from earlier cohorts of OCSP ordinands (or transferees). They strike me as very solid men, in stark contrast to the most recent cohort scheduled for 2018 (leaving the seminarians aside from this characterization). It's worth noting that Fr Lewis moves to a prosperous parish that can assure him a stipend, Fr Vieira can rely on an Army pension, and I assume Fr Vidal has some assurance of financial stability while he's at St Luke's.Will it get a new location and a new parochial administrator when Fr Vidal leaves in October, or disappear like St Gilbert, Boerne/Ingram once it is no longer needed as a titular appointment for someone whom someone wishes to have ordained?
The 2018 cohort suggests that without some financial incentive, the quality of the candidate pool drops off severely. But the number of OCSP parishes that can pay a priest is not growing.
