The Guide to Parish Development for the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter does state that a community must have either 100 members or 30 families to become a full parish — and from this, you wrongly jumped to the conclusion that every community that is not a full parish must have fewer than 100 members. Rather, this requirement for membership is only one of several requirements to attain status as a full parish. . . . An ordinariate community actually can have more than a hundred members, but not be constituted as a parish due to lack of some or all of [several] additional elements. Additionally, the change in status requires approval of the governing council, which probably meets only a few times per year.In other words, this suggests that I may be ignoring groups larger than 100 that are not yet full parishes. However, my estimate goes no farther than to suggest the real "membership" of the OCSP is in the low to mid four figures. To change this significantly, you'd have to find a way to suggest it's in the high four figures, which says to me you'd have to find additional communities with membership big enough to add several thousand to the total estimate.
My understanding is that the Omaha community is reaching the point of eligibility to become a full parish, though we now have a situation where the Calgary group, whose full-time priest is leaving and will not be replaced by a full-time one, could at least technically fall out of parish status. (We don't know, as well, what effect the loss of leadership could have on membership there.)
However, even if there's some chatter at the edges of which communities are or are not parishes, I don't think this affects estimates that I think are credible. Bp Lopes clearly thinks the numbers are roughly double the estimates published here. One can certainly choose to give Bp Lopes more credence.
On the other hand, my regular correspondent points out that there's one very clear indicator of "canonical membership" in the OCSP that's never been published. The How To Join the Ordinariate page of the OCSP web site says those who wish to become members must complete and sign an application form and either submit it to the pastor of an OCSP community or mail it directly to Houston.
Your pastor will verify you have received the Sacraments and/or confirm that your are currently enrolled in catechesis to be received into the Church. Your Pastor will then forward the original, signed documents to the Chancery.This means that at minimum, someplace in the chancery is a metal file cabinet containing completed application forms with copies of letters verifying receipt and approval. It would then be a simple exercise to have a volunteer count these approved applications, and voilà, there's a number. As far as we know, either this has never been done, or if it has, the number has never been released. While such a total wouldn't account for potential attrition, I think nearly everyone would accept it as a very close estimate of OCSP canonical membership.The Chancery will mail you with notification of receipt of your application and, after review of your application, the status of your request for membership. YOUR MEMBERSHIP IS NOT COMPLETE UNTIL YOU HAVE RECEIVED CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE ORDINARIATE CHANCERY VERIFYING RECEIPT AND APPROVAL OF YOUR REGISTRATION.
The only recent mention of application forms has been a reference on Our Lady of the Atonement websites to the need for OLA parishioners to get their application forms in, which suggests that numbers may be disappointing.
But without any announcement citing things like the actual number of application forms on file, observers are reduced to looking at Facebook posts, photos on parish web sites, and estimates of potential attendance based on the size of venues. All of these make figures of 10,000 canonical members and Sunday attendance of 20,000 hard to credit.
