Formulaic?

Bp Lopes in Vienna called the process of ordination for the OCSP "forrmulaic". Observers are still trying to figure out how. My regular correspondent says,

I am trying to sift through recent candidates/ordinands to determine who was selected by Lopes/Perkins and who was a leftover from Steenson/Hough 3. Of this year's three, only Fr Erdman is in the former category. He was fast-tracked, presumably because he had local publicity as a conscientious objector to same-sex marriage who had lost his job in TEC, and because he had successfully put together at least a small group of converts. Messrs McCrimmon and Wills, having been ordained as transitional deacons this summer, will presumably be on the list for priestly ordination next June 29, but that is all we can say for sure. The Bros, Mr Bayles, Mr Mayer---none of these have made it to deacon yet.

Having said that, I agree that they all seem to be damaged goods in some respect, and one has to wonder, or perhaps it is obvious, why a clergyman without a congregation would go the OCSP route rather than the Pastoral Provision, especially since in any event he will be spending most of his time at a diocesan parish, school, or other stipendiary post. I think that Houston is trying to find people who will be either leading a group or available to take over an existing group. From that perspective it appears less interested in phoney publicity than those who decided to ordain Laurence Gipson, Ken Wolfe, or Jon Chalmers.

But the closest Houston can come in most cases is to find a way to put together a minimum-size Potemkin group and then find a candidate who is willing to relocate, like Mr Mayer, or indeed the Pasadena group, which Fr Bartus is assembling but which will eventually go to a new candidate. I question whether this really meets the intent of coetus as expressed in both Summorum Pontificum and Anglicanorum coetibus. Both usages strike me as envisioning a more or less spontaneous, bottom-up or outside-in petition, rather than a collection deliberately assembled by the prelature to justify putting a body into a preferment.

My other friend replies,

Having read your post today, it appears that you missed the second quote from Bishop Lopes’s presentation in my previous post. The bishop said that, in the case of clergy coming with congregations, the Vatican allows Catholic ordination to take place part way through the program of formation. It’s less clear whether ordination typically happens four months, or six months, or some other period of time into the program of formation, but the fact remains that the candidate still completes the rest of the two-year program after ordination.

It also appears that some of the candidates have begun the Catholic program of formation while they were still active clergy in their former denominations, several months before reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church. It’s pretty clear that this happened with the original clergy of all three ordinariates.

But even when he disagrees, my friend expresses uncertainty about what the actual policy is. My regular correspondent suggests Fr Erdman's case was fast-tracked, but we don't know exactly how. Certainly the procedure expressed by Bp Lopes involves the CDF imposing exams on the candidate before finally approving his ordination, and I assume that if the formation process is rigorous, one would need to complete most of it before passing such an exam. Is the exam waived in some cases? I betcha it is.

Also, I followed the progress of some candidates in the 2012 intake, and at least at that time, they were required to resign their Anglican orders before submitting their dossiers. My memory says they had to include the resignation letters with the dossiers. If the process has since been modified, as my friend suggests it may have been, then this simply adds to the growing list of exceptions to expressed CDF and OCSP policy. This is not "formulaic", and it seems to me that Bp Lopes was disingenuous in Vienna.

What I think is happening is that the coetus envisioned in Anglicanorum coetibus has been quite rare, and of those fewer than a dozen occurrences, roughly half had already been assembled under the Pastoral Provision. Only a handful of parishes ever made the transition as integral coetus from an Anglican denomination directly to the OCSP, and no new ones have entered after the first small wave.

As a result, the OCSP has had to shift its model completely, so that the current paradigm seems to be the one we see with Mr Mayer: a minimum-size new group, quite possibly not Anglican at all, gets together but for whatever reason can't continue. In order to justify proceeding with the candidate's formation, the OCSP must find him employment in a friendly diocese, no matter how distant, relocate him, and then hope it can cobble together another new little chapel group, Anglican or not, in that distant location for him to tend.

This is not the Christopher Phillips paradigm, whereby the Anglican arrives, builds on existing interest in the community, and fairly quickly establishes de novo a parish that becomes a major player in the diocese, which the diocese fights to retain.

Whatever his strengths or weaknesses, no current OCSP priest has matched what Fr Philips accomplished. I can only conclude that the OCSP and the CDF are so anxious to find another Phillips -- indeed, they're now sending him around to show other parishes how it's done -- that they'll bend every rule in hopes one will turn up. Sorry, you can't make a Bartus into a Phillips, for good or ill, no matter how hard you try. But the Phillips model, while potentially successful, isn't even the Anglicanorum coetibus paradigm, whereby an existing Anglican parish comes into the Church.

Trying to discover another Christopher Phillips is in fact an acknowledgement that Plan A didn't work, now we need a Plan B! Maybe they can have a special collection to buy lottery tickets. That sounds about as effective a strategy.