Wednesday, July 26, 2017

The OCSP Clergy With "Normal" TEC Careers

My regular correspondent notes,
Current OCSP clergy who came directly from TEC to the Catholic church are few (Frs Bergman, Catania, Chalmers, Duncan, Erdman, Gipson, Lewis, Sellers, Venuti, Vidal, and Wolfe). And Msgr Steenson, although his current connection with the Ordinariate is difficult to discern. Not all were great catches, for various reasons, but I do not think that they were of the same order of nullity as the "continuing" crowd.
The list includes those retired, but it excludes those who came from the ACNA "Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth".

I'm aware of several who had "normal" TEC careers, submitted dossiers, but didn't make it in. Bp Lopes's Vienna lecture outlined the steps in a successful application, but it didn't list the various ways in which an application could derail, including the dossier disappearing down a black hole, no nihil obstat being granted, or a rescript being issued but overridden by Msgr Steenson. I can't second-guess what happened, but I know several individuals involved here, and I think that, had they been able to shepherd groups or parishes, the results would have been at least as good as the results we've seen from the group that made it in.

Beyond that, if the former TEC pool was the best that could be hoped for, I've got to say that on balance, I never thought TEC clergy were the sharpest knives in the drawer. Fr Chad Ripperger, a Catholic priest and an Aquinas scholar, has said he became a priest because he thought his siblings were all smarter than he was. This may have been tongue in cheek. You've got to be awfully smart to keep up with Aquinas. The Anglo-centricity of Anglicanorum coetibus risks leaving the Anglicans who come in unaware of the strong Catholic intellectual appeal and the priests who can elaborate it.

Catholicism for dummies is what we don't want.