[D]espite the best efforts of Pope Benedict, it is an open secret that the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales has never been keen on the Ordinariate. It has become something of a disfavoured ghetto. Even if a priest or parish has a dubious relationship with the CofE hierarchy, crossing the Tiber is unlikely to improve matters.The author suggests that the Church of England has been somewhat more flexible in allowing variations in practice among high- and low-church parishes as well and notes that Anglo-Papalist parishes use the full OF Roman rite, as my correspondent has frequently pointed out. My correspondent also says,
Of course the majority of those ordained in the OOLW have no connection with an Ordinariate group, so perhaps they escape the stigma while cutting the preparation time.But regarding the situation in Canada, my correspondent makes some additional observations:
I have seen a few articles posted around the net on [the TEC clergy surplus], and the plight of younger Episcopalian clergy unable to find "a call." In the ACC, ordinations are limited to the number required to fill full-time positions. This may account, at least partly, for the lack of new recruits to the Canadian Deanery. As I have mentioned, there are only two Canadian OCSP priests below secular retirement age, one of whom was never an Anglican clergyman. The "continuing" church has all but disappeared as the generation of opponents of the ordination of women in the 1970s dies off. Apart from the Bros I know of no former Anglican clergy in the pipeline; indeed I cannot determine whether they are both there, or just Br Shane. No word on a replacement for Fr Hodgins, who has not managed in five years to grow St Thomas More, Toronto to parish status in an area with 5 million people that supports 189 ACC parishes.The situation in the US, as far as I can see, is a variation on the "tragedy of the commons" that's poisoned all graduate programs, including those in the hard sciences. Overproduction of graduate degrees, including MDivs from seminaries, is a byproduct of how full-time university faculties are funded, with low-cost graduate assistants and contingent faculty teaching high-profit mass-enrollment undergraduate courses. The high margins from these courses then fund the full-time faculty, who have every incentive to inflate enrollment in the graduate programs that justify their tenured positions.
If the ACC has been able to limit this, so much the better. TEC doesn't -- the best it can do is for bishops periodically to release seminarians from their vows while in their seminary programs, which still doesn't equalize the market, but the postulants and candidates have already wasted years of their lives training for non-existent jobs.
Even so, it's a mistake for the Catholic Church to assume that anyone in this position, even among the straight males, is automatically a good candidate for the Catholic priesthood. Someone who's spent years in a US academic environment is probably going to be a misfit just about anywhere.
