Unsurprisingly, given his career as a Vatican bureaucrat, Bp Lopes is a conventional thinker on most issues of Church governance, and he has certainly made no attempt to play up OCSP experience with married clergy, whom he clearly regards as a necessary evil to be phased out or at least minimised as the Ordinariate starts producing internal candidates for ordination. All the publicity centres around the celibate seminarians, and if married OCSP clergy are interviewed by media, Catholic or otherwise, they are quick to support the norm of clerical celibacy and downplay anything positive they might bring to ministry as married men. Clearly this is the message from the top, and it is quite different from what a married Ukrainian or Melkite priest would say in a similar interview, especially those in North America where their sui juris Church waged a century-long battle on this subject. It is entirely possible that clerical celibacy is on its way out in the Latin Rite, but no one will be looking to Bp Lopes to comment positively on this aspect of the Anglican charism.But although my correspondent insisted yesterday that "Manpower is a continuing challenge," that should really be modified to say "Manpower who are available is a continuing challenge." There is still an absolute surplus of OCSP clergy -- it's just that, with families and jobs rooting them to particular places, they can't be moved where they're needed. So why keep ordaining them?No wives invited to this year's clergy gathering, for the first time.
For that matter, why the charade of ordaining men to minister to groups numbering a dozen or two, when experience is showing that they aren't going to grow into any sort of viable number? A geographic diocese would be in a position to fold group A into group B and move the extra priest where most needed. By the nature of Anglicanorum coetibus, this can't happen.
Theoretically, this is because these little groups of a dozen or two require the precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony, viz, half a dozen adventitious prayers added to the OF mass, and they must hear them said by a barely qualified priest who was unable to secure a preferment in a Protestant denomination, often a quite marginal one. Bp Lopes, whatever he may be thought to wish in the indeterminate future, is continuing to seek out and ordain such marginal men as we speak, building on a surplus of underemployed and undeployable clergy.
I appeal to the principle of sufficient reason, the principle of proportionate causality, and the principle of finality. There must be a cause of this thing existing. The cause of this thing existing must be sufficient for it to exist, or continue to exist. It must exist for a reason. Or it would cease to exist.
As far as I can see, maybe a little like a duckbill platypus, this strange creature exists and continues to exist. It continues to eat and reproduce in its current form. There must be a reason for it. Qui bono?
