"Why Is He In The Ordinariate, Then?"

I ran into the comment above somewhere on a blog discussing Fr Treco's removal, but I can't locate it now. It refers to his list of complaints against the Church and the seeming fact that he got his back up so hard that I would think the most pastoral and even indulgent efforts by Bp Lopes and Msgr Steenson to bring him home were of no avail. Yet he'd blogged for 15 years or so about how much he wanted to be a Catholic priest. My regular correspondent has what I think is a good insight:

Changing denominations seems to be commoner in the US than elsewhere. In the case of some OCSP clergy, as we have discussed, it seems to reflect simple careerism. But I have also encountered the kind of personality, clerical or lay, that seems perennially dissatisfied with the ability of any denomination to meet his or her high standards. For a time, each new institution seems like the One True Church, but gradually the leaders turn out to be flawed, the rules ignored in practice or even changed, the philosophical underpinning inadequate. So, on to the next! Surely certainty and perfection are out there somewhere. Perhaps Fr Treco is of this school.

This seems to have been the case with the Charismatic Episcopal Church, from which Fr Treco came. According to Wikipedia,

In the United States, the ICCEC experienced rapid growth for the first ten years of its existence. . . . In 2006 the US church experienced a crisis resulting in the departure of approximately 30% of its clergy and congregations, including seven actively serving bishops and one retired bishop. Though from diocese to diocese a variety of reasons were given for these departures, the crisis stemmed from allegations against some ICCEC leadership in America.

This is simply one fringe denomination among the pool from which Houston has been recruiting. Let's be clear: Fr Treco is the fourth OCSP priest who's required serious action by a bishop -- Fr Phillips was removed by the Archbishop of San Antonio while he still had authority over the parish, but shortly before it entered the OCSP. Under Bp Lopes, Phillips returned to the parish only as a retiree and was immediately replaced as pastor. Every indication is that Phillips had been a long-standing problem for whomever was ordinary.

In addition to Fr Phillips, Frs Kenyon and Reese have had to be removed before Fr Treco. This isn't a good record, and the two most recent, Reese and Treco, have given Houston a black eye, since they required action by the local archdioceses as well, and in the case of Reese, also made the eleven o'clock news.

This is cause for me to renew my reservations about Anglicanorum coetibus:

• Both priests and laity are likely to have a higher-than-normal proportion of malcontents who won't be satisfied in any denomination
• Priests in particular come from an applicant pool reflecting jurisdiction-hopping among fringe "Anglican" denominations, which suggests personnel issues aren't sufficiently probed in the discernment process
• Candidates for priesthood have widely disparate backgrounds, ranging from elite Episcopalian seminaries to no formal MDiv
• Both Reese and Treco are at the no-formal-MDiv end of the spectrum, and extended remedial training was clearly of no effect in both cases (UPDATE: Apparently Fr Treco has an M.Div from Trinity International University in Deerfield, IL class of 1988) This is an evangelical school that would not be much good for Catholic formation, and the degree is 30 years stale.
• The poor formation of OCSP priests raises the question of how effectively laity are catechized before they're received.

All of this suggests that the current trend of instant ordinations -- reception into the Church, ordination as a deacon, and ordination as a priest in a single weekend does happen -- has a great deal of risk attached. With a small pool of priests to start with, the pattern of one or two removals per year, sometimes amid scandal or at least public attention, is not encouraging. I don't think Fr Treco will be the last such case.