Yet Another Grandstanding Married Priest

As if it weren't enough to have Frs Treco and Phillips in our faces over the last few weeks, we get another self-promoter on EWTN. This is Fr Ed Meeks of the North American ordinariate. His story is very puzzling. He talks about being in both major and minor Catholic seminaries, but leaving the major seminary after two years. At about 10:00 he talks about being "driven" to the Assemblies of God by the "chaos" and "liturgical innovation" in the Catholic Church. Then he went into the Charismatic Episcopal Church.

I've talked about Fr Meeks here before, because the same puzzling question has come up. By his account, he was raised Catholic in Trenton, NJ, in a good Catholic family. He admired the priests in his parish and diocese and wanted to become one. But he's actually quite vague on why he left the seminary, and then why he left the Church, especially since he bloviates about wanting to remain a faithful Catholic after leaving the seminary.

But he didn't, because Vatican II. (Maybe he and Fr Treco need to find a support group.) The problem here is delict of schism, and I raise this for the same reason I raised it earlier -- some applicants for the priesthood in the OCSP have been denied for precisely this reason, while Fr Meeks was brought in. As I said in 2016,

So as far as I can see, the issue normally involves someone who was raised Catholic, presumably completed catechism and completed the sacraments of initiation, had a mature understanding of the faith, but then, by free will and fully understanding what he was doing, left the Church in some public way (e.g., by getting ordained in a Protestant denomination). This would not preclude that Catholic from going to Confession and returning to the Church, but it would raise entirely reasonable questions about whether he should become a Catholic priest.

So this would extend the restriction I previously understood, that a Catholic priest who leaves his orders is not re-ordained. Here, a serious Catholic who deliberately and publicly leaves the faith is probably not a good candidate for ordination once he claims to have returned to the faith. Seems pretty non-controversial to me.

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest Meeks left the seminary to ride the denominational carousel, and his longing for a perfect Church isn't too different from that of Fr Treco. But also, Fr Meeks's situation isn't all that different from that of Abp Hepworth, who left the priesthood, got married, divorced, and remarried, became an Anglican divine, and eventually decided to become a Catholic priest again. Not a chance, in his case. Fr Meeks, no problemo. In fact, Fr Meeks became the vocation director for the OCSP for some period of time. My regular correspondent commented,

But he was bringing around 130 parishioners (a third of whom were originally Catholic) and a church building with him---the largest non-Catholic congregation to enter the OCSP. The downside is that the parish seems to be all about Fr Meeks. The FB page is almost exclusively dedicated to videos of Fr Meeks' Sunday sermons. Here is the "Staff" page on the website. Not much else on the website; last event was Christmas Bazaar 2017. Perhaps because of his HR background Fr Meeks was originally Director of Vocations for the OCSP. He did nothing, as far as I can gather; missed every General Council meeting. Parish must be doing okay; a new parish centre has been constructed in a building on the property, and a home school support program has been founded. Torch-passing could be a challenge, however, given the OCSP talent pool.

Well, I guess this does say something about the talent pool. In the EWTN interview, he takes very nearly an hour to be unimpressive. I'm wondering if Houston ought to impose a moratorium on appearing in these sorts of forums, especially when, as Fr Meeks does here, its priests express such a longing for pre-Conciliar times.