My correspondent has researched their backgrounds in some detail. The first two are celibate seminarians. Mr Alejandro is a former OLA parishioner who had been part of the music program there. Mr Davis was a parishioner of Mt Calvary, Baltimore who entered the Church with that congregation. He was briefly at the local diocesan seminary but later transferred to St Mary's Seminary in Houston, where Mr Alejandro also completed his studies.
Mr Way is an older man, a parishioner of St Augustine, San Diego, who was formerly in the permanent diaconate program of the Diocese of San Diego. It isn't clear whether he will become a permanent or transitional deacon in the OCSP.
Jon C. Jenkins, was previously a TEC priest and and more recently at All Saints Anglican, Atlanta, an ACNA community which moved to the suburbs. He and his family were received into the Church in April 2017 in Atlanta, at which time he was telling his Facebook friends that he had started preparation for ordination. He has been working as a Family Life Director at a consortium of Catholic parishes in Wisconsin. He will be ordained a priest in June.
It's a shame that this blog has to provide information that should be in a press release from Houston, but as we've been seeing, Houston does not provide many other, more critical, services that are routine for a diocese. But I have other questions.
One is that the original Anglicanorum coetibus paradigm involved existing established Anglican or Episcopalian parishes coming in with their clergy. Once again, this is observed only in the breach, but on top of that, I simply question how many new members were received anywhere in the North American ordinariate this past Easter vigil, vs the new deacons that will be ordained next Thursday. Four new deacons vs optimistically a hundred more or less new lay people. Isn't something out of whack here? (If anyone can reassure me that at least 2500 former Anglicans were received last month, I'll be happy to celebrate.)
My regular correspondent comments,
In a few years many OCSP clergy will retire (again) or die. So even with little or no growth the Ordinariate will need more clergy. The problem is that the departing priests have been mostly self-supporting, and such men will not be available to replace them. Unless the OCSP is prepared to fold a significant number of communities it will have to find jobs, presumably with the local diocese, for most of its new priests, which is not an ideal situation. At least half a dozen men who were in this situation subsequently left their Ordinariate community to become full-time diocesan clergy. One suspects they were the the abler cohort.In other words, as a practical matter, many of these men in their actual pastoral work won't in fact minister to many, or any, former Anglicans -- I'd guess that far greater numbers of ex Anglicans are productive members of Novus Ordo parishes, after all, than are members of the OCSP, and they're well used to the 1979 BCP Rite Two, which is an easy transition to the OF mass.
Mr Jenkins is a separate question. He's currently working at a diocesan lay pastoral job in Wisconsin, where there's no nearby ordinariate community. So why would he not go in via the Pastoral Provision, which is still available, rather than the OCSP, where he would have no connection? My regular correspondent speculates that the Pastoral Provision quota may be full in the local diocese, but at that point, we're playing jurisdictional games.
Jenkins as well has extensive Anglican experience as a rector in Texas and Atlanta, well beyond other recent ordinands. My correspondent speculates,
Maybe they have a spot for him at SMV, Arlington or maybe St Timothy, aka St Thomas Becket, Ft Worth is finally going to get a resident Parochial Administrator. Bp Lopes visited them last Sunday.But we're still dealing with the impression that the OCSP has more priests than people, and it's continuing to operate at a point where collecting verges on hoarding.
