More On The Talent Pool And The Marginal Groups

My regular correspondent sent two e-mails responding to yesterday's post. The first covered primarily Houston's willingness actually to relocate members of the top tier, or those like Fr Chalmers who don't serve as ordinariate priests but still qualify as members of the club.

Fr Sellers moved from North Dakota to Texas, Fr Sly from Virginia to Missouri, Fr Chalmers from South Carolina to Alabama, Fr Duncan from Texas to South Carolina, Fr Lewis from Washington, DC to Texas, Fr Seraiah from Des Moines to Atlantic Iowa and then to Missouri, Fr Vidal from Baltimore to Corpus Christi to Washington DC---I could go on but you get the idea.

Fr Sellers was a member of the original Nashotah House club who appears to have been a disappointment. Fr Seraiah started out as a hardship case, since he was recruited to take an ACA parish into the ordinariate, but the parish changed its mind. Under Bp Lopes's authority, he was parish administrator at an Iowa diocesan parish until Bp Lopes seems to have found it possible to move him a relatively short distance to Missouri, where he could also serve a marginal ordinariate group along with several diocesan parishes.

But there's another interesting point:

At the moment St Margaret of Scotland, Katy, TX has three priests for a congregation of perhaps forty, one of whom is Fr Mitchicam about whom you posted June 19, 2018. What are his long-term plans? How soon will the three transitional deacons ordained this month be ordained to the priesthood? Who is being ordained priest on June 29? My point is that there are some new men, none bringing congregations, who could theoretically be sent to Calgary. Immigration not a problem, if the number of priests currently arriving in Canada from Africa, Viet Nam, and the Philippines is anything to go by.

However, although we don't know exactly why some marginal groups continue and others are closed, the picture we have is that those on the lower end of the scale are unstable.

The criteria for replacing the clerical leader of an OCSP group are unclear to me. St Edmund, Kitchener was allowed to fold when Fr Catania left. St Gilbert, Boerne likewise did not get a replacement when Fr Wagner went into full-time diocesan ministry, nor was there a replacement found in Savannah when Fr Lindsey died, or in Corpus Christi when Fr Vidal left for Washington. As I mentioned, some otherwise marginal groups have continued because lay people have taken initiative, either to find a local priest to say mass or at least to hold on and apply pressure to find an Ordinariate replacement.

But Fr Liias documented in some detail on the parish website the attempt to find a way for the St Gregory the Great, Stoneham, MA community to continue after his retirement. This was a considerably larger and more active group than the others I have mentioned, although not a full parish. Bp Lopes met with them personally, basically to tell them it wasn't going to happen. The best that could be done was to merge them, as a worshipping community, with St Athanasius, Chestnut Hill which as Norm explained at length on Ordinariate Expats was very inconveniently located for most members. The two groups have maintained separate web identities which suggests things aren't going well. So why did St Gregory not get a local version of Philip Mayer?

Well, even versions of Philip Mayer, men who failed to start careers as Protestants (and in Mayer's case, even in the Pastoral Provision) aren't common. Consider that Protestants serious enough to consider vocations as Protestants have solid reasons for not being Catholic, and many have started families. Going through additional formation and ordination in a new diocese under those circumstances isn't an attractive option, leaving aside the likely first assignment of starting an evensong group in someone's front parlor. So a new Philip Mayer in Peoria or wherever is hit-or-miss, and the diocesan bishops involved may prefer to see the groups close as well.

So we're still looking at a situation where:

• No pickup group that did not come in as a previous Protestant parish has grown to become a parish
• The front-parlor groups, and even those meeting in diocesan chapels and cafetoriums, don't have a good prognosis
• They're formed primarily as an excuse to ordain the marginal men who've failed in Protestant careers anyway
• These men require diocesan day jobs to support themselves and their families, and the situation never seems to improve.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds, "The attitude of the local bishop may be a bigger factor than we know. Maybe the Archbishop of Boston felt that the Pastoral Provision congregation in Chestnut Hill was enough, thanks." Certanily we know that Bp Lopes had to pay a visit to Bp Barnes of San Bernardino before Barnes would allow the Holy Martyrs parish to open. There seems to have been unusual interest in the situation in Calgary from the bishop there.