Priestly Formation And Small Communities

Following up on yesterday's post, a visitor asks,

Any idea if any of the Ordinariate priests have experience with parishes with congregations in the hundreds range? I assume the first Ordinary did, but I am concerned about how well small church experience scales to larger.

Well, some do, many don't. I think the question is complicated by the fact that groups in the North American ordinariate by and large aren't growing, and no matter what experience the priests have, the numbers overall are stagnant. It seems to me there are three groups of ordinariate priests, a top tier that had moderate success with Anglican or Pastoral Provision parishes, and they continue to be moderately successful where they are. A second tier that was at least partly successful with larger Protestant parishes, but now is in charge of stubbornly small OCSP communities; and a third tier of Protestant seminary graduates who never got a career footing in their prior denominations and is performing poorly with OCSP groups, often cobbled together exclusively as an excuse to ordain them.

Contrast this with the pattern for newly ordained diocesan seminarians. They're sent to larger parishes as new associates, where they're inundated with the actual conditions that surround pastoral work and are generally trained and mentored by more senior priests and chancery staff. In the OCSP, there are only a handful of parishes that justify associates at all, so this opportunity for training isn't generally available.

Another issue is that most OCSP priests are married, and their families are tied to communities by children's schools and wives' careers. The low performers are tied to diocesan make-work jobs themselves. They can't move around the way celibate priests do.

This brings me to the question of the Minnesota group recently closed. The removal of Vaughn Treco as priest opened up a unique opportunity, which was to have the ordinary emeritus, as the visitor today noted an experienced priest in a large-parish environment, make a considered assessment of the group's potential. I would guess that Msgr Steenson, if he'd in fact seen something there, would have been young enough at 67 to give things one more effort. I can only think that, after several months and prayerful reflection, he determined it wasn't worth his time or anyone else's.

Treco was in the third tier of low-performing priests I noted above. It sounds from occasional comments on blogs that even as a hospital chaplain, he set teeth on edge by celebrating daily mass ad orientem in the chapel. How many other third-tier OCSP priests are instead kept on in these hopeless situations, simply to maintain the appearance of success in Houston, or out of sympathy for men who've proven they don't actually have much of a vocation and their families? It was an act of mercy to laicize Treco,

I think the OCSP's experience is in fact bringing into the light difficulties that result with married priests:

• The priests' families become hostages that limit the flexibility of bishops in removing or reassigning priests
• Their families become obstacles to career mobility, where relocation is an essential ingredient.

This leaves aside the considerations Fr Longenecker, himself a married former Anglican, raised recently,

The main practical objection to married priests is simply that the infrastructure and hierarchy of the Catholic Church is not equipped for this change. They don’t know how to do it and don’t want to do it.

There is a darker side to this. The celibate priest is bound much more closely to the bishop and his fellow priests than a married man. It’s a guy’s club and it’s pretty tight. Furthermore, the celibate priest is in a dependent relationship with the diocese much more than a married man. His whole life and livelihood is dependent on the bishop’s whim. Without the bishop he has no visible means of support.

As I ruminate on these questions, I come back again and again to the fact that Anglicanorum coetibus was advanced with no serious consideration to the issue of how married priests would have careers in what would prove a stagnant backwater of the Church, quite possibly because it was thought that a first wave of Episcopalian priests, already middle-aged and eligible for TEC pensions, would come in with their parishes, retire in due course, and be promptly replaced by celibate seminarians.

The actual circumstances, with some of the best older candidates rejected from the start and few Anglican parishes of any size coming in anyhow, has been that the OCSP continues to be a last, desperate option for young Protestant seminary graduates -- this in part because even celibate candidates for Catholic seminary can probably find better opportunities within their local diocese. The're in a market shortage, while the Protestant also-rans are in surplus everywhere.

One thing I don't see is any sort of up-or-out provision for OCSP groups. Nobody's established a policy for the other groups like the Minnesota one that was closed, whereby if they continue for x years with fewer than y members, they're closed. Heck, keep the priests in their make-work diocesan jobs if you have to. Or I guess, that's if the bishops want them.

Maybe some of these guys should have spent more time reflecting on whether they actually had a vocation.