Father Duncan is a graduate of the University of the South and Nashotah House. You don't get much more Episcopalian than that, huh? Seems like there weren't enough buyers nevertheless.
I hate to say this, but even in my Episcopalian years, I wouldn't have gone to something just because Fr Chichester went to Sewanee and Nashotah House.
A snake-belly low parish like St. James would not, for an instant, consider joining the Ordinariate. They seem to me to be, at heart, Evangelicals/Pentecostals who like a bit of very unadorned absolutely Protestant liturgy to class things up a la Newport Beach.Blessed Sacrament Placentia raises its own set of issues. It hosted the Newman group-in-formation before it was received into the OCSP, when it moved to a Catholic parish. At that time (2011-12), the Episcopal rector was on the verge of retirement and from what I was told, he was sympathetic to Anglicanorum coetibus and possibly even considering going into the OCSP after he retired. However, neither he nor the parish made any move in that direction. I believe that for a time, it hosted an ACNA parish that used its worship space, and it also was placed under a conservative bishop, rather than Bp Bruno.A more likely candidate would be (would have been?) Blessed Sacrament, Placentia. Their problem, though, is with a Pope, not with "popery".
This is clearly the sort of Episcopal parish that must have been in the minds of Bp Pope, Fr//Bp/Msgr Steenson, and Cardinal Ratzinger when they mooted an Anglican personal prelature, but as a practical matter, there was little actual demand.
My regular correspondent had several comments.
I would note that there was a wide discrepancy in the percentage of members of ACA/ACCC parishes who entered the OCSP. In some cases the uptake was 90%, in others the percentage was reversed. I do not think this was because of the inherent bias of the membership of any given parish; I think it was because of leadership. In many parishes significant numbers who had left the Catholic church for Anglicanism were reconciled. That's a sales job.Later,In other parishes, clergy could not seem to make a convincing case to those who had regarded themselves as Catholic their entire lives and only needed some clarification on the Petrine claims. Members of these "continuing" denominations had already left mainstream Anglicanism in protest over numerous issues. They could see that their microdenomination had failed to thrive and faced eventual extinction. If their pastor could not make the case that their values would be preserved and nourished in the Catholic church I think that's on him, not some inherent Anglican resistance.
I have probably made previous reference to the ACCC parish in Victoria, BC, whose rector was completely committed to taking the parish into the Ordinariate; indeed, he took the position that since the ACCC synod had voted nearly unanimously for this course of action it was unnecessary for the parish to vote on the subject. When one of the assistant clergy openly suggested that it was worth at least having a parish discussion he was pronounced "excommunicated." This was later rescinded but the clergyman in question left the parish, along with some of its members. But the larger part remained.Still later,Then, after the OCSP was erected and the rector submitted his dossier, he was informed that he had been denied a nulla osta on the grounds of delict of schism. At this point he declared that he would be remaining in the ACCC, and while about a dozen laypeople (and five clergy) ultimately left and formed the BlJHN group in Victoria, a large majority of the congregation then decided to remain in the ACCC with him. Meanwhile on the BC mainland only ten people from the four parishes there followed their rector (he served all four parishes, with a total membership of about a hundred) into the Church. Again, this cannot be a story about Anglican predispositions.
So I would estimate that the number of "walk-ins" to the OCSP in its four years of existence--those who have become Catholic, or been reconciled to the Church, other than as a member of a previously existing group led in by a former pastor--probably number fewer than a hundred. More than 1,200 adults were baptised and/or confirmed at the Easter Vigil in the Diocese of Brooklyn last year. By this standard the evangelisation effort of the OCSP has been an even more massive failure than its membership numbers suggest, and they are pretty low.
This Saturday, we have our Fall Work Day, September 10, in preparation for the Feast of the Holy Wood of the Cross. (September 14th & 18th, Sunday observance). [We still pray that the Conscience of the Thief will be stricken, to return the Relic of the True Cross, & other items taken from the Parish.]The Girl Scouts and Brownies are a new addition. It's good to see the parish continuing to be part of the community.We will do the upstairs projects, & outside work, from 9 to 12, as the downstairs Hall will be occupied by the Girl Scouts, Brownies, and Daisies (10am-12n). When they have gone, we will break for lunch, and then attend to downstairs projects.
However, "evangelizing the culture" was proposed as an objective for the Pasadena group-in-formation. I suspect it was inserted as something everyone could agree with (and almost certainly something that would ingratiate Fr Bartus with Bp Barron), but it's worth going a little farther to examine what it means.
This takes me back to another question I raised yesterday, why the deeply troubled St James Newport Beach Anglican/Episcopal parish doesn't seem to have considered the OCSP as an option for any significant group of its membership, which appears to have been quite large in earlier times. Remember that both the Pastoral Provision and Anglicanorum coetibus were intended to reach a target audience of disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians -- if there's a culture to evangelize, this would seem to be the nearest opportunity for the OCSP.
I would say that St James Newport Beach, whose dissidents went to the ACNA, is an example of the Fort Worth dilemma writ small. Bishoip Iker, we've seen, appears to have considered an option of taking the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth into the Catholic Church as a body prior to Anglicanorum coetibus, but he doesn't seem to have taken it seriously for any length of time. The simplest explanation is probably the one Damian Thompson offered last week: you can dress things up, but a certain large contingent will reject anything they perceive as Catholic.
Add to that the number of Episcopalians who left the Catholic Church after a divorce and remarriage, as well as those who feel TEC's views on same-sex attraction are hospitable. Our Lord's remarks about the seeds that fall on rocky ground are probably appropriate, and the history of the Pastoral Provision should be illustrative: a major development within Anglicanism has been the steadily growing overhang of seminary graduates and unemployed priests, and the one successful aspect of Anglican evangelization since 1980 has been the number of these who have been recruited to Catholic diocesan work.
But consider the most specific example of Catholic evangelization I've seen close at hand: Patrick Madrid's morning radio show. He has degrees in philosophy and dogmatic theology that specifically qualify him for apologetics. From what I can gather as a frequent listener, he seems to pay most attention to Mormons, Pentecostals, and other evangelicals. This is probably because
What strikes me is the vaguely defined purpose of the "new Catholic parish". It is going to save souls, reach non-Catholics, the lapsed, and the wider culture. One thing that bothers me is that at least three bishops (Lopes, Vann, and Gomez, plus auxiliaries) presumably signed off on this, and the process must have included some assurance that a new Catholic church in Pasadena would not be poaching on any existing parish. Yet the announcement is nothing but sorta-kinda shilly-shally.
There's no direct mention of Anglicanorum coetibus or the complementary norms mentioning "lay faithful originally of the Anglican tradition" -- just a "unique tradition" that may refer to Anglicanism or "wider" Catholicism. Any specific discussion is reserved for links. I would say that no equivalent proposal written this poorly would reach approval in a real corporate environment, which has me wondering about the bishops or their staff.
In many ways, it seems to me that this is an acknowledgement that in the US, Anglicanorum coetibus has failed to achieve its goals, in part due to bungling and poor personnel choices. Recall that in January 2012, it was assumed that St Mary of the Angels, 13 minutes by car from Pasadena, would have served this area with an established building and an existing parish.
But it also occurred to me that a formerly thriving Episcopal and ACNA parish 15 minutes from the Irvine group, St James Newport Beach, triply lost its property, first as TEC, then as ACNA, and then again as TEC -- yet other than Fr Baaten, very briefly an ACNA pastor there, there doesn't seem to have been much interest in the nearby Ordinariate parish, when this might have been a reasonable choice for at least some.
And why the need to be so vague about what's really on offer? There's a problem here. If nobody's buying closer to home, throwing something vague against the wall in Pasadena and hoping it might stick is not a strategy.
". . .Luke Reese, a former ACA clergyman with no M.Div, was taking courses at St Meinrad seminary for three years before his ordination for the OCSP this spring."In fact, I noticed in the list of this year's graduating class from St. Meinrad School of Theology which I receive as an alumnus (Master of Theological Studies in Pastoral Ministry, 1992) that (Fr.) Luke Reese was on the list of graduates -- but with a Master of Arts (MA) in Theology, which is normally a degree for lay ministry, rather than with a Master of Divinity (MDiv), which is the normal seminary degree -- probably because the MA in Theology was the better match for the coursework that he needed to prepare for Catholic ordination.
I also believe that (Fr.) Luke Reese had a significant head start on his preparation for Catholic ordination. In a reply on the blog "The Anglo-Catholic" (which is now essentially defunct) some time before the formal erection of the ordinariate, I recommended to him that [he] meet with Bishop Christopher Coyne, then Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis (and now Bishop of Burlington, Vermont), to establish a working relationship. I believe that he did make contact, and thus began his studies before the formal erection of the ordinariate. In any case, the fact that he took over three years to complete an MA in Theology, which requires only 48 hours of coursework, strongly suggests that he was a part time student rather than a true seminarian.
I too wondered why Mr Simington had to do two further years of seminary training when Andrew Bartus, with identical academic qualifications and minimal pastoral experience, was ordained after a few webinars. But Mr Simington was also given major publicity as the "first seminarian" even though Luke Reese, a former ACA clergyman with no M.Div, was taking courses at St Meinrad seminary for three years before his ordination for the OCSP this spring.I disagree over the importance of the heterodox, not to say heretical, Nashotah House alum. His example goes to the dilemma of the elite school, and make no mistake, its alumni regard Nashotah House, and by inference themselves, as the crème de la crème. I got into the college admissions rat race as a teen, and my parents and counselors represented to me that with a degree from _______, many doors would be opened that might otherwise remain closed.Several older ACCC clergy with no divinity degrees were ordained in the "first wave;" Fr Carl Reid did not even have to do the distance education program. I feel the thinking was "Let's get something going for these retired clergy and their groups while they're still active; then we can begin to set up the ordination training we actually want, for the celibate candidates we will be seeking going forward." I think it is perhaps unfair to keep citing the Episcopalian clergyman who had no use for the Seven Deadlies as completely typical, but in any event that is not the sort of person who will be recruited in the future. Bp Lopes mentioned recently that there are 78 members of the OLW Servers'Guild, boys and youth who have never been anything other than Catholics. That is where the Ordinariate will be looking for future vocations. I personally feel that this will mean that the "Anglican Use" becomes to Anglicanism as General Tso's chicken is to Chinese food, but presumably no one will care.
Never mind the fact that all manner of claptrap was, and still is, taught in every department of every elite school, that students are coddled and flattered into thinking that if they're at _______, they must be learning stuff that's worthwhile and important, especially since they don't need to work very hard at it. This pervades the atmosphere on campus. It's drilled into them that a degree in art history from ________ is worth far more than a degree in engineering from Podunk State. After all, at _______ they learn to think!
The Great Gatsby is misunderstood in English departments I think primarily because a central theme is the criticism of elite school education (Fitzgerald attended Princeton but didn't graduate). The fact that Tom Buchanan, a Yale graduate, is a white supremacist who believes the eugenics conventional wisdom that was common in the 1920s is a statement about the education he got there. My father always thought it was significant that a neighbor, a Princeton grad, once told him, "I really like sales. It has so many faucets." (This didn't keep Dad from giving me what everyone else was about the need to get into ________.)
About 15 years ago, I naively got involved in a movement by ________ alumni to elect more representative members of the board of trustees, with an aim in part to enact curriculum reform. This movement failed spectacularly for a number of reasons, but in part it was because both alumni and parents of current students objected that any controversy there would reduce the value of a ________ degree vis-a-vis one from other elite schools, where there was no controversy.
So the status quo remained, and all elite-school alums continue to believe what they're told, although the value of any four-year degree is in gradual decline. I would say, though, that the value of any Episcopal seminary degree is plummeting much more quickly, due in large part to a decreased demand for what's taught there.
It seems to me that between 2012 and 2016, the OCSP has had plenty of experience with the value of a Nashotah House MDiv, such that it finds a need to reteach what was taught there in a fundamental way. Insofar as a Nashotah House alum learns to be the best possible Anglican, it's plain that this skill set is simply much less transferrable to the Catholic priesthood than had been thought. I suspect the signals the CDF received over this wouldn't have been much different than the signals my father's Princeton neighbor sent about faucets. You don't need too many anecdotal cases to pick up that signal loud and clear.
I think my correspondent raises an important point in suggesting that Anglicanorum coetibus is going to be faced, if it continues, with the need to develop a new form of Anglicanism that can exist within Catholicism, a little like General Tso's chicken. But isn't this multiplying entities without necessity?