A visitor asked, very astutely, who might have been a candidate for pastor at Our Lady of the Atonement if Steenson's cell phone call had gone unheard by witnesses. I would have to say that the pattern of ordinations and clergy deployment in the Ordinariate under Steenson was puzzling -- desultory at best. But there are hints.
One candidate might have been Fr Scott Hurd, an Anglican Use priest who reported to Cardinal Wuerl in Washington and was serving as Steenson's vicar general at the time. OLA might have been a reward for effective service, although Hurd was deeply involved in the bungling at the Hollywood parish. When neither OLA nor St Mary's became available, he was out of the running and stayed in Washington.
Another could have been Fr Jon Chalmers, whose involvement with the Ordinariate appears to have been relatively brief and surprisingly marginal. Chalmers was ordained a Catholic priest in June 2012, only the second to be ordained in the OCSP. His wife, Margaret Chalmers, was the OCSP's chancellor, and I had e-mail exchanges with her during the 2012 troubles in Hollywood. I found her disappointing, full of excuses over the bungling, and, as a canon lawyer, she would never have been effective in the corporate litigation area demanded by the St Mary's situation. (On the other hand, bungling may have been what Steenson wanted to see.)
Fr Chalmers received his MDiv from the Berkeley School of Divinity at Yale, not quite Nashotah House, but making him part of the elite nonetheless. Yet after being ordained with enormous fanfare, he stayed with the tiny Ordinariate group in Greenville, SC until last year with a day job in hospital administration, when he left to become principal of a Catholic school in Birmingham, AL. Neither he nor his wife appears to have any remaining connection with the OCSP. A puzzle.
Another candidate could have been Fr Steve Sellers. A visitor says,
I was always intrigued by the fact that Steve Sellers left his position as Dean of the Fargo Cathedral, admittedly not a stellar post but attractive enough to lure him away from Texas in the first place, to come back to Houston as a substitute teacher with no parish responsibilities. Surely that was not Plan A. The post of Communication Director which he so mishandled was surely created after the fact, as is his current title of Director of Schools. Not that he qualifies as particularly young. But three years ago I am not sure who else would have been a possible candidate. Given the size of OLA it would not have been a job for someone at the beginning of his career.It seems as though the US-Canadian Ordinariate staffed up without realistic ideas of where to put its new hires. Thus the old boys kept around in make-work jobs and sinecures. To tell the truth, I'd want to have a better idea of what Bp Lopes had in mind for these guys before I made more than a token donation to the Bishop's Appeal. (For now, we think it's a better bet to send our money to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.)
Pray for Bp Lopes and the US-Canadian Ordinariate.
