"More Priests Than People"

This was the subject line of an e-mail I received from a visitor yesterday. He continued,

I happened to attend mass at Notre Dame, Kerrville, TX this past Saturday and found that it was the last mass weekend for the long-time pastor there.

His replacement is an “on-loan” OCSP priest.

A lot of interesting stuff in the introduction, written by the man whom Fr. Wagner is replacing.

The point that clearly grabbed my visitor was this (emphasis mine):

Because the Archbishop wishes me to continue working on several formation teams (for priests, deacons, and laity) as well as serving at St. Peter Upon the Water, and because there are more priests than people in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, Archbishop Gustavo and Bishop Lopes have made an agreement to bring Father David Wagner and his family to Notre Dame Catholic Church and School.

This brings up what I would call the true supply-side issue in the Anglican and Ordinariate priesthoods. Yesterday's post contained some remarks on a Facebook page that, frankly, get this issue completely wrong:

Many Protestants, especially those of liturgical denominations, have felt abandoned by certain factions within their denomination's leadership that hav pursued a variety of controversial agendas not viewd as consistent with historic Christianity.

So of course, Ordinariate parishes on three continents are overflowing with new Catholics joyous at Rome's gracious offer contained in Anglicanorum coetibus -- and petitions for new groups-in-formation are flooding in. Sorry, if the above were the case, we'd see those results. We aren't. Why not?

The supply side is the priests. There's no shortage of priests, either in Anglican denominations or in the first cohort of Ordinariate ordinations. It's worth pointing out that, as Douglas Bess noted in his invaluable Divided We Stand, disaffection with The Episcopal Church's political stances dates at least from 1960, well before women's ordination or the new prayer book -- but even Bess neglects to mention that TEC had begun departing from historic Christian teaching on birth control and divorce-and-remarriage well before then.

We might see these developments at least partly as causes of the widespread and long-term decline in church attendance that began in the 1950s, particularly in main line Protestant denominations like TEC. But wait -- there has never been any equivalent decline in Episcopal seminary enrollment! If anything, it's increased! The result has been an ever-increasing surplus of Episcopal candidates for the priesthood, and indeed, Episcopal priests, which the ordination of women and openly gay men has only exacerbated.

Obviously this is a microcosm of the educational crisis confronting Western culture: university and professional education creates an oversized quasi-elite class that is in considerable measure unemployable. Let's look at Fr Wagner's background as outlined in the link my visitor sent me:

Born on March 28, 1958, in Ravenna, Ohio, and baptized that April, he lived in Ohio before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1978, assigned in Albuquerque, N.M., and Germany. In 1988 he graduated from the University of New Mexico with a BA in Philosophy, then studied Library Science. From 1994-1996 Father David studied at Yale Divinity School, graduating with the degree of Master of Arts in Religion. After marrying Carol Anne Castillo from Albuquerque that same year, they worked in Chicago while Father David continued studies at Dominican University there. . . . In 2002 Father David responded to the interior call to ministry, entering the Episcopal Seminary in Nashotah, Wisconsin, and finishing his studies with a Master of Divinity degree. He was ordained an Episcopal priest on June 12, 2005.

So let's see, undergraduate studies in philosophy and library science which likely qualified him to work flipping burgers. I assume his professors in New Mexico nevertheless thought well enough of him to get him admitted to Yale Divinity, but that degree doesn't seem to have led to much more, so next he went to another elite school, Nashotah House, though while he was ordained an Episcopal priest, presumably due to the huge oversupply of candidates we have no record here of a pastoral assignment.

So, perhaps in hope of better opportunities with women and openly gay men out of the applicant pool, he became Catholic and was part of the initial contingent fast-tracked into ordination under Anglicanorum coetibus (although he appears to be among the dozens who, in apparent contravention to stated policy, came in without a group in formation). The end result is an observation from a diocesan priest that, with more priests than people, Bp Lopes had to find something to do with the guy.

This has crystallized other thoughts for me on what our elites are about (and make no mistake, degrees from Yale and Nashotah House make this a story about elites, or at least elite-wannabes). More to come -- but isn't it strange that the Founder of this enterprise caused consternation precisely by not aligning himself with all the right people?

UPDATE: My regular correspondent reports,

Fr Wagner has been ministering to St Gilbert's, Boerne,TX, an OCSP group with no web presence. I think it was set up by Fr Mark Cannady, now retired, who lives in Boerne and was a priest in the Episcopal diocese of Fort Worth, one of six ordained together in 2012. St Gilbert's does seem to have been a bit of a make-work project for both men. I gather from the bulletin of the host church (St Peter's, Boerne) that the St Gilbert's group will be moving to, yes, Kerrville. Since this is 35 miles away the convenience of the congregation, if any, does not seem to be a big issue.

I assume that moving the Bourne group to Kerrville would be part of trying to find more meaningful employment for Fr Wagner.