A Couple More Puzzles

A visitor notes,

Regarding the youngest priests in the OCSP, Fr. Wagner, Kerrville, is about 58, and is on loan to the archdiocese as pastor of the mid-size Norte Dame parish. Fr. Joshua Whitfield, Dallas, is a young man who was ordained through the OCSP and serves as administrator of diocesan parish St. Rita, Dallas. I don't know what the "loan" arrangement there is. He is an occasional columnist for the Dallas Morning News and seems to be that paper's "go-to guy" on topics Catholic. I don't find his writing particularly enjoyable, it being overly pedantic and dense, but he gets a lot of inches with it. He was pastor of SMV briefly after retirement of Fr. Hawkins and apparently was not happy there.

So there you have two young OCSP priests with families serving not in the OCSP but in large diocesan parishes. How come, if a perceived issue is lack of dynamic pastoring?

The answer is simple: the two priests are expecting to be paid, but the OCSP can't offer them paid positions. I would say that even if they were willing to relocate with their families, they still couldn't be paid, at least not in OCSP parishes. This is a money problem, not a family relocation problem.

But this brings up another issue that Bp Lopes mentioned in his Vienna lecture: a disadvantage of the Pastoral Provision was that it was too easy for a diocesan bishop to redirect a PP priest to exclusively diocesan work. But here we have young and presumably dynamic OCSP priests being redirected to diocesan work, and I would say that this is due exclusively to a structural defect in the OCSP, viz, it can pay only a handful of priests.

UPDATE: My regular correspondent adds a slight correction:

Fr Whitfield was one of the "Fort Worth Six," along with Chuck Hough père et fils, ordained by Bp Vann in 2012 but he has always identified himself as PP. He is not on my list of active OCSP clergy, although some priests in military chaplaincy or diocesan ministry are (Frs Sherbourne and Rojas, for example) So I think he has been excardinated. Presumably the Anglican Patrimony doesn't interest him much. In Fr Wagner's case I think the diocesan assignment is more clearly one of financial necessity.

But this doesn't change my basic point, which is that there is little practical distinction between how married Anglican priests are used between the Pastoral Provision and the OCSP, especially if the canonical difference is externally indistinguishable. And this also reinforces my point that Anglicanorum coetibus did not resolve the problem, pace Bp Lopes.

My regular correspondent points again to the related actuarial and demographic issues:

Fragility seems to come in two forms in the OCSP. There are groups which have semi-respectable numbers and/or a building, but lack the resources to support a new priest when their current retiree retires again. St Anselm's, Rochester is currently in this situation. In a small town or city it may be difficult for a priest to find a second position which will provide him with a stipend but still leave him the time needed to minister to the OCSP group. Even where this arrangement is possible, of course, it does not seem conducive to growth. Corpus Christi, Charleston; St Anselm's Greenville; Our Lady of Hope, Kansas City are some examples of groups which share a pastor with a diocesan parish or school and seem to be merely staying afloat.

But even this may not be on in Payson, AZ. Then there are the truly tiny groups, barely in the double digits. Some of them, like St Augustine's, as you noted, and Our Lady of Walsingham, Maple Ridge, are in or near large population centres but just don't seem to have attracted any new members. It is easier for these groups to find someone---a sympathetic local diocesan priest, say---to officiate at a mass but this is not the kind of leadership which will build the community to the point where it can renew itself when key members disappear. I would estimate that half of the OCSP groups could close in the next five years because they are in one or other of these fragile groups.

So there is a confluence of related problems: younger married priests saw Anglicanorum coetibus as a way to bypass the hiring practices of TEC, where women and openly gay ordinands were competing in the applicant pool for steadily diminishing clerical slots. Effectively opportunists, they were ordained into a jurisdiction that almost immediately found itself in surplus and had to scramble to find them any opportunities at all -- but these were diocesan, in effect no different from the very situation Bp Lopes outlined that the CDF wanted to avoid. The problem wasn't solved!

But what's the problem? The problem is that even within five years of the OCSP's erection, there's not enough interest among former Anglicans even to maintain the 40-odd entities that were received in the first waves. It's not as though those OCSP priests in diocesan work can just wait a few years for new parishes to emerge in, say, Boise, Saskatoon, or Albuquerque (or Atlanta, Memphis, or Pittsburgh). The problem for Bp Lopes is going to be how to manage the situation when, as my regular correspondent points out, possibly half the remaining OCSP groups fade away in another five years.

I don't think this is an unreasonable projection. I would certainly be interested to hear realistic strategies for reversing the situation, but even Bp Lopes's Vienna lecture is explaining a problem the CDF saw in the 1980s and 90s, and it's not looking at the practical outcome in the 2010s. A visibly new strategy will be the only way to avoid this. I don't know what it might be, but then I'm not a bishop.