The usual explanation for the structure of the Ordinariates is that the personal prelature protects and promotes the existence of "Anglican Use" parishes in a way that the Pastoral Provision was unable to do in the US. It is true that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles rejected the idea of a PP parish within its boundaries, despite significant interest there, and perhaps that is a sufficient argument. The other problem situation pointed to is that of St Mary the Virgin, Las Vegas, which closed when the local bishop declined to appoint a replacement for the departing Fr Clark Tea.I'm not sure if enough attention has been paid to why some bishops have resisted either Pastoral Provision or OCSP parishes. Let's note, for instance, Bp Matano of Rochester seems to have had reservations about Fr Catania, although he is celibate but not formed in a Catholic seminary, while he's apparently approved a new priest for the Rochester group who is both celibate and has spent time in a Catholic seminary. (This, by the way, might also suggest that he was more fully vetted by vocation directors while there.)At least two other parishes---St Margaret of Scotland, Austin and Good Shepherd, Columbia---were suppressed. But can the OCSP prevent similar occurrences? Three OCSP groups folded when their parochial administrators relocated. Two others underwent specious "mergers" with not very conveniently located communities. Two have, like Good Shepherd, Columbia, withered away for lack of interest. And at least a dozen more are vulnerable owing to being led by an aging priest who is unlikely to find anyone to replace him when he retires.
With the exception of those leading the full parishes, younger clergy must supplement any stipend the OSCP group can offer with diocesan employment---in other words, they will depend on the goodwill of the local diocesan which the establishment of a personal prelature was supposed to make irrelevant. We recall that Fr Catania had to leave St Alban's, Rochester because the local bishop was unwilling to provide him with a diocesan appointment or even a place to live.
If I were a diocesan bishop, or a diocesan auxiliary, or a diocesan vocation director who had the auxiliary's ear, I might have very similar reservations about bringing in an Anglican, no matter how "respectable", who had not been through a Catholic vocation process, no matter what. We need refer only to the examples of Frs Phillips, Kenyon, and Reese for support of such cautious views.
We're also back to the question of Fr Phillips and why some observers have asked how he survived so long in the Archdiocese of San Antonio despite what appear to have been conflicts of long standing with the chancery there. I've suggested before that Phillips had Cardinal Law's protection, though I would go father and suggest that Msgr Stetson, who was Law's secretary for much of this time in Law's capacity as Delegate for the Pastoral Provision, was also close to Abp Gomez when Gomez was in San Antonio.
It would not surprise me if some of the resistance by Cardinals Manning and Mahony to admitting St Mary of the Angels under the Pastoral Provision came, not just from suspicion of how the parish itself would fare under Catholic authority, but from concerns that, if it created disciplinary issues for the archdiocese (as OLA did), it could become an occasion for Cardinal Law to interfere in Los Angeles's internal affairs as well. I'm increasingly of the view that diocesan bishops who resist either the Pastoral Provision or the OCSP are doing it less on grounds of prejudice than on grounds of wanting to avoid outside meddling in diocesan affairs on petty issues.
As best we can determine, Bp Barnes of San Bernardino did in fact resist the establishment of the Murrieta group, and the fact that it had to start in a storefront suggests that he was unwilling to allow diocesan facilities to be used for it.
Again, we're looking at the OCSP as a personal prelature that fosters an "alternate universe" Catholicism, in which standards for ordination are clearly relaxed and lay people of no particular qualification or training, like Mr Coulombe and Mrs Gyapong, can replace diocesan catechists and interpret the "Anglican patrimony" to modify Catholic doctrine as they please. This is certainly a potential reason why a small but vocal number of cradle Catholics seem drawn to the OCSP -- there's an equivalent appeal to that of Anglo-Catholicism, the ability to insist they're really Catholic in a pre-Conciliar way, without the need to know Latin well enough to appreciate an EF mass, or indeed the need to register at a real parish.
I simply don't know what other dues they may feel they don't need to pay, but I assume there's always something.
