The June 12 Tampa Bay Post And More On Mayer's Resume

A very helpful visitor located at least a version of the deleted June 12, 2017 post regarding Mr Mayer and the Tampa Bay group in the Wayback Machine. I believe this may be a later draft, as the initial one I saw seems to have mentioned Bp Parkes by name, but in any case, any reference to it was subsequently deleted completely.

While the original request was that I delete that post, I'm concerned that the information in it now tends to raise questions about Mr Mayer's conflicting stories about his ride on the denominational carousel, his overall sincerity, and his generally unstable career. Recall that elsewhere, he portrayed himself as a Pastoral Provision candidate in the Diocese of St Petersburg. But the version we see here makes no mention of this:

Moving to Continue Discernment

Dear Friends,

Thank you for coming out to our evensong and potluck service on June 4, 2017. The attendance and support was greater than I expected and I believe that seeds were planted, that there might be an Ordinariate parish established in the Tampa Bay area at some point in the future.

I recently learned that in order for me to continue my discernment of a vocation to priesthood within the Ordinariate, I will need to relocate. At the same time, my present employment is scheduled to end this calendar year. It thus becomes essential that I redirect my energies, and so I will not be continuing to develop a local Ordinariate community.

We will not offer evening prayer on July 16 or August 13.

I deeply appreciate your encouragement over recent weeks. Please keep my family and me in your prayers, and join me in praying for the success of the evangelizing mission of the Ordinariate across North America, and for a continued appreciation of the unity in diversity that the Ordinariate offers our Church.

Yours in Jesus and Mary,
Philip Mayer

So what we learn that's new here is that his "present employment is scheduled to end this calendar year". Let's put this in the context of what we've learned from his accounts of his career elsewhere: from 2011 to 2017, by his version, he was a Pastoral Provision candidate for the priesthood in the Diocese of St Petersburg, attending the Boynton Beach seminary and working in various diocesan jobs to support his family. But Pastoral Provision formation is normally, we've learned, a two-year process. I already thought it was unusual that he should be spending six years at it.

I've got to surmise that the Diocese of St Petersburg also began to think this was unusual. After watching the video I linked yesterday, I even wonder if, past a certain point, the diocese simply never took him seriously, and may have decided the merciful thing to do would be finally to cut him loose, end the provisional employment arrangements with generous notice (which I think is implied in his post), and urge him to find a line of work to which he was more clearly suited.

Instead, having failed at the TEC priesthood, he appears also not to have been deemed suitable for the Pastoral Provision -- and I've got to raise the possibility that he must have been regarded as rather a sad case by the authorities in the diocese. But no matter, Houston's standards are even lower! He didn't work out after six years of trying to be a Pastoral Provision priest, but the OCSP is going to ordain him after little more than a year and send him to rescue a failing mission, exactly the sort of job that his track record says he won't succeed at.

Having watched the video, I'd say that one step he might have taken could have been to lose the scraggly beard and weird shoes, but I would guess that the vocation directors in St Petersburg realized the problems were deeper than that. But I'm also seriously concerned that the problems in Houston lie deeper than Mr Mayer.