Who is coming forward for ordination in the OCSP? The two men ordained this June seem typical. One was a marginal TEC clergyman, recently ordained in that denomination, who couldn't find a real TEC job. There is a short description of his path to ordination here. The other is, I believe, a former APA clergyman who was ordained to the diaconate October 30, 2018 at Christ the King, Towson. [This was erroneously reported as an ordination to the priesthood in the St Luke's newsletter at the time, par for the ordinariate course.] There is some vague idea that he will serve the three MD parishes/communities but there is nothing else about him on the net. I assume he is some old pal of Fr Meeks.Besides the routine misreporting in ordinariate publications, it's more disturbing that Robert Kirk may as well be an Albanian sleeper agent for all anyone can find of him on the web. OCSP ordinands usually have some sort of paper trail: they appear in seminary class news, presiding over weddings and funerals as Anglicans, in parish newsletters welcoming them as new curates. We simply have no record of Mr Robert Chapman Kirk anywhere -- there isn't even a Robert Chapman Kirk on Google who is a Ford dealer in Boise. Just nothing besides a deceased one on Ancestry.com.
So this raises an entirely reasonable question: does now-Fr Kirk have an MDiv? Records of seminary graduation and subsequent Anglican ordinations do normally turn up. Not in his case. Aren't we entitled to know more about Fr Kirk? And let's get real, it's the stealth candidates with no MDiv who go bad within a few years of their ordination in the OCSP.
Now-Fr Gregory Blake Tipton's background has in fact been discussed on this blog here. Although he was ordained in his local diocese of The Episcopal Church with several others in a cohort that year, unlike most TEC ordinands, who typically aren't ordained unless they already have a parish assignment, he drifted in a series of token jobs like cleaning out a campus Episcopal center before he focused on putting one of those tiny OCSP Potemkin groups together as a Plan B.
What we've found already is that men without clear direction and without good personal skill sets have a good chance of flame-out several years down the road in the OCSP. A visitor commented:
Though the Ordinariate is “like” a diocese, it is a guest of the diocese. Ordinariate priests are allowed to function as a “favor” to the Ordinariate. A bishop can withdraw faculties of Ordinariate priests in his diocese just as easily as he can religious order priests or priests from other diocese.I think Houston is beginning to build a track record of sending men out into dioceses who haven't been adequately formed or even vetted and then letting the local bishop take the heat for the inevitable result. A visitor draws an analogy by suggesting Houston may not know what's in the package:
I liken this to a person who needs a couch badly but has very little money. The person goes to a thrift store and buys a decent little used couch. Unfortunately, before the couch was donated to the thrift store, it was stored in a garage, where unbeknownst to anyone, a group of spiders crawled into the frame and laid about a billion eggs. When the guy brings the couch home from the thrift store, he is satisfied it looks good and is comfortable. Then, about a month later, he is watching TV and is attacked by all these fresh hatched spiders.The analogy here isn't fully apt. It speaks of someone buying a couch to watch his own TV shows -- but actually, a better parallel might be a guy who runs a business selling furniture to motels. He cuts corners by going to a thrift store. The baby spiders aren't coming out while he watches Live PD at home, they come out at motels in Indianapolis, St Paul, and Calgary, and angry guests are storming the motel office.Should Bishop Lopes et. al. be punished for not knowing there were spiders in the sofa? Probably not. But how much sympathy will he get if he goes to a thrift store and buys an upholstered chair and doesn’t spray it/check it for spiders this time? Bishop Lopes is in danger of forfeiting his very few remaining sympathy points.
The question I have is whether Bp Lopes is spraying his thrift store chairs and checking them for spiders, when he already knows the couches and chairs from that particular thrift store are coming back with spider eggs. Archbishops in St Paul and Indianapolis have already learned about the spider eggs. My regular correspondent comments,
Fr Kramer may be boasting about three or four queries a week but in fact the ordinations in the OCSP are failing to keep pace with deaths, retirements, and of course, laicisations. At the moment there is still considerable redundancy---OCSP priests who have never had an Ordinariate assignment---but with the exception of military chaplains Bp Lopes seems not to be continuing Msgr Steenson's practice in this regard. So I think the ranks are thinning, although I cannot feel confident that there is any corresponding improvement in quality.
