The St Anselm Group Greenville, SC

As we saw yesterday, the St Anselm group in Greenville, SC was an early instance of the recognition that the Anglicanorum coetibus model, existing Anglican parishes coming into a Catholic personal prelature as groups with their clergy, would not prove viable. Instead, new "gathered" groups of interested parties, whether unreceived Anglicans, cradle Catholics, or anyone else, would gather during off hours at a diocesan parish for an Anglican-rite liturgy.

A July 2013 Facebook letter to the group from Fr Chalmers outlines the difficulties this model presented:

The bottom line, it seems to me, was that there wasn't enough focus among the group as it developed to form a coherent community, and it turned into a coffee hour-with-morning prayer between OF masses on Sunday mornings.

Another interpretation would be that the group as it existed wasn't justifying a dedicated priest -- I note that Fr Chalmers also celebrated the 9:00 Sunday OF mass. Yet another inference would be that Anglicanorum coetibus had, within a short time of its promulgation, become primarily a justification for giving marginal Anglican clergy jobs in Catholic dioceses, laity of any flavor a distant secondary factor.

A story on the Ordinariate's own site on Fr Evan Simington's journey to seminary during this period gives additional insight into this situation:

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter had a thriving Catholic community [in Greenville]. And it was simply where he felt called to be.

“It was a critical step in faith,” the 29-year-old said of his move, which opened the way for his reception into the Catholic Church. Simington was received into the Ordinariate at St. Anselm’s, the Ordinariate’s community in Greenville, in October 2014.

He found work as a pastoral associate at Prince of Peace — a Catholic parish in the Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina — until this summer, when he packed up his truck once again to start a new leg of his journey.

The strong implication is that Simington came to Greenville looking for clergy work, and he found it via the ordinariate, though throughout the history of the St Anselm group, it lacked the size and focus to justify any full-time effort by anyone. As we saw yesterday, Fr Chalmers left Greenville in 2015 for Birmingham, where any involvement by him with ordinariate laity to date has been minimal. Fr Jonathan Duncan took over the St Anselm group at that time.

According to my regular correspondent,

After Fr Duncan took over, there was a DW mass every Wednesday evening at St Mary's, and a Sunday evensong. In November 2016 Fr Duncan began celebrating a DW Sunday morning mass at the chapel of St Joseph's School, where he was the chaplain. Apparently 45 adults and children attended the first one. Fr Duncan is now an Assisting Priest at St Mary, Greenville in addition to his job as school,chaplain.

My regular correspondent sums up the lack of focus and scheduling problems at St Anselm's as follows:

Fr Chalmers alludes to [the mission to develop the Anglican patrimony] in his third paragraph but how this will be fulfilled by Coffee Hour and Adult Sunday School is unclear. He does include something he calls "the Morning Office so vital to the Anglican tradition" by which I presume he means Morning Prayer. With only 55 minutes at their disposal, this program seems over-ambitious.

Fr Duncan added a Wednesday evening DW mass and Sunday Evensong, but for families with children probably neither of these were very convenient. So back to the idea of a Sunday mass. But once it was moved out of St Mary's to the basement chapel at the school it ceased to be a draw, even to former Anglicans. The whole thing illustrates some fundamental problems with AC.

I posted on the group's eventual closure on January 30, 2018. My regular correspondent summarized the situation at the time:

Its members have apparently drifted away to parishes with children's programs and the other sorts of parish activity which a small group with no weekday meeting space could never offer. In these groups the priest is active in the local dioceses; it is lay demand which has disappeared.

Question: In this and other cases, the North American ordinariate has provided married former Anglican priests primarily for diocesan work. How does it differ from the Pastoral Provision? What actual function does it serve, outside of probably fewer than a dozen viable parishes? Could those parishes be folded into dioceses and the function of forming former Anglican priests be taken over fully by the Pastoral Provision?