What irritated me from his YouTube, titled Hollywood-style "My Movie", is that he talks down. I don't like priests who talk down. I left our original Catholic parish because of the "Happy Birthday, Jesus" routine there, but our current parish has none of that, and the priests treat us as intelligent adults. By doing so, they seem to be effective fundraisers, among many other things.
But my regular correspondent has brought up other troubling issues. A post here on September 24, 2017 outlined what appeared to have been ordinariate policy on ordinations going forward:
The intention is that "transitional" deacons will remain so for close to a year, although I note that Fr Erdman had been a deacon for only two months when he was ordained a priest this past June. , , , The OCSP now has an upper age limit of 55 for new candidates (for the priesthood.However, the theme of the post was the number of exceptions that take place to these putative policies. There were exceptions then, and there are exceptions now. Fr Wooten is 57, when the upper age limit had been set at 55, and in addition, my regular correspondent tells me he was ordained deacon May 21, 2020. He will be ordained priest during the OCSP Clergy Conference October 19-22, 2020. But we see in the YouTube that he's already wearing full clericals and talking down as if he'd been at this for 30 years.
Clearly something's up. I'd already surmised that the million-dollar gift was not the surprise Fr-designate Aw Shucks says it is -- what million-dollar gift is a big surprise? Nor are they granted out of the blue after a couple of phone calls and a "little proposal", as Fr-designate Aw Shucks puts it.
Given the apparent lack of transparency here, my institutional instincts, honed by years in academic, corporate, and government bureaucracies, suggest to me that the gift and Fr-designate Aw Shucks came as a package. My regular correspondent observes,
Rereading Fr Stainbrook’s letter to the members of SJV, Cleburne which you linked on Friday it seems clear that the intention was always to fast track his ordination to the priesthood—-Fr S refers to Fr Kennedy as assisting in the “short hiatus between (soon to be) Father Wooten’s appointment as your Pastor [July 1] and his Priesting.” Mr Wooten converted in 2017, I believe. Apparently he resigned from Good Shepherd, Wichita Falls in 2015. Fr Stainbrook describes him as in preparation for his ordination “since that time” but I think that statement cannot be taken at face value.The other details of his career suggest he'd been a member of the Nashotah House-Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clique that dates from the founding of the North American ordinariate and continues in the person of the feckless Fr Perkins and other clergy. This does not strike me as reassuring for the success of this project.
But hey, if the same old thing hasn't worked up to now, may as well try it again, right?
