Saturday, April 29, 2017

New Ordinations And Seminarians

On page 2 of the OCSP 2016 Year in Review it is noted that as of December 2016 there were 14 men in some formal stage of preparation for ordination in the OCSP. Therre were four celibate candidates in seminary. This leaves ten others. My regular correspondent tells me "Fr Perkins mentioned '10 or 11' former clergy in the pre-ordination program recently. Jonathan Erdman in Louisville has just been ordained deacon and will be ordained priest in June. Ed Wills will be ordained deacon in August. So there are another eight or nine."

Very little seems to be known about who these men are. There seems to be an assumption that most are married with families. It seems to me that we have the continued problem that Anglicanorum coetibus was originally intended to bring Anglicans into the Church as groups of both laity and clergy, but it appears that a new cohort of priests is in the pipeline without groups attached. But we're also talking about 10 or more priests who would have a hard time relocating, and if there are currently fewer than 10 parishes total that can pay a priest, potential openings for any of the new ones would seem to be problematic.

A month ago, my regular correspondent noted:

Bp Lopes will be ordaining three men to the priesthood this summer: Evan Simington, the "first seminarian" who was given major coverage in the now-defunct, apparently, Ordinariate Observer; Adrian Martens, who has been a parish deacon at St John the Evangelist, Calgary since 2014; and Jonathan Erdman, a former Episcopalian clergyman who entered the Church in December 2015 and who has gathered the small Community of Our Lady and St John in Louisville, KY. He [has just been] ordained to the diaconate. Only Mr Simington, the celibate candidate, would appear to have any potential to be moved to a community in need of a priest. The fact that Jonathan Erdman has been fast-tracked suggests that the others do not have even the nucleus of an OCSP community, nor are they potentially available to fill imminent vacancies in Toronto or Payson, AZ.
But add to this my correspondent's entirely reasonable projection that as many as half the OCSP groups will fold within five years. Unless Bp Lopes has ideas for radically renewing the OCSP and expanding it, it's difficult to see where this is headed.