The provision provides a way for individuals to become priests in territorial dioceses, even after Pope Benedict XVI's apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus established the Personal Ordinariates, a non-diocesan mechanism for former Anglicans to join the Church.
[1] Since at least the early 1950s, former Anglican, Lutheran and other clergy who join the Catholic Church have been granted exceptions to the norm of celibacy, in a practice mentioned in Pope Paul VI's encyclical Sacerdotalis caelibatus of 1967.
[3] The decision of the Holy See was officially communicated in a letter of 22 July 1980 from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the President of the United States episcopal conference, who published it on 20 August 1980.
The provision was authorized by Pope John Paul II in 1980 and announced in 1981,[4] in response to requests from former United States Episcopalians and members of the Continuing Anglican movement.
[3] The Vatican erected the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a jurisdiction canonically equivalent to a diocese, for former Anglicans in the United States and Canada on 1 January 2012,[6] and appointed then-Rev.
Jeffrey N. Steenson, a married priest ordained under the pastoral provision who formerly had served as the Bishop of the Rio Grande in The Episcopal Church, as the first "ordinary" of this jurisdiction, subsequently naming him an apostolic protonotary (the highest rank of monsignor).
As of late 2017, only one chaplaincy in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston established under the Pastoral Provision remains in diocesan jurisdiction,[7] after the parish in San Antonio was transferred to the Ordinariate.