It is Time To Close All the Seminaries - Part 2

Jesus Christ spent over three years with his apostles teaching them what it means to truly love and serve God and His people.  He taught them how to be evangelizers in the fullest sense of the word, not being afraid to get down in the dirt with people in order to lift them up.

Our Lord did this by walking and living among the people, going into their homes, going out among the outcasts, the lepers, the rejects of society.  He laughed with the people and He cried with them. He healed them and even brought them back from the dead.  Finally, He died for them.

But since the time of the Reformation, the Church has decided that the best way to prepare men for the priesthood, for a life of serving God and His Church, is by shutting them away in buildings, regimenting their lives, and teaching them history and philosophy.  Seminarians may occasionally venture out among the people, but it is only on the rare occasion.

To use the words of Pope Francis, our seminarians never get the smell of the sheep on them.

As I discussed in my previous post, seminarians live in an artificial environment, interacting only with each other, never learning how to form deep, meaningful mature relationships with people outside of the seminary.

They are given a great academic education, but there are no classes in the ways of day-to-day living. There are no classes to teach seminarians how to deal with the challenges and pain faced by the laity whom they are supposedly being trained to serve.

This kind of training would never work in the military. When young people join the military, their first step is boot camp. There they learn how to be soldiers. Those in boot camp go through grueling physical training and then are put in combat situations in order to learn how to fight and defend themselves against the enemy. They engage in war games using live ammunition. These war games are as real as the military can make it without actually sending the soldiers to war.

Young men go to seminary to learn how to serve the people of God. But unlike men learning how to be soldiers in the military, seminarians spend very little time in real life situations.  Seminarians rarely venture out among the people whom they will one day serve. The vast, vast majority of their time is spent in the artificial environment of the classroom and with each other, completely isolated from the real world that the rest of us live in.

This is like trying to train a solider by only giving him an occasional brief glimpse of the cold realities of war. How prepared do you think he will be for real combat?

An article from The Arlington Catholic Herald gives an idea of the typical day in the life of a seminarian, this one being at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio. 

These seminarians start their day at 6:45 with morning prayer and Mass. Certainly nothing wrong with that. I try to do the same thing myself.

After that, it is all about academia:

Daniel Rice is one of the diocesan seminarians who came to seminary right after high school. He is now in his third year of college, studying philosophy. After one more year in the college he will have four more years of theology before he can be called to orders.

According to Rice, the seminary's class scheduling process is very similar to other colleges.

"At the beginning of each semester we schedule classes," said Rice. "Twelve credit hours, almost always more."

Instead of filling up their schedules with the typical general education courses, seminarians such as Rice take classes in the celebration of Christian mystery, contemporary philosophy, metaphysics, psychology and sacred music, with a directed independent study session in Greek before or after lunch.

I'm all for a good education, but this is beyond ridiculous.  To prepare for a life of service, these young men spend seven years sitting in classrooms studying philosophy and theology.  Just how much philosophy, metaphysics and "directed study session in Greek" is used by the average diocesan priest?

Doesn't exactly mirror the way in which Christ taught his disciples, does it?

But this article tells us that seminarian life is not all academics.  These seminarians do have "works of service" they perform:

On Thursdays, seminarians participate in various works of service.

"The whole goal of formation is pastoral service, so once a week in order to prepare ourselves for the ministry of the priesthood we have apostolic assignments," said Rice.

Some of the seminarians teach RCIA, others teach high school religion. Rice volunteers at the Heinzerling Foundation, which is a home for severely disabled people, some of whom cannot walk or communicate at all. Rice enjoys visiting the residents and always has a book ready to read to them.

"I really enjoy it, and mostly we are not actively preaching the word of God in words," said Rice. "It is more of a ministry of presence."

This is not exactly going out into a colony of lepers or ministering to prostitutes as Our Lord did with his disciples.

Can you imagine training soldiers for war by having them sit in a classroom 95% of the time and the remaining 5% of the time giving them a brief glimpse of war?!  These men would be good for nothing but target practice for the enemy.

So what do the seminarians do when they are not in class or "pastoral service"?

In addition to their studies, the Josephinum encourages the men to make time for extracurricular activities with their classmates. The seminary is fully equipped for a variety of indoor and outdoor activities. A full indoor basketball court can be converted into an indoor soccer field when it rains, and there is a four-lane bowling alley underneath the gym, which seminarian Tony Bennett manages. According to Bennett, the alley is a very popular pastime on weekends. The school only recently installed the machines to automatically replace the pins. Previously, the pins would be set up by a few brave seminarians with quick reflexes to dodge the occasional flying pin or ball.

"Some would say the new machines took half the fun out of the whole experience," laughed Bennett.

When the weather does cooperate, seminarians play baseball, football, soccer or the ever-popular Ultimate Frisbee.

When Bennett is not manning the bowling lanes under the gym, he can be found fishing with fellow seminarian Jordan Willard at nearby Lake George. The lake is one of many quiet spots on the 78-acre property the men can use for recreation as well as personal prayer.

Certainly I would never deny young men the chance to engage in leisure activities.  We all need time to unwind.

But these men are suppose to be preparing to become servants of the Church.  They are going to go out into the world representing Jesus Christ.  They are suppose to be as ready to die for the Church as our Savior was.

They are never going to get to that point in their lives through bowling, baseball or Ultimate Frisbee.  And in all of these activities, they are still living apart from the rest of the world which they are suppose to be serving.  Their only personal interactions are with each other.

And that leads to another huge problem.

"The brotherhood is very strong here," said James Waalkes, a first-year theology student from the diocese. "There is a real unity of purpose, and hopefully there is a union of mind and will in Our Lord for the pursuit of holiness and the salvation of souls."

So these seminarians are building very strong bonds with each other, apart from the rest of the world. And yet this naive young man still believes that somehow this will translate into "the pursuit of holiness and the salvation of souls."

We have seen exactly what this "brotherhood" leads to: covering up for each other.

The duty of a priest is not to form strong bonds with other priests and take care of each other.  They are here to serve Jesus Christ and His Church.  The only way they will truly learn this is by getting out into the real world into the midst of the sheep and getting the smell of the sheep on them.

That sure ain't happening in the seminaries.

This article from The Arlington Catholic Herald tries to paint a very idyllic picture. There is no mention of the problem of homosexuality in the seminaries.

And it is a very real problem.

I am not a fan of Rod Dreher, but he reported on the experiences of a young gay man in seminary. Here the young man talks about entering seminary:

It was summer after a successful first year of college. I had planned on joining a fraternity in the fall and had a social and academic life that was flourishing, but I was compelled to put it aside to explore the priesthood.

A well connected priest whom I met on the bus en route to Canada and lived near me seemed to simply snap his fingers, and with very little questioning, an MMPI test given to me to fill out at home. A therapist asked what my sexual orientation was (I said straight), and within two short months I was enrolled in a small house of formation for undergraduate men pursuing the priesthood.

. . .

I should be clear that this seminary experience on the outside had every appearance of orthodoxy, and even of traditionalism. This was not a place that promoted homosexuality whatsoever. In fact on paper, we were led to come down very hard on “liberalism” and anything of the like. We scoffed at guitar masses and nuns without habits. We would pass around books like Goodbye, Good Men, which chalked up the low numbers in seminaries to devout traditional men being turned away by so-called liberals and nuns who’d supposedly hijacked seminaries.

This seminary was nothing of the sort. It was an old boys’ club, complete with all the gin (usually scotch) and lace and incense one could imagine, and a love for Latin. Add a penchant for dressing up statues of the Virgin of Fatima with sumptuous fabrics and tiaras, too. In a frat house, there might be Victoria’s Secret catalogues strewn about. At the seminary, it was vestment and liturgical furnishing catalogs.

It was also an atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy. Nothing quite seemed clear, transparent, or holistic. It felt like acting school. The ethos, speech, and behavior that permeated the environment did not match the rather staunch vintage-like Catholic culture we were being trained to live and promote.

One seminarian openly went by a woman’s name as an alter ego. “She” would come out with some choice words over bad choices in liturgical music, bad weather, or complaints about our seminary chef.

There were seminarians in their late twenties who had uncomfortably close friendships with high school boys.

Half-drunk priest guests would be leaving the bishop’s and clergy quarters at the crack of dawn while I was sitting in the refectory eating cereal, usually unable to sleep.

I remember feeling that there was an awful lot of overly casual familiarity between many of the senior priests and monsignors and the well-connected seminarians. Trips, stipends, lots of scotch, and lots of smoking.

In what other world does a young man walk out of high school and into a social life almost exclusively with other men three times his age?

There is much more to this article with a lot of very gross stories of sex between the seminarians and priests.  But is this really surprising?  These young men are all thrown together and isolated from the outside world.  The problem is, men don't stop being sexual when they enter seminary.  They still feel the very same temptations and desires they felt in the "real" world.

But maybe if these men were actually out in the real world, serving the people, working in soup kitchens, volunteering in homeless shelters, visiting prisons, etc., they wouldn't have the time or energy to cater so freely to their sexual appetites.  If they went out in the world and looked for Jesus Christ in the people they are serving, maybe they would be more attuned to the Holy Spirit than to the demonic spirit they seem to be serving.

The former seminarian made an interesting statement to Rod Dreher:

The cliques that form in these so called lavender palaces are founded on a deep fear of being found out, and those who are in these circles — the ones I’ve encountered being the most “conservative” and “traditional” you could imagine — will go to any length at all to remain in the shadows.

They aren’t interested in genuine intimate friendships and healthy relationships outside of their circles, even with family members, who often are among those they are most trying to hide from. They will often dabble in a spiritual book or go to confession someplace far away where they won’t be recognized, as a way to sort of “reset” when they start feeling a little dirty — and then they do it all over again. It looks very much like a typical scene from a mafia movie with an underlying life of scandal and dishonesty often veiled with “family values” or in the case of the priesthood, traditionalism.

This seminarian also tells us that this problem among priests crosses ideological lines:

There are sick, broken, power hungry, scared men on both sides of the “liberal/traditional” Catholic fence. We have to stop blaming differences of opinion about things like guitar music at mass vs. the use of a pipe organ as the source of the problem.

Priests who celebrate the Tridentine mass are often guilty of abusing their power. Priests who couldn’t care less about their choice of vestments are too. Some priests who preach against gay marriage are having gay sex. Some priests who preach acceptance of all people are having gay sex too. A particular priest who ended up sexually assaulting me, after rambling on about his love for the Tridentine Mass, responded to my question of how this results in anyone’s greater holiness and well-being with, “It doesn’t. That’s not the point.”

What is? The mystery and nostalgia hit evokes a time when priests would never have been suspected of anything, and the word gay just meant “happy.”

Conservatives have for decades now been scapegoating the Second Vatican Council for every problem to hit the planet, and this is no exception. It’s simply not the case. No side is innocent, and no display of liturgical, theological, or ideological extremism is a sign of a priest’s well-being.

We all talk about the problems in seminaries, but no one seems to ever think of doing away with seminaries.  Forget about the emphasis on academia and concentrate on service and love of the brethren.  Let us look at the example of Jesus Christ, who trained His disciples in the real world, not behind a high wall set apart from everyone else.  Let men discern and train for the priesthood as they did for 1500 years before the Council of Trent.

The Council of Trent created seminaries because they wanted to keep young men away from the temptations of the world.  This has resulted only in giving the devil a perfect enclosed environment to bring the world in and completely corrupt the priesthood.  And now the entire Church is paying the price.

As the former seminarian said in Rod Dreher's article:

It is extremely difficult for the average lay Catholic to understand something that is at the heart of the present crisis: THE SEMINARY SYSTEM AS IT NOW EXISTS ACTUALLY DESTROYS VOCATIONS IN MANY INSTANCES. THE EVIDENCE IS OVERWHELMING.

Tear down those walls.  Close ALL the seminaries.