Pope Francis' View of Seminaries versus my experience

WHAT POPE FRANCIS SAID THIS WEEK ABOUT SEMINARIES…
 
If this breaking story [excuse me, stories] did not lead your 11 PM local news this week, let me be the harbinger. Within the past week Pope Francis exhorted a meeting of Italian bishops to exclude homosexuals from admission to seminaries. Then, reporters picked up from some of the bishops present that Francis, speaking in Italian, spoke of seminaries marked by “faggotry” [English rendering of an Italian term.]. The Vatican quickly issued an apology but without an admission that the pope said that.
 
In truth, the Vatican Congregation for Clergy had instructed bishops several times recently that homosexuals were not to be admitted to holy orders: in 2005 under Pope Benedict XVI, and in 2016 in the Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, the official Church teaching on the formation of priests, which is updated periodically. The 2016 Ratio, signed by Pope Francis, is a bit more nuanced on the subject than the pope’s instruction last week. In the 2016 document’s words, “The Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called ‘gay culture’. Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women. One must in no way overlook the negative consequences that can derive from the ordination of persons with deep seated homosexual tendencies.”
 
Curiously, with a few strokes of a pen, one could write the same instruction for “heterosexuals.” A bishop is not likely to ordain a sexually active straight man, either, nor one with a deep-seated preoccupation with fantasies about women, nor a card-carrying member of the Playboy Club.
 
But then the 2016 Ratio continues: “Different, however, would be the case in which one were dealing with homosexual tendencies that were only the expression of a transitory problem – for example, that of an adolescence not yet superseded. Nevertheless, such tendencies must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate.” It is interesting to note that both the pope’s words of last week, and the Ratio of 2016 single out what one might call “institutional gay culture.” The Ratio draws a line between public sexual orientation and display, on the one hand, and the individual who is privately [with Church counsel] working out his life, “an adolescence not yet superseded.”
 
Again, you have to wonder how any candidate seeking seminary admission-- who today is a typically older individual than in, say, 1962, when my class entered St. Joe’s as high school freshmen—could enter with "adolescence not yet superseded." but evidently many seminarian applicants today bring significant deficits to vocation recruitment, as I will explain later in the post. However, in the following paragraphs I have included several sources which we can use for two points of discussion: [1] Did Callicoon prepare us with the age-appropriate assistance we needed during our critical formative adolescent and early adult years, and [2] is there something to what the Pope said, allowing for the messy way he said it?
 
BACK ON AROMA HILL…
 
“The Boys of Aroma Hill” blogsite has focused over the years on our individual and mutual experiences of life for up to six years in a minor seminary—with occasional forays into our major seminary years for those of us who did the dime plus two. It has been a long time since I posted a “Boys of Aroma Hill” entry…age and attention to other blog topics has kept me busy, but I didn’t want to lose connections with that significant part of my life and the community of guys around me who, more than they know, kept me sane and reasonably optimistic about the future.
 
What was the purpose of any minor seminary, [i.e., a high school or junior college seminary] including the one I left my family for? In 1962 the raison d’etre of minor seminaries—many of which were boarding seminaries--was still the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which described the purpose of minor seminary personnel "to take care especially to protect from the contagion of the world, to train in piety, to imbue with the rudiments of literary studies, and to foster in them the seed of a divine vocation." Suitable boys were encouraged to graduate to a major seminary, where they would continue their tertiary studies for the priesthood.
 
In the early twentieth century the popes were deeply concerned about the spread of secularism, i.e., the alienation of religion from the world at large. In 1910 Pope Pius X, in his encyclical Quam Singulari, moved the age of First Communion to age seven, to strengthen even young children from the modern ways of a changing world. This logic extended to seminary training, too, the earlier the better and far away from the corrupting influence of urban life. To be sure, Callicoon met those standards.

However, the pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II literature on minor seminaries enjoyed a certain enlightenment, too. Those who advocated them understood such schools as aids to life discernment and, curiously, as ministerial outreach to all who studied in them, wherever their destinies lie. The fact that many would not go on to collegiate seminary studies was accepted, and as the twentieth century progressed, Vatican directives instructed seminaries to maintain or initiate civil accreditation so that those students who left the priestly studies could transition into other careers. St. Joe’s was a New York State Board of Regents high school which made us eligible for $500 annual scholarships for our seminary college studies, the tuition of which was, conveniently, $530. [I hope my Uncle Nelson Rockefeller took care of you “Jersey Boys,” too.] In some parts of the country, a minor seminary boarding school might be the only Catholic secondary school, period, in a fifty-mile radius, as I later learned from my Catholic University classmates years later from other orders.
 
I received acceptance to Callicoon, a boarding school, and to the Diocese of Buffalo’s high school seminary, a day school, at the same time in 1962. The Callicoon letter was welcoming. The Buffalo letter told me to avoid, among other things, unnecessary social contact with women and to avoid swimming pools as an occasion of sin for a future seminarian. Seriously.
 
For better and worse, I tried to come to grips with my human and religious development during my six years on the hill, between my 14th and 20th years. Curiously, the few classmates I have recently discussed this with talk about a perceived spiritual deficiency during those years that they have worked to develop in adult life. We did not grow religiously in the direction of Thomas Merton or Thomas a Kempis. We were certainly regimented to daily Mass, regular confession, and devotions such as the Crown [Franciscan rosary] after supper. The language is telling. Spiritual “exercises;” like training for the Olympics.
 
However, in the real world of the seminary, I cannot recall the idea of meditation or silent, wordless prayer ever mentioned to me or to my class, nor recommendations of any book of spiritual guidance. I had my own copy from home of Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, which I reflected upon after receiving communion. I brought the book from home. It brought me my only measure of spiritual peace and consolation for several years.
 
Looking back, it is worth noting that seminaries like St. Joe’s had one assigned spiritual director for everybody. Later, in the major seminary—for my class, Holy Name in Washington—each cleric was supposed to have his own director, although that was not always observed in the breech. But there are plenty of times in Callicoon I could have used personal and spiritual guidance and encouragement. We were separated from our natural fathers and the parishes/schools and clergy that launched us, and given the boarding seminary structure, our parents were cut out entirely from our development. In six years, my parents came to Callicoon three times—two graduations and a 1962 October visit in first year to make sure I was OK.
 
I was not OK. I gained fifty pounds in my first year and my grades dropped two letters. Nobody on the faculty said a thing. The irony: in the fifth year I dropped fifty pounds, and Eddie Flannagan told me to stop dieting.
 
To make matters worse, the “changes” in the Church were just starting to build to a crescendo through the 1960’s—more so in Callicoon in some ways than in many of our families’ parishes-- and in my sixth year a letter went out from the Rector’s Office [Columban Hollywood] to all the parents in my class saying in essence that a “healthier environment” for our priestly training would be achieved if our class enrolled in Siena College after sixth year; St. Joe’s College Division would be closing. I can’t speak for the other parents, but my mother was furious. My family could not afford Siena. She wrote Columban an unfiltered opinion of his missive. He never held it against me, though, and eventually the plan was scrapped, and my class entered novitiate after sixth year in 1968 as originally planned. To this day I do not know the politics of how that policy change was rescinded.
 
We were administered the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory once, I think, and I have severe doubts that anyone ever actually scored them beyond screening for profound psychosis. In 1986, when I was thirty-eight and a friar pastor, I took the MMPI again, this time to learn how to interpret it as I was studying for a master’s degree in counseling at Rollins College. I had several elevated scores—anxiety, psychosomatic tendencies—but the one that alarmed me was an elevated schizophrenic score. I talked to my Rollins professor, and he explained that the number indicated a tendency to “think outside the box.” A valuable gift, he told me [unless your box is the highly structured clerical life.] I’m sorry that we didn’t get personal guidance and insight in the minor seminary. Even public schools had guidance counselors.
 
How each of us progressed with our sexual identities is obviously a question I would not assume to answer except in my own case. My first stirrings of sexual feelings for a particular girl occurred before Callicoon, in the seventh grade. She and I had gone to the same school since first grade, and one day I looked at her…and she was a fully developed woman! And I realized I was a man. I went to her house every night to help her with math, and then, when the seventh-grade school year was over, she moved away to the suburbs. Life is cruel. But after she left, I flirted with other girls in my parish’s CYO. I liked the experience of womanhood in my life. I reasoned, though, that giving up girls, hard as it might be, would be more than compensated by the joys of clerical life. Later, in college, Eric Kyle commented on the joys of adulthood—wine, women, and song: “You guys can sing all you want.”
 
Curiously, I think that the classes several years behind ours may have been a little more sexually liberated in Callicoon. In sixth year [1967-68] I was often a substitute waiter at table, and part of our job was to answer the phone down the hall and retrieve the student being called. Pretty soon we older guys noticed a steady stream of calls for certain of our younger brethren. We didn’t report it that I know of, and as things turned out, those younger classes were heading to Siena, a coed school, where presumably they wouldn’t need phones anymore.
 
I don’t recall much serious thinking about same-gender attraction as an issue, or if any of my classmates were “queer.” I had already been taught at home that “some men love other men” but at 13 I just filed that away as an irrelevant topic for me. In Callicoon we used gay slang, on occasion, but more about people who engaged in activities or interests outside of the “jock culture” that pervaded a lot of life on the hill. The seminary handbook, written long before my class arrived and read every Friday, stated that PF’s [particular friendships] were forbidden; we were certain that this was related to homosexual mores, and we laughed the rule to scorn because close friendships are one of the best things we took from Callicoon.   
 
Was there sexual activity between students in Callicoon, heterosexual or homosexual? The institution was open for 72 years, so statistically it must have happened. I was not aware of any substantive “coupling” in my time between students. There were two expulsions from St. Joe’s in my six years for sexual conduct issues that I know of. In one case, a classmate tried to smuggle letters to a girl in another classmate’s mailed laundry case. Both guys got bounced. A few years later it was discovered that two guys had a porn stash in the trunk room. They, too, were missing by suppertime.
 
But what of sexual abuse by adults in authority? About all dioceses and religious orders in the United States have made public those with credible accusations of abuse accusations. Holy Name Province’s public list is here, but it is unusual in that it does not list the accused assignments of the accused, the normal procedure. There are on this list two friars who served at the seminary during my time, as well as the friar who recruited me to the Order. The issue may have been more pronounced in Washington, our major seminary. I can say with certainty that at least two friars in formation in Washington were sexually assaulted by an individual in a position of authority.
 
A year or two ago I received a private communication from a St. Joe’s student in a different class who had been physically beaten on seminary grounds by a friar in position of authority. This occurred in the 1960’s, but by the 2002 U. S. Bishops Dallas Charter guidelines, such an action, if investigated and corroborated, would have been grounds for removal of the friar from ministry and arrest.
 
THE POPE’S REMARKS…
 
The Pope’s instruction regarding the admission of homosexuals, has generated much controversy. My opinion, having read several commentaries, is that the pope’s remarks are directed at the institution of seminaries and their leadership as much as the individuals who people them.
 
Father James Martin, S.J, noted for his LGBTQ ministry, observes that the offensive word in the pope’s remarks is better translated into English as “campiness.” When I arrived in Washington to study in 1969, where so many religious orders had houses of study and formation, it was “common knowledge” which houses were gay, and which were straight. How could one tell? The word “camp” was commonly used back then, and evidently still today in many quarters. In simple terms, camp is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to, characteristic of, homosexuals…”
 
Campy seminaries? Apparently, the pope and the Italian bishops discussed the fact that as late as 2024 candidates are avoiding seminaries where such an atmosphere persists. The United States went through a period when a similar problem existed in some seminaries and among cliques of priests throughout some dioceses. The 1960’s marked the age of cultural upheaval in the United States, and this tectonic shift impacted Church life, particularly in the close quarters of seminaries.
 
A blanket prohibition of admission of homosexuals to the seminary and priesthood does not make sense to me. I have close family members and friends who are gay, and every one of them is an exemplar and a witness to Christian living. Interestingly, the Catechism’s teaching 2357 admits that regarding homosexuality, “its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained.” In fact, we do not know or understand human sexuality as well as we claim to, and future Church moralists may revisit the Church’s body of moral teaching to embrace a fuller communion with what we know and don’t know about the human species.
 
TODAY’S ADMISSION/FORMATIVE SEMINARY POLICIES VERSUS OURS….
 
It is 62 years since I entered St. Joe’s, and despite all the years, the Council Vatican II, and the reworking of priestly formation since then, there is more angst among bishops and seminary personnel about the screening of today’s seminary prospects than I remember. To be sure, Doc Fink weeded out the eccentrics back then and regaled us with stories about the odd balls, and today’s candidates enter older than many of us did. But the United States Bishops are adding a ninth year of seminary life due to the issues that candidates bring to the admission process.
 
I came across a May 24 essay in Homiletic and Pastoral Review by Fr. Etienne Huard, O.S.B., defending the longer seminary format for American applicants, which many seminarians object to. This is an excellently composed piece which describes areas of deficiencies in formation which some of us observed a half-century ago and compares the cultural world from which we launched forth compared to the culture of 2024. If you have time read the full essay, I have attached it here. Here is a powerful excerpt:
 
The culture young men are being formed in is no longer Christian. American society now promotes extremes in self-absorption, pleasure-seeking, and grave distortions surrounding gender, marriage, and sexuality. These experiences are combined with social media technologies’ isolating effects and influence (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). The effect is that society and media have contributed to negatively forming men, where their sense of reality and mental habits of choice and belief have often been corrupted. The Program for Priestly Formation 6th edition [the U.S. Bishops’ directory for the acceptance and training of seminarians, 2022] understands that these factors create an environment where new seminarians lack the “requisite qualities for formation.”
 
There are three critical areas of concern: psychological, spiritual, and intellectual health and ability. Psychologically, men present with higher rates of anxiety and depression, personal and family trauma, isolation, and lower rates of interpersonal skills. Spiritually, men entering the seminary have less familiarity with Catholic tradition, piety, prayer, and general practices. Additionally, men often have a lower sense of worth and being a beloved son of the Father, possessing an obscured sense of masculine virtue and value. Intellectually, men tend to have a diminished ability and desire for critical thinking and expression, especially in writing and the basics of intellectual work. This issue has only been compounded since the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, there is a lower ability for hard, focused, and sustained work.
 
This is hardly a cheerful assessment. I wonder where the Church will find and finance the personnel necessary to address all three areas of concern.
 
AND A PERSONAL NOTE…
 
Seminary life—in Callicoon and in Washington—was difficult and disappointing at times, but for distinct reasons. St. Joe’s fostered something of an adversarial divide between the friars and the students. I was not used to that. In Washington, to be frank, nobody was in charge and many of us floundered in the chaos.
 
For all of that, formation was successful in one particularly important aspect—learning the joys and the obligations of friendship. In 1998, at the age of fifty, I married my best friend, and she and I have enjoyed our common life for over a quarter century. Strange to say, I had no idea I was so suited for marriage.
 
Now if you will excuse me, it is my night to cook.