The Role of Psychology in Seminary Admission and Life

Today’s post is an introduction to a source of information about the Catholic Church in the United States that few people are aware of, but everyone is entitled to see. We will enter the world of research and analysis, and in today’s case a series of recommendations from one such study, for bringing psychology into the process of admitting candidates into American seminaries and determining the mental fitness of seminarians with an eye toward addressing personal problems and enhancing the strengths of candidates for Holy Orders. Released July 19, 2026, the document we will focus upon is “Do You Know Them To Be Worthy? Twelve Proposals For Bishops, Rectors [of seminaries], Seminary Formation Teams, and Mental Health Professionals In Assessing The Suitability of Men For Holy Orders.” Perhaps an awkward title, but a body of information that should be available to the entire Church: a blueprint for the preparation of your priests of tomorrow.
 
WHO ARE THE MAJOR PLAYERS HERE?
 
The McGrath Institute for Church Life exists as a research arm of Notre Dame. It oversees an interdisciplinary array of ND faculty and established professionals in other schools and positions to address various issues of pressing concern to American Catholicism and ways to make improvements. These surveys, studies, and recommendations—some commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops itself--are then made available to bishops, dioceses, seminaries—and the general Catholic public, though they are rarely publicized in local parishes or diocesan newspapers. But they should be. You can poke around the McGrath and CARA websites any time, to keep up on things.
 
Researchers like McGrath at Notre Dame and CARA at Georgetown University do not shy away from troubling issues, given their dedication to the good of the Church. For example, The Institute’s Study, Sexual Harassment and Catholic Seminary Culture [2019] put the number of harassed seminarians/candidates at somewhere between 6-10%; this led to the Institute’s development document Benchmarks [2023] for reporting such abuse to appropriate Church officials. I am pleased to say that Florida’s state seminary has signed on to adopt the 2023 Benchmark recommendations. In 2025 McGrath teamed with CARA, Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, to produce Evaluating the Church’s Practices in Assessing the Suitability of Candidates for Holy Orders. McGrath released a 12-point summary  in July 2026 which will serve as the focus of today's post on the Cafe's site. 

REGARDING THIS STUDY, IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
 
“The McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame commissioned a study examining the ability of seminaries and dioceses to assess the suitability of seminarians for ordination. The research had a particular focus on discerning the appropriate role of psychological services in assisting candidates in their needed growth and on what role those services should play in seminary formation going forward. Using a mixed-methods approach, CARA surveyed and interviewed five constituencies: diocesan bishop ordinaries, diocesan vocation directors, seminary rectors, seminary formators and spiritual directors, and mental health professionals who work with seminaries.
 
MY PARTICIPATION HERE: What I will do is break down the twelve recommendations with a brief explanation, and in some cases, I will draw from my own experience as a 12-year seminarian myself. I was a seminarian from 1962-1974 when studies for the priesthood could begin as early as the high school freshman year. All my seminary training was institutional and residential. I left home at 14. Today's seminarians begin later and extend formation over 6-8 years.

 THE PROPOSALS OF THE McGRATH STUDY:
 
Recommendation 1 calls for two psychological evaluations of a seminarian, one at the time of application and the second at the “Configuration Stage” which is much closer to ordination. Under normal circumstances, this second evaluation would occur late in the Configuration Stage of seminary training or closer to ordination. 
 
The general rule of thumb among professionals is that a full psychological evaluation has a shelf life of three years. The granddaddy of examination instruments is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), first developed in 1939 and still considered the gold standard for pencil and paper personality testing; it is now also computerized. It is important to note that the MMPI isolates serious mental and/or personality conditions; a psychopath prone to violence and a hardened narcissist are two candidates who would probably be denied admission to the seminary for obvious reasons.
 
It is the low to moderate range of scores among seminarians that the report addresses here. No one gets a perfect score on a test like the MMPI. All of us will have elevated or below normal measures on at least some of the MMPI’s measures. I will use my own “results” over the years, paltry as they are. The fact is that my seminary freshman high school class was tested upon our arrival in 1962. The results were never shared with us. [I wonder if the tests were even scored.] From 1962 till the day I was ordained in 1974, I received no testing and no mental health interviews, except for several unscientific “peer evaluations” in novitiate and my major graduate school seminary, instruments that were the rage in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Today’s McGrath researchers are concerned that seminarians are not receiving ongoing mental health counseling to address problematic areas of personality that may impede them as priests.
 
In 1986, twelve years after my ordination, I attended Rollins College to earn a master’s degree in mental health counseling. In a course we nicknamed “weights and measures,” I had to learn how to administer the MMPI and thus decided to self-administer the instrument. My scores did not surprise me much. Of my elevated scores, none, including depression, anxiety, hypochondriasis, and schizophrenia, registered in the “red zone,” but they were noticeably elevated. I was intrigued by the last one, schizophrenia, so I hunted up my prof and asked for his interpretation. He explained that at my level of testing I probably tended to think out of the box and to some degree resisted authority. “By the way,” he asked, “what do you do for a living?” I replied that I was a Catholic priest, pastor of a church. He paused for a moment, looked at my full test, then asked me, “So how’s that working for you?”   
 
Recommendation 2. To quote the report, “The psychological evaluation must be understood not merely as a screening instrument, but as a tool for growth and ongoing formation.” In major seminaries, a student is assumed to have a priest mentor with whom he meets regularly about his progress and struggles on the road to the priesthood. A student is also expected to have a regular confessor. The priest counselor and the priest confessor cannot be the same person, because the priest counselor must report to the full faculty on the progress of his seminarian[s] when it comes time to approve the seminarian for continued studies. [The confessor, for obvious reasons, is bound to secrecy.] In my day we referred to such faculty discussions as “votations,” which were conducted for all seminarians at least once per year and probably twice annually. [My memory is slipping.]
 
This recommendation argues for the priest counselor to have access to the initial psychological assessment tool[s] such as the MMPI to better assist the seminarian in making progress toward the fullness of priestly living. This paragraph recommends that “the seminarian should be invited to sign a written consent form acknowledging his informed and free consent for that report to be shared with his formation advisor.” It adds “personalized accompaniment with a formation advisor cannot be reduced to a superficial monitoring of a seminarian’s external comportment.” I must admit that in my seminary years the old Woody Allen observation was applicable: “Showing up is 90% of life.” If you did not make waves, attended daily Mass-Lauds-Vespers, helped with the housekeeping, and passed your grades, the assumption of suitability for the priesthood was favorable. As we will see, the issue of access and privacy to testing is more pointed today because of HIPAA regulations and again, the secrecy of the confessional.
 
Recommendation 3: The report calls for seminaries to appoint “a full-time in-house director of psychological services who serves as counselor/psychotherapist for seminarians and reviews each seminarian’s initial psychological evaluation with him, even when it has already been reviewed by the assessing psychologist.” If the room seems to be getting a little crowded, it is.
 
Here is the problem. It is difficult to find psychologists who [a] are Catholic or who understand Catholic protocols, and [b] who will be readily available to the faculty and to individual seminarians. Psychologists are much more expensive than master’s level therapists like myself; notice that the recommendation is for a “counselor/psychotherapist” to review test results with the candidate even when the testing psychologist has presumably already done so. Many practicing psychiatrists and psychologists may not react to a client’s use of pornography or habitual masturbation as an abnormality for an adult man. Clearly, this attitude would not be sympatico with values the seminary is attempting to impart. The recommendation to find a full-time in-house director seems to me an attempt to blend accredited mental health services with a “Catholic interpreter.”
 
My major seminary did have a counselor/psychotherapist priest in our residence, a member of my order. His role in our lives was never officially stated. He was very curious about our personal lives, and we nicknamed him “the chipmunk” because he was “always looking for nuts.” I refused to play cards with him in our rec room because he was always distracted, listening to conversations at other tables. By today’s HIPAA standards, if he was assessing seminarians and sharing that information, he was skating on the edge of mishandling personal data without our knowledge or consent.
 
The literature that crosses my desk on vocation recruitment and seminary formation strongly suggests that today’s candidates are quite different from those of the 1960’s. A shifting culture has resulted in far more anxiety and uncertainty among young adult men. Consider the suicide rates of young male adults in general life. The McGrath recommendations seem to be that today’s candidates for seminary life need considerably more assistance to discern and develop their identities. Whether bishops and seminary rectors can afford, financially speaking, to provide mental health care and discernment to the degree that today’s seminarians seem to need it is a significant matter. But we can’t afford not to bear these costs, either. The abuse scandals have cost American Catholicism $5-10 billion dollars; one cannot begin to assess the spiritual cost of ill-suited candidates being approved for ordination and public ministry, simply to keep up the numbers.
 
Recommendation 4: Seminaries and dioceses must recognize the difference between candidates who profit from periodic life development therapy and those with “deeply entrenched personal issues.” There is debate within the religious and psychological communities about accepting the latter into seminary programs. Many experts and official policies seem to discourage the risk. On the other hand, some bishops, desperate for priests, are willing to take the higher risk with the hope that a troubled candidate for admission can be rehabilitated within the seminary framework, so to speak.
 
Recommendation 5: For the Church, through its seminaries, to rest assured that it is ordaining fit candidates, a goal of spiritual direction and psychotherapy should be assisting the seminarian to bring into the external forum those personal issues known in the internal forum which bear on his own formation and on a judgment pertaining to his suitability for Orders.
 
Let me translate that into English, LOL. “The internal forum” is another term for the secrecy of confession. Over the centuries men have given their lives to protect the seal of the confessional. You may be aware that in some states the legislature has attempted to require priests in confession to report to law enforcement admissions of child abuse heard in confession. To my knowledge, no state has followed through to this point. What Recommendation 5 is driving at are situations where a seminarian is confessing sins that, if known to his spiritual director and seminary officials, would at the very least, create delay in the seminarian’s progression, or even dismissal from the seminary itself. The hope expressed here is that the seminarian’s spiritual director would explain the wisdom of the seminarian's sharing the “internal forum material” with the spiritual director, that some kind of counseling or at least soul searching might take place so that the seminarian’s sinful issues—including ones that would disqualify him from priesthood—might be addressed and healed. A confessor, by the way, cannot participate in any seminarian’s votation for progression to ordination.
 
Granted, I entered the seminary 62 years ago last Tuesday. I can’t recall what the seminary rule book said about confession. I would guess it stated that we should go every two weeks. "Devotional confessions" were quite common then in Catholicism. On the other hand, there was no way for seminary officials to verify even that. There were eight different friar confessors in the boxes. I do remember that around 1966 or 1967, when we entered the college division, several of my classmates and I talked at length privately about whether we were getting anything out of going to confession, where little or no spiritual direction was ever offered. After that, I admit I went to confession only sporadically, like on retreat. In addition, our theology instructors were explaining that Penance was a sacrament of profound religious and psychological change; the Greek term metanoia [180 degree turn] came into play. The idea of frequent confession became more “old fashioned,” and our decision to pull back was not a particularly radical one at the time.
 
In considering Recommendation 5 and the major seminary, I can only fall back on my own experience. I think we were told to choose a friar priest at the major seminary level--the final six years--to be our spiritual director, and I went to him a few times. But I was a musician and I started working with him on nuns’ retreats and other ventures as a major seminarian. We morphed into business buddies, you might say.  It would seem that he was my representative at the “votation” meetings and reported favorably on me. Put bluntly, it was very easy to pass through my seminary with little or no hard scrutiny. Woody Allen’s law of “showing up.”
 
Are things better today in seminaries? The McGrath recommendations assume that a lot of pieces are in place. If that is true, that is an amazing turnaround. But it is still hard to know what goes on behind the walls today.
 
Recommendation 6: This step calls for national uniformity in psychological testing of seminarians and specialized training for those who conduct “psychosexual history assessments” of seminarians. My guess: your phone book psychologist is more tolerant of many cultural sexual behaviors that run counter to Catholic teaching. Recommendation 6 seems to suggest that psychology by itself not be taken as the last word on evaluations, particularly on matters of celibacy, but they still must be done.
 
Recommendations 7-9 address specific cases.
 
Recommendation 7: This section addresses applicants who present Autism Spectrum Disorders; this hyperlink to the Mayo Clinic should provide the symptoms and disabilities associated with ASDs. The McGrath Study itself notes that “57% of Bishops are concerned about advancing a candidate who is high scoring on the autism scale, and 20% noted that alone would disqualify the man from being ordained.” That the issue appears here at all suggests that a greater cross section of men is presenting itself for admission. This question will have to go to the U.S. Bishops’ subcommittee for further work. I do believe that a devoted individual with limited or modest ASD markers can serve the Church in a wide range of ministries and functions.
 
Recommendation 8: This is a discussion of candidates with ADHD or OCD. At the risk of oversimplifying, ADHD means your boiling point is set too high; OCD is stress caused by a perceived and subjective belief in what constitutes good order and serious stress when order is disrupted. Interestingly, “hoarding” is now under the OCD umbrella.
 
ADHD is the less worrisome of the two disorders. Main reason? The standard treatment is medication, and my experiential opinion is that seminary evaluators would due best to monitor their charge’s fidelity to meds and their effectiveness in managing the agitation symptoms. ADHD meds are stimulants, waking up the brain to exercise control. It may be that medication will be necessary throughout the seminarian's lifetime. The stimulating effects of ADHD medications make Ritalin and other ADHD drugs desirable for recreational use for those who do not have ADHD. Think of how you feel after a 24 oz. truck stop bucket of caffeinated coffee. I feel like King Kong, LOL.
 
OCD is a different sort of condition. It is a collage of anxiety, need to control, and satisfaction. In my psych schooling forty years ago, I learned that the tricyclic antidepressant Imipramine was helpful in reducing stress and symptoms. Today we have “Son of Imipramine,” Clomipramine. I mentioned this once to a penitent in confession who was battling a recurring sex fetish. The reply I got from behind the grill: “I don’t come in here for psychological bull----. I want absolution.” My advice to seminary evaluators: get a second opinion before admission in such cases.
 
Recommendation 9: Since many of today’s candidates for seminary come to the Church with “significant formative deficits,” seminaries must understand the responsibilities in seeing that their admitted candidates get all the mental services they need. A CARA study notes “in some settings, institutional pressures to maintain high numbers of seminarians may at times overshadow the necessary attention to the quality and readiness of candidates for priestly formation.”    
 
Recommendations 10-12 deal with supporting chastity and celibacy formation.
 
Recommendation 10 is a lengthy discussion which turns again to the question of how well seminaries are preparing young men for both the self-control and the spiritual purposefulness of clerical celibacy. The authors point to a significant split between the impressions of seminary personnel and mental health professionals on how well seminaries prepare their men for celibacy. Citing a CARA study across those involved in seminary formation, when asked if they believed seminaries are adequately forming men for sexual maturity, these results were obtained:
 
Bishops 85% yes
Vocation Directors 72%
Rectors 84%
Spiritual Directors 81%
Mental Health Professionals 35%
 
I could write hundreds of words to interpret why we have this curious configuration of results. One reason may be that only highly motivated, mature seminarians seek out regular advice and/or mental health counseling. Hence, the optimism of seminary personnel. I can recall that as I approached ordination, I was not seeking added scrutiny. You get to a certain point—in my case, ten years or so of seminary life—where you say to yourself, “I’m not going to punt away a decade of seminary training because I have worries about X, Y, or Z. I can manage myself, thank you very much.” But nobody on the faculty ever asked me, “how are you doing?” Hey, I was “showing up.” And I seriously believed I could be a useful priest. I can safely say that the results of my MMPI testing in 1986—twelve years after ordination, for a second master’s degree—would have given a seminary rector some pause [though in my six years of major seminary experience, I had four different rectors].
 
Section 10 recommends that regarding applicants for seminary admission, “they should have been already sexually continent for a sustained period of time of at least several months without a lapse.” For a deacon candidate, the period without lapsing into masturbation or pornography is recommended at two years. Oddly, there is no mention anywhere in this study about actual sexual intimacy up to and including the seminary years between people. What about seminarians who fall in love—with women or men--during formation, the precise years—ages 19-29—that Erik Erikson defined life’s major development stage as learning to love maturely? After I was ordained, I served for a while on a review board for my order’s formation program. My superior for that venture, a man of great wit, summarized our discussion of one case with theatrical flair: “Men, the problem with this candidate is that he’s never loved a woman and he’s never hated a man.” That was fifty some years ago, and I remember that like it was yesterday. In his strange way, he put his finger on the heart of human nature. 
 
Recommendation 11:  This entry engages in a lengthy discussion of whether candidates for the seminary with “same sex attraction” should be admitted. I was able to retrieve the EWTN news release of 2005, which reports Pope Benedict’s teaching on the priesthood: “As watchers had expected for months, the Instruction affirms the Church’s long-held teaching that men with ‘deep seeded’ homosexual tendencies should not be admitted to the priesthood. It adds that such tendencies ‘gravely’ hinder potential priests “from relating correctly to men and women.” This is the operative guidance that bishops must follow today. Not all bishops agree or follow the directive, possibly because many of us know homosexual priests who serve or have served the Church with distinction and a healthy spirituality.
 
The McGrath Recommendation here is for greater study of the question. The EWTN story does note that Benedict’s teaching comes on the heels of “The Scandal,” which some have attributed to homosexuality. That has never been proven to my satisfaction. [An intriguing doctoral study would be an examination of the seminary records of proven perpetrators.] It is hard to understand how homosexuality ipso facto gravely hinders potential priests from relating correctly to men and women. To suggest revisiting the policy is not an act of disloyalty to the Church.
 
Recommendation 12:   This stage is a continuation of the previous one. “We propose a more meaningful way of defining “transitory same-sex attraction [T-SSA]”and “deep seated same sex attraction [DS-SSA] for use in seminary formation programs.” The issue here is disagreement in the mental health community about how such a division can be meaningfully established at this stage in a man’s life.
 
 
 
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