You can do that research, its not that hard. But anyways, each bishop decides where to send his seminarians and he does not always send them to the same place.
Interesting. Here in Australia we have a Jesuit, Fr Frank Brennan, who is also a well-known human rights lawyer. Apart from his legal work he also writes books, speaks at conferences and so on.
Most Jesuits have secular academic degrees. It’s part of their charism. In other religious orders, this is not as common, except for the medical and teaching orders where they must have licenses to practice.Interesting. Here in Australia we have a Jesuit, Fr Frank Brennan, who is also a well-known human rights lawyer. Apart from his legal work he also writes books, speaks at conferences and so on.
I don’t know whether he earns any money from so doing, or if so what happens to the money.
How does this fit in with your notion that if a priest is also a member of a religious order then his ‘full-time’ vocation consists in living the religious life?
Let’s not confuse people. The point is tthat a priest who is a Carmelite Friar vows obedience. He obeys your rule, your constitution and your superior, regardless of the wording at the time of profession. A secular priest, if he is a diocesan priest has no rule, constitution or superior.Great post Br Jr but you know how I love playing the stick in the mud!
We Carmelites vow obedience to our rule, constitutions, and superiors. We do not know who are founder is and the constitutions are set by the general and provincial chapters so they do not be vowed to as vowing obedience to the constitutions covers them.
There is one thing that has to be said in defense of secular seminaries. They are dealing with a much larger number of people than you have in a rectory. It is much more difficult to have everyone eat whenever they please or make their own schedules. I know that our diocesan seminary has a schedule for meals, classes, mass and Liturgy of the Hours. The policy there is that if you miss it, you’re out of luck. There is no sneaking into the kitchen to make yourself dinner. You eat with the rest of the community or find your own food. I don’t think that they require that you attend every hour of the Divine Office. They do have a restriction on involvement in activities outside of the seminary, but not because they have to live in community as do friars and monks.
Giving the seminary more structure is not the same as turning it into a religious house. It should be a place where people can live, pray, study and grow spiritually and intellectually. It’s not a frat house.
Wow, that is simple. I wish ours was that way, When I was writing out my vows for my simple profession I had to start over as I ran out of space on the page. We name each vow, as well as the rule, the constitutions, and the superior. Among other things. I forget as it was two years ago and I did not keep a copy or if I did it is packed away, most likely in DC. I will be reminded if I am allowed to make final vows in the next couple of years, most likely 2. We average 4 to 5 years in simple vows.
We’re not allowed to write our own profession. Our rite of profession was decided by St. Bonaventure when he was Minister General in the 13th century and he forbade the three orders to ever change it. The friars, the nuns and the seculars each have the same rite of profession with every prayer prescribed from beginning to end. It takes about 15 minutes. There is the interrogation, the litany of the saints, the profession above and the promise of salvation made by the major superior. Then it’s over. The only difference between simple profession and solemn profession is the change of habit. At the end of simple profession you change your habit from that of the novice to that of the professed.
The ‘current hierarchy’ did not institute any of what you want to change. As ASinner noted they were codified by Trent (Trent codified many things, very few were wholly new) and reiterated by the 2nd Vatican Council. The matters may be prudential, but I do wish you would at least try to engage the documents that you disagree with, not just tilting at an idea.
The line, while clearly drawn for religious (in theory, and in a growing number of communities in practice), is not as clearly drawn for secular priests. They are called in a special way to perfection, (paraphrasing, again, from Presbyterorum Ordinis), the ‘proven’ route for that is the evangelical counsels (expressed differently due to their state in life, ie, they generally need a car and cell phone, and the freedom to make decisions in their ministry).
I assure you, there is a good deal of diversity among the men in most seminaries. From pacifists to war vets, baby-faced kids to 50 yr old “2nd career” men, studious to partiers, there is variety. (Most seminaries do not have the regularities of dress, and even those that do for classes have varieties among cassoks and collar types, and cliques who identify themselves by their choices
).The problem is that there have been a great number of scandals before the establishment of seminaries and since they were allowed more latitude. (I do still know of one or two run the “old way” that make all others look lax…) There are reasons for what you want to throw out. I know because exactly a year ago I was fed up with the whole thing myself and had to deal with similar issues (I was, at that time, a monastic postulant and seminarian, commuting to a large seminary [btw, bad mix]). I was bored to tears with the academics, most of it is irrelevant to the *immediate *demands of the priesthood but being steeped in philosophy and theology helps curb some of the inanity that crops up in pop theology.
I’m not sure it is just “documents” though. How seminaries are run is not just a matter of “documents” (which I do not think necessarily exclude the model I imagine), but the practical decisions of the men who run them.
“loyalty” is different than agreeing with all administrative/disciplinary decisions. As I said, disagree but don’t disobey.
I think a lot of those issues STEM from that, though, and solutions would trickle down if we had priests who were real leaders instead of a bureaucracy where keeping-your-head-down is rewarded.
Another old saw that has only been true since 1789, really. The Church wheeled and dealed plenty in her day, made hasty alliances and even hastier retreats. 180-degree turn arounds between Popes of opposing factions, etc.
This is strange to me, is it something new? When I spoke with the vocation director for the Assumption of the BVM province (that is where the Byzantine Franciscans receive their formation through) told me that I would do a 6 month postulantacy in one of their ministries and then a year novitiate and then would finish my college degree then moved on to the seminary. I have not asked any of the friars at WTU what they have done.
See, I think this is the problem we’re seeing here. You say you’ll accept that you’re not called if nothing is changed, but at that point you’re basing your own vocation on your terms. You’re getting into that “negotiating with God” idea where you say “ok, I’ll follow this vocation but only if x y and z happen”. It’s becomes all about what you want instead of what God wants. It’s the same thing we see in people who don’t want to become Catholic unless q p and r are changed to their liking.
That may very well be the way that they do it. Each province has some margin as long as they don’t go beyond or below what the constitution requires. We don’t do it that way, because we can’t afford to pay for college. By having a long pre-novitiate program it allows those guys who need to go to college for the philosophy courses to do so, but they pay for the cost.
That may very well be the way that they do it. Each province and each obedience has some margin as long as they don’t go beyond or below what the constitution requires. We don’t do it that way, because we can’t afford to pay for college. By having a long pre-novitiate program it allows those guys who need to go to college for the philosophy courses to do so, but they pay for the cost.
OK, let’s look at this another way. A person who is looking to become a secular deacon or priest has a canonical right to request admission to the diocese where he feels that God is calling him to serve. There are differences in policies and formation programs among the dioceses. That’s one of the many reasons why they are called secular clergy. Like every secular man and woman in the Church, they have the right to shop around for a diocese where they feel at home, unlike religious. We don’t have that option. You join the order as it is and it is what it is around the world.
My Province of the Carmelites runs 3 Catholic High Schools on our own and shares two with two different groups of sisters in the United States.
Thank you; I apologize.
This was a really insightful look at the diocesan/religious formation programs.Seminaries? Why seminaries? What’s so strange? Secular students attend seminaries. Religious do not. Religious are formed in their own houses of formation and study theology at univesities or theologates. When neither are available or affordable, then a religious superior will strike up a deal with a diocesan seminary to have his religious study theoloyg there. Usually they do not live at the seminary to avoid mixing the waters, so to speak. You don’t want your secular seminarians being turned into religious or your religious turned into seculars. This happened a lot in the past.
Many secular seminarians, also known as diocesan seminarians, only if they belonged to a diocese, frequently these poor guys were subjected to a routine that was an imitation of life in a religious house: common liturgy of the hours, community mass, community times for meals, community recreation, community property, no freedom to enter and leave the grounds without permission, no personal property such as cars, telephones, TVs, radios, stereos, etc. In other words, they were imitation friars. But the big problem came when they were released from the seminary and found themselves in a parish. They were not ready to be responsible for themelves or to live alone. The result: most of these priests left during the 1970s. They were miserable, lonely and had little independent living skills.
On the other hand, those religious who were subjected to living with diocesans often lost their religious vocation. They became very independent. They had no sense of community life, community prayer, poverty, obedience to a superior, and became very clerical. Their life revolved aroiund their priesthood. They often mis-identified themselves as priests instead of: Franciscan Friars, Carmelite Friars, Dominican Friars, Benedictine Monks. They suddently became Franciscan Fathers, etc. When they found themselves in a house governed by a friar who was not a priest, they became condescending and angry. How dare a non-priest govern them. When they were required to surrender their cars, TVs, stereos, money, freedom, time and submit to community schedules, community rules and give up some of their pastoral work to allow time for community life, they were uspet and miserable. They left in the thousands during the 1980s and 90s. But God has a way of turning something wrong into something good.
Even though the numbers of ordained priests, secular and religious, went down, the men that we lost were very unhappy, broken and would have hurt their dioceses or their religious communities more than they would have contributed to them. They need to find their place in the world and in the Church. On the other hand, dioceses and religious communities had to reasses how they formed their men and their charism.
We confused and blended religious life with secular priesthood and created chaos. In the chaos, we tried quick fixes, instead of stepping back and recovering what was good and leaving what did not work. No one wanted to take the fall. So everyone blamed it on Vatican II. Some said Vatican II did not go far enough and others said it went too far. It’s easy to blame a Council, because councils cannot call you on your mistakes.
All Vatican II said was that priests should be priests and religious should be religious. Duh, this was a novelty? Many lay people opposed and still oppose the distinction between religious life and priesthood. As long as the laity resists and tries to mold every priest into an imitation friar and every friar into a priest, they are going to get resistance. This is not modernism. It’s priests and religious fighting for their right to be the men that God called them to be, not the men that the laity wants them to be.
We have to learn to appreciate the difference between Holy Orders and religious life, if we’re going to benefit from the richness that comes from having both priesthood and religious life working together, while maintaining their separate identity and mission in the Church. The whole idea of imposing poverty on secular priests is imposing something that is not pat of the priesthood. Only religious are called to make a vow of poverty. A religious who becomes a priest, already has a vow of poverty.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
