As I said at the beginning, I think the article is very well written. I regret that I did not notice the date of the article. Obviously, the situation is not too current, because the writer is ordained.
As I said in one of my previous posts, one of the problems that I see diocesan seminaries facing is an identity problem. For a very long time, secular seminaries operated like novitiates, with much stress on community. To preserve community, they incorporated many of the practices of religious houses of formation; one of those was the uniform community mass.
The Church certainly wants her priests to deal, work and pray with a fraternal spirit; but it’s a different type of fraternity than that found in a religious house. In the religious house, everything is adjusted to support the fraternal life, as it should be. They are religious to be religious, even if they are clerics. If you lose sight of your religious charism, you’re just diocesan priests in vows.
In the secular seminary, they have not yet found a balance. Some are very much like novitiates. Others are like any other college for young men, which is obviously secular, but often lacking in the spiritual life. My personal feeling is that the formation teams must strike that balance that creates a spiritual fraternity, without locking the men into a paradigm that is more appropriate for religious. This degree of uniformity and conformity is unnecessary for the secular priest, be he going to a diocese as a diocesan priest or to a society as part of a fraternity of priests. I think that the faithful were not aware of this concern until SP and UE. In the mind of most lay people, “A priest is a priest” or “All priests are formed the same way. After all, it’s only one Catholic Church.” Well that’s quite the way it works.
It is one priesthood, the priesthood of Jesus Christ, but all priests are not formed the same way. The environment in which they are formed must fit their state in life, that is either secular or consecrated. This, along with the fact that there is some real prejudice against the EF, complicates the matter.
Do not always think that an resistance to the EF is a rejection of the EF. It can be. I would never say that it’s not. But there is this other element that most people don’t know about, the desire of formation teams to maintain cohesive communities by maintaining strict uniformity. The latter has to be reviewd. It may to too much uniformity for diocesan priests.
Having said that, allow me speak as one who comes at this issue from the perspective of a religious who belongs to a family of religious who has some priests. Not all male religious are priests. Each religious community needs to recover its original charism in order to go forward. Sometimes, I feel that the lay faithful do not take seriously the needs of these men and the parameters with which these men operate.
Some lay people make pronouncements about the EF, for or against, as if every ordained man is the same. To the religious, this often causes a great deal of pain, be the comment from the extreme right or extreme left. Religious men feel that they are part of the Church and that they have given much to the Church and have much more to give. They often feel ignored in this discussion, because they are the minority.
When people talk about introducing the EF into seminary formation, how often do they stop to think that most priests in religious orders have never set foot in a seminary. This is a very new thing. For centuries, we were deliberately kept apart to avoid contamination. The secular clergy did not want to be consecrated religious and the religious did not want to be secular clerics.
After Vatican II, some religious began to send their men to study at seminaries. However, not every religious community does so. Most religious communities send their men to study at universities or at colleges of theology that are exclusively for religious. Even those religious communities that send their men to study theology at a diocesan seminary do not allow much interaction. I remember one seminary where there were Capuchin Franciscans. They had their own recreation area, at one table apart from the diocesan seminary and lived in a separate wing. At another diocesan seminary, there are Franciscans of the Eternal Word. They attend classes with the diocesan seminarians, but they live in a separate house. At Catholic University, where I trained, we attended classes with diocesans, but we did not interact. We were friendly. We talked only to religious, played basketball only with religious, prayed only with religious and usually did not hang around the campus. We were friendly, but conscious that we lived in different worlds.
This became very evident at WYD. The organizing committee, which is predominantly lay, planned a mass for seminarians. The only religious who were included were religious who study at seminaries. There were about 4,500 men at this mass and about 200 of them were from religious communities. We know that there are over 2,000 religious studying to be priests and many of these young men went to Madrid. They are theology students, not seminarians, so they were not included.
When they are excluded from activities or not taken into account in these conersations, we run the risk of following the pattern of society. We ignore the minority. When you ignore a minority, you encourage heterodoxy. We need to be careful in our understanding and applications of these documents.
Our expectation regarding the formation of these men must be consistent with their state in life. A secular seminarian should have a diverse experience of liturgy, while a religious should have an experience that is consistent with the charism of his community. The lay faithful should welcome both, because each brings gifts that the other cannot bring.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
