New Model For Seminaries Will Produce Even More Out of Touch Priests

Having been raised Roman Catholic and been an altar boy for ten years, I have had my share of interaction with priests and even a couple of bishops. Then during my closeted married years as a parishioner I often was utter frustrated with trying to discuss common sense real world issues with parish pastors. Throughout this time frame I noticed a couple of things: (1) all too often priests were given unquestioning deference even when they clearly were out in left field and (2) most had absolutely no real world experience or any remote concept of what married couples with families go through. Between having housekeepers and fawning church women pandering to them, they had few household worries, had more vacation time then most married men, and often had more disposable income with which to indulge themselves than parents raising children. In short, they were clueless and had at best limited ability to understand family dynamics and struggles.

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Now the Church - rather than allowing women and married priests - come up with some pilot programs for restructuring seminaries and the training of celibate priests. If anything, programs like the one described in a San Francisco Chronicle story seem likely to lead only to even more unthinking blind obedience to the corrupt Church hierarchy and more priests with no real world experience , common sense, or normal emotional maturity (one of the factors some psychologists cite as a root of the sexual abuse of minors by priests). Here are some highlights:
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The seminarians' wallets are empty, except for driver's licenses and insurance cards. To buy cigarettes or clothes or anything else, they must ask their superiors for money - an exercise in obedience and a reminder that material things aren't important.

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They have virtually no time alone, on or off campus, and are required to travel in pairs, "two by two," like Jesus' disciples. They live in a world without cell phones or personal computers, and their evenings end promptly at 10.

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Redemptoris Mater is a new experiment in molding Catholic priests who are faithful to church teaching and authority and zealous in their desire to lead other Catholics down that same road. On the one hand, the rules are a throwback to 50 years ago, when would-be priests led regimented existences apart from the rest of the world. But Redemptoris Mater men also teach the faith at parishes and spend two years on mission trips, knocking on doors looking for Catholics in Bronx housing projects or Minneapolis suburbs.

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All told, there are 33 students from 14 countries. In this, they reflect the changing face of the U.S. priesthood. Their greater ethnic diversity and hunger to show fidelity to the church are hallmarks of the coming generation of priests, . . .

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In other ways, Redemptoris Mater seminarians stand apart from their peers. The seminary is not the province of a religious order or a diocese headed by priests and bishops. Instead, Redemptoris Mater seminarians and the priests who oversee them come from Neocatechumenal Way communities. . . . The group's approach to discipline at the seminaries it operates in the United States (besides Denver, Redemptoris Mater seminaries have opened in Boston; Dallas; Newark, N.J.; and Washington, D.C.) has attracted notice in important places.

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When a Vatican office summarized a 2005-06 study of U.S. seminaries seeking answers to the clergy sex abuse scandal, it recommended that seminaries make their rules more demanding so men shed a "worldly style of life" - and it suggested that Redemptoris Mater seminaries were examples worth following.

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The reasons for decline [in vocations to the priesthood] may be in dispute, but the numbers are not: The number of priests in the United States has dropped from 58,000, in 1965, to 40,000 today. The past decade has seen an uptick in ordinations; this year's class is 472, up from 442 in 2000. But it's still not enough to replenish the priesthood's aging ranks.

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In my view, the Church has yet to understand that what worked with an uneducated laity and in a world without instant access to information just doesn't cut it in today's world. The dictatorial structure of the Church hierarchy and its increasing refusal to embrace modern knowledge are things that thinking people no longer will blindly accept. In truth - as I have posted previously - but for the influx of Hispanic immigrants, most of whom are Catholic, the Church did not grow in the USA. The only real growth has been in backward and uneducated parts of the world. The Redmtoris Mater model may work in training priests for those backward growth areas of the world, but I suspect they will not do well in the USA. Certainly not inareas outside of rural and ultra-conservative areas. And most of these areas are not heavily Catholic to begin with.