U.S. Seminaries: Condition Stabilized

by Dale Vree
Perhaps you saw the headline earlier this year: "Vatican reports most U.S. seminaries are generally healthy." If you missed it, you're not the only one. The results of the long-awaited "apostolic visitation of U.S. seminaries" were released by the Vatican way back on December 15, 2008 -- but news of the report didn't begin filtering out in the American press until mid-January when the U.S. bishops posted a response to the report by Boston's Sean Cardinal O'Malley. Given the scant attention paid to the report in the media, it is likely that this tidbit passed many by. Even those reports that attempted to sum up the 20-page document on the moral and intellectual life of U.S. seminaries seemed to gloss over the most noteworthy aspects of the findings, instead opting for a sanitized "all is well" synopsis. It is instructive to note that the U.S. bishops themselves seemed none too keen on drawing attention to the Vatican report. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) didn't even bother to send out a press release; the report itself, though available, is buried deep in the USCCB website.

So, what did the report actually say, and why aren't the U.S. bishops promoting it?

A little bit of background first. In his book Goodbye, Good Men, published a full seven years ago, NOR Associate Editor Michael S. Rose concretely and vividly described how certain vocations directors and seminaries screen out or persecute manly orthodox men while homosexuals and dissenters are welcomed and proceed to ordination. The book was researched and written in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the clerical sex-abuse scandals of 2002. Rose was one step ahead of a situation that caught most of the Catholic world by surprise. Given the history of out-in-the-open and flagrant homosexuality at certain seminaries discussed by Rose, Goodbye, Good Men went a long way in explaining how we could have had so many moral degenerates in the priesthood in recent decades. Not only did the book make The New York Times bestseller list, it was reportedly widely read in and around Rome. While it is difficult to trace the influence of any particular book, Goodbye, Good Men did, without a doubt, introduce into the mainstream the terms "lavender mafia" and "pink palace."

A few short months after the book's release, Pope John Paul II held a Vatican summit with all the U.S. cardinals. One result of that surprise emergency meeting was a call for another Vatican investigation of U.S. seminaries: "A new and serious Apostolic Visitation of seminaries and other institutes of formation must be made without delay, with particular emphasis on the need for fidelity to the Church's teaching, especially in the area of morality, and the need for a deeper study of the criteria of suitability of candidates to the priesthood." (A previous systematic on-site investigation of seminaries ordered by the Pope in 1981 was generally regarded as a whitewash, having been delegated to certain unreliable U.S. bishops with the expectation that they would effectively investigate themselves.)

As for the line about "the criteria of suitability of candidates to the priesthood," John L. Allen Jr., the National Catholic Reporter's Rome correspondent, explained its meaning (May 3, 2002): "Observers took this point as an oblique way of calling for a much tougher policy concerning the admission of homosexuals to seminary study. [Bishop Wilton] Gregory [then-president of the USCCB] lent weight to this perception during an April 23 press briefing, acknowledging the existence of a ‘homosexual atmosphere and dynamic' in some seminaries.... Gregory called for ‘an ongoing struggle to be sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men.' Conservative Catholic commentators...have argued that tolerance of a ‘homosexual subculture' in the priesthood was partly to blame [for the priestly sex scandals].... The summit endorsed that view." In other words, while Rose was being smeared by conservative Catholic publications, banned from appearing on EWTN, and threatened with a libel suit by one seminary, the Vatican summit essentially affirmed what he reported in Goodbye, Good Men.

It took three years to organize, but the Apostolic Visitation (meaning an investigation commissioned by bishops) took place from September 2005 to May 2006, with 117 investigators visiting all 229 U.S. seminaries. It then took another two-and-a-half years for the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education to digest the data, produce its findings, and offer its recommendations to the U.S. bishops. After all that, the USCCB has done little to publicize the results. Why? Certainly not because it isn't a hot-button issue relevant to the health of the Church in the U.S. After all, seminaries are the seedbed of the priesthood. This is where vocations come to germinate, where men come to be formed and educated and trained as the future leaders of our parishes and other Catholic institutions. The health of seminaries is relevant to every believing Catholic -- and more than a few others.

One possible reason for the bishops' reticence is that the Vatican report vindicates all the general critical claims made in Goodbye, Good Men. Though couched in carefully diplomatic Vatican language, the report also uses unusually blunt terms, especially in its criticism of seminaries run by religious orders. That being said, the assessment also gives American Catholics some authentic cause for hope. Generally speaking, most U.S. seminaries are in better shape -- morally, spiritually, and intellectually -- than they were a dozen years ago. That's good news, yes; but there's still much work to be done if the state of American seminaries is to be considered healthy and robust. Thankfully, the Vatican report clearly identifies several problem areas and proposes simple, viable solutions.

Four basic problem areas are worthy of a closer look: the dissidence of some seminary faculty members who are contemptuous of Church teaching; the "ambiguity" about homosexuality in the seminary and the priesthood (including cases of accepting homosexuality as a part of seminary life); the liturgical and devotional life of seminarians; and the teaching on the nature of the Catholic priesthood itself. Not surprisingly, these were the four basic areas of seminary life that received extensive treatment in Goodbye, Good Men.

First, the most obvious problem is the employment of professors and spiritual directors who reject Church teaching, something the report notes was not news to most seminary rectors. The report reminds bishops that procedures exist to fire such dissenting faculty members, and notes that these procedures "are not invoked as often as they should be." What the report calls a "lack of harmony" in the formation of priests "is almost always" due to educators "being less than faithful to the Magisterium of the Church." We're talking about priests, nuns, and laymen who do not believe what the Church teaches on essential matters of faith and morals, including the nature of the priesthood and the Holy Eucharist. "Quite often," the report states, "the Visitation discovered one or more faculty members who, although not speaking openly against Church teaching, let the students understand -- through hints, off-the-cuff remarks, etc. -- their disapproval of some articles of Magisterial teaching." But in other places the dissent was flagrant: "particularly in some schools of theology run by religious [orders], dissent is widespread" in the area of moral theology, which includes the Church's teaching on sexual morality. "It is not rare in religious institutes to find basic tenets of Catholic moral doctrine being called into question."

Obviously, one of the issues of moral theology concerns homosexuality, and on this subject the report notes that "ambiguities still exist," again, especially in seminaries and "houses of formation" run by religious orders. The report urges seminary educators and evaluators to continue to watch candidates for signs of homosexual tendencies and underscores the importance of the Vatican instruction that prohibits accepting as candidates men who experience deep-seated homosexual attractions. Just as Archbishop Wilton Gregory admitted, the Vatican is concerned that seminaries -- in the U.S. and elsewhere -- ought not become magnets for the homosexual subculture. The report confirmed that homosexual seminary subcultures were a problem by acknowledging that "homosexual behavior" is now on the wane in U.S. seminaries, though it still persists: "Of course, here and there some case or other of immorality -- again, usually homosexual behavior -- continues to show up."

Another significant problem identified by the report is that in some seminaries, again particularly those run by religious orders, the teaching on the nature of the Catholic priesthood itself is distorted. The report noted that students in some seminaries have an "insufficient grasp" of Catholic teaching on the distinction between the common priesthood of the faithful and the hierarchical priesthood. The report also observed that seminaries are hampered by "mistaken" fears of offending those "who judge the reservation of the Sacrament of Holy Orders [priesthood] to men alone as discriminatory." In other words, they're buying into the concept of women's ordination. Another problem is that the discipline of clerical celibacy is too often called into question. Generally speaking, however, the report states that "chastity" education appears to be "adequate" in all of the U.S. seminaries. Still, the Vatican evaluators recommended stronger oversight of seminarians during their free time, including monitoring their use of the Internet.

The report also points to the decline in many seminaries, widely reported anecdotally by priests and seminarians, of the traditional Catholic devotional life. The report called it "profoundly regrettable" that many seminaries do not include such practices as the Rosary as a normal part of the day-to-day life of students. "Some institutes even have an atmosphere that discourages traditional acts of Catholic piety -- which begs the question as to whether the faculty's ideas of spirituality are consonant with Church teaching and tradition.... Unless a great many seminaries introduce regular recitation of the Rosary, novenas, litanies, Stations of the Cross, and so on, the seminarians will lack an education in the sacramentals and will be unprepared for ministry in the Church, which greatly treasures these practices." Blunt words for the Vatican, to be sure. It should be noted, however, that the report lays the blame at the feet of seminary administrations, and actually praised the seminarians themselves, saying, "Almost without exception, the seminarians show authentic apostolic zeal and possess a ‘Catholic' vision of Church life." This is what one wants to hear. And from all indications, 21st-century seminarians, on the whole, are much more tradition-minded and orthodox than their instructors and other priests ordained a generation before them.

Lending credence to reports that U.S. seminaries are "generally healthy," the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education concludes: "This visitation has demonstrated that, since the 1990s, a greater sense of stability now prevails in the U.S. seminaries. The appointment, over time, of rectors who are wise and faithful to the Church has meant a gradual improvement, at least in the diocesan seminaries."

Next up: the Vatican has ordered an apostolic visitation of women's religious orders in the United States, with an eye toward revitalizing and renewing religious life.

[The forgoing article was originally published as one of the New Oxford Notes in New Oxford Review (April 2009), and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.]