Greg Daly
Integrity was central to a major international formation conference at the national seminary, writes Greg Daly.
If there were recurring themes in last week’s international priestly formation conference in Maynooth they were ones of integrity and integration.
Opening comments from Armagh’s Archbishop Eamon Martin on identity and closing ones from Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin on the role of the priest in the Ireland of tomorrow understandably dominated headlines, of course. There was, however, much more to ‘Models of priestly formation: assessing the past, reflecting on the present and imagining the future’ than the observations of Ireland’s two leading clerics.
Fr Hans Zollner, head of the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Centre for Child Protection, for instance, in a talk on the spiritual and practical aspects of formation in safeguarding, noted how the highest risk factor in becoming an abuser is uncertainty about sexual identity. Personal integration is key to this, he explained.
Problems can develop after seminary too when many priests stop praying properly or fail to develop their prayer lives. Recalling how prayer is, in key respects, a conversation with God entailing bringing our lives before God, Fr Zollner said the challenge is to integrate priests’ personal and pastoral lives with their spiritual lives.
Spiritual life
All too often, he said, priests’ personal and pastoral lives grow and develop in the years after leaving seminary, while their spiritual life remains in what he called the “late adolescent stage of the seminarian”, causing a split to develop to a point where priests either lead double lives or break under the strain.
Aside from the problems posed by a lack of personal integration, further problems can be caused by a lack of integration between seminaries and dioceses, he implied. Pointing to how differences between seminaries and dioceses can lead to bishops overruling men who seminary staff had spotted as unsuitable, Fr Zollner warned against “magical thinking” and said that while bishops’ difficulties are understandable, “a craving for numbers is just very harmful for everyone”.
Serious integration between seminary and diocese was just one of the many levels at which Fr John Kartje, rector of the University of St Mary on the Lake at Mundelein, Illinois, in the Archdiocese of Chicago, said integration should take place in seminary formation.
Best practice, the onetime astrophysicist said, entails seminaries being integrated into their dioceses – such that priests should look on the seminary as the “heart of diocese”, with this entailing lay admissions boards and with interaction with archdiocesan women’s councils, and dioceses having vicars for ongoing formation. Not that this is simply a task for the ‘institutional’ church, he said: every Catholic has a role in priestly formation, because new priests need to leave seminary understanding what they’re called to do.
He noted how the most recent Vatican guidelines on priestly formation – 2016’s Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis – say seminaries should form missionary disciples “in love” with Christ himself, “shepherds with the smell of the sheep, who live in their midst to bring the mercy of God to them”. Such priests he said, should see themselves as disciples on journeys, constantly needing an integrated formation, understood as a “continuous configuration to Christ”.
Changes
Recalling how spiritual formation should be at the core of seminary life, Fr Kartje pointed to Pastores Dabo Vobis, St John Paul’s 1992 exhortation on priestly formation which emphasised the importance of integrating intellectual and spiritual formation in a pastorally effective way, and considered different ways in which classroom instruction might take place in seminaries.
Lessons can be learned from changes in instruction in medical schools, he said, where collaborative ‘reversed classroom’ approaches emphasise how the instructor is not omniscient, and help students to live with imperfection while considering topics in whole rather than disjointed ways.
Getting outside the classroom is important too, he said, pointing to how it’s worth considering the lived experience of priesthood in ways that go beyond pastoral field education: he cited two seminaries that avail of ‘teaching parishes’ where men in formation can witness the ‘life cycle’ of parishes, having a partial immersion in parish life for their entire time in seminary.
Such models, he said, involve weekly parish visits with limits on time spent there, mentorship in parishes with involvement in parish lay committees, learning objectives and agreements for the year, parish feedback, and regular theological reflections in the seminaries on parish experiences.
Challenges in such approaches, he said, can include time management, fears of getting things wrong, and discomfort with uncertainty.
Faculty members need an integrated approach to things too, he said, with faculty members spotting issues of concern being urged to share these with formation advisers as soon as possible, the academic faculty being made aware of any issues, weekly meetings of formation teams, and counsellors and spiritual directors being asked to share general perceptions of the state of the community based on their sessions.
Stressing the usefulness of meaningful benchmarks in formation, Fr Kartje said a good spiritual director can help priests in training bring to the surface those issues the Church needs to know, emphasising that trust and accompaniment are critical in these areas.
Sensible and sensitive accompaniment are key in the formation process, said Fr Christopher Jamison, Abbot President of the English Benedictines and until this autumn Director of England and Wales’ National Office for Vocations.
Experience
In particular, he said, careful handling is needed when dealing with men who begin seminary formation after years of experience ‘in the world’ – an increasingly common situation, and one that had prompted Fr Zollner to observe that a one-size-fits-all approach is far from ideal when seminarians can include men barely out of college and ones who have had homes, cars, and girlfriends.
“Losing the autonomy they’ve had for a decade or more is very difficult, yet this personal deconstruction is a necessary part of formation,” Fr Jamison said, maintaining that this should not be “a process of humiliation through silly practices” but instead should be “a real stripping back to the basics of the spiritual life”.
Likening such situations to difficult parts of long hikes that – if persevered through – lead to beautiful views and experiences, he said: “This can lead to distress and panic when they realise that their autonomy is slipping away, but if well handled by a formator, it is a key moment in formation.”
Seminaries
Fr Jamison’s address sought to explain to those gathered what surveys reveal today’s young people to be like, the ecclesial and spiritual qualities of those Catholic candidates for seminaries and ordinations, and the formation needs of such candidates, and began with the simple reality that today’s young people stay young, in a sense, longer than their predecessors did.
It’s not merely that they enter seminary later, he explained; they marry significantly later too. Their sense of affiliation to institutions is lower than those who came before them too. Young people belong to their friends and sometimes their families, but not to institutions, and social media is providing them with alternatives to the kinds of networks and communities previously found in trade unions, political parties, and churches.
The value and nature of the relationships formed online are, he said, different issues, though he said that they clearly have some value.
While affiliation to religious bodies is lower among today’s young adults than their predecessors, he said, what affiliation there is tends to be intensely felt and consciously chosen. Religious by intention, not by inheritance, these have had to choose Faith deliberately and tend not to be impressed by half-hearted inherited Faith.
While, he says, today’s young Catholic adults – those from whom today’s seminarians tend to come – cannot simply be pigeonholed as “all conservative”, they do tend to have conversion processes in common, with the vast majority of seminarians in England and Wales being converts, reverts or at least people who can point to when they started to take their Faith seriously.
The proverbial zealous convert, he cautioned, can take time to mature, and there are questions about how long it takes before somebody can be described as genuinely being Catholic.
The Eucharist, he said, is utterly central to the Faith of such young adults, the Mass truly being the source and summit of their Faith. In this light, it’s worth noting that while many young people who identify as Catholic still find Mass boring, those who come forward have learned what Mass is about.
In short, he said, candidates for seminary and religious life today tend to be strongly Catholic, having come to an intentional Faith during early adulthood with a deep devotion to the Eucharist.
Not that they always come forward quickly, he observed, describing as the world’s largest religious order the Little Brothers and Sisters of Perpetual Discernment. ‘Discernment’, he said, could be a wonderful experience, but equally can be a protracted one, experienced as a heavy burden. It is, he said, not always good to tell young people that God has a plan for them, but that it can be better to assure them that they are on a journey, accompanied by the Holy Spirit, who will guide them where they need to go.
With today’s young adults coming from a generation that’s in some ways quite individualistic, it is perhaps not surprising that they have a strong – perhaps an excessive – focus on individual salvation, that does not pay sufficient attention to the mandates of Matthew 25, while others can suffer from a perhaps suppressed self-loathing drawn from broken family experiences, or from a sense of self-importance, that, in combination with personal fragmentation, can be lethal.
Most candidates have a great zeal for evangelisation, reflecting their generational sense of self-sufficiency and tendency towards optimism, but they need careful formation if they are to be reborn as pastoral disciples, he added.
Induction
Crucial to doing this, he said, tends to be an induction into communion, with clergy realising that their priestly communion is foundation to their priestly formation. Also vital, he said, is helping young adults distinguish between good spirits and bad spirits at work in our souls; bad spirits love to destroy communion, and men in formation must learn to test their spirits and see whether they are drawing them into communion or out of communion. It’s perhaps most important that they learn to tell when bad spirits come clothed as angels of light.
“Much of the Catholic blogosphere,” he added in passing, “is full of the bad spirit masquerading as the good, and this can affect seminarians.”
The third and final priority for this generation of seminarians is to ensure that the story in their heads is the story of the Gospel, not the story of themselves. The daily reading of Scripture is to be engaged in a story where the star performers are Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Describing this as “the necessary antidote for the bad spirit”, he cautioned that without the deep engagement through God’s word that is lectio divina the bad spirit can take control and let us see ourselves as the stars of our own lives.
Fr Jamison’s reference to the blogosphere and social media sparked a panel discussion and a debate about the use and abuse of the internet in seminaries, an issue of obvious importance in Maynooth given rumours that captured national headlines in summer 2016.
Abandoning the internet is hardly an option as one of those attending pointed out – Popes have spoken of the internet as a digital continent and digital continents need digital missionaries. At the same time, said Archbishop Jorge Carlos Patrón Wong, Secretary for Seminaries in the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, today’s seminarians, with internet-ready phones, have opportunities for sins that simply weren’t options for their predecessors.
“Spiritual war,” he said, “breaks out after night prayer.”
This is not grounds for panic, he maintained; he has been impressed by how young adults can live in both the real and online worlds, and has found “marvellous” the ability of people to integrate their virtual, personal, and prayer lives. We are seeing, he said, the last generation of bishops and formators who are migrants to the internet: the next generation are natives, and it can be easier and more fruitful to learn from them.
Fascinating papers
The conference was packed with other fascinating papers, including an exploration of different models of priestly formation around the world offered by Fr Ronald Witherup, the Superior General of the Society of Priests of St Sulpice, while Sr Katharina Schuth of St Paul Seminary in Minnesota, USA, spoke in dazzling detail on ‘Priestly Formation after Pastores Dabo Vobis’.
Constantly emphasising the need to form priests for their role as pastors, Sr Katharina warned of the dangers of incomplete or ineffective vetting of applicants, and how, for instance, inexperienced vocations directors can hinder sound admission practices.
Maynooth’s own Fr Kevin O’Gorman SMA spoke on the implications for formation of different models of priesthood, pointing to the need to prevent clericalism, while Sr Brenda Dolphen RSM of Rome’s Gregorian University discussed the joy and the cost of learning to become a Christlike pastor with Fr Eamonn Conway of Limerick’s Mary Immaculate College pointing out that for the Christian, self-fulfilment comes through self-emptying.
Ahead of the conference the President of Saint Patrick’s College, Fr Michael Mullaney, said it was his hope that the speakers and participants at the conference would benefit from their deliberations and reflections.
It is hard to imagine that anybody left Maynooth last week without having gained immensely.