Posted on 01/18/2006 7:49:46 AM PST by NYer
A Vatican-chartered inquiry team began work at St. Vincent Seminary in Latrobe Monday, part of a study of whether U.S. seminaries are providing proper spiritual, moral and theological training for the priesthood.
Two bishops and two priests will spend five days interviewing all 64 candidates for priesthood and all regular faculty. All graduates of the past three years have been invited to meet with the team or to offer signed comments in writing.
Identical studies are being done at all 229 Catholic seminaries in the United States. SS. Cyril & Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary on the North Side was among the first to be visited in November, and St. Paul Seminary in East Carnegie will be visited next month.
Because the visitation is the Vatican's response to the child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic priesthood, and it coincides with a statement banning men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from ordination, many media have treated it as an investigation into the sexual climate of the seminaries. However, the 55 questions that each team is expected to address range widely. Only one concerns whether there is "evidence of homosexuality in the seminary."
That question, however, is among six mandatory ones. The others concern psychological testing of candidates, the "moral life" of students and faculty, quality of preparation for celibate living and whether seminarians are able to offer compelling intellectual responses to contemporary society.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
Father Belsole expects at least two years to pass before hearing how St. Vincent fared.
"There is no exit interview. The [visitors] are going to present all of their opinions to the [Vatican] Congregation for Education, but we don't hear anything ourselves," he said.
How long before some leftish Catholic starts to call it an Inquisition?
I thought they already had.
I personally think we could use a little MORE Inquisition (the real one, not the caricature portrayed in Protestant and Secularist "history" books.)
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Recently I read an article about a more left-leaning seminary somewhere in the U.S. that went through an inspection along the lines of this (although I don't think it pertained to this partiular process). I can't remember where I read the article, but it may have been New Oxford Review.
Either way, the article said that, according to some seminarians, when the people who ran the seminary knew they were going to be "inspected", all of the heretical books disappeared from the shelves of the seminary to be temorarily replaced by Orthodox books. Instructors changed their ways long enough to give the appearance of teaching Catholic Orthodoxy. After the inspectors left, the Orthodox books vansished, the old heretical books reappeared, and it was back to business as usual.
Assuming that all of this is true, and assuming that this will be done at many seminaries in the U.S., shouldn't a different approach be taken?? These seminaries are making a mockery of The Church. How about "surprise" inspections, without notifying the seminary in advance of the inspector's arrival?? It just seems like it will be too easy to fool the inspectors with tactics like those outlined above, and the liberal infestation will continue.
I am wondering if this entire exercise will be a waste of time.
Hence the interview with the seminarians?
I know that one of the seminaries on LI had totally slipped the bounds of orthodoxy back in the '80s (no surprise, given the bishop) but is now on the up and up. IMHO, the more heterodox bishops can no longer afford to cover up the activities in their seminaries. Ever since the sex abuse scandal, a spotlight now shines on them and their seminaries and seminarians. I reside in the diocese of an ultr liberal bishop who has tried to cover up the shenanigans in his diocese. He is under the scrutiny of one unrelenting attorney who seeks to take him down. Just my opinion.
In May, I will be attending the celebration of a newly ordained priest. I met him several years ago. There aren't too many 'straight' priests in this diocese and it was refreshing to meet a young seminarian who was 'straight'. It should be interesting to see how he survived his formation in the seminary of this diocese.
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