Posted on 06/02/2007 2:55:33 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
CHICAGO - For more than a century, Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary has quietly prepared teenage boys for the priesthood, largely unchanged as the city transformed around it from gritty industrial center to gleaming modern metropolis.
But another kind of change finally caught up with Quigley.
The 102-year-old seminary _ housed in a Gothic-style building that looks like it belongs on a square in Europe instead of in a tony Chicago shopping district _ will close its doors for good in two weeks because of a shrinking student body that has seen just one graduate ordained in the last 17 years.
It's the latest reminder that Catholic preparatory seminaries have all but vanished in the United States, and highlights the Church's struggle to find men willing to dedicate themselves to the priesthood.
"This is more or less the final nail in the coffin of the preparatory seminary," said R. Scott Appleby, a historian at the University of Notre Dame who has written extensively about the church.
"Historians of the Catholic Church will point to the closing of Quigley ... as a final landmark in a trend that has been building now for almost 50 years," he said.
As recently as the late 1960s, there were 122 high school seminaries in the U.S. with a combined student body of nearly 16,000, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
Quigley, which counts New York Cardinal Edward Egan and Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory among its alumni, was bursting with about 1,300 students in the 1950s; it had just 183 at the beginning of this school year. When church officials announced in September that the school would close, they said it would be $1 million in debt by June.
Its closure will leave just seven preparatory seminaries with a combined enrollment of about 500 students in the United States.
The decline of high school seminaries illustrates a dramatic shift in the way the church finds priests _ and how it's had to scramble to do so.
Parishes increasingly are being served by priests from foreign countries, in large part because fewer American men are becoming priests. At the same time, the average age of new priests is older, with many men waiting until their 30s, 40s and beyond.
When 13 priests were ordained last month in Chicago, all but one was from another country; nine were in their 30s. The lone American was a 42-year-old former advertising executive.
The reasons for the shift begin with how dramatically things have changed since Quigley opened in 1905.
Like other seminaries, Quigley, which moved to its present home in 1918, thrived because large Catholic families, many Irish or Polish, often sent at least one of their sons there.
"In the old days you had an Irish family with three kids. One was going to be a priest, one was going to be a cop and one was going to be a fireman, and the mother was going to be the one who decided which was which," said Peter Makrinski, a longtime teacher and coach at Quigley.
That began to change in the 1960s and '70s. Archdiocese spokesman James Accurso said that seminaries fell out of favor among young people for the same reason marrying right out of high school did.
"A lot of things in life are delayed, young people get married later and I think they join the priesthood later," he said.
Morgan Mellske, an 18-year-old Quigley senior, said that, while some students are considering becoming priests, most are not.
"I don't even know what I want to do with the rest of my life," said Mellske. "People become priests in the middle of their life."
Appleby, the historian, said there's more to it.
"It's a culture that raises a collective eyebrow at the notion of a young man or a young woman would renounce sexuality or sexual self expression," he said. "There's a general skepticism about the emotional health of people who would do that voluntarily," particularly, he said, at such a young age.
Within the church itself, more people began questioning the wisdom of training teenagers to become priests and forego sex.
"Our understanding (of sexuality) is more developed today," explained the Rev. Donald Cozzens, a professor at John Carroll University in Cleveland and a former seminary rector who criticized mandatory celibacy in a book, "Freeing Celibacy."
Further, as families shrank, so did the pool of prospective seminarians.
"When they don't have more than one boy, parents are very reluctant to let that child go into the priesthood," said Sister Katarina Schuth, a teacher at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who has studied seminaries for more than two decades.
Even families that continued to send their sons to Quigley made it clear they were doing so for a Catholic education and not to start them on a path to the priesthood.
"The parents, they want their sons to make money, they want their sons to get married," Makrinski said. "They'd say, 'I'd much rather see them get a job.'"
In fact, while more than 3,000 young men have graduated from Quigley in the last 17 years, just one, a 1999 graduate, has been ordained.
But student John Anschuetz, 17, says the school serves a purpose every bit as important as turning out priests.
"Just because we don't become priests doesn't mean the school isn't accomplishing its goal," he said.
It’ll fool a few who want to be fooled.
This isn’t about a seminary! This is about a high school, just a minor seminary. Typical wrong headline.
Serves its purpose, however, if you want to believe this pap.
Take it up with the Journal Gazette and Times-Courier. The headline was cut-and-pasted, w/o modification, from their website.
Another MSM writer with a "few milliseconds" worth of knowledge about the Catholic process of seminary formation.
We are speaking as to the ignorance of the one who wrote it (the article) or the copy editor who came up with the “nifty” title. We are not impugning your post or you. This is not “ad hominem.”
The story following makes it clear that this was for high school men who were then expected to go on to Major Seminary.
Frank
Perhaps it was shortened due to space considerations?
What’s the meaning of your tagline, if you don’t mind me asking?
Perhaps.
The word “Minor” next to seminary is five whole letters. Think of how many letters are then saved on a news run of 450,000 copies of which 70% end up at the bottom of bird cages and of which 60% are given away free to keep advertising dollars up.
hope they do something good with it, like give it to the F.S.S.P.
It is written in “Creto-Syngallic script” and is the location of the Grail which Silas gave me to keep.
In truth, it is for Father Vincent R. Capodanno, a Maryknoll Missionary from Long Island, who decided in his 30’s that he wanted to join our troops in Vietnam as a Military Chaplain. He did two tours and was given the name “The Grunt Padre” because he went with his Marines into the bush. He was assigned to the 3/5 Marines of the 1st Division, Fleet Marine Force. He was killed trying to rescue an injured Marine in a fierce fire fight and was later awarded the Medal of Honor.
Fr. Dan Mode who is now in Virginia and has served as a Chaplain himself has written a book about him called “Grunt Padre.”
Many Vietnam-era Marines will remember him and the example he gave. If you Google his name, he has a website in his honor. The K of C has a number of Assemblies/Councils named for him.
F
Ping!
Good story. “The Word Among Us” had an article on Fr. Capodanno that I remember reading. Also another Knights of Columbus chaplain, who served in the Korean War and was a POW. I don’t recall the name, but his cause for sainthood is also in progress.
Or a Rescue Mission.
Hey Tomkow you ever hear of this school
ALMIGHTYE and everlastyng God, whiche haste geven unto us thy servauntes grace by the confession of a true fayth to acknowlege the glorye of the eternall trinitie, and in the power of the divyne majestie to wurshippe the unitie: we beseche thee, that through the stedfastnes of thys fayth, me may evermore be defended from all adversitie, whiche liveste and reignest, one God, worlde without end.
The author apparently doesn't understand the difference between a "preparatory" or "minor" seminary -- essentially a boys' high school with an emphasis on subjects useful to a seminarian (e.g., more classics, less shop) -- and a "major" or "college" seminary, which is a college and graduate school with programs to prepare men for ordination to the diaconate and priesthood.
It mentions -- very deep into the article -- that only one Quigley alumnus has been ordained in the last 17 years. Obviously, as a minor seminary, it doesn't have much to do with producing priests in the Archdiocese of Chicago, and hasn't for some time.
The major seminary for the Chicago archdiocese is in Mundelein. It's very much open and in business.
**because of a shrinking student body that has seen just one graduate ordained in the last 17 years.**
To me, this indicates that something is wrong here. Vocations to the priesthood are increasing everywhere. Perhaps the prepatory phase in a high school is not popular anymore.
Our seminary has 98 seminarians at this date; 25 from our diocese and the remainder from other disoceses.
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