Catholic Seminary Quotes

I was amazed, shocked, and sickened by what I heard throughout the day, over and over, by many victims' stories. I can think of no one with whom I didn't recognize a common thread. These monsters, these evil priests, used the same words and methods on all of us. With each session, I would find something that sent a cold chill down my spine. It amazed and frightened me that the actual words used on me, to rape me, to rape me, were the same as the words used on so many others from all over the United States. You would think that all these priests either were educated in how to concur and rape us, or they met privately with each other to compare notes and develop their plan of attack on us. The pattern was so much the same, with the same words, that you would swear it was scripted and disbursed to these priests. Do they secretly have closed-door meetings on how to abuse us? A chilling thought. Neary's routine of saying the “Our Father” during the rape and making me say it with him, repeating the “thy will be done” over and over, the absolution given me after he “finished,” the threats of having God take my parents away, the lectures about offering my suffering up to God, etc., etc., etc. My experience was identical, word-for-word, to that of many others. The exact words during the abuse were not just close, but exactly the same, as if it were some kind of abuse ritual. Ritual abuse is not limited to the religious definition and can include compulsive, abusive behavior performed in an exact series of steps with little variation. How could these similarities occur without the priests taking the same “abuse seminar” together some place, somehow? Was it taught in the seminary? In some dark corner? It goes beyond coincidence—the similarities in deeds and verbiage that these predators use on us. It truly chilled me to the very marrow of my bones.

The approach taken to the Bible in almost all Protestant (and now Catholic) mainline seminaries is what is called the “historical-critical” method. It is completely different from the “devotional” approach to the Bible one learns in church. The devotional approach to the Bible is concerned about what the Bible has to say—especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society. What does the Bible tell me about God? Christ? The church? My relation to the world? What does it tell me about what to believe? About how to act? About social responsibilities? How can the Bible help make me closer to God? How does it help me to live?

I want to be and to stay Catholic. So why am I required to suppress our seminary? Why am I required to suppress our Sacerdotal Fraternity of Saint Pius X? Why am I required not to perform these ordinations? There is only one reason: to bring me into line with this policy. They want me to lend a hand in this destruction of the Church, to join in this communion which, for the Church, is adultery. I will not be an adulterer. I will Keep my Catholic Faith! That is why I refuse. I refuse to collaborate in the destruction of the Church. I refuse to collaborate in loss of faith, in the general apostasy. I know perfectly well that if I do not perform these ordinations, if I stop, I shall be given nothing. Ordination sermon of June 29, 1977

Income from the Maryland province had already helped finance the school that would become Saint Louis University in Missouri and established the Washington Seminary, which later became Gonzaga College High School, in the nation's capital. It also supported Georgetown Preparatory School, a private Catholic high school now located in North Bethesda, Maryland, which was once part of Georgetown College. ... Meanwhile, Jesuits based west of the Mississippi River, who also relied on slave labor, ran colleges in Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Ohio.

When Italians and then Poles and other Eastern Europeans followed the Irish, they became part of an American Catholic Church that was, in essence, an Irish church. As Boston Globe reporter Maureen Dezell noted in her book Irish America: Coming into Clover, 90 percent of men enrolled in American seminaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century had Irish names, while by 1900 three quarters of the American Catholic hierarchy was Irish. (Even by the 1990s, when Hispanics emerged as the biggest ethnic group in the American Catholic Church, and the Irish made up only 15 percent of the laity, a third of the priests and half of the American bishops were of Irish descent.)

Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.

You were taught that even when the charism of celibacy and chastity is present and embraced, the attractions, the impulses, the desires will still be present. So the first thing you need to do is be aware that you are a human being, and no matter how saintly or holy you are, you will never remove yourself from those passions. But the idea was making prudent choices. You just walk away. Celibacy is a radical call, and you’ve made a decision not to act on your desire.” Today, seminaries say they screen applicants rigorously. In Boston, for example, a young man must begin conversations with the vocations director a year before applying for admissions, and then the application process takes at least four months. Most seminaries require that applicants be celibate for as long as five years before starting the program, just to test out the practice, and students are expected to remain celibate throughout seminary as they continue to discern whether they are cut out to lead the sexless life of an ordained priest. Some seminaries screen out applicants who say they are sexually attracted to other men, but most do not, arguing that there is no evidence linking sexual orientation to one’s ability to lead a celibate life. The seminaries attempt to weed out potential child abusers, running federal and local criminal background checks, but there is currently no psychological test that can accurately predict whether a man who has never sexually abused a child is likely to do so in the future. So seminary officials say that in the screening process, and throughout seminary training, they are alert to any sign that a man is not forming normal relationships with adults, or seems abnormally interested in children. Many potential applicants are turned away from seminaries, and every year some students are forced out. “Just because there’s a shortage doesn’t mean we should lessen our standards,” said Rev. Edward J. Burns,

And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort. Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast. The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find? Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large. That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.

The news coverage, depending on who you believe, the last pope to take the name either did nothing about the Holocaust; said nothing about the Holocaust; or was actively responsible for the Holocaust.” Abasi said, “True. Before then, I did not know that every historian who specialized in Catholic history was a reject from the seminary, an ex-priest who married an ex-nun, or ‘Catholics’ who, mysteriously, support none of the teachings of the Catholic Church.” Wilhelmina

When you leave for seminary in a few weeks, I hope to have convinced you of how much I love you.

Seven habits to be cultivated are: •​daily celebration of the Mass •​frequent confession and spiritual direction •​daily examination of conscience •​daily reading of Scripture and other spiritual reading •​days of recollection and retreats •​Marian devotions •​meditation on the Passion of Our Lord These habits of life are necessary for the priest to carry out the work he was ordained to do. The contrast between these and the actual habits cultivated in today’s seminaries and evidenced in many priests ordained over the past three decades is sobering.

And the Catholic Church in Connecticut was both large and powerful. By the state’s three hundredth anniversary in 1935, Connecticut had well over a half-million Catholics served by 292 churches, 39 religious communities, 4 hospitals, 100 parochial schools, 3 colleges, and 4 seminaries. This was a force to be reckoned with, and for some, to be feared.

The approach taken to the Bible in almost all Protestant (and now Catholic) mainline seminaries is what is called the “historical-critical” method.

He could appreciate the value in something, even if he ultimately rejected that something—and could see the errors and flaws in something, even if he ultimately accepted that something. This attitude figured into his creation of the illegal seminaries of Zingst and Finkenwalde, which incorporated the best of both Protestant and Catholic traditions. Because of this self-critical intellectual integrity, Bonhoeffer sometimes had such confidence in his conclusions that he could seem arrogant.

Though I wholeheartedly supported celibacy at the start of my seminary career, my opinion changed as I made my way toward and through priesthood.

Fred, who was probably gay, didn’t bother to hide himself and didn’t care if you looked. Then again, he never hinted at wanting to fool around and I suspected he might be asexual, but really, I think he was very comfortable with his sexuality. Simon was a lot of fun to be around because he was gay and totally trusted our inner circle with his secret. Simon, Declan, Cody, and I generally shared an unspoken bond of knowing about each other while in seminary—we didn’t have to tell each other we were family.

During my tenure at seminary, at least two gay couples formed and voluntarily left because they had fallen in love and no longer wanted to be priests.

I fell head-over-heels in love with Lance in the middle of first theology. Like others before me, I fell in love in seminary—which made Lance my first boyfriend after Reese.

I discovered I was Lance’s first love—a joyous and dangerous reality—because we had not come to seminary to fall in love.

That’s when I finally quit. I don’t know if Lance quit, but I was done. The last thing I needed to do was think about another man’s testicles in my effort to straighten out. I thanked him for his time and walked out of his office. I drove back to the seminary, at peace with having ended the useless reparative therapy.

As Boston Globe reporter Maureen Dezell noted in her book Irish America: Coming into Clover, 90 percent of men enrolled in American seminaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century had Irish names, while by 1900 three quarters of the American Catholic hierarchy was Irish.

I was cast as Agnes in a non-Equity production of Agnes of God and had to wear a nun’s habit. It was itchy black wool and smelled like mothballs. When I saw myself in the mirror with the wimple, I suddenly got it why women like chadors and burkas; they take the ego out of how you look. Then, playing a nun woke up the selfless me, the me who yearns to do good, who believes in the God of Love that Catholics (on my mother’s side) and Sikhs (like my paternal grandfather) believe in. It took me 3 years to get to seminary after Agnes (I had to get the acting bug out of my system), but the day I put on that habit I began moving toward ministry.

The question of the teaching authority of the bishops in general was followed by that of Vatican II in particular, upon which the judgment of Fr. Pierre Marie, editor of the French Traditional Dominicans' quarterly magazine, Le Sol de la Torre, was quite severe. Proceeding in logical order, he examined first whether the Council documents come under the Church's extraordinary or ordinary infallibility - not under extraordinary infallibility, he argued, because both Pope John XXIII and Paul VI explicitly said the Council was making no definitive declarations; nor under ordinary infallibility, both because (see above) the Church's bishops were no longer scattered at Vatican II, but gathered together in such a group as to expose them to group pressures which could and did falsify their judgments; and because the bishops of Vatican II presented none of their doctrines as requiring defectively to be believed. Nor, Fr. Pierre Marie went on to argue, are these doctrines even part of the Church's authentic (i.e. ordinary, non-universal) teaching, because the bishops expressed no intention to hand down the Deposit of the Faith, on the contrary their spokesmen (e.g. Paul VI) expressed their intention to come to terms with the modern world and its values, long condemned by true Catholic churchmen as being intrinsically uncatholic. Therefore, concluded Fr. Pierre Marie, the documents of Vatican II have only a Conciliar authority, the authority of that Council, but no Catholic authority at all, and no Catholic need take seriously anything Vatican II said, unless it was already Church doctrine beforehand. Letter #148 March 1996

That is why, to come to our question, for leaders and for people, the real purpose of the Clinton acquittal, as of the release of Barabbas, is to get rid of Jesus. The Clinton acquittal is a battle not only in a culture war but in a religious war. The people want to sin. They want money, materialism, and all the pleasures money can buy. They want no restraints upon their sinful ways. This is why they want power to the moneymen and to corrupt politicians. That is why Barabbas was released and Clinton was acquitted. (letter #183 March 1999)

The problem is that modern godlessness undermines all authority, which hollows out institutions, which leaves only individuals. If then the individuals prove unworthy of trust, there seems to be nothing left. That is why many Catholics today cling to unworthy churchmen and follow them in their Liberalism because the only alternative seems to be to abandon the Church altogether. On the contrary, as the July letter suggested, when Catholics have a robust faith as in the Middle Ages, their faith in the Church as an institution remains unshaken by an misbehavior of the individual churchmen, because the institution is that much greater than the individuals. That is why a Catholic today can severely criticize the recent popes without having to be a sedevacantist, and he should be able to say these popes have been very bad for Catholicism without his needing to be accused of losing the Faith or of seeking to destroy the Church. Letter #118 September 1993.

After studying at Edinburgh University, he spent a decade broadening his mind on the Continent; for example, he befriended some Jansenists in the famous Catholic seminary at Douay in the Spanish Netherlands, and discovered in them a depth of sincere Christian faith and spiritual life he had not thought possible in Roman Catholics. It seems they reminded him of the Christians of the earliest centuries. There was always to be a Jansenist leaven in Leighton’s own piety; in particular, he admired monasticism and the celibate life—he himself never married.25

Certainly, I am taken as a reactionary, as an "ultra-traditionalist", as someone who impedes reform - and it is true! I am hindering reform. Yes, indeed, for I do not accept it! I consider this reform a reform to destroy the Church. I think that I have showed you this. It is, therefore, clear that it is for this that I am attacked by Rome, by this power of subversion that is found there. I have been asked to close my seminary; I have been asked to send away all my seminarians. In conscience, however, I think that I must say that I will not collaborate in the destruction of the Church; I cannot collaborate in the destruction of the Church!

As I have said before, the bishops talked about sharing with the poor, but they fail to set an example by their own actions. They meet in the best hotels in Washington and enjoy the best meals. They even hold one of their meetings in Chicago's luxurious Palmer House. How can they justify that? Why don't they meet at a seminary and dine on a seminary menu? Why don't' they give up the luxury of private baths, king-sized beds, expensive liquor, and suites with the best air conditioning? Their actions are so inconsistent with their words that they have lost a tremendous amount of prestige.

The priests in Maryland, who relied on the proceeds derived from slave labor and slavery, built the nation's first Catholic college, the first archdiocese, and the first Catholic cathedral and helped establish two of the earliest Catholic monasteries. Even the clergymen who established the first Catholic seminary operated a plantation and relied on enslaved laborers. ... Yet enslaved Black men, women, and children remain invisible in the origin story traditionally told about the emergence of Catholicism in the United States.

I had spoken about the dogma of Faith being under attack even from within the Church, and I had made reference to some examples of Church teachings which were losing acceptance among many "Protestantized" Catholics. One of the seminarians of this group brought that point up again and told me that he, for one, did not believe in what I had said was the Church's teaching. It was enough for him to know that a certain Cardinal had said the opposite. "I follow the living magisterium," this seminarian told me! I could hardly believe my own eyes and ears. This was a seminarian who was preparing to become a priest to say only the traditional Latin Mass, and who had supposedly had a traditional seminary formation. As best I could tell from the discussion that followed, the superior of the group shared this seminarian's understanding of the Church's Magisterium - basically, that a "magisterial teaching" is whatever happens to be the latest word from Vatican officials, no matter how contradictory this might be to the prior constant and defined teachings of the Church!

It was intended that Catholics and Protestants draw closer together, but it is evident that Catholics have become Protestants, rather than the reverse. The New Mass itself was a Protestant conception and leads to Protestantism, and it is for that reason that we cannot conceive the possibility of using it in our seminaries. The definition of the Mass as given in the Introduction of the Novus Ordo Missae is clearly a Protestant one, and this, in itself, is inadmissible and inconceivable! Henceforth, the emphasis will be on the Supper, the Meal, and no longer on the Sacrifice. This shift of emphasis must of necessity lead - and is already leading - to the destruction of Catholic Doctrine which rests upon the Sacrifice of the Cross continued on the altar. It will lead to loss of faith in the Real Presence, and to the ruin of the Catholic priesthood. This alone would suffice to justify our emphatic rejection of the Reform. This means that no compromise whatever can be consented to in this regard. It means also that those who have taken the Mass along that road bear a heavy burden of responsibility.

I mention all this only incidentally to establish my evangelical credentials. The real purpose is to say that I don’t recall abortion being a topic of conversation in evangelical circles in the middle decades of the twentieth century, so Weyrich’s declaration struck me as credible. During the 1970s, the decade when the Religious Right began to emerge, I attended and graduated from an evangelical school, Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, and then worked in the development department for its sister institution, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, while completing a master’s degree in church history as a part-time student. As it happens, a single member of the seminary faculty, Harold O. J. Brown, became exercised about abortion, what most evangelicals considered a “Catholic issue,” in the latter part of the 1970s. But he was regarded as an outlier, an exception that proved the rule, on a faculty more interested in recondite doctrines such as biblical inerrancy, the notion that the Scriptures are entirely without error in the original (no longer extant) manuscripts.

The enemies of Christ from Nero to Napoleon eventually discovered that to attack or murder the pope only creates sympathy and martyrs. It is a failed strategy in every era. So instead, they sought quietly to place one of their own in the papal shoes. It would require decades, even a century, to create the seminaries, the priests, the bishops, the cardinal electors, and then even the pope or popes themselves — but it would be worth the wait. It has been a slow, patient plan to establish a Satanic revolution with the pope as puppet.

Although there are no reliable statistics on CCR membership broken down by nations, other statistics indirectly reveal the energizing effect of the CCR. In 1960, in the whole of Latin America there were only 4,093 men enrolled in Catholic seminaries; by 2015 this had risen to 21,520.40 Mass attendance has enjoyed a similarly huge increase, as can be seen in Table 8.2 overleaf, which shows the percentage of Catholics in each Latin American nation who said ‘yes’, when asked: Have you attended a place of worship or religious service in the past seven days?

Penance (Scripture selection — Joel 2:12-13) The name of Gene Hamilton may be new to you if you are not from the archdiocese of New York or have not read A Priest Forever by Father Benedict Groeschel (published by Our Sunday Visitor in 1998). Gene was a seminarian for that archdiocese at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie. From all accounts he was a fine student, a friendly, sincere young man, eager to be a priest. He was diagnosed with cancer, and the final years of his life were a real cross for him — pain, decline, hopes way up after surgery and treatment only to have them dashed with another outbreak. In his brave struggle a saint emerged, and I use that word purposefully. In his pain, agony, and dwindling strength, a man of deep faith, indomitable hope, and genuine love arose; a seminarian of prayer, who never complained, thought more of the needs and difficulties of others than his own. A man driven by one desire: to be united with Jesus in his passion and death, hopefully, yearning to do so as a priest. There was a lot of longing for a miracle by his family, brother seminarians, friends and admirers; many, including doctors and other medical personnel, told the young man, “You’re going to beat this, Gene.” Dozens who just knew he was too good, too innocent, too pure and holy to die so young and painfully, prayed for his recovery. In January of 1997, Gene Hamilton was too ill to come on the pilgrimage here to Rome with the men from Dunwoodie. Bishop Edwin O’Brien, realistic and thoughtful man that he is, with the late Cardinal John O’Connor, approached the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, the dicastery of the Holy See under which seminaries come, for permission to ordain

Two of my closest seminary friends broke all contact with me after I told them I was leaving priesthood and coming out of the closet. I’ll never know if they felt betrayed because I lied to them about being straight or if they truly believed the words they told me: “You’re not a priest anymore, so we have nothing in common.” So much for the kindness, mercy, and compassion of God.

505 The first seminary, the first formation program, the first college is the Catholic family. No director, however talented or skilled, can replace parents. If this most fundamental unit breaks down, the future of the Church and of human society becomes shaky and risks collapse. On the day he turned fifty, Pope John XXIII wrote in a letter to his parents, “Dear Mom and Dad, today I have reached fifty years of age. God has given me many positions in the Church, I have been to many places, I have studied much, but no school has given me more instruction or has been more beneficial to me than that which I received when I sat on your laps.