Training Candidates for the Priesthood
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I will give my address in French, but perhaps I will say a few words in English by way of introduction. You are all very welcome in my Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels. I am very glad that you are here and I am happy to meet you. I hope that you will have a good conference in this fine city of Leuven, which for more than 550 years has been home to a Catholic university serving the church and society.
I have been asked as an introduction to this consultation for rectors of major seminaries to present an overview of the situation of priestly formation following the Second Vatican Council. I'm going to tell you about the main factors, the situation, things which we have already accomplished and things which still remain to be done. Let me just give you a few ideas, some food for thought, because you will have many speakers over the next few days who will deal with more specific questions and issues.
My intervention will be inspired by the very important post-synod exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis, which appeared in 1992 and which gives us an outline of the general situation of seminary education and formation for priests throughout the church. Since I am a bishop in western Europe, as you know, I would like to limit my remarks to the situation in western Europe and the United States and Canada. I will not, however, be speaking about Africa or Asia or Latin America. I apologize for these limitations which I imposed upon myself, and leave it to other speakers to inform you about the situation in other parts of the world.
Let me also tell you that I shall be giving you some personal opinions, which are, of course, open for discussion. I am going to be very frank and open with you, but I do not want to monopolize the truth or have you think that I would try to do that. My comments are based on the fruit of about 20 years serving as a bishop in western Europe, in a very secular world.
From my vantage point, the real challenge for seminaries involves the education and formation of priests for the future — priests, according to the Gospel, that Jesus would have wanted. We want to train seminarians for the future destined for specific tasks and destined for specific cultures and specific places. And here is a major problem for seminaries. We have to take priests as Christ would want them and not change their inner natures, their inner identities, but at the same time we need to form them so they are able to adapt at any moment to any culture or any country which might have need of them. Of course, this task is not easy. But it is the challenge and also the marvelous opportunity about seminary formation at this time.
So now let me turn to the challenges in northern Europe, western Europe above and below the Alps, and in North America — Canada and the United States.
Challenges in Formation
What are the great challenges for priestly formation in these areas? First of all, we are seeing a real scarcity of vocations. We have very, very few priests, particularly in Europe. If you look at Belgium, for example, there are very, very few vocations to the priesthood throughout the country. In Flanders, the north of the country, there are nine new candidates for a population of about 5 million Catholics in the country. The fact that there are so few seminarians in formation is, of course, a determining factor in many of the seminaries and gives rise to many problems. Because there are not many vocations, seminaries are turning into very small groups of people indeed. Training therefore concerns specific small units, which from a human point of view is often a disadvantage.
The education and formation of four or five candidates is not the same as training 50 or 100. There are many more difficulties, sometimes interpersonal, which become more intensified than they would be if the numbers were larger. Every day the faculties, formation personnel and the rectors face the difficulty of being confronted with small units and not with the whole, the many.
Second, the seminarians, too, have problems because they feel themselves a rare, perhaps endangered breed. Some feel they are alone in the world. And predictably, among some of the few who are in seminaries there exists a specialized and exceptional psychology at work that gives rise to a lot of discouragement, doubts and hesitations. This would not be the case if you were in seminary with 100 or 200 others. When so many were preparing for the priesthood as was the case when I was in seminary, we shared a corporate identity. We were happy to be there. We were not exceptions to the rule. Today's situation is quite different.
Third, results of recruitment are often haphazard. When I was preparing for the priesthood, we were all roughly the same age. Nowadays, candidates are coming in at 18, 20, 30 and 40 years of age, and sometimes older. There exists no classic profile for those who enter seminary. Candidates for priestly formation are different, with different backgrounds. These factors, of course, add to their perception of themselves as exceptional, which does not make the rector's job any easier because each seminarian is like a completely different planet and for each one the rector and staff have to deal with a unique situation.
So you can see that these small groups made up of people from all different kinds of backgrounds, all sorts of personal histories, are very difficult to unify. To say the least, it is very difficult to draw up any kind of comprehensive program for each one. There is no standard formula anymore. There is no longer just one menu; everybody is eating a la carte, if you like.
Why So Few Candidates?
If we tried to determine the cause of there being so few people coming forward to prepare for the priesthood, there are many reasons. In Belgium where we have so few candidates, we puzzle why this is so. After all, we have a very good tradition of priestly formation. People are very generous and very much involved in the church, and so are the young people. So what could the cause be? I don't want to go on too much about this, but let me just tell you a few of the reasons I've identified.
First of all, becoming a priest is no longer a social promotion. It is actually perhaps an instance of downward mobility, and the question is. Who would choose to do such a thing? Who would choose as their profession to go down one step on the social ladder? In the past, of course, this was not the case. Priests were regarded highly and were respected persons in the world, in society and of course in the church. Nowadays priests often come under a lot of criticism, and people feel sorry for them. Society does not accord them the prestige they once enjoyed.
A second reason for the scarcity is that families are getting smaller and smaller. What this means is that when parents have two children in a family they do not necessarily want to see one of them in the priesthood. Things were different when families had seven or 10 or 12 children and were honored to have a priest in the family. In addition, many seminarians come from broken homes where the stability and warmth of family life were missing. This sometimes affects the transition into seminary life.
A third reason why so few candidates for the priesthood exist is that our society is almost entirely secular, a society where God has disappeared due to the influence of public life and the tabloids. Religion is no longer talked about on the radio or television except if there is some scandal. We seem to have moved out of the public eye. We are no longer taken seriously by the media. So this means that priests are actually public people for private interests, because actually religion has become a private issue. Religion is something done in private and not talked about in public.
A fourth reason, then, for the scarcity of candidates for seminaries is that many people and many young seminarians grapple with a negative image of the church and of the priesthood. This may be especially true with regard to diocesan priests. The diocesan priest is a generalist —he is a general practitioner who is on call to do everything, while monks and priests in religious orders at least can become specialists. Nor does a diocesan priest have the support of a community. He is on his own, and he is on the firing line every day for problems from individuals. He doesn't have the backup of many colleagues or he does not really have much backup even if some backup exists.
All of these elements go toward promoting a negative image of priests that is difficult to deal with when you want to become a priest. You would have to overcome this negative image at each stage of your journey.
What is more difficult and tougher for young seminarians and young priests than what I have already mentioned is a fifth point, namely, that we are no longer looking toward the invisible in our society. The world no longer sees God. God has become invisible. For secularists, God has become a cosmic vital energy, God is no longer a person. God has been reduced.
Christ too has been reduced in our society. Some regard him as just a man like any other because there is Buddha, Mohammed, and Christ is configured along with all sorts of other prophets. Christ is not seen as particularly exceptional. He might be interesting but he's not unique. And the church? The church is perceived by many in society as a kind of philanthropic UNESCO, dealing with people generally in a spiritual manner but without reference to Christ.
There's nothing mysterious about the church. And the words, the words of the priest, are no longer heard as the words of Christ. People don't believe priests when they speak. The word of God is judged according to human criteria. So whether you communicate well determines whether or not people respect what you say. The public is not necessarily concerned with the direct message of Christ. They are concerned now with the messengers and whether they communicate the message properly.
This almost total disappearance of the sacramental principle of our faith is a most important thing. The church as a sacrament of salvation, the Word as sacrament of divine communication, the eucharist as sacrament, not just a kind of noble symbolism, the Mass at the heart of worship and not as a theatrical event —all of these are crucial parts of our identity. But the depth behind the symbols is no longer being perceived. Romano Guardini already complained about this at the end of his life. He said it is as if we had a blind patch on our retina. We can no longer see the invisible, and that is absolutely true.
Of course, this poses great problems for young priests. It is difficult for them to accept and to believe that in them, in their words, in their actions and in their behavior there is a sacramental aspect that is very deep and that can only be accessed by faith. The reason for the difficulty is that they are constantly competing with better speakers than they are, more proficient orators, with people who are better communicators, with people who are better at organizing family and community life, and with a world that gives deference to these superficial things. And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that the lay community no longer seems aware of the special sacramental nature of the message of Jesus mediated through the priests. So it is no wonder that vocations are becoming rarer and rarer.
Furthermore, it is becoming difficult and almost impossible for young people today to bear any kind of suffering, and this attitude has affected young priests and seminarians as well. What people are saying is that suffering should be avoided at all costs. People seem incapable of giving any deep meaning at all to suffering, and many people have not suffered at all. There are children who have never been soaked by the rain. If it's raining, they are taken to their destinations by car. (Yet children would be happy to go out and stand in the rain and be drenched!)
At the synod on the formation of priests, the cardinal from Sydney said that he was astonished that a priest who had been ordained for only two years left the priesthood not because he could not be celibate, not because he had a crisis of faith, but because he was unable to bear failure of any kind. Priests like this never learned to integrate the cross into their lives. They may still be preaching the Gospel of the cross, but they do not see any importance or meaning in suffering and they do not know how to manage failure — or apparent failure.
Fifty years ago priests were preaching the cross on Easter Sunday. But now the opposite pertains in many areas — even on Good Friday some are already talking about the resurrection or wondering actually why Christ bothered to rise from the dead when he never really suffered that much, according to the way some theology is taught these days. So I think it was a very profound comment that the cardinal of Sydney made a few years ago regarding the difficulty of integrating the suffering represented by the cross.
Because there are a few, only a few priests and because some of them have two or three or four different parishes, they cannot actually see what they've accomplished at the end of the year. But young people today are interested very much in results, in knowing precisely what they have achieved. At the end of the pastoral year, of course, you often cannot see what you've directly achieved. The principle of profitability, economic or otherwise, transposed into the realm of the spiritual simply does not work. It cannot be done. A priest may look at his ministry and think he probably has not accomplished anything at all, but that's not true. A different set of criteria measures what has been done in pastoral settings, and these criteria cannot be written down in figures on ledger sheets.
And the last reason, particularly in Belgium but also in the United States and Canada, why I think there are very few vocations generally is that we have very generous, charitable youth involved in all sorts of charity and voluntary work, for example, in the Lent campaign working with the Red Cross, with the disabled and the handicapped. I'd like to describe the work these young people do — and it is commendable — as having a very horizontal vision. It is horizontal generosity. But vertical generosity, doing something for God, is not something with which many are familiar. And I think increasingly — and this is not a good thing — increasingly we are defining and determining the specifics of Christianity in a horizontal manner.
What is a Christian? Someone who loves the poor, who is in solidarity with the poor, who sets the prisoners free, who helps the downtrodden, who commits himself or herself entirely; and we no longer say that Christians are people who love God with all their heart, with all their soul and with all their mind. The specificity of Christianity is not solidarity with those who are less fortunate than ourselves. Our specificity is that we love God. And when young people question that specificity — "Love God? What is that all about? We can't see God after all" — this attitude has a ripple effect which is becoming a big problem. How can we attract and form people who come out of this kind of background, with this kind of attitude?
All of these points, I think, suggest why vocations to the priesthood have become rarer and rarer.
Forming Priests for the Future
For those candidates who come to seminary the issue before us now is, How can we train priests for the future? I will make three points — on human formation, intellectual-theological formation and spiritual formation.
Human Formation
First of all, there is the human side of formation and education. When young candidates come to seminary at 18, 20, 25 years of age, they are often not mature in the same way as people who were their age two or three decades ago. So their development as human beings is not complete; it is ongoing. These are people who are very generous but they are not stable; they are not solid. And this does not apply only to seminarians, because I think many young people are like that. Adolescence is going on forever nowadays, it seems to me. You can be an adolescent until you are 20, 25, 30. A few years ago people were leaving home as quickly as possible; now they no longer want to leave home. They ask themselves, "Why would I leave home?" And occasionally, after a while parents say to themselves, "When are they going to leave?" So we have eternal adolescence apparently, which sometimes goes on until 40 or 50 years of age.
So what we once called "shaking of the foundations" no longer applies, since many people no longer have any foundations. They are not rooted. They don't know where their affinity should lie, where they should be connected, because all their fixed points are moving. They can't find poles to guide them; they are lost. And there is no longer any philosophy to assist them.
All kinds of philosophy have been thrown out the window. The philosophical training they may have received in the past has been eliminated in favor of positivism. There seems to be no other system.
And along with the lack of intellectual grounding, there is also an absence of an emotional and affective foundation. People are having sexual experiences at an earlier age, and this is very frequent. There is, however, no emotional or affective stability accompanying these experiences.
Because family life is no longer what it was, young people live without a moral reference point. Moral subjectivity reigns: What's good? Well, whatever gives me a good feeling. What's bad? Well, it's what harms me.
And then there is no longer a clear, fundamental ethical consensus within our society on issues which one would expect to be obvious. For example, respect for life, which should be something automatic but even this is something that now needs to be codified into laws. Our society is becoming a society of judges and lawyers. If there is a problem, legislate. When laws and decrees are the basis of our moral code, there will always be loopholes. And this cannot be where we find the moral compass for our lives and world.
Perhaps the absence of a moral reference point is connected with the absence of a parent, the father, in the lives of young people. The priest was always to some extent a "father" — a father in the best sense of the word, of course, not in a paternalistic way. And young people now are often missing a father figure both at home and in the church.
So what can we do in training candidates for the priesthood? I think we need to give weight to the human process of maturing. And we need to try to find a balance between law and liberty since many seminarians have a problem in this area. Sometimes they abuse liberty. They feel free to do what they want; they do not understand what this freedom could lead to in a positive sense.
An experience of freedom or liberty within seminary training is absolutely essential, but we also need to know about the law. When I was trained here at the interdiocesan Leo XIII seminary in Leuven in the 1950s with about 100 seminarians who studied at the university, we learned how to be free, and at the same time we knew what was to be done, what the law was. There was no control exerted on us. It was more like an elastic cord. The rector met with us every lunchtime and made decisions that were needed, but it was also very important for us to know the laws, which we freely accepted and through which we compromised our own personal freedom. It was an important balance. Seminary formation involves learning how to exert our liberty in conjunction with the limits we need to set, respecting certain taboos.
One of the biggest difficulties for young seminarians is accepting and learning how to live with authority, and since seminarians have to transfer their understanding of authority to living with the church, with the magisterium of the church, this is a rather important issue. Often enough, if you ask young seminarians where they stand with regard to authority, they don't know what you are talking about. They are confused. And when one hasn't learned in the seminary how to situate oneself with regard to authority, the relationship priests later have with Rome becomes a serious issue. So the question of authority remains one of the major problems in today's church for priests.
I won't say much about sexual or affective formation, but I think the level of training in this area is often very poor. Seminarians need to understand that celibacy in the priesthood is not understood by public opinion. So it becomes critical to educate them to withstand criticism because within their groups of friends and acquaintances not many are going to understand the importance of celibacy. Of course, the media does not understand it at all.
I think we need to purify the motivation for celibacy within the priesthood. We are celibate not to be able to work more, to put in more hours of work. There are many doctors who work longer hours than priests and who are married. The only real motivation for celibacy is being faithful to the total imitation of Jesus Christ. All other arguments for celibacy fall before this one. And if you don't want to do this, then don't come to seminary. Celibacy is an issue of love, and love cannot be explained or reasoned. Why am I celibate? Young people ask me all the time why I don't marry. The answer is, I don't know. Does that mean I'm not free? Not at all. I say to those young people who question me, "If you fell in love with a certain person and I asked you why, you would probably not have an answer either." Love is simply love. It cannot be explained. That's all there is to say.
Angelus Silesius, an author who lived centuries ago, said that the why and wherefore of the rose is the rose. And I would say the why and wherefore of celibate love for Christ is celibate love for Christ. It cannot be explained further than that. But I would maintain that this motive for celibacy is an important part of the formation of seminarians and that we need to take advantage of the collective wisdom of psychologists and psychoanalysts as well in dealing with this subject.
I would say, however, that if you were to measure whether someone were living healthily as a celibate, you would need to look at the presence of joy. A celibate needs to be joyful. If you have a sad candidate in formation, my advice to you is send him away. If he is joyful, keep him. In a famous story, a novice mistress once sought the advice of St. Vincent de Paul. She bad two candidates for the order. One was melancholy, but she kept the rules faithfully. The other was extremely joyful but disobedient. What should she do? St. Vincent de Paul replied unequivocally, "Send the melancholy one away and keep the joyful one." And I agree with his judgment.
We also need to teach our seminarians and young priests how to live in a way consistent with celibate life. I think some do not know how to behave, so they do things that married people would never do. For example, they go on holiday where promiscuity prevails and they don't seem to realize what they are doing. I sometimes think they were all born on the 28th of December — I mean by that they are all "innocents," all naive.
Seminarians need to know the rules of the friendship they have entered with Christ. After all, all friendships have rules — ways a person should behave. There are rules for how a seminarian or priest should behave with women and young girls. The rules that apply to celibates are in many ways similar to those married men have when they associate with women who are not their wives.
How often, in reflecting on celibacy, do I ask myself why more priests do not choose to live in community. If you look at St. Norbert, who founded a diocesan order during medieval times, he grouped his priests for parish ministry together in his priories. I think perhaps today the time has come to do the same. Indeed, we may need to do that if we are to survive.
Most priests, of course, do not do that. And many priests do not like the idea at all. Often when it is proposed priests object. They have their own houses, apartments, freedom. They say, no thank you. I don't know what to do in response to that. Theoretically, I'm absolutely convinced nowadays that we need to see more community life, although in practice I do not see this happening.
Intellectual Formation
I am concerned about the intellectual formation in seminaries, especially since as recently as 10 years ago training was essentially pastoral. We were against almost any kind of theory or serious theology in seminary. My good friend Gustavo Gutierrez, with whom I studied in Leuven, said there is nothing more practical than theory, and that's true. A major problem for priests, as Cardinal Danielou said before he died, the major problem would be their intellectual qualities. I agree with that.
So many of our priests are afraid to talk with university professors. So they go out of their way to avoid discussion groups, public meetings, forums and seminars, which I think is a shame. I don't think that helps us. It is important to have a good intellectual training and not to think that generosity and simplicity suffice. We need intelligent, generous and prayerful priests, but never should one quality exist to the exclusion of the other.
Intellectual people, as we know, are not always appreciated, although this attitude is changing, especially here. There was a trend in the church not many years ago when people questioned why seminarians should study two years of philosophy when they should be learning only about Christ. We fell into this trap of simplifying the intellectual formation of priests. I am absolutely convinced that philosophical background is essential — and I am talking about philosophy as a discipline in its own right.
Why is philosophy so important? Why should it be cultivated for its own sake? Because subjectivism is omnipresent. Simply look at people's tactile sensitivities to know that they believe what hurts them is bad and what gives them pleasure is good — although everyone knows that the truth sometimes hurts. It is important that seminarians be shown that the truth is not something we invent solely with regard to ourselves. It is something which already does exist. Truth is a pre-existent structure, but we can move the furniture around within it even though we can't change the structure of the building. The individual is part of the process, but he is not the master of all he surveys. He is perhaps the shepherd. He can lead the flock but he cannot create the flock.
What we want to do is to create a dialogue that will hold water. We are trying to create comparisons that will be valid. We need to learn to think, learn to judge — to be correct. We need to have rules for thought. We cannot simply say that it feels good so it's probably true. Philosophy and logic are important, and within this philosophical training, a spirit of synthesis is necessary or we will be lost with endless analysis.
I am also not convinced myself that we need to declare ourselves in favor of one true philosophy, even though I have a great deal of admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas. The Greek ideas as adapted by him for Christianity are a huge and excellent achievement. But we must bear in mind that there are good points in other philosophies. We need a system of thought, and we need a dorsal fin, as it were, on our backs to be able to discern the value of one system from another.
The synod on the formation of priests was very emphatic about all of this. And because of that, I found it important to organize an initiation year for seminary candidates. We did this 10 years ago for the French-speaking part of our country and a few years ago for the Dutch, and it is working very well. So now anyone who comes into the seminaries, whatever their background, has a year of initiation and catching up in three major areas: First, in the content of our faith they need to be given a catechism; second, they need to learn dogma; and third, they need to learn liturgy, the psalms and the Bible.
Some of our pre-candidates don't know what Advent is or what Lent is. Some think the feast of the ascension is the anniversary of when we sent the first cosmonaut into space. It's incredible, this lack of knowledge! So it is necessary to have at least a year to catch up as well as a year to discern whether they truly have a vocation to the priesthood. Sometimes candidates have not had a conversation in depth with a priest or spiritual guide. They come in broad-minded and well-intentioned but sometimes with not too much content on board. A Russian Orthodox bishop once told me his candidates for priesthood had generous spirits but did not know much about the Christian faith. Fides qua yes, but fides quae —all of that is nonexistent.
After this initiation year, the candidates are always happy to have gone through it. We also find the number of young people who leave seminary after the preliminary year is few. Since we have so few seminarians, our statistics may not be scientifically valid, but not many seem to leave after their initiation year. Now to the theological formation.
Theological Formation
We need to explain theological methods and to teach the relationship between revelation and human thought, between science and faith, and between philosophy and faith. There is a theological genius or essence, if you will, so that if you read authors you can tell whether they have this or not — or whether they are just philosophers or humanists or whether they have been slightly influenced by theology or whether they are truly inspired by theology. Theology is a specificity. You can tell whether it's there or not, and we need to teach seminarians how to discern this.
My definition of theological formation — and I may be mistaken about this — is that it is based on two things: the Bible and liturgy. If you look at Sacrosanctum Concilium, the fathers of the council said that the aim of all theological training was to move everything toward the liturgy. I myself thought that was a bit exaggerated, but in any case I see their counsel has not been applied at all.
The Bible and the tradition and liturgy are the pillars for training a theologian. I want to be very subtle in the way I express myself here. They are always more important than any systematization of our faith. Dogmatics is kind of systematizing after the event with the help of a philosophy of that which one may take from revelation and translate into a system. So I feel dogmatics must continually be recentered in biblical reference and liturgy in order to be renewed and refreshed.
But what is not acceptable is to think that everything is written in canon law. There is a trend in some circles of the church to simplify things. Some say, "Don't bother reading the Bible. Find the information in canon law." Fortunately, canon law is more theological now than it was, but even so, if you focus only on canon law you are missing a great deal.
Often when we ask someone about baptism, they quote the applicable canons. Of course, everything about baptism is not in canon law. Canon law is the necessary legal prescription for entering and remaining in the church. It is absolutely indispensable, but it is not theology. There are some who say everything can be found in canon law, and I say those people are just lazy. I have nothing against canon law. Indeed, I am fond of it because legal texts are important and deserve to be read, but not everything is in there. Please do not let us fall into the situation we had before Vatican II.
Let's now turn to the magisterium in its precise position. I believe that the magisterium is indispensable. Besides, it was wholeheartedly desired by Jesus. I think in the Anglican church you can notice the absence of a magisterium. They have the Archbishop of Canterbury, their primate, but what they seem to be looking for is a higher referee. I have esteem for the magisterium; certainly it is absolutely essential, but it can never replace the Bible. So the magisterium is from the order of serving.
There are two other important points that I believe are necessary in theological formation: ecclesiology and sacramentology. These are perhaps two halves of the same issue. In order to believe in the law of the incarnation in the church there must be a visible and invisible part. The visible always points toward the invisible, which is the most important. In sacraments the visible gestures point the way toward invisible grace, and invisible grace is always the most important issue. Formation in these areas is crucial and teaching seminarians how to contemplate, how to look closely, this is indispensable for Catholic priestly training. This is the core of Catholicism: sacrament and sacramentality.
In morality it is absolutely essential to insist on the objective aspects of good and evil. Good and evil are not concepts that can be manipulated. Good goes before us and evil goes before us; they are already there before we become involved. Moral subjectivism, which allows the individual to be the arbiter of what is good and what is evil, is disastrous for life in society. And while some objected, sometimes seriously, to Veritatis Splendor, it is the value of Veritatis Splendor that evil and good are objectified.
While some Catholics expressed opposition to Veritatis Splendor, many unbelievers were in favor of it. American magazines did not believe what they were reading! They said it was a marvelous text against the skepticism, indifference and chaos that surrounded us. One can argue about many things but the fundamental objectification of good and evil is something absolutely indispensable.
We need also to teach seminarians how to interpret the "signs of the times." Everyone talks about signs of the times, but we must teach how to apply evangelical discernment to determine the correct signs of the times and to give seminarians the sense of the genius or essence of what is Catholic and what is theology. There does exist an essence or genius that is essentially Catholic and an essence or genius that is essentially theological, and it is very important to pass on the ability to sniff out, to know instinctively, what is essentially Catholic. To be able to pick up the scent of what is Catholic — and to train seminarians in these instincts — is all part of seminary formation.
When I was writing for a newspaper 30 years ago, my mother used to tell me she read what I wrote and often did not understand it, although given the source, she felt it must be true. It seemed to me that if she didn't understand what I wrote, then it probably was not true. And often that was the case. She had an instinct, a nose, if you will, for the truth of Catholicism. She never studied theology, but it was her training in the faith which was with her all her life that enabled her to have that instinct.
With this in mind, I began the reform of the curricula in our seminary in the French-speaking side and the Dutch-speaking side. We were at the time being asked to teach everything in the seminary: media, music, diction, homiletics, listening skills, pastoral care, ecumenism, Latin — everything! So when seminarians left at the end of the day, they did so with a random assortment of knowledge. Every year, of course, the situation became more complicated as we were asked to add even more to the curriculum. One day I had enough. I said that we could discuss the plan I was proposing but that I was absolutely against subjects being divided up and diluted and that we simply could not keep up with the demands to add more and more trends to the program of study. The time had come to set limits for ourselves, and I proposed that for three years we focus on serious theology.
I was quite draconian in the measures I took. A few major areas would need to be covered: eight hours for the sacred Scriptures, four hours for dogma, four hours for moral theology, two to three hours for church history and two to three hours of sacramentology and liturgy. That is all. It's hard, it's tough, but it gives students a kind of weaponry; and I think they are well trained because of that. As for diction, music, the pastoral care of the sick — these areas could be managed in separate modules, perhaps two-day courses, for which seminarians could gather every fortnight or so.
Of course, the pastoral side is also important, but sending a first-year seminarian who has not studied theology to do pastoral work usually means he doesn't know what to do. He listens but he doesn't have the tools; he lacks the necessary background. It's like sewing a tapestry onto nothing. So the fourth year of study is devoted absolutely and totally to pastoral issues. At that point they will have three years of theology behind them, and in the fourth year they will go to parishes and return for two-day seminars to think about pastoral theory, tell us what's happening and return to their pastoral settings. Of course, as deacons they are able to be active in their parishes. I prefer this system of three years of rigorous intellectual training, which is limited in nature, and then one full year of pastoral theory and practice. Of course, that is something to be discussed, and it doesn't happen in all seminaries in Belgium by any means.
Something else which seems indispensable and not often talked about is the cultural background or training given to our seminarians. Are seminarians familiar with the arts? With literature? With films that they could discuss afterward? Are they conversant with the technological and scientific world in which they live? Do seminarians actually ever read anything? Sometimes it seems they don't even read the newspapers! Seminarians need to be taught how to enter the world of culture, which is immense, beautiful and interesting. They are often immature, I know, but they could at least be introduced to those things.
As a professor of liturgy in Bruges, I taught a class on confession and reconciliation, and in the first three months, from September to December, I read with the seminarians the major works on sin, repentance, expiation, crime and punishment. We read Dostoyevsky, Graham Greene, Julien Green, Francois Mauriac and Franz Kafka right up until Christmas. My colleagues commented that this was not theology but literature, and they were right. But if you read the Greek tragedies — Oedipus and Antigone — you see sin, faults, pardon, redemption, repentance, remorse, expiation and vengeance in authors who deal deeply with themes central to Christianity. I sense culture as an extremely important aspect of the formation of our seminarians, and I oppose the training in the pastoral and theological areas and nothing else.
Spiritual Formation
When it comes to spiritual formation, in my opinion only one thing is important: to teach seminarians about Christ and to nurture in them the love of Christ. At the end of seminary what we want are priests who love Christ.
Spirituality is neither a method, a "trick," nor a textbook. It is a person we are talking about and a relationship with the person of Christ. The basis of spiritual training, I believe, is the Bible, liturgy, and the liturgical feasts and seasons — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost — this is all extremely important. Any other spiritual issue will be lost at some stage, but this is something they will have for the rest of their lives. It will accompany them to death. The spiritual formation we give must be founded on the liturgy and the Bible. Seminarians need to be familiar with the word of God, which they seldom read. In fact, they don't read it often at all. There is an absence of lectio divina, the monastic tradition par excellence, which we do not see very often in our seminaries either.
As for what is to be read in addition to the Bible, it is probably well to begin with the doctors of the church, not with the 20th century, and to read texts along with the students. It is pointless to go through a survey of the history of spirituality because they will forget that. Some texts come to mind: The Confessions of St. Augustine, the Memoralia of St. Gregory, the sermons and homilies of St. Bernard, the Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the writings of St. Vincent de Paul, of St. Therese of Lisieux, of St. John of the Cross and of St. Teresa of Avila. We were often told in the past in liturgy classes to read Hippolytus, to read the eucharistic prayers, to read the sermons of the fathers. It is just like working with the Bible: You need to read and then study and to analyze the texts. We should not be teaching spirituality one step removed. It is all well and good to talk about Augustine, but there is no substitute for reading Augustine along with your students.
For prayer, the foundation is the psalms. I suffer from the fact that there are so many priests — and we ought not to be under any illusions here — who have been ordained 50 and 60 years and who merely read the psalms. The psalms have never actually entered into their hearts or have had any emotional impact on them. For many years now I have not heard a sermon where a priest actually quoted a verse from the psalms.
The spiritual training of priests involves training their hearts to be a good pastor. Link them to Christ, the Good Shepherd. Christ was the only Good Shepherd. We need to educate seminarians in spirituality, teaching them how to give their lives to Christ, how to sacrifice themselves for the cross, to train them in eucharist theology and spirituality — all of this is absolutely essential.
A most essential issue for me is that we will have succeeded in training seminarians when we have succeeded in having them love the church. If you ask me about priestly spirituality, I would suggest it be a spirituality of the Good Shepherd who loves the church passionately, who is sick when the church is sick, who rejoices when the church rejoices, who loves the church. This is extremely important. A priest who is happy with the church but who is not spiritually and psychologically attached to the church and who does not think of the church as part of his own flesh — this is a risk. The church needs to become part of their very beings. But if they are not prepared to accept this, they are distancing themselves internally — and it will divide them. It will, if you like, make them schizophrenic.
In summary, what this means is that at the end of training a young priest coming out of seminary should feel completely at ease with his identity as a priest. He is a priest. He is special. He is original. He should be completely at ease among the laity, and he needs to find his place serenely, joyfully, happily, without feeling superior to be people, without feeling inferior to people, without any complexes at all. Surrounded by the laity, the best we can hope for is that he does not feel isolated or overcome. Coming out of seminary as a priest who is happy, who is secure in his identity as a priest, who is intellectually alive, in love with Christ and committed to the church is what we hope for. It is a miracle when that happens, and it is what can happen in your seminaries with God's help.
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