“Shrinking” vocations: the McGrath report on seminary reform, pt. 1

By Eamonn Clark, STL ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 31, 2026

The McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame recently released a document about seminary reform in the USA. The report, “Do You Know Them to be Worthy?”, contains 12 practical recommendations for improving the formation process for seminarians, based on the Institute’s research, as part of an ongoing project regarding seminary renewal.

Readers of the present article may be relieved to know that among those of us who have our finger on the pulse, right now the general impression of seminaries in America is actually good or even great. Present-day horror stories are far and few between, and often when some alleged scandal breaks, the sensationalist grifters are just making mountains out of molehills to get clicks and views. As someone who has been close to several such headlines in years past, I would advise the readers of these stories to start with the assumption that the truth is somewhere in the middle, skewing towards the least interesting explanation available.

The occasional yeti blood oath notwithstanding, American seminaries are “boring” in the best way. Overall, they are staffed by intelligent, hardworking priests and laity who are sincerely concerned for the authentic welfare of the Church and the men entrusted to their care. We have come a very long way since the strange ecclesiastical, moral, and liturgical experiments of the 1970s and 80s, for which seminaries were among the chief laboratories.

This being said, those who take up the work of seminary formation are still human beings. They have their own agendas, their own personal problems, their own limitations. Some formators are certainly better than others. There is no perfect system—humanity is baked into the equation.

There is a strong temptation to make the perfect system to optimize the formation experience, especially by adding requirements or steps for seminarians. Another workshop. Another evaluation. Another rule. Another “opportunity” being “suggested.” It all seems to converge towards a better program, because the more requirements and benchmarks there are, the more the man will conform to the ideal which the formation team has set before him. Right?

This is flawed thinking. While it is not difficult even for a committee to agree on how to describe an ideal seminarian in abstract terms—even though another committee of equally well-educated and pious people may have a different yet equally unobjectionable ideal—the problem is the complexity of implementing a real program which accords with these ideals in a reasonable way.

There are diminishing returns. The more policies, programs, and parameters there are, the more difficult they are to keep track of, both for the formation team and for the seminarians. An instruction manual should make things easier, not harder. If there are needless descriptions of the minutiae of intuitive processes, a bunch of extra steps intended to optimize the outcome but indistinguishable from what is truly necessary, and useless technical jargon that confuses the reader, the manual can actually complicate and impede its own implementation. There more steps and policies, the more ways there are to get formation wrong up, whether by mistake or intentionally, going for or against a seminarian’s favor. And it can be exhausting for the seminarian and for the formators.

The young man who isn’t put off the idea of priesthood by a perusal of the 91-page “Ratio Fundamentalis,” the whopping 211-page Program of Priestly Formation, and the lengthy handbook of policies of the local seminary ends his internet-lurking phase of discernment and begins an application. He will soon find himself doing mountains of paperwork and eventually in front of a psychologist.

Now we return to the topic of the McGrath report.

Anyone familiar with the real lives of American priests and seminarians will be aware of a broad psychology fatigue. There is disagreement over the value of the discipline as it relates to formation and priestly life. There is grave concern over its weaponization. Some of this is personal historical bias, with memories of barely-theistic hippies playing gatekeeper to diocesan formation programs, sending men away for shocking things like believing that only men can be ordained or wanting to kneel at mass or for valuing celibacy. Too uptight!

I do not think that the bias caused by these past extreme abuses suffices to dismiss the concerns of the aggregate about milder abuses today. A third party’s “expert scientific opinion” on a man’s personality, behavior, beliefs, or self-understanding is a serious tool which can be wielded in any number of ways, especially against his stated goal of ordination. It could be used to punish the man for ideological differences, or saved for a rainy day as leverage. It can be used to justify an ongoing grudge. It can be deployed as evidence of unsuitability for ordination altogether, especially when coupled with cherry-picked examples of behavior or skewed readings of his self-evaluations.

And who can question the all-knowing psychologists? After all, they have a scientific degree. They are the experts. They are a kind of super-formator whose words may be appealed to by the formation team or vocation director or bishop when they suit the agenda of whomever appeals to them. Otherwise, they can be and are largely ignored—it’s too much work to keep track of a hundred different psychological assessments in the context of running and executing a complicated academic and pastoral program with liturgies, meetings, and events going on all the time. It’s just an extra step in the instruction manual.

Yet the psychology-as-bludgeon dynamic is broadly present only in a low-grade sort of way in most cases of men who don’t truly deserve real scrutiny. The vast majority of well-balanced seminarians receive decent treatment from and on account of psychologists.

In my opinion, the McGrath report threatens this.

The first six out of twelve recommendations are explicitly about increasing and intensifying the psychologist’s role in the formation process, from application through ordination. The second six are also deeply intertwined with psychology and cannot be appreciated apart from the first section; the seventh through ninth recommendations related to “special needs” of the psychological variety, and the final three relate to sexuality, especially as a psychological phenomenon. Only Proposal 10 seems in itself to have little if anything to do with psychological evaluation or treatment.

Proposals 1-3 read:

Two psychological evaluations should ordinarily be incorporated into the course of seminary formation: an initial evaluation during the diocesan application process, and a second evaluation before or during the early part of the Configuration Stage [note: a period a few years into formation]. Because the report of the initial psychological evaluation can serve as a rich tool for a candidate’s personal growth, it should be available to the seminarian’s formation advisor. Seminaries should appoint a full-time in-house director of psychological services who serves as counselor/psychotherapist for seminarians and reviews each seminarian’s initial psychological evaluation with him, even when it has already been reviewed by the assessing psychologist.

To an outsider unfamiliar with how seminaries actually work, this might seem completely unobjectionable. And it’s true that most men will not have any serious problems. The men who will actively suffer because of this are those who are by objective standards in the “middle of the pack,” but have done something to irk a formator who now has it out for them. The psychological reports and the house psychologist—a Super Formator, whose scientific expertise cannot be challenged—will play an outsized role in whatever maneuvers are made to get the man thrown out, or at least to give him a harder time than necessary.

Beyond this, the idea that one’s psyche ought to be put on display to a team of semi-public evaluators, who are not themselves professional psychologists, raises a serious red flag. Who is going to be fully honest and thus fully benefit from a psychological evaluation, if he knows it’s not highly protected information? Talking to the shrink simply becomes part of the game, one more political move.

The fresh-faced applicant to a diocese might be naïve enough not to know that he is now involved in a complex network of risks, rewards, and relationships where he is part agent and part pawn, and that basically everything he says can go into a “file” which can and will be used against him. But by the time a man reaches theological studies, this pollyannaish attitude is usually long gone, sometimes replaced by bitterness and cynicism after learning the hard way. He understands that he is in a glass house, and that the secrets he shares may not stay secret for long. To blur the lines between protected conversations with psychologists and the prerogatives of other formators risks losing any benefit that a trusting relationship with a psychologist or therapist could have in the first place.

But the McGrath report becomes even more aggressive in this regard. I will explore this in the next part of my commentary when I discuss the explicit suggestion that seminarians be guilt-tripped into talking about their most private mental health issues—as if speaking confidentially to the psychologist is like a set of “training wheels” for real formation. I will also look at the report’s discussion of abnormal psychology and problems with unchastity.