Share this postPosts and Podcasts - with Jacob and VeronicaDeconstructivating the Catholic SeminaryCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMoreDeconstructivating the Catholic Seminarya Jacob Mason essayJacob X MasonJun 18, 20252Share this postPosts and Podcasts - with Jacob and VeronicaDeconstructivating the Catholic SeminaryCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMoreShareArticle voiceover1×0:00-1:22:56Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.Deconstructivating The Catholic Seminary A Jacob Mason Essay3.99MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadThe Glorious PDF edition.DownloadThanks for reading Posts and Podcasts - with Jacob and Veronica! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Subscribe
![The passing and coming of a pope brings to my mind the way Genesis repeats the motif that things pass, not as we typically think – from sunrise to sunset – but from darkness to light, from evening to morning. We are an Easter people, eh? While hoping to avoid millenarianism, I think that there are ways in which the Church is presently working through a time with its own unique darkness, and we may not quite yet see the morning twilight. I write this essay to talk about my experience studying to be a Catholic priest, and to suggest a theoretical and historical framework around which to think about it. This essay is divided into 10 parts, which can be read independently. Check the contents and jump to whatever strikes your fancy. If you have time and interest, start from the beginning, as this is a unified whole, where the parts build upon each other. I will start with a grand unified theory™ of historical ecclesiastical development. BUT! for the titillating details and some wild hypothetical exercises, skip ahead to Part 2 or look for purple. Reality is full and a theory is like one artist’s two-dimensional painting, so I don’t claim this IS the reality, or even the best theory or interpretation of the reality, but it may be a worthwhile or a useful one. PART 1 – THE PROBLEM IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TODAY (BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY I KNOW...) PART 2 – LIFE IN DISFUNCTIONAL HARRY POTTER SEMINARY PART 3 – WHAT WENT WRONG IN PHILLY (AND HOW THIS IS SYMPTOMATIC OF THE CHURCH HIERARCHY) PART 4 – WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE BISHOPS oops I mean THE CHURCH (AND A LINK TO THE DEATH OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION) PART 5 – WHY NO ONE SHOULD GO TO THE SEMINARY (WITH A BONUS GUIDE ON HOW TO WIN IN EPISCOPACY SIMULATOR 2025) PART 6 – AUTHORITY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND LOVE ✨🌱🍄💗🧿🌈 ✨ (STARTING WITH WHY ABOLISHING THE MINOR ORDERS IS A BIG DEAL) PART 7 – DIS-HARMONIOUS CHAIRS (BUTTERING BREAD IN EPISCOPAL BED) PART 8 – STEPS FORWARD (MY ADDRESS TO LAY PEOPLE, PRIESTS, BISHOPS, AND THE VATICAN) PART 9 – CHANGING THE FORMATION OF SECULAR PRIESTS (OBSERVATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS) PART 10 – ON CATHOLIC SHUNNING AND MY MOTIVATIONS PART 1 – THE PROBLEM IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TODAY (BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY I KNOW...) Perhaps the previous great paroxysm of christianity was the Reformation. The timeline seems simple – Luther posted his theses in 1517 and the Roman response (The Council of Trent) closed its final session a mere 46 years later, setting out a Catholic game plan. The arc of that episode, however, might be said to run all the way from the rise of scholasticism in the 11th century, or at least from the Renaissance, and through to at least the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Why the history? In the conservative christian circles in which I was raised, the pre-conciliar 1950s, or at earliest the late 19th century heyday of Pope Leo XIII, were canonized as the ‘radix’, the true, jewel-encrusted incarnation of Catholic christianity to which if-we-could-but-force a return, would inevitably induce universal holiness among the baptized, the final evangelization of all peoples, and (best of all) the return of Ecclesiastical Latin as the lingua franca. I jest, but consider this – why in American Catholic parishes is recitation of the St. Michael prayer after Mass effectively a mark that the parish is ‘conservative’ and respects ‘tradition’? That prayer was composed and introduced in the 1890s under the previous Leo and worked into its current form in the 1920s under Pius XI. Why would a real traditionalist not choose, say, the Didache, or the Our Father, or the Nicene Creed as the mark of true orthodoxy? (I might personally pick the “happy bees, buzzy bees, pretty little bees” prayer from the Paschal Vigil.) My point here is that the common vision of the troubles which face the Church and the landscape over which her petty battles are often fought is historically (and ontologically) illiterate. One of my favorite Chesterton quotes, which addresses this perennial illiteracy, is: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition.” This is why, when John Paul II came out with the luminous mysteries of the rosary in 2002, traditional and conservative Catholics poo-pooed them. 100 years from now, preferring the luminous decades will inevitably be the mark of a true conservative Catholic. A real Catholic – not one of those wishy-washy liberals who don’t respect tradition. In truth I don’t pray them myself because I am a self-respecting conservative Catholic, but in another 50 years I definitely would. Greater souls in the Church knew there was a spiritual crisis brewing by the mid-19th century. The spiritually-invigorating (while also intensely terrible) wars of religion had largely ceased and the industrial revolution was hitting full steam, causing dramatic societal change. Protestantism saw awakenings in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Oxford movement in Anglicanism also in the 19th. The Catholic Church held Vatican I. These were not random religious events. Christians at that time recognized the need to form a religious response to moral decline and dramatic social and technological change. And there was a problem with the Catholic response – interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war and the unification of Italy, the council never got close to achieving its aims. Unlike the other, less institutionally-rigid christian churches, the Catholic Church’s social teaching, legal structure, ecclesiastical structure, liturgical rules, and its customs were largely locked in place throughout this period of collapse of European civilization, until after 1950. This caused at least two concomitant problems: Catholic Christianity was basically prevented from addressing issues which had been internally identified for 100 years (and the internal clock of the Catholic Church already runs 30 years behind the times), and when the Catholic Church got around to addressing the problems, it began with addressing the problems of the 19th century in the 1970s instead of the real situation which the Church was actually in by that time. Why can’t one wait to address the world, the flesh, and the devil for 130 years? They will eat you. The parochial schools, the parish church life (particularly for priests), the customs of the Vatican, and most especially the seminaries of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church produced many of the rough waves of the last 70 years in the western Catholic Church. It was pre-conciliar priests who wrote the new rites and prayer books, it was largely pre-conciliar priests and nuns who left their vocations in droves. It was largely priests disciplined through the pre-conciliar seminaries who committed sexual abuses in the 1950s-1980s. It was pre-conciliar priests who taught in the post conciliar seminaries. And it was pre-conciliar bishops who ruled the post-conciliar dioceses. The rot, the sickness was there inside and around the church – it had not been addressed in the proper time. What fault, too, must be placed on the steps of Vatican II? It was its task to address unresolved philosophical, political, social, legal, educational, and pastoral challenges of the 1840s, but in the 1960s. This is one reason that the preparatory documents (schema), prepared by the roman curia for the council were torn up by the bishops on their arrival. There was perhaps wisdom in this, but less in the men who wrote the new plans. The men (and I use the gendered term specifically here) who decided that the church needed to dramatically open itself to the spirit of the times in the 1970s, to fill the Church with the music and art of the flower children, to consider all laws and customs excessive, to deify the personal over the objective were men born in the 1920s, reacting to the unmet needs of the 1840s, and formed in a system built in the 1570s. If you fix yesterday’s problem today, you will have new and different problems tomorrow which you did not anticipate. Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged this in reflecting on the unrealistic misguidedness of some of the reforms he himself advocated at the time of the council. Many men, good and evil, inside the Church were living in a calcified relic which had lost sight of what lay outside for over a century. PART 2 – LIFE IN DISFUNCTIONAL HARRY POTTER SEMINARY What did this all look like to the man on the street? Well, am I that man! The street was Overbrook. Upon acceptance into priestly formation for my mid-atlantic diocese, I was sent to venerable St. Charles Borromeo Seminary of Philadelphia to begin my preparation. That seminary has a special relation to my historical theorizing. It is one of the oldest American Catholic seminaries, in one of the oldest dioceses, in a historically Catholic region, which was ruled under the iron crosier of John Cardinal Krol up to 1988. It seems Cardinal Krol came back from Vatican II reasonably well-chuffed. What took the shine off of his miter (I have tried on two of them – very, very tall and encrusted with jewels – my traditionalist seminarian friends immediately kissed the cumbersome rings which appeared upon my fingers) were the implementations of the reforms which came after the council. The Saturday vigil Mass, for example, which had been universally permitted from Rome in 1970, was forbidden in Philadelphia and suffragan dioceses until the mid-1980s (among many similar prohibitions). St. Charles Seminary, when I arrived, was still one of those immensely repressful places where most seminarians found themselves unhappy and filled with cognitive dissonance while attending, yet surprisingly nostalgic for upon review. When I came to Overbrook in 2014 it had been only a year since many seminarians still wore cassocks…all day – at Office and Mass, meals and class, and even sports. And the ecclesiastic inbreeding was legendary – every member of the full-time teaching and formation staff (with the exception of about 4 lay teachers) had attended St. Charles themselves for their formation and education. It was a dry campus, which makes sense – you want to force your 21-year-old seminarians to leave the seminary if they want to drink outside their bedroom. And it had all sorts of little rules. “We don’t genuflect before communion here at St. Charles, we bow. Is that going to be a problem, Mr. Mason?” was an actual statement of ‘fact’ which I received from the burly Dean of Men, who was embarrassed to have to tell me. There was a seminarian rule book dating back decades which still has a positive requirement that “seminarians should take care not to speak in a manner or engage in any conversations that might be construed as effeminate”. The rule against mocking authority was almost universally violated. There was, appropriately, a rule against accessing porn, but try this mental exercise: Take a lot of 17-35 year old single men, set a daily schedule which makes communal sports impossible (because your institution is insolvent and can’t afford to pay people to work normal hours), don’t allow them to drink together, don’t permit roommates (because we don’t tell anyone, but we’ve apparently had big problems with sexual misbehavior in the recent past and we think this will prevent it), almost never enable interaction with women of any type under any circumstances (many seminarians go from the age of 18 to 26 without a single female friend), give them unfiltered internet, and threaten social opprobrium and expulsion from the community for any moral infraction. What is my point? If you fail to provide men with community, activity, and a healthy social sphere, but you give them solo rooms and unfiltered internet, you are asking for trouble. Porn, not liturgical orthodoxy, was perhaps the most serious actual problem for seminarians. But it was the classroom that I found most jarring. The ‘smart’ graduates of Overbrook were sent on for further studies to Rome where they sat at the feet of the true masters™ and drank of the nectar of TanquereySchillebeeckx, which style they promptly brought back to St. Charles (which is how they had all been taught anyway). This created a social expectation in the classroom (where there might be only 3 students) that the only acceptable thing a student is permitted to do is listen to the teacher read a (mediocre) textbook…and maybe ask politely for clarification if absolutely necessary. I had previously attended an excellent private college and later a solid graduate school, but made the decision to stop reading assignments ahead of time because the same assignment was just going to be read to me in class by my professor for two hours. It didn’t matter if you knew the material – the point was to play your ‘role’. I was shouted at in class by a priest and later a monsignor for not paying enough attention to them. The monsignor made a point of stopping his address and singling me out in a loud voice to upbraid me for bringing in ‘some book’ and ignoring his lecture. He was lecturing on the wisdom literature and my book was the Bible. Please note, this is not Dublin, circa 1953. This all took place between the years 2014 and 2018. [Oh, purple! We are in a thought experiment.] It was fortunate the seminary wasn’t more regressive or we might have had high level faculty members who drank heavily before breakfast, or formators who publicly lost their tempers with other adult men, or I might have heard first hand accounts of multiple on-campus sexual encounters, or Philadelphia might have had a presbyterate which was chronically unable to identify with or befriend their parishioners and even more chronically alcoholic. In such a diocese, the archbishop might have had to close more churches (80) over 5 years, than the total number of parishes in my diocese (79), and more people in my own diocese might have attended Mass in those 79 than the number of parishioners attending the ~250 remaining Catholic churches in Philadelphia. If the seminary and diocese were run any worse there might have been two grand jury inquiries into sexual abuse scandals in 2008 and 2011, and the former Cardinal Archbishop might have died the night before he was supposed to testify in the single case which resulted in a prison conviction, and that Cardinal might have died on the grounds of St. Charles Seminary, and the college seminarians might have been led through the room to see his body before a police investigation could take place. There also might have been a 2018 grand jury which implicated other Pennsylvania dioceses (fortunately not Philadelphia!) except that roughly half the priests in that report would have attended St. Charles seminary for the duration of their formation. In such a scenario, the former secretary of the mysteriously-deceased Cardinal, might have later served as rector of…St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, before in 2016 being appointed bishop of my own diocese and, 13 months later, dismissing me from formation. I wasn’t dismissed for knowing or experiencing things other people didn’t. As far as I can tell, I was dismissed for being unhappy about it, and when asked by formators why I was unhappy, being transparent with them. It was a sad irony that, within two months of my dismissal, the final Philadelphia parish I was assigned to lost its second consecutive pastor. The first pastor had been imprisoned at the conclusion of the same court case our dead Cardinal was supposed to have testified at. The pastor I worked for in 2017, who spoke of his close personal friendship with my own new Philadelphia-sourced bishop, was two months after my dismissal, placed on leave and suspended, then convicted for civil financial improprieties as well as admitted personal improprieties. A priest ordained by my own diocese ended up being the backfill at that Philadelphia parish. PART 3 – WHAT WENT WRONG IN PHILLY (AND HOW THIS IS SYMPTOMATIC OF THE CHURCH HIERARCHY) To return to the arc of history, the archdiocese of Philadelphia I found myself sent to be formed in was a mess, and part of the reason was that, because Cardinal Krol so opposed the post-Vatican II reforms, he gripped tighter and prevented any reform. While much of the western Catholic Church experienced its most violent turmoils in the 1970s and 80s, Philadelphia looked golden until nose-diving in the 1990s, and it had just finished bottoming out as I arrived. You cannot stop change, and for a living organism, growth, reform, even rebirth is essential for life. What I saw in Philadelphia is what has happened to many old institutions – they die through lack of change, trapping everyone inside into the corpse called “process thinking”. Members of the thing that used to be an institution are conditioned to understand that the “way this all works” is by “doing the thing.” “What’s next?” “Go do the thing.” “Why?” “I told you to do the thing.” “I feel like I don’t have agency here.” “None of us have agency here.” This works best if maybe you can catch new victimsdiscerners, say around the age of 16 or 18 and control their behavior and access to the outside world until they are, say 26. You take an aspiring young man, looking toward Jesus, and you put him in the thing machine, either he gets ejected out of the side, damaged, or he comes out – but conditioned to keep looking back into the machine waiting to be told to do the thing. Or the man ends up somewhere on the spectrum in-between. After being in the seminary for a few years myself, I started to notice the significant anxiety (I believe bred by attempting to maintain cognitive dissonance) which many of the good parish priests I had known for years were subtly withstanding. There were roughly three types of seminarians at St. Charles. • The men who fit in: There were seminarians for whom the system genuinely worked fairly well. These tended to be the most peaceful and wholesome guys to be around. But you had to fit a certain personality type. • The men who gave up: Ideals are hard and conscience can be drowned out by nice meals and chancery appointments, right? • People for whom ‘the system’ sucked and took that seriously. These fell in two groups: o The Jansenists: “If I say no to enough things hard enough, maybe I can get Jesus to love me?” o Those who found the situation inadequate. (Perhaps just me.) What did process thinking look like at St. Charles? I had a one-on-one to discuss classes with the academic dean at the recommendation of my spiritual director. The dean’s response to my frustrations? “Well you could do some reading of your own in the library. For you the classes might need to be more of just a matter of discipline.” The trouble is everything became a matter of discipline. Very few people in the formation team and seminary leadership said anything remotely coherent about what a priest is and does, which it seemed to me was sort of step 1 for a seminary. There was also a complete inability to have a discussion about the scope or boundaries of the authority of The Formation Committee or one’s bishop – which is actually somewhat necessary when you run your system based mostly on discipline – unless that is, you don’t want to limit the scope of your power, or your culpability for abusing it by having to define it. I laughed when a very popular and well-mannered seminarian planned a big event at his home parish at a time when no seminarians were required to be at the seminary. Many Philadelphia parish priests attended and contributed, some seminary priests were invited, and there was a blanket invitation for all seminarians. The Formation Committee actually had a meeting in which they discussed whether said organizer should get in trouble for planning a party on his own time for his friends, but not inviting all of The Formation Committee. There is obviously no limit to what The Formation Committee’s breadth and depth of authority could possibly be. You can also tell an organism or institution is dying when it is no longer able to adjust itself to internal or external stimuli. It eventually goes septic. The clue that this is imminent is that, while there are actual rules, following the rules doesn’t yield the results they are supposed to, and enforcement of the rules becomes arbitrary. Many of the actual rules either weren’t enforced or were interpreted dynamically – unless you got on the wrong side of the right bishop. There are rules, but they are not written down, and are (usually) enforced as social norms by the inmates themselves. Going back to my genuflection incident, there was no rule about that. In fact, I had already been pulled aside and warned by two seminarians that I would get in trouble by not doing the same thing as everyone else (despite it being a permitted, and in my diocese a normal behavior). The Dean of Men (a formator, an authority I was willing to listen to) was embarrassed to have to address me directly and if you go back to re-read his words, he was unable to ask or direct me to do it, the way a man could have. This became an very common incidence. It was almost impossible to get members of The Formation Committee, or other authorities, to make any direction or request (unless their superior ‘made’ them do it – and the superior probably initially proffered it as a question). Rector: “Father Formator, do you think the seminarians ‘feel comfortable’ coming to this event in clerical clothing?” Father Formator: “Seminarians, you will NOT be wearing clerical attire to this event.” Seminarians to themselves: “Okay, I guess we’re not.” Archbishop, at the event: “Rector, why aren’t any of my seminarians in clerical attire?” Rector: “I *really* don’t know, Archbishop. I can ask Father Formator if it was their preference.” I became allergic to this chronic shielding from taking responsibility for the use of power, so when the same Dean of Men two years later pulled me aside after class (to address my paying too much attention to a book during his lecture), he posed it as a question. I was done at that point so I asked him directly “Father, would you like me not to bring books into your lectures?” He immediately blew up in my face, making our one-on-one conversation a public event “DO YOU THINK I DON’T WANT YOU TO BRING BOOKS INTO MY LECTURES. DO YOU THINK?” I was struck by the fact that even in his anger, he was unable to exercise his own authority by a simple direct request or direction. There is no policy on bringing books into classrooms at St. Charles – most of the seminarians apart from myself were on their laptops. How hard would a “Mr. Mason, please do not bring books into my lectures” have been? A DIGRESSION ON PROGRAMS AND SPIRITS One of the dramatic characteristics of what dying institutions (my ‘thing machines’) do to the men inside is, as I suggested, neuter their agency. What might this look like? Allow me to torture a metaphor: Let us take hypothetical man in position of authority Number 1. A thought is presented to him: “if we, the authority, can keep our power but avoid ever taking responsibility, wouldn’t that be nice, wouldn’t we have it much easier?” “What if we create a body – no wait – a program (which could run on a machine...)” What a shame there are always ghosts in the machine. Here’s a thought, let’s call the ghosts “spirits” and imagine that, oh perhaps, the spirits are there before the machines. What if the spirits are waiting for weak men, susceptible to suggestions? The men could be encouraged to build a little machine to offload that annoying responsibility into. Soon there are lots of programs running on the machine and the machine isn’t little any more. Dear me! Unfortunately it turns out that rejecting responsibility might need to become a requirement of admission for everyone now, since the machine is sooo big that we now need everyone to become “machine managers” (we’ll just call them “managers” for short). A new kid comes in and asks “where are the responsibility and accountability I need to develop virtue and maturity?” A manager ponders “maybe the machine ate the responsibility and accountability? But machines aren’t alive and cannot consume the spiritual challenges which build character. Maybe spirits can. *At this point a metaphor’s battered and lifeless body falls through a ceiling tile and thuds on the carpet.* I warned you. Let’s jump back to the topic of offloading responsibility. I have a thought experiment: *A literary device falls through the adjacent ceiling tile, thudding alongside the metaphor, even more lifeless.* Let us say that the US Catholic bishops had a big meeting in the early 2000s to respond to increasingly visible sex abuse scandals. (Of course those bishops couldn’t have known a thing about any scandals ahead of time. It’s weird that the secular media and judicial system found out first, huh?) Let’s say that the bishops definitely wanted to take full responsibility. It would be an odd coincidence if that entailed creating a program which could run on a machine. It would be just too bad if that program was foisted on all of the hapless parish staff and volunteers. Sacrifices must be made...and stuff. It would be a strange coincidence if in the future there were additional abuse problems. Unfortunately for any victims and justice seekers, the machine has taken responsibility for abuse away from the bishops. Too bad. It would be a weird coincidence if the architect of that response to sex abuse scandals happened to be Theodore McCarrick. It would also be a weird coincidence if that program was still running nationwide today in 2025. There’s no way, right? It’s pretty great that the bishops can talk about their program in press releases and court statements. It’s too bad the bishops can’t take personal responsibility for assessing character and taking responsibility themselves. It’s not like the job is about sacrificing themselves after all. Here in the provincial little parochial (which here I use colloquial) ivory tower, the regular ‘issue’ in my own formation meetings was that The Formation Committee™ needed to know why I wasn’t happy and that I needed (at the prodding of a priest with no formal psychology training) to self-analyze myself again and figure out what I need to make to do for me to be happy. I am not exaggerating here – in my final formation meeting, I was told that the biggest issue The Formation Committee had was that I was “not happy”. As a seminarian you are supposed to lower your aims – settle for being “happy” to wear nice lace (which is definitely not “effeminate”), drink really expensive liquor, clock out at 5pm and dump that bothersome priest outfit, have a cook make you a fine dinner each night, lord it over your servile parish council, become a huge sports fan, save up for a beach house in Jersey, maybe – oh maybe some day be rewarded by being named a Monsignor! If you can’t find a way to be fully actualized by all that, maybe something is wrong with you. At one point doing some academic research for a job, I ran across a fascinating longitudinal (i.e. across time) study of Catholic priest psychological profiles in the UK, US, and Italy. The study found that, tracing from the 1980s into the 2020s, the tested psychological profiles of priests were becoming more similar (which did not track with the general public). Two observations and a question: • You can form a person over time to adopt a different psychological presentation. • You can filter out people who don’t match the psychological profile you are looking for (or maybe the machine doesn’t like). • Why would Catholic seminaries and bishops increasingly be sorting and forming for less psychological diversity in the presbyterate? PART 4 – WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE BISHOPS oops I mean THE CHURCH (AND A LINK TO THE DEATH OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION) In the seminary, I definitely felt sorry for many priest formators. It was painful to watch what I could see some of them going through. And those I had conversations with felt largely incapable of doing anything substantial to change the system they we were in. I had a deja vu experience several years later, speaking with a priest professor at a major university run by a religious order. This priest was a member of the order which ran the university as well as being on the academic faculty. He was bemoaning to me the sad moral and philosophical state of the university. My unspoken reaction was “who the heck is going to address this if not you?” But while I sympathized with the formators, I felt much more for my fellow seminarians. One of my most heartbreaking experiences was meeting with a close seminarian friend who had voluntarily left the seminary. (In typical fashion, not a single person from his diocese or the seminary had reached out to him in the many weeks after leaving, save a single kind-hearted Augustinian priest – shoutout to Leo, may he live forever. Imagine leaving all of your friends and professional colleagues with whom you have spent your entire life for several years and no one contacting you voluntarily.) My friend explained to me that he had a personal struggle prior to seminary, which he had thought was under control, and that being at the seminary would help him maintain a life of virtue. His experience at St. Charles was the opposite, and his struggles became worse, and he had gotten to the point where he could not live like that any more. This was not an isolated problem. I could see it on the faces of some seminarians I knew well – the facade had to look right, regardless of what was going on inside. It was also increasingly distressing to me that frequency with which the most passionate, most intelligent, most driven men – those whom I reckoned the Church needs the most – departed voluntarily or were kicked out ignominiously. I know from personal experience that being smart, having a strong will, and having high standards were all considered problems to be dealt with. In what world does an organization tell its next generation of leaders those things are “going to be a problem for you,” as I was told on multiple occasions? Last year I visited a lovely small town, Heilegenblut, in central Austria for a few days and during my stay, noticed a memorial to the sons of the town who had died in the two World Wars. It struck me that the casualties were higher in WWI, but also that there was significantly more variety in the last names of the men who died in the first war. My read on this is that, at the end of World War I, many of the families of the village were simply left with no sons to pass on the name. As an American, I had not taken the Great War for the social and cultural catastrophe which it was for Europe. Two novels had previously been brought to my attention (by the excellent These Times podcast), Roth’s The Radetzky March and Lampedusa’s The Leopard which treat of this period of European history. The novels focus on the decline of the aristocratic leadership of, respectively, the Austro-Hungarian and Italian states, which led to radical social change and violence, and left dramatic spiritual and cultural voids. The leadership of Europe is seen to be pervasively complacent, exhausted, and incapable of self-criticism. Lampedusa shows an aristocracy which has lived in a closed system of self-privilege for too long. In the end when WWI comes, most of Europe’s leaders sit on their hands, feeling incapable of actually effecting an end to conflict, wrecking countless families and condemning millions of sons to the machine of war. I knew that Europe experienced a radical shift toward representative governments and new dictatorships in the 1920s (prompting some of Pius XI’s greatest concerns and encyclicals), but did not previously understand why. The unaccountable aristocrats abdicated their responsibilities and allowed the machine to consume the young men of Europe. The populaces could not abide this, and most of the leading dynasties and structures were tossed out for any alternative (often worse ones) in the interwar period, leading to a great loss of culture and civilization, and generally failing to actually bring about meaningful cultural and social change...hence WWII. The Catholic and Protestant leaders were largely in bed with the negligent political leadership, and church attendance dramatically declined. Prior to WWI, European church attendance was similar between urban and rural areas, but declined much more dramatically (often by about half) in urban areas after the war. It also declined much more dramatically among men than women, and while the upper classes (and to some extent the middle class) largely still attended church by 1935, the churches had gone from ~45% of the working class attending church in 1910 to closer to 10% by 1935. Those whom felt that the churches failed them, stopped going to church. My fear is that, writ large, Church leaders in Europe and the US have largely not learned from the death of Europe. Insulated from the radical political changes which societies can experience, clerical leaders have simply settled into a resigned ‘ho-hum, it’s too bad no one goes to church any more.’ ‘Dear me, it is such a loss that our societies are embracing ideas and policies which are destructive to human flourishing.’ ‘I wish there was something I could do...’ I vividly recall being at dinner with a spry grandfatherly Monsignor in Philly one evening and hearing him lament something along the lines of “It saddens me that the seminary really taught us to be caretakers. I’m taking care of this parish, but I don’t really know what it would look like to go out there and get people to come back to church.” Both Protestants and Catholics put serious new thought into training their religious leaders in the 16th and 17th centuries. That was an era dominated by the intellectual battles amongst christianity and the religious control of unassailable social and political institutions. We are no longer living in that world. It seems to me that the present social structure is weak and failing, but whatever tomorrow brings, it will not be 1570 again. We need a re-think. PART 5 – WHY NO ONE SHOULD GO TO THE SEMINARY (WITH A BONUS GUIDE ON HOW TO WIN IN EPISCOPACY SIMULATOR 2025) Life is never going to be easy. For all the talk of modern comforts, there are plenty of modern anxieties and travails as well. I think it is vastly under-discussed that in the US, single-earner US median income has dropped from about $98,000/yr (2023 dollars) in 1970 to about $56,000/yr in 2023, when compared to cost of living. If you want a young man to be successful, be a good match for a young woman, start a family, contribute to society, he needs to get moving. Here is what the Catholic Church is doing to young men: 1. Make them get a college degree. You force them into significant debt and put them on an extremely slow-developing career trajectory. If they attend a seminary college, that degree is largely worthless, and they won’t know how to interact with women. 2. Isolate them from their friends and family. You make most seminarians go to a strange city, with limited contact with the outside world. Even during breaks, their time to spend with family and friends is significantly constrained. You do this for years. How many friendships, networks, common pastimes, similarities of lifestyle perdure years of complete neglect? 3. Make them accrue personal debt. I was constantly anxious about debt in the seminary. Most dioceses and seminaries have a 1950s vision of American life – seminarians wouldn’t need a car, insurance, expenses like a computer and phone. Despite the fact that dioceses increasingly prefer men post-college, the tacit assumption is that everyone goes home and lives with mom and dad during breaks (as they are forcibly evicted from the seminary) and that they won’t have any real expenses. Of course, in the best 1950s style, the home parish ought to cover all clerical clothing expenses and so forth. I was astonished as one deacon admitted to me that he had about $100k in personal debt as he was entering his final year. I broke my diocese’s rule that seminarians aren’t allowed to have a job, working in the seminary’s academic library, because I was desperate. 4. Keep them entirely off of a functional career path. When I left seminary after 4 years in 2018 (having no advance warning), my social and academic friends were mostly settled in teaching roles, or a few steps up a ladder into some sort of business career. Many of them had started families. Any hope of leveraging school or work networks is reduced. Not only did 30-year old me only have a resume with two years of actual work on it, I had to figure out how to explain to employers why I hadn’t worked a job in 4 years. I managed to find an entry level position where I made $35k/yr. One might question whether this is a great way to set up future priests even if they make it through. For seminarians and priests who don’t, however, this is fairly catastrophic. They emerge, separated from family and friends, in a lot of debt, with no good job prospects, and not only behind on a career path, but having to compete with men years younger than them who have a commensurate amount of experience and credentials and much better networks. On the family side of things, seminarians have been preparing themselves for a life of celibacy, setting aside dating or building close friendships with women their own age, and emerge further isolated by the fact that many of their own friends will have started families. Meanwhile and the former priest or seminarian may be the sole single man in their former friends group. In terms of concrete numbers, for men entering the seminary after college, in more successful dioceses, about 75-80% make it to ordination, in struggling dioceses this number can be closer to 50%. For men entering college seminary (i.e. with no degree), the most successful dioceses see about 50% make it to ordination (plus, you will probably have to assume up to $60k of college loans). Place your bets accordingly. “But, Jacob” you say, “we need to reform the system! How do we get ‘our guys’ into prominent positions inside the Church hierarchy?” Good question! Happily I come armed with a hypothetical guide to career advancement within the western Catholic Church: So you’re a well-mannered kid who just graduated from Catholic high school. First off, sign up for seminary. While you are there, make sure to kiss enough ass (...) that you are well-liked by the administrators. It’s not enough to say the ‘right’ things and avoid the ‘wrong’ things – you need to make sure the powerful people know that you are the kind of person who closes and opens his mouth at the appropriate times. If you play your cards right, after a token parish assignment you might end up being tapped to be an archbishop’s secretary. (Jumping out of the scenario to observe that this is the most straightforward path to the episcopacy, especially at a relatively young age.) Anyway, whilst you are personal secretary to the Archbishop, if your secretary for clergy happens to present a list of 35 likely priest abusers to the archbishop (which list the archbishop orders destroyed), definitely make sure you don’t know anything about it. Make sure that all you do is sign the Archbishop’s Christmas cards for him. Have you played our fun game correctly so far? Good! Monsignor for you! Oh, you are cooperating with the system™ so well, you receive a system reward: You get to run the machineseminary! You are going places now. Bishophood comes next, but your diocese has an incumbent...hmm, how to solve this? Let’s send you to carpetbag a newer, far more successful and vibrant diocese in a culturally different part of the country. It’s such a shame that none of that diocese’s own priests was as successful at being born in a decrepit, politicized diocese like you were. They should have played the game harder. We all know that marriage is under assault, and the Church needs to encourage and support it. However when it comes to moving up, make sure that you don’t think concepts like ‘spiritual marriage’ (perhaps to your diocese) could apply to you. You deserve to keep climbing the ladder because you are playing the game correctly. Divorce, sorry, I mean annul...dang it, gracefully accept a transfer to a more politically prominent young vibrant diocese. It’s a good thing that diocese doesn’t have internal candidates like the sons of famous Supreme Court justices among its priests. Anyway, we need you to keep climbing, so solidify your allegiances to the systems which got you here. If that means sacrificing some of the diocese’s own sons who don’t play nice in the machine, oh well. You can’t make a tomato pie without breaking a few...err...not sure where that metaphor was going... Anyway, be sure to never publicly explain the reasons for your executive decisions if you can avoid it. You can ill afford tarnish on your polyester escutcheons if you want to make cardinal some day. That’s when you can really save the Church from the inside. Be sure to start introducing system™ rewards in your new diocese too. How are you going to get your priests to put their sticks in the right places if you don’t offer them the carrot of Monsignordom? PART 6 – AUTHORITY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND LOVE ✨🌱🍄💗🧿🌈 ✨ (STARTING WITH WHY ABOLISHING THE MINOR ORDERS IS A BIG DEAL) There is a perverse incentive for bishops – a post-conciliar ‘reform’, exacerbated by negligence: In 1972, Paul VI promulgated Ministeria Quaedam, which abolished the minor orders (e.g. Lector, Acolyte). This was billed as an update to formation, but also sold heavily as partly to facilitate lay men to perform some functions previously reserved to the clergy (we mostly see this as ministers of communion and readers today). Parenthetically almost all bishops refrained from actually following the motu propio and instituting lectors and acolytes. This was at least in part so that women could be included also as “emergency substitutes”. (I’m not making a judgement on whether women should be – just saying ‘rules for thee, but not for me’ is a problem.) In any event, abolishing the minor orders meant that, while previously seminarians would be clerics from tonsure (typically received after one year of a six-year formation period), now they are only clerics once they are deacons (after five or six years). For one thing, this means seminarians have absolutely no status or recourse within the juridical structures of the Catholic Church until they are almost priests. And additionally, this incentivizes bishops to wait and let questionable seminarians cook for a few years, and then to be increasingly picky and trigger-happy the longer a seminarian is in formation. Tl;dr: 1. The bishops of Vatican II call for a reform of the minor orders. 2. In 1972 the reform is made to abolish the minor orders. 3. Seminarians lose clerical status for most of their formation (including some clerical rights and responsibilities – oh look fewer responsibilities! Yay, we hate those!). 4. The bishops find themselves in a position where they are in a more significant relationship imbalance and actually incentivized to let a man whom they won’t be ordaining remain in formation longer. 5. No one does anything about it. I would add that liability-traumatized diocesan and seminary administrators try to sell this as a good thing. “Come try out seminary and see if it’s for you” is the literal sales pitch I heard repeatedly. That is nonsense. Church administrators tell themselves that the reason priests do bad stuff is because we make them feel too much like they were committed as seminarians. (This analysis is quite similar to the lack of commitment which is being sold by a degraded culture as ‘the good life™’ to our young men and women, encouraging less marriage, fewer kids, more casual sex.) My read is that young men today are desperate for commitment, identity, and reliable structure in their lives. It is the seminarians who all want to wear priestly garb in public. It is the boomer priest administrators who don’t want to ‘let’ them. The whole idea of the authorities seeing priestly clothing as a privilege they can permit seminarians to wear is backwards in the first place. Clerical dress was an obligation of the clerical state, not a privilege to be extended or withdrawn. No one is going to stop any lay person, Catholic or otherwise, from walking around dressed like a priest. But you get into seminary, and there alone, they will assume the authority to ban a man from wearing it. No boundaries on the exercise of authority, right? The Company Line Now bishops and formators might point us to the directives of the Program Of Priestly Formation, that the Lord has establishing a hierarchy, the need for order, obedience being directed to God through superiors, protection from error through the Church, the bishop as father, the need for docility, etc. To this I ask, what good parent arrogates to himself the notion that he can with full confidence assume complete freedom from error or questioning because God made him a parent? What kind of teacher or parent, when questioned by their student or child, reflexively reverts to the disparity of their relationship? The hierarchical relationship exists, if not for the sake of, then at least within a broader context. The goal here is that every man and woman reach that union with the Blessed Trinity which God seeks them for. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, that is, discipline and control is necessary to start a child along the path to God, but the only way to continue on that path is for the child to discover something that is worth seeking, to desire the good and beautiful. Vatican documents oft refer to the need to adapt priestly formation to the changing needs and increasingly unique experiences of men entering formation, but for some Church leaders, their instincts on the formation of priests seem to draw inspiration from the darker impulses of the Feenyites or the SSPX or TFP or perhaps some other religion which solely prioritizes submission... I observed in seminary (as elsewhere) a pattern in how some authority figures respond to challenges. When faced with a seminarian who questioned or struggled, their instinct was to increase control. But control and discipline is not the only or appropriate response to all situations. Some things will shatter if you hold them too tightly. I mentioned Cardinal Krol in Part 2 for a reason – he epitomized this approach. I think Krol’s theological instincts, his liturgical preferences, his love of the tradition were largely well-placed, but you cannot force a person to be good. You can force him to ape goodness, to be compliant. God himself gives man free will. A man who does not choose the good is not a good man. A moment from my final semester at seminary epitomized this disconnect, when a priest formator whom I deeply respected said in a gathering of seminarians “I see my role as protecting the bride of Christ from bad men.” This caused me distress, but I was not sure why. On reflection it struck me that this is not what a good teacher tells his student or a good father his child. This is not the first role of a formator. God has given you something incredibly precious. These un-formed men are the very ones he is calling to serve him most intimately. Every priest entrusted with the care of vocations should see nurturing the growth of seminarians as a special and privileged opportunity. A father who sees his role as protecting his wife or the world from his own child has failed. Through my seminary years, I encountered a surprising (to me) blitheness and confidence with which some priests and bishops would exercise authority. A confidence that divine appointment guarantees correct judgement. There can be a profound disconnect between the fact that you are the authority and the equally factual possibility of exercising your authority in error. Authority cannot finally be unbound from responsibility. Every person in authority will not escape being uniquely accountable for the actions he takes with his authority. And there is no guarantee that any bishop, diocese, local church institution, or temporal authority is safe from complete loss of integrity and dis-union with the Lord. There is very little standing in the way of finding yourself alongside Bishop Michael Martin, worshiping at the denuded altar of his lord and savior Michel Foucault. PART 7 – DIS-HARMONIOUS CHAIRS (BUTTERING BREAD IN EPISCOPAL BED) As intimated in my historical musing, the malaise in the church goes to the top of the Catholic hierarchy. There seems to me to be a real problem of the politicization of episcopal sees. Some spirit inclines bishops, even popes, to be politicians over pastors. The name if this game is “the episcopal transfer”. Let’s be real, this is only ever done for the “good of the faithful”, but it has rendered me faith-fed-up. My own vibrant Virginia diocese has never had a native bishop. We have only ever had bishops from Philadelphia, Chicago, and Connecticut. One of our bishops was transferred from a diocese so tiny that we had parishes with more registered parishioners than his entire diocese, yet the ‘salvation of souls’ in Virginia obviously required this. We haven’t had a bishop from our metropolitan territory, Baltimore, the oldest see in the English USA – because Philly and Chicago have more political clout at present. Philadelphia, a collapsing relic, has 15 living and 8 active bishops, while Harrisburg (a suffragan) has an additional 3. Of these 11 active bishops, 5 hold the sees of dioceses which they were not ordained for. Does this matter? A previous bishop of my diocese (transferred from elsewhere) was well-regarded by the priests and faithful – but only after many years in office, when he (to his credit) understood and adjusted to the local culture. I do see myself as a victim of a bishop (Burbidge) whose first allegiance was to the men and institutions of his original diocese, rather than to my own. Bishop Burbidge’s administration of my diocese is also much more akin to the outmoded northeastern model he was raised in, rather than present-day Virginia. I recently encountered a similar phenomenon in Europe. While episcopal politics in the US lands career-hunters in the more populous and growing sees, in Europe, it also tends toward the historic seats of power. While in Bavaria (a place to which I have affinity, as a descendant of German-speaking Catholics) I was struck by the fact that Munich, the prize see of conservative Bavaria, is held by progressive Cardinal Reinhard Marx. Why would a bishop from a different, less conservative, less Catholic part of Germany, be foisted on the people of Munich? Because it is a prize. Why did the convicted Philippe Barbarin, ordained for Paris, end up as Archbishop of Lyon, “Primate of Gaul”? Why is the current Archbishop of Paris from Dijon? Here is an case for progressives: In Utrecht a few years ago, I attended Mass at the sparsely-attended Catholic cathedral. In the mid-20th century, The Netherlands, was predominantly Catholic and Church attendance high, but the episcopal leadership in was extremely progressive. John Paul II (peace be upon him) transferred the ideologically conservative Bishop Adrianus Simonis of Rotterdam to fill the (primatial) see of Utrecht. Here is a timeline of Mass attendance in the Netherlands: • 1965: ~55% of Catholics • 1983: ~18% of Catholics when Bishop Simonis is transferred • 2007: ~7% of Catholics when Bishop Simonis retires • 2024: <3% of Catholics At the same time, the proportion identifying as Catholics declined. About 1.4 million Dutch people attended Mass regularly when Simonis arrived in Utrecht, about 300,000 when he retired, and about 170,000 now. Somehow Utrecht is still a primatial see, and Philadelphia is an archdiocese, despite a similar number of souls attending Mass on a typical Sunday in my own diocese as in the entire country of the Netherlands or in the archdiocese of Philadelphia. The point of this anecdote is that if we normalize episcopal political games, we encourage everyone, up to the pope, to view bishop power plays as the solution to problems in the Church. It is certainly true that sometimes you need an outsider, for healthy cultural exchange, to clean up a mess (Chaput was transferred to Philly for this reason). The trouble is that too many bishops are accustomed to view episcopal sees as prizes on a tier list, and to measure success as a bishop in terms of how high up the list they can climb. Priests and people suffer the consequences. If the reason for a bishop’s transfer is “he earned it”, you are doing it wrong. I was greatly cheered in 2017 by an appointment in Allentown. They unexpectedly lost their incumbent bishop (to a transfer), and one Msgr. Alfred Schlert was appointed administrator by Allentown’s own senior priests (College of Consultors). Months later Schlert was named the new bishop of Allentown. That one’s bishop might to be chosen from the capable and respected in his own diocese is a thing I profoundly wish were more common. PART 8 – STEPS FORWARD (MY ADDRESS TO LAY PEOPLE, PRIESTS, BISHOPS, AND THE VATICAN) I will speak extremely frankly here. I would love discussion and pushback, but am putting down some reckless impulses to start a conversation. --- Dear lay christians, do not assume that you can trust your church leaders to be transparent with you. While there are outstandingly transparent and honest leaders (the great Archbishop Chaput being one), there is a serious culture (one might say a “spirit”) of avoidance of responsibility and a reflexive, unthinking concealment of absolutely everything which could come back to put accountability on the doorstep of leaders in the Church. You need to hold church leaders accountable. Find where the money is going, and don’t accept that anything is being ‘taken care of’ if you cannot see with your own eyes. If a bishop or chancery or press office makes a statement about a significant or surprising change of... • Priest assignment • Lay staff/school leadership • Program usage (especially around ‘safeguarding’ types of issues) • Diocesan policies • Local scandals connected to any priest or lay staff person connected to the diocese ...assume that there is a reason and ask for it. This might require asking in a public forum, because (as has been abundantly shown in the concealment of scandals like sexual abuse by clergy) the public forum is the only place where church leadership consistently responds. You are the only ones who can do this – the priests cannot. Rev. Vincent De Rosa, respected pastor at Mother of God Parish in Washington, D.C., in December 2024 wrote an open letter to his parishioners apologizing for the Archdiocese of Washington’s lack of transparency around financial accountability – including to its own priests – along with his frustration at the situation. For the horrifying crime of actually being transparent with his parishioners, Fr. Da Rosa was summarily booted from his parish and sent to chaplain at a hospital. The parish didn’t even get a replacement pastor, being assigned to a priest who already had another parish. --- Dear priests, you are the closest to Jesus’s flock, and they love you. Be assured of their profound need and gratitude for you. Be willing to acknowledge a disconnect between what it seems like your people need and what you sometimes experience and are required to do by your legitimate authorities. (Take Fr. Da Rosa as a caution and put things in writing only if you are confident it won’t come back to hurt you and your parishioners.) Be transparent with the laity, while trying to engender respect for your local bishop as possible and appropriate. If you find yourself on the wrong side of a confusing demotion or assignment change, know that you aren’t alone in that, and it can be a serious cross. Know that your bishop and the pope are not perfectly independent, self-aware moral actors – there is a culture of avoidance of responsibility in the Church hierarchy. --- Dear formators, yours is a hard job. Thank you for doing it. But be empowered to bring change where it is needed. Additionally (calling out to bishops as well) rely on your own F****** judgement of character and don’t try to farm out your responsibility to external authorities like psychologists, treating them like the Oracle of Delphi. You have a broader training and vision than any external “professional” and certainly the responsibility to make hard decisions yourselves, based on your own judgement, and take ownership of this. Incorporate external expertise, but rely on your own judgement. No seminarian should ever be told “sorry we’re letting you go because an external secular person said we should.” --- Dear bishops, learn how to fall on your own swords. Read some of Catherine of Siena’s thoughts on bishops and church leaders. Don’t beat up your priests because they are the only ones you can really ‘control’. Don’t convince yourselves that your priests all trust you completely. (The Pillar has done some excellent reporting on this topic, and there’s a lot of relevant psychological literature about those findings as well.) Share the load – attempting to completely hide and resolve genuine problems on your own (like priests with issues) isolates you and makes things harder on you. Also, divest control of diocesan finances so that the lawyers don’t constantly convince you to hide from accountability. Stop hiding behind programs, secrecy, and internally-commissioned investigations to avoid accountability, Cardinal Joseph Tobin. You are in a hostile world which hates the truth and the gospel and you as a leader of the Church. Rather than consolidating power in your own person and hiding behind secrecy, be open with your fellow christians and courageous against the world. --- Dear Vatican peeps (and Cardinal Pierre), 1. Stop the episcopal farm system. The cultural and spiritual disconnect between bishops and their priests and flock is being greatly exacerbated by this. Most sees in the United States are held by men who were ordained for a different diocese. Consider restricting transfers outside of metropolitan areas. Go back and read the Apostolic Canons, Nicaea, and Constantinople. You have allowed the western church to devolve into a power-grabbing political game, where influence-hungry archbishops ordain lots of little auxiliaries so that they can send them out to carpetbag younger, more vibrant sees. There is an obvious political game of ‘you pat my back, I’ll pat yours’. In 2016 my diocese gets Bishop Burbidge (originally of Philly, but most recently) from Raleigh. Burbidge’s backfill in Raleigh is an auxiliary sent by a certain Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta (who himself was originally from Chicago). And (who would have thunk it!) Burbidge’s vocation director is selected to be the new auxiliary in Atlanta. Stop enabling this. The status quo is a system of politicized managed decline, where the oldest, most decrepit sees in the developed world stretch out their greedy withered fingers to prey upon the Church where it has the most life. 2. Overhaul and enforce the way in which the selection and formation of priests in the western church is run. Draft an advisory board of religious order priests and parochial vicars with at least 10 years of pastoral (no administrators!). The decision board should involve bishops and religious superiors who are not from Europe or North America (and not all from the Latin Church). The Church needs good administrators, but I think many failures of the post-Vatican II era can be pinned on letting administrators tell pastors how to pastor. 3. Write and enforce some rules on financial transparency and episcopal divestiture. The 19th and 20th century trend to consolidate all assets under the direct control of the bishop was a mistake. It’s not healthy for the bishops, and it makes them and the diocese legally vulnerable in a manner which encourages them to shirk accountability and push responsibility down the chain. 4. Recognize that the Church historically had political resistance from external entities like the state (as we still see in China). This was a threat, but also played a role in keeping men in the Church honest (as in the US secular legal action have proven to be the only thing capable of holding Church leaders accountable). Additionally, the Church in the west had for a thousand years strong religious orders, which are now mostly gone. Ecclesiastical power is predominantly in the hands of the secular clergy. In many regards, western Church leadership now finds itself in a serious bubble. I have thought at times that if France still had a king, there would not have been a Novus Ordo. (No judgement on the Novus Ordo.) PART 9 – CHANGING THE FORMATION OF SECULAR PRIESTS (OBSERVATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS) I would see secular priestly formation collapsed into two categories: formation of the mind (academic) and formation of the heart (everything else). Obviously a man is a single integrated person, and I don’t want these to be apart, but I think the current canonical rules are inappropriate, vague, and mis-applied. Current USCCB language gives us intellectual, spiritual, human, and pastoral “pillars” of formation. In my experience, the current seminary system does not serve any of those particularly well. Human: The post-collegiate men with whom I entered seminary tended to be at least as ‘normal’ and well-formed humans as the formators we were assigned to. If you want men to mature, give them time and responsibilities around normal adults – the laity as well as priests in active ministry. Life in glorified daycare the seminary doesn’t provide this. Pastoral: What could be more pastoral than...a parish? If you want to develop serious pastoral skills among the new clergy, and ease the transition into active ministry, create a structure which gives the opportunity for real, sustained pastoral activity, accompanying active clergy, carrying real obligations, and developing serious relationships with the flock. The current US model bounces seminarians through one shallow experience after another. The only real thing it tests is the seminarian’s ability to be “nice”. We only give men serious ministerial opportunities after ordination to the diaconate. (If you are a bishop, worried about whether a guy can function as a priest, why wait until you’ve ordained him to find this out?) Spiritual: My experience of the Propaedeutic Year was awesome. (Thank you Abp. Chaput!) I participated in a version based on a novitiate. We were a small community with a live-in priest, and daily visitors from the seminary community. The focus on prayer, community, and separation from the world, was tremendously freeing for me. The relationships I built there were similarly wonderful. This was, however, dramatically different from ‘normal seminary’. Academic: Secular men and women who got to grad school do so through passion and dedication. Especially in the non-STEM fields, a PhD is a path to perpetual poverty (high debt and low wages) and takes a lot of genuinely hard work – even more work, more hard to get a tenure-track position. With notable exceptions, the priest professors I encountered were voluntold off to CUA or Rome and largely rubber-stamped to a degree their diocese paid for. If the academic pillar is about academics, those two ecosystems aren’t comparable. The seminary lecture method in a supposedly graduate-level system is also wrong. Academically, the seminary system is already 200 years outmoded, and that gap will increase rapidly without adjustment. --- The way things actually work in the seminary system is that the academics and canonically-mandated time frames become hoops to jump through. Who cares if the academics are poor, the other aspects of formation are not being served by it, and the application of the rules bears a tenuous connection to what a seminarian actually needs? It’s not like there’s some goal we hope to achieve, is there? This is about the rules! Seminarian, squeeze into your darn box! Here are some thoughts: • Start off with the “Propaedeutic Year” (I hate fancy language) –call it the spiritual year. The focus here is holiness. • Cut the academics – Seminary is too long, especially since dioceses are increasingly taking older candidates. If a man has qualifications in a relevant subject, waive required studies and allotted time. • Consider exam-based rather than time-based elements of the academic evaluation system. Let men learn at their own pace. • Transfer some academics to be formal continued studies in between a priest’s ministry. (It could even serve as a nice canonically-enforced sabbatical for many overworked priests.) • Move some studies out of the seminary classroom. Word on Fire, The Augustine Institute/FORMED, Ascension, The St. Paul Center, The Thomistic Institute, Dynamic Catholic, etc. provide more valuable and practical catechesis and training than the seminary. Take half the academic years out of the seminary and embed the seminarians in parishes (in their home dioceses). Have them come together to study and discuss online classes two days a week. Mix the order of classes so seminarians will spend some time studying with men ahead and behind them in formation. • In addition to/aside from the seminary rector and formators’ recommendation, add a recommendation from a randomly-selected group of the seminarian’s own diocesan clergy. Also add a recommendation from a randomly-selected group of mass-attending catholics from a parish in which the seminarian has conducted substantial ministry. • Change juridical rules to be clear and simple. The current state of things is florid and vague. Conflating a rule and its justification is a way to avoid the exercise of judgement and to confuse the goal with the process. Make the rules and exceptions as clear, simple, and goal-oriented as possible. Don’t tell me “this shall be done towardasmuchas such and such niceness blooms”. Keep it clear that the rules (restrictions) are there to serve a positive good, a goal. On community: I have never felt the draw to most religious orders, largely because I always wanted to be with normal people, working adults, families, and to serve among them. By my final year in seminary, I was the only seminarian from my diocese in my year. How am I being prepared to be a priest for Arlington, with all of my formation being with priests and seminarians from other places, whom I will never live around again? Take some serious thought about the ideal and the practical reality of the secular priesthood. If the ideal is something more akin to a religious congregation or to canons, start changing parish structures NOW to accommodate that. This will be far more complicated than the formation revisions I request. But if it’s necessary, do it. If we aim toward the practical, where many priests are almost alone in their rectories, we need a different model of formation and preparation. We need to stop preparing men for clerical community to then consign them to a life of lonely hermitude. On discipline: Ditch the ‘discipline uber alles’ military-seminary style. I have been to USMC officer school – it is 10 weeks long. An enlisted soldier attends boot camp, typically for 3 months, then The Basic School (or equivalent) for another ~6. Even if we wanted that sort of formation for our priests, why subject them to 7-9 years of military school play acting when the real military can do it in 9 months? Not only is this bad for the priests who are supposed to be leaders – it trickles down the chain. I recently attended Sunday Mass at a Franciscan TOR parish, where the ~30-year-old priest preached about what rules Catholics should and shouldn’t follow. This is what the modern seminary environment breeds – rule-following administrator types. This won’t spread the gospel and it cannot be the goal of the christian life. On abgnegation and gifts: During seminary, I was told by different priests that in another time such-and-such a religious order would have been a good fit for me (most oft the Society of Jesus). We need formators, bishops, etc. to realize that many men following a call to the priesthood in the US have almost never seen a religious order priest. Growing up in Virginia, I never had a chance to say “I like the Augustinian’s community”, because I had never seen an Augustinian. Nor “the of Servants of Charity do good work”, because they never came that far south, and aren’t around any more.. The secular priesthood is the only option for many, and for now it must cater to a broad audience. The attitude I would wish for formators to adopt toward each seminarian is “what are this man’s unique gifts from God and how can those be oriented toward the life and work of a priest?” As noted, at St. Charles any seminarian who possessed outstanding qualities, was viewed with suspicion by some formators if he sought to employ those talents. A Philly spiritual director once said to me “if Caruso had entered the seminary, they would have barred him from ever singing at Mass.” Great. Better go bury those talents in the ground, Caruso. This attitude among formators fits my historical gloss: In the first Christian-era dark age, conservative extremist iconoclasts chopped the noses, hands, and phalluses off of beautiful statues. In the late medieval darkness prior to the Reformation, conservative extremist churchmen hoarded the Scriptures and literacy. In this passing dark age, conservative extremist formators saw it their role to diminish the souls of men. To quote the near-inimitable Greta Thunberg, “How dare you!” In seriousness, how dare a formator consider it his prune away the most splendid and beautiful aspects which God has bestowed upon a person in their charge? Iconoclasts defaced statues, medievals grasped at God’s word, but you are breaking God’s very image. Perhaps a priest who is an excellent administrator and good with kids will need, by the exigencies of this world, to be sent to work in a hospice. That is the call to abnegation which the Lord calls us to, not a destructive forced mediocrity imposed on all by petty and selfish formators. How many men and women have failed to accept the gospel of Jesus because the priests they see are too remarkable? PART 10 – ON CATHOLIC SHUNNING AND MY MOTIVATIONS It has been painful for me to watch the ongoing saga of Bishop Strickland, formerly of Tyler, TX. Guilty, among other things, of making some particularly Boomer-ish tweets about Pope Francis, containing particularly conservative boomerish thoughts, he verged on schismatic if taken seriously. Bishop Vigano demonstrated a much more extreme and persistent version of the same strain of thought. It seems to me that Cardinal Burke and other conservative bishops tread the borders of this territory at times. But I get where Strickland is coming from. Being effectively shunned in the Catholic ‘priest world’ is really confusing and isolating, especially if one’s expulsion is not for some obvious malfeasance or misbehavior. I want to make it really clear that I acknowledge the legitimate authority of my bishop to kick me out of the seminary. I told him so in the meeting when he kicked me out. I acknowledge his authority in the diocese where he is bishop and I don’t think he is some illegitimate pawn of the devil. It has been a really terrible experience for me and perhaps I fully deserved it, but that doesn’t mean sowing disorder and disunity is a solution. But am I effectively sowing disorder by writing this essay? There are probably men in the Church who would say so. I might agree that were I in seminary or a priest, I should not share what I have. I think I did a good job of making the church, my seminary, and my diocese look good while I was a seminarian, despite seeing some ridiculous and disheartening things while there. Gosh, the first time I was back at my home parish as a fledgling seminarian I was walking from the rectory to the church for Sunday Mass and a person driving by rolled down their window to yell at me “how many kids have you abused today?” It wasn’t always great fun. And it has taken more than seven years for me to write down some thoughts. I think, however, that hiding the church’s internal problems serves no one well. No more whitened sepulchers. Bishop Burbidge said to me something I found odd during my dismissal meeting. He told me reassuringly that the fact that I was being dismissed by him from priestly formation (rather than for any other reason, such as rule violation or voluntary departure, I suppose) would, of course, be kept private. My thought in the meeting was “why would the reason for my departure be kept private?” But I may have still been in tears at that point, and had not thought through what all of this meant. No one had given me an indication of what the meeting was for in advance. In reflecting on that comment afterward and since I have wondered what it served. If I have done something wrong I want to know and I prefer it to be public that the bishop kicked me out. If I haven’t, I also want it to be public that the bishop kicked me out. I didn’t know and wasn’t told at the time of my dismissal that if I ever wanted to be a priest anywhere for anyone in the future, any previous dismissal would need to be thoroughly addressed and discussed anyway, so whom does this protect? Could it be a case of…not wanting to take responsibility for the exercise of authority? On the shunning point: In the immediate aftermath of being dismissed, I reached out to a few priests whom I had contact with as a seminarian who had bona fides in canon law. I did not know what “dismissal” was, or what it meant juridically or for my future or if there was any recourse. They were all afraid to talk with me. Period. No one would not even do me the courtesy of explaining to me what a dismissal was. So there you have it. I, once a seminarian for the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, was dismissed from priestly formation by Bishop Michael Burbidge in January of 2018. I wasn’t given a reason in person or in my dismissal letter (which I only ever received by email – because why follow the Church’s rule that it is supposed to be a physical letter?). The bishop assured me in our conversation that if I worked through some things, perhaps there would be an opportunity to have another discussion in “a year or two.” Well it turns out that dismissal involves a two-year ban on admission to formation, meaning I would need to wait at least two and a half years. Additionally, I initiated multiple conversations with the Arlington vocation director (roughly every two years since) and have learned there was no truth in Bishop Burbidge’s statement at all. Maybe in the moment he believed it himself. I am sure any mouthpieces of the Arlington Diocese or St. Charles Seminary would be deeply saddened by any pain any dismissed seminarians or priests may have suffered. I trust that their hearts would ache for any who have experienced upset and they would commit themselves to listening with compassion. The Church is, of course, a place of healing, not harm and each Diocese, every seminary is, of course, fully pledged to full transparent accountability…offer sincere prayers…commitment to dignity…[lawyer checking notes – “Hmm, have we covered everything we need to for legal and press purposes. Can’t take liability or responsibility for anything here…] blah, blah, blah, healing…blah, blah, blah, programs have a tremendous track record… Oh, wow, that actually makes me *feel* amazing, and my life is now back on track. (Those programs particularly impress me.) Perhaps could I be invited to be a lay-member of a new commission to study and make recommendations about seminaries and formation? I would prefer it to be a commission from which I can get disgruntled and quit 10 months later when I realize it doesn’t actually do anything…well except maybe take the appearance of responsibility away from bishops. That sounds great. I want it to be clear to everyone reading this essay that I struggle with bitterness. It is a wound which began while I was yet in formation when I saw those whom the leaders and institutions of the Church were failing. It tears again whenever I run into someone whose good heart and intentions have been met with abuse and neglect by Christian leaders and organizations. I hope any reader will interpret this essay through that lens. In conclusion, it is one thing, for the good of the church, to avoid airing all of our dirty laundry. It is another thing to so assiduously avoid taking responsibility for the possession and exercise of authority in the Catholic Church that our leaders (that’s you, bishops) are insulated from being accountable for anything. You cannot hide from your consciences and God, and at the end of the day, that is what matters. Things can be concealed for while in the dark, but morning follows evening. To draw my rambling narrative to a close, I want to propose another reason why parishes pray the St. Michael prayer. We are still working through the Catholic Church’s long response to the chaos of the industrial revolution. Leo XIII, who mandated the prayer, was the first post-Vatican I pope to work a response and leadership which that truncated council was unable to complete. Perhaps we need to keep the St. Michael thing going at least until that task is finished. Maybe another Leo can move the ball forward. Why is this posted as an image on Substack? I wanted formatting options beyond what that platform can offer. How else was I supposed to use comic sans every time I wrote Monsignor?](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ibGp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd19225c2-2bdf-4a42-a07f-8414656b8567_2550x6600.jpeg "The passing and coming of a pope brings to my mind the way Genesis repeats the motif that things pass, not as we typically think – from sunrise to sunset – but from darkness to light, from evening to morning. We are an Easter people, eh? While hoping to avoid millenarianism, I think that there are ways in which the Church is presently working through a time with its own unique darkness, and we may not quite yet see the morning twilight. I write this essay to talk about my experience studying to be a Catholic priest, and to suggest a theoretical and historical framework around which to think about it. This essay is divided into 10 parts, which can be read independently. Check the contents and jump to whatever strikes your fancy. If you have time and interest, start from the beginning, as this is a unified whole, where the parts build upon each other. I will start with a grand unified theory™ of historical ecclesiastical development. BUT! for the titillating details and some wild hypothetical exercises, skip ahead to Part 2 or look for purple. Reality is full and a theory is like one artist’s two-dimensional painting, so I don’t claim this IS the reality, or even the best theory or interpretation of the reality, but it may be a worthwhile or a useful one. PART 1 – THE PROBLEM IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TODAY (BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY I KNOW...) PART 2 – LIFE IN DISFUNCTIONAL HARRY POTTER SEMINARY PART 3 – WHAT WENT WRONG IN PHILLY (AND HOW THIS IS SYMPTOMATIC OF THE CHURCH HIERARCHY) PART 4 – WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE BISHOPS oops I mean THE CHURCH (AND A LINK TO THE DEATH OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION) PART 5 – WHY NO ONE SHOULD GO TO THE SEMINARY (WITH A BONUS GUIDE ON HOW TO WIN IN EPISCOPACY SIMULATOR 2025) PART 6 – AUTHORITY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND LOVE ✨🌱🍄💗🧿🌈 ✨ (STARTING WITH WHY ABOLISHING THE MINOR ORDERS IS A BIG DEAL) PART 7 – DIS-HARMONIOUS CHAIRS (BUTTERING BREAD IN EPISCOPAL BED) PART 8 – STEPS FORWARD (MY ADDRESS TO LAY PEOPLE, PRIESTS, BISHOPS, AND THE VATICAN) PART 9 – CHANGING THE FORMATION OF SECULAR PRIESTS (OBSERVATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS) PART 10 – ON CATHOLIC SHUNNING AND MY MOTIVATIONS PART 1 – THE PROBLEM IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TODAY (BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY I KNOW...) Perhaps the previous great paroxysm of christianity was the Reformation. The timeline seems simple – Luther posted his theses in 1517 and the Roman response (The Council of Trent) closed its final session a mere 46 years later, setting out a Catholic game plan. The arc of that episode, however, might be said to run all the way from the rise of scholasticism in the 11th century, or at least from the Renaissance, and through to at least the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Why the history? In the conservative christian circles in which I was raised, the pre-conciliar 1950s, or at earliest the late 19th century heyday of Pope Leo XIII, were canonized as the ‘radix’, the true, jewel-encrusted incarnation of Catholic christianity to which if-we-could-but-force a return, would inevitably induce universal holiness among the baptized, the final evangelization of all peoples, and (best of all) the return of Ecclesiastical Latin as the lingua franca. I jest, but consider this – why in American Catholic parishes is recitation of the St. Michael prayer after Mass effectively a mark that the parish is ‘conservative’ and respects ‘tradition’? That prayer was composed and introduced in the 1890s under the previous Leo and worked into its current form in the 1920s under Pius XI. Why would a real traditionalist not choose, say, the Didache, or the Our Father, or the Nicene Creed as the mark of true orthodoxy? (I might personally pick the “happy bees, buzzy bees, pretty little bees” prayer from the Paschal Vigil.) My point here is that the common vision of the troubles which face the Church and the landscape over which her petty battles are often fought is historically (and ontologically) illiterate. One of my favorite Chesterton quotes, which addresses this perennial illiteracy, is: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition.” This is why, when John Paul II came out with the luminous mysteries of the rosary in 2002, traditional and conservative Catholics poo-pooed them. 100 years from now, preferring the luminous decades will inevitably be the mark of a true conservative Catholic. A real Catholic – not one of those wishy-washy liberals who don’t respect tradition. In truth I don’t pray them myself because I am a self-respecting conservative Catholic, but in another 50 years I definitely would. Greater souls in the Church knew there was a spiritual crisis brewing by the mid-19th century. The spiritually-invigorating (while also intensely terrible) wars of religion had largely ceased and the industrial revolution was hitting full steam, causing dramatic societal change. Protestantism saw awakenings in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Oxford movement in Anglicanism also in the 19th. The Catholic Church held Vatican I. These were not random religious events. Christians at that time recognized the need to form a religious response to moral decline and dramatic social and technological change. And there was a problem with the Catholic response – interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war and the unification of Italy, the council never got close to achieving its aims. Unlike the other, less institutionally-rigid christian churches, the Catholic Church’s social teaching, legal structure, ecclesiastical structure, liturgical rules, and its customs were largely locked in place throughout this period of collapse of European civilization, until after 1950. This caused at least two concomitant problems: Catholic Christianity was basically prevented from addressing issues which had been internally identified for 100 years (and the internal clock of the Catholic Church already runs 30 years behind the times), and when the Catholic Church got around to addressing the problems, it began with addressing the problems of the 19th century in the 1970s instead of the real situation which the Church was actually in by that time. Why can’t one wait to address the world, the flesh, and the devil for 130 years? They will eat you. The parochial schools, the parish church life (particularly for priests), the customs of the Vatican, and most especially the seminaries of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church produced many of the rough waves of the last 70 years in the western Catholic Church. It was pre-conciliar priests who wrote the new rites and prayer books, it was largely pre-conciliar priests and nuns who left their vocations in droves. It was largely priests disciplined through the pre-conciliar seminaries who committed sexual abuses in the 1950s-1980s. It was pre-conciliar priests who taught in the post conciliar seminaries. And it was pre-conciliar bishops who ruled the post-conciliar dioceses. The rot, the sickness was there inside and around the church – it had not been addressed in the proper time. What fault, too, must be placed on the steps of Vatican II? It was its task to address unresolved philosophical, political, social, legal, educational, and pastoral challenges of the 1840s, but in the 1960s. This is one reason that the preparatory documents (schema), prepared by the roman curia for the council were torn up by the bishops on their arrival. There was perhaps wisdom in this, but less in the men who wrote the new plans. The men (and I use the gendered term specifically here) who decided that the church needed to dramatically open itself to the spirit of the times in the 1970s, to fill the Church with the music and art of the flower children, to consider all laws and customs excessive, to deify the personal over the objective were men born in the 1920s, reacting to the unmet needs of the 1840s, and formed in a system built in the 1570s. If you fix yesterday’s problem today, you will have new and different problems tomorrow which you did not anticipate. Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged this in reflecting on the unrealistic misguidedness of some of the reforms he himself advocated at the time of the council. Many men, good and evil, inside the Church were living in a calcified relic which had lost sight of what lay outside for over a century. PART 2 – LIFE IN DISFUNCTIONAL HARRY POTTER SEMINARY What did this all look like to the man on the street? Well, am I that man! The street was Overbrook. Upon acceptance into priestly formation for my mid-atlantic diocese, I was sent to venerable St. Charles Borromeo Seminary of Philadelphia to begin my preparation. That seminary has a special relation to my historical theorizing. It is one of the oldest American Catholic seminaries, in one of the oldest dioceses, in a historically Catholic region, which was ruled under the iron crosier of John Cardinal Krol up to 1988. It seems Cardinal Krol came back from Vatican II reasonably well-chuffed. What took the shine off of his miter (I have tried on two of them – very, very tall and encrusted with jewels – my traditionalist seminarian friends immediately kissed the cumbersome rings which appeared upon my fingers) were the implementations of the reforms which came after the council. The Saturday vigil Mass, for example, which had been universally permitted from Rome in 1970, was forbidden in Philadelphia and suffragan dioceses until the mid-1980s (among many similar prohibitions). St. Charles Seminary, when I arrived, was still one of those immensely repressful places where most seminarians found themselves unhappy and filled with cognitive dissonance while attending, yet surprisingly nostalgic for upon review. When I came to Overbrook in 2014 it had been only a year since many seminarians still wore cassocks…all day – at Office and Mass, meals and class, and even sports. And the ecclesiastic inbreeding was legendary – every member of the full-time teaching and formation staff (with the exception of about 4 lay teachers) had attended St. Charles themselves for their formation and education. It was a dry campus, which makes sense – you want to force your 21-year-old seminarians to leave the seminary if they want to drink outside their bedroom. And it had all sorts of little rules. “We don’t genuflect before communion here at St. Charles, we bow. Is that going to be a problem, Mr. Mason?” was an actual statement of ‘fact’ which I received from the burly Dean of Men, who was embarrassed to have to tell me. There was a seminarian rule book dating back decades which still has a positive requirement that “seminarians should take care not to speak in a manner or engage in any conversations that might be construed as effeminate”. The rule against mocking authority was almost universally violated. There was, appropriately, a rule against accessing porn, but try this mental exercise: Take a lot of 17-35 year old single men, set a daily schedule which makes communal sports impossible (because your institution is insolvent and can’t afford to pay people to work normal hours), don’t allow them to drink together, don’t permit roommates (because we don’t tell anyone, but we’ve apparently had big problems with sexual misbehavior in the recent past and we think this will prevent it), almost never enable interaction with women of any type under any circumstances (many seminarians go from the age of 18 to 26 without a single female friend), give them unfiltered internet, and threaten social opprobrium and expulsion from the community for any moral infraction. What is my point? If you fail to provide men with community, activity, and a healthy social sphere, but you give them solo rooms and unfiltered internet, you are asking for trouble. Porn, not liturgical orthodoxy, was perhaps the most serious actual problem for seminarians. But it was the classroom that I found most jarring. The ‘smart’ graduates of Overbrook were sent on for further studies to Rome where they sat at the feet of the true masters™ and drank of the nectar of TanquereySchillebeeckx, which style they promptly brought back to St. Charles (which is how they had all been taught anyway). This created a social expectation in the classroom (where there might be only 3 students) that the only acceptable thing a student is permitted to do is listen to the teacher read a (mediocre) textbook…and maybe ask politely for clarification if absolutely necessary. I had previously attended an excellent private college and later a solid graduate school, but made the decision to stop reading assignments ahead of time because the same assignment was just going to be read to me in class by my professor for two hours. It didn’t matter if you knew the material – the point was to play your ‘role’. I was shouted at in class by a priest and later a monsignor for not paying enough attention to them. The monsignor made a point of stopping his address and singling me out in a loud voice to upbraid me for bringing in ‘some book’ and ignoring his lecture. He was lecturing on the wisdom literature and my book was the Bible. Please note, this is not Dublin, circa 1953. This all took place between the years 2014 and 2018. [Oh, purple! We are in a thought experiment.] It was fortunate the seminary wasn’t more regressive or we might have had high level faculty members who drank heavily before breakfast, or formators who publicly lost their tempers with other adult men, or I might have heard first hand accounts of multiple on-campus sexual encounters, or Philadelphia might have had a presbyterate which was chronically unable to identify with or befriend their parishioners and even more chronically alcoholic. In such a diocese, the archbishop might have had to close more churches (80) over 5 years, than the total number of parishes in my diocese (79), and more people in my own diocese might have attended Mass in those 79 than the number of parishioners attending the ~250 remaining Catholic churches in Philadelphia. If the seminary and diocese were run any worse there might have been two grand jury inquiries into sexual abuse scandals in 2008 and 2011, and the former Cardinal Archbishop might have died the night before he was supposed to testify in the single case which resulted in a prison conviction, and that Cardinal might have died on the grounds of St. Charles Seminary, and the college seminarians might have been led through the room to see his body before a police investigation could take place. There also might have been a 2018 grand jury which implicated other Pennsylvania dioceses (fortunately not Philadelphia!) except that roughly half the priests in that report would have attended St. Charles seminary for the duration of their formation. In such a scenario, the former secretary of the mysteriously-deceased Cardinal, might have later served as rector of…St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, before in 2016 being appointed bishop of my own diocese and, 13 months later, dismissing me from formation. I wasn’t dismissed for knowing or experiencing things other people didn’t. As far as I can tell, I was dismissed for being unhappy about it, and when asked by formators why I was unhappy, being transparent with them. It was a sad irony that, within two months of my dismissal, the final Philadelphia parish I was assigned to lost its second consecutive pastor. The first pastor had been imprisoned at the conclusion of the same court case our dead Cardinal was supposed to have testified at. The pastor I worked for in 2017, who spoke of his close personal friendship with my own new Philadelphia-sourced bishop, was two months after my dismissal, placed on leave and suspended, then convicted for civil financial improprieties as well as admitted personal improprieties. A priest ordained by my own diocese ended up being the backfill at that Philadelphia parish. PART 3 – WHAT WENT WRONG IN PHILLY (AND HOW THIS IS SYMPTOMATIC OF THE CHURCH HIERARCHY) To return to the arc of history, the archdiocese of Philadelphia I found myself sent to be formed in was a mess, and part of the reason was that, because Cardinal Krol so opposed the post-Vatican II reforms, he gripped tighter and prevented any reform. While much of the western Catholic Church experienced its most violent turmoils in the 1970s and 80s, Philadelphia looked golden until nose-diving in the 1990s, and it had just finished bottoming out as I arrived. You cannot stop change, and for a living organism, growth, reform, even rebirth is essential for life. What I saw in Philadelphia is what has happened to many old institutions – they die through lack of change, trapping everyone inside into the corpse called “process thinking”. Members of the thing that used to be an institution are conditioned to understand that the “way this all works” is by “doing the thing.” “What’s next?” “Go do the thing.” “Why?” “I told you to do the thing.” “I feel like I don’t have agency here.” “None of us have agency here.” This works best if maybe you can catch new victimsdiscerners, say around the age of 16 or 18 and control their behavior and access to the outside world until they are, say 26. You take an aspiring young man, looking toward Jesus, and you put him in the thing machine, either he gets ejected out of the side, damaged, or he comes out – but conditioned to keep looking back into the machine waiting to be told to do the thing. Or the man ends up somewhere on the spectrum in-between. After being in the seminary for a few years myself, I started to notice the significant anxiety (I believe bred by attempting to maintain cognitive dissonance) which many of the good parish priests I had known for years were subtly withstanding. There were roughly three types of seminarians at St. Charles. • The men who fit in: There were seminarians for whom the system genuinely worked fairly well. These tended to be the most peaceful and wholesome guys to be around. But you had to fit a certain personality type. • The men who gave up: Ideals are hard and conscience can be drowned out by nice meals and chancery appointments, right? • People for whom ‘the system’ sucked and took that seriously. These fell in two groups: o The Jansenists: “If I say no to enough things hard enough, maybe I can get Jesus to love me?” o Those who found the situation inadequate. (Perhaps just me.) What did process thinking look like at St. Charles? I had a one-on-one to discuss classes with the academic dean at the recommendation of my spiritual director. The dean’s response to my frustrations? “Well you could do some reading of your own in the library. For you the classes might need to be more of just a matter of discipline.” The trouble is everything became a matter of discipline. Very few people in the formation team and seminary leadership said anything remotely coherent about what a priest is and does, which it seemed to me was sort of step 1 for a seminary. There was also a complete inability to have a discussion about the scope or boundaries of the authority of The Formation Committee or one’s bishop – which is actually somewhat necessary when you run your system based mostly on discipline – unless that is, you don’t want to limit the scope of your power, or your culpability for abusing it by having to define it. I laughed when a very popular and well-mannered seminarian planned a big event at his home parish at a time when no seminarians were required to be at the seminary. Many Philadelphia parish priests attended and contributed, some seminary priests were invited, and there was a blanket invitation for all seminarians. The Formation Committee actually had a meeting in which they discussed whether said organizer should get in trouble for planning a party on his own time for his friends, but not inviting all of The Formation Committee. There is obviously no limit to what The Formation Committee’s breadth and depth of authority could possibly be. You can also tell an organism or institution is dying when it is no longer able to adjust itself to internal or external stimuli. It eventually goes septic. The clue that this is imminent is that, while there are actual rules, following the rules doesn’t yield the results they are supposed to, and enforcement of the rules becomes arbitrary. Many of the actual rules either weren’t enforced or were interpreted dynamically – unless you got on the wrong side of the right bishop. There are rules, but they are not written down, and are (usually) enforced as social norms by the inmates themselves. Going back to my genuflection incident, there was no rule about that. In fact, I had already been pulled aside and warned by two seminarians that I would get in trouble by not doing the same thing as everyone else (despite it being a permitted, and in my diocese a normal behavior). The Dean of Men (a formator, an authority I was willing to listen to) was embarrassed to have to address me directly and if you go back to re-read his words, he was unable to ask or direct me to do it, the way a man could have. This became an very common incidence. It was almost impossible to get members of The Formation Committee, or other authorities, to make any direction or request (unless their superior ‘made’ them do it – and the superior probably initially proffered it as a question). Rector: “Father Formator, do you think the seminarians ‘feel comfortable’ coming to this event in clerical clothing?” Father Formator: “Seminarians, you will NOT be wearing clerical attire to this event.” Seminarians to themselves: “Okay, I guess we’re not.” Archbishop, at the event: “Rector, why aren’t any of my seminarians in clerical attire?” Rector: “I *really* don’t know, Archbishop. I can ask Father Formator if it was their preference.” I became allergic to this chronic shielding from taking responsibility for the use of power, so when the same Dean of Men two years later pulled me aside after class (to address my paying too much attention to a book during his lecture), he posed it as a question. I was done at that point so I asked him directly “Father, would you like me not to bring books into your lectures?” He immediately blew up in my face, making our one-on-one conversation a public event “DO YOU THINK I DON’T WANT YOU TO BRING BOOKS INTO MY LECTURES. DO YOU THINK?” I was struck by the fact that even in his anger, he was unable to exercise his own authority by a simple direct request or direction. There is no policy on bringing books into classrooms at St. Charles – most of the seminarians apart from myself were on their laptops. How hard would a “Mr. Mason, please do not bring books into my lectures” have been? A DIGRESSION ON PROGRAMS AND SPIRITS One of the dramatic characteristics of what dying institutions (my ‘thing machines’) do to the men inside is, as I suggested, neuter their agency. What might this look like? Allow me to torture a metaphor: Let us take hypothetical man in position of authority Number 1. A thought is presented to him: “if we, the authority, can keep our power but avoid ever taking responsibility, wouldn’t that be nice, wouldn’t we have it much easier?” “What if we create a body – no wait – a program (which could run on a machine...)” What a shame there are always ghosts in the machine. Here’s a thought, let’s call the ghosts “spirits” and imagine that, oh perhaps, the spirits are there before the machines. What if the spirits are waiting for weak men, susceptible to suggestions? The men could be encouraged to build a little machine to offload that annoying responsibility into. Soon there are lots of programs running on the machine and the machine isn’t little any more. Dear me! Unfortunately it turns out that rejecting responsibility might need to become a requirement of admission for everyone now, since the machine is sooo big that we now need everyone to become “machine managers” (we’ll just call them “managers” for short). A new kid comes in and asks “where are the responsibility and accountability I need to develop virtue and maturity?” A manager ponders “maybe the machine ate the responsibility and accountability? But machines aren’t alive and cannot consume the spiritual challenges which build character. Maybe spirits can. *At this point a metaphor’s battered and lifeless body falls through a ceiling tile and thuds on the carpet.* I warned you. Let’s jump back to the topic of offloading responsibility. I have a thought experiment: *A literary device falls through the adjacent ceiling tile, thudding alongside the metaphor, even more lifeless.* Let us say that the US Catholic bishops had a big meeting in the early 2000s to respond to increasingly visible sex abuse scandals. (Of course those bishops couldn’t have known a thing about any scandals ahead of time. It’s weird that the secular media and judicial system found out first, huh?) Let’s say that the bishops definitely wanted to take full responsibility. It would be an odd coincidence if that entailed creating a program which could run on a machine. It would be just too bad if that program was foisted on all of the hapless parish staff and volunteers. Sacrifices must be made...and stuff. It would be a strange coincidence if in the future there were additional abuse problems. Unfortunately for any victims and justice seekers, the machine has taken responsibility for abuse away from the bishops. Too bad. It would be a weird coincidence if the architect of that response to sex abuse scandals happened to be Theodore McCarrick. It would also be a weird coincidence if that program was still running nationwide today in 2025. There’s no way, right? It’s pretty great that the bishops can talk about their program in press releases and court statements. It’s too bad the bishops can’t take personal responsibility for assessing character and taking responsibility themselves. It’s not like the job is about sacrificing themselves after all. Here in the provincial little parochial (which here I use colloquial) ivory tower, the regular ‘issue’ in my own formation meetings was that The Formation Committee™ needed to know why I wasn’t happy and that I needed (at the prodding of a priest with no formal psychology training) to self-analyze myself again and figure out what I need to make to do for me to be happy. I am not exaggerating here – in my final formation meeting, I was told that the biggest issue The Formation Committee had was that I was “not happy”. As a seminarian you are supposed to lower your aims – settle for being “happy” to wear nice lace (which is definitely not “effeminate”), drink really expensive liquor, clock out at 5pm and dump that bothersome priest outfit, have a cook make you a fine dinner each night, lord it over your servile parish council, become a huge sports fan, save up for a beach house in Jersey, maybe – oh maybe some day be rewarded by being named a Monsignor! If you can’t find a way to be fully actualized by all that, maybe something is wrong with you. At one point doing some academic research for a job, I ran across a fascinating longitudinal (i.e. across time) study of Catholic priest psychological profiles in the UK, US, and Italy. The study found that, tracing from the 1980s into the 2020s, the tested psychological profiles of priests were becoming more similar (which did not track with the general public). Two observations and a question: • You can form a person over time to adopt a different psychological presentation. • You can filter out people who don’t match the psychological profile you are looking for (or maybe the machine doesn’t like). • Why would Catholic seminaries and bishops increasingly be sorting and forming for less psychological diversity in the presbyterate? PART 4 – WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE BISHOPS oops I mean THE CHURCH (AND A LINK TO THE DEATH OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION) In the seminary, I definitely felt sorry for many priest formators. It was painful to watch what I could see some of them going through. And those I had conversations with felt largely incapable of doing anything substantial to change the system they we were in. I had a deja vu experience several years later, speaking with a priest professor at a major university run by a religious order. This priest was a member of the order which ran the university as well as being on the academic faculty. He was bemoaning to me the sad moral and philosophical state of the university. My unspoken reaction was “who the heck is going to address this if not you?” But while I sympathized with the formators, I felt much more for my fellow seminarians. One of my most heartbreaking experiences was meeting with a close seminarian friend who had voluntarily left the seminary. (In typical fashion, not a single person from his diocese or the seminary had reached out to him in the many weeks after leaving, save a single kind-hearted Augustinian priest – shoutout to Leo, may he live forever. Imagine leaving all of your friends and professional colleagues with whom you have spent your entire life for several years and no one contacting you voluntarily.) My friend explained to me that he had a personal struggle prior to seminary, which he had thought was under control, and that being at the seminary would help him maintain a life of virtue. His experience at St. Charles was the opposite, and his struggles became worse, and he had gotten to the point where he could not live like that any more. This was not an isolated problem. I could see it on the faces of some seminarians I knew well – the facade had to look right, regardless of what was going on inside. It was also increasingly distressing to me that frequency with which the most passionate, most intelligent, most driven men – those whom I reckoned the Church needs the most – departed voluntarily or were kicked out ignominiously. I know from personal experience that being smart, having a strong will, and having high standards were all considered problems to be dealt with. In what world does an organization tell its next generation of leaders those things are “going to be a problem for you,” as I was told on multiple occasions? Last year I visited a lovely small town, Heilegenblut, in central Austria for a few days and during my stay, noticed a memorial to the sons of the town who had died in the two World Wars. It struck me that the casualties were higher in WWI, but also that there was significantly more variety in the last names of the men who died in the first war. My read on this is that, at the end of World War I, many of the families of the village were simply left with no sons to pass on the name. As an American, I had not taken the Great War for the social and cultural catastrophe which it was for Europe. Two novels had previously been brought to my attention (by the excellent These Times podcast), Roth’s The Radetzky March and Lampedusa’s The Leopard which treat of this period of European history. The novels focus on the decline of the aristocratic leadership of, respectively, the Austro-Hungarian and Italian states, which led to radical social change and violence, and left dramatic spiritual and cultural voids. The leadership of Europe is seen to be pervasively complacent, exhausted, and incapable of self-criticism. Lampedusa shows an aristocracy which has lived in a closed system of self-privilege for too long. In the end when WWI comes, most of Europe’s leaders sit on their hands, feeling incapable of actually effecting an end to conflict, wrecking countless families and condemning millions of sons to the machine of war. I knew that Europe experienced a radical shift toward representative governments and new dictatorships in the 1920s (prompting some of Pius XI’s greatest concerns and encyclicals), but did not previously understand why. The unaccountable aristocrats abdicated their responsibilities and allowed the machine to consume the young men of Europe. The populaces could not abide this, and most of the leading dynasties and structures were tossed out for any alternative (often worse ones) in the interwar period, leading to a great loss of culture and civilization, and generally failing to actually bring about meaningful cultural and social change...hence WWII. The Catholic and Protestant leaders were largely in bed with the negligent political leadership, and church attendance dramatically declined. Prior to WWI, European church attendance was similar between urban and rural areas, but declined much more dramatically (often by about half) in urban areas after the war. It also declined much more dramatically among men than women, and while the upper classes (and to some extent the middle class) largely still attended church by 1935, the churches had gone from ~45% of the working class attending church in 1910 to closer to 10% by 1935. Those whom felt that the churches failed them, stopped going to church. My fear is that, writ large, Church leaders in Europe and the US have largely not learned from the death of Europe. Insulated from the radical political changes which societies can experience, clerical leaders have simply settled into a resigned ‘ho-hum, it’s too bad no one goes to church any more.’ ‘Dear me, it is such a loss that our societies are embracing ideas and policies which are destructive to human flourishing.’ ‘I wish there was something I could do...’ I vividly recall being at dinner with a spry grandfatherly Monsignor in Philly one evening and hearing him lament something along the lines of “It saddens me that the seminary really taught us to be caretakers. I’m taking care of this parish, but I don’t really know what it would look like to go out there and get people to come back to church.” Both Protestants and Catholics put serious new thought into training their religious leaders in the 16th and 17th centuries. That was an era dominated by the intellectual battles amongst christianity and the religious control of unassailable social and political institutions. We are no longer living in that world. It seems to me that the present social structure is weak and failing, but whatever tomorrow brings, it will not be 1570 again. We need a re-think. PART 5 – WHY NO ONE SHOULD GO TO THE SEMINARY (WITH A BONUS GUIDE ON HOW TO WIN IN EPISCOPACY SIMULATOR 2025) Life is never going to be easy. For all the talk of modern comforts, there are plenty of modern anxieties and travails as well. I think it is vastly under-discussed that in the US, single-earner US median income has dropped from about $98,000/yr (2023 dollars) in 1970 to about $56,000/yr in 2023, when compared to cost of living. If you want a young man to be successful, be a good match for a young woman, start a family, contribute to society, he needs to get moving. Here is what the Catholic Church is doing to young men: 1. Make them get a college degree. You force them into significant debt and put them on an extremely slow-developing career trajectory. If they attend a seminary college, that degree is largely worthless, and they won’t know how to interact with women. 2. Isolate them from their friends and family. You make most seminarians go to a strange city, with limited contact with the outside world. Even during breaks, their time to spend with family and friends is significantly constrained. You do this for years. How many friendships, networks, common pastimes, similarities of lifestyle perdure years of complete neglect? 3. Make them accrue personal debt. I was constantly anxious about debt in the seminary. Most dioceses and seminaries have a 1950s vision of American life – seminarians wouldn’t need a car, insurance, expenses like a computer and phone. Despite the fact that dioceses increasingly prefer men post-college, the tacit assumption is that everyone goes home and lives with mom and dad during breaks (as they are forcibly evicted from the seminary) and that they won’t have any real expenses. Of course, in the best 1950s style, the home parish ought to cover all clerical clothing expenses and so forth. I was astonished as one deacon admitted to me that he had about $100k in personal debt as he was entering his final year. I broke my diocese’s rule that seminarians aren’t allowed to have a job, working in the seminary’s academic library, because I was desperate. 4. Keep them entirely off of a functional career path. When I left seminary after 4 years in 2018 (having no advance warning), my social and academic friends were mostly settled in teaching roles, or a few steps up a ladder into some sort of business career. Many of them had started families. Any hope of leveraging school or work networks is reduced. Not only did 30-year old me only have a resume with two years of actual work on it, I had to figure out how to explain to employers why I hadn’t worked a job in 4 years. I managed to find an entry level position where I made $35k/yr. One might question whether this is a great way to set up future priests even if they make it through. For seminarians and priests who don’t, however, this is fairly catastrophic. They emerge, separated from family and friends, in a lot of debt, with no good job prospects, and not only behind on a career path, but having to compete with men years younger than them who have a commensurate amount of experience and credentials and much better networks. On the family side of things, seminarians have been preparing themselves for a life of celibacy, setting aside dating or building close friendships with women their own age, and emerge further isolated by the fact that many of their own friends will have started families. Meanwhile and the former priest or seminarian may be the sole single man in their former friends group. In terms of concrete numbers, for men entering the seminary after college, in more successful dioceses, about 75-80% make it to ordination, in struggling dioceses this number can be closer to 50%. For men entering college seminary (i.e. with no degree), the most successful dioceses see about 50% make it to ordination (plus, you will probably have to assume up to $60k of college loans). Place your bets accordingly. “But, Jacob” you say, “we need to reform the system! How do we get ‘our guys’ into prominent positions inside the Church hierarchy?” Good question! Happily I come armed with a hypothetical guide to career advancement within the western Catholic Church: So you’re a well-mannered kid who just graduated from Catholic high school. First off, sign up for seminary. While you are there, make sure to kiss enough ass (...) that you are well-liked by the administrators. It’s not enough to say the ‘right’ things and avoid the ‘wrong’ things – you need to make sure the powerful people know that you are the kind of person who closes and opens his mouth at the appropriate times. If you play your cards right, after a token parish assignment you might end up being tapped to be an archbishop’s secretary. (Jumping out of the scenario to observe that this is the most straightforward path to the episcopacy, especially at a relatively young age.) Anyway, whilst you are personal secretary to the Archbishop, if your secretary for clergy happens to present a list of 35 likely priest abusers to the archbishop (which list the archbishop orders destroyed), definitely make sure you don’t know anything about it. Make sure that all you do is sign the Archbishop’s Christmas cards for him. Have you played our fun game correctly so far? Good! Monsignor for you! Oh, you are cooperating with the system™ so well, you receive a system reward: You get to run the machineseminary! You are going places now. Bishophood comes next, but your diocese has an incumbent...hmm, how to solve this? Let’s send you to carpetbag a newer, far more successful and vibrant diocese in a culturally different part of the country. It’s such a shame that none of that diocese’s own priests was as successful at being born in a decrepit, politicized diocese like you were. They should have played the game harder. We all know that marriage is under assault, and the Church needs to encourage and support it. However when it comes to moving up, make sure that you don’t think concepts like ‘spiritual marriage’ (perhaps to your diocese) could apply to you. You deserve to keep climbing the ladder because you are playing the game correctly. Divorce, sorry, I mean annul...dang it, gracefully accept a transfer to a more politically prominent young vibrant diocese. It’s a good thing that diocese doesn’t have internal candidates like the sons of famous Supreme Court justices among its priests. Anyway, we need you to keep climbing, so solidify your allegiances to the systems which got you here. If that means sacrificing some of the diocese’s own sons who don’t play nice in the machine, oh well. You can’t make a tomato pie without breaking a few...err...not sure where that metaphor was going... Anyway, be sure to never publicly explain the reasons for your executive decisions if you can avoid it. You can ill afford tarnish on your polyester escutcheons if you want to make cardinal some day. That’s when you can really save the Church from the inside. Be sure to start introducing system™ rewards in your new diocese too. How are you going to get your priests to put their sticks in the right places if you don’t offer them the carrot of Monsignordom? PART 6 – AUTHORITY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND LOVE ✨🌱🍄💗🧿🌈 ✨ (STARTING WITH WHY ABOLISHING THE MINOR ORDERS IS A BIG DEAL) There is a perverse incentive for bishops – a post-conciliar ‘reform’, exacerbated by negligence: In 1972, Paul VI promulgated Ministeria Quaedam, which abolished the minor orders (e.g. Lector, Acolyte). This was billed as an update to formation, but also sold heavily as partly to facilitate lay men to perform some functions previously reserved to the clergy (we mostly see this as ministers of communion and readers today). Parenthetically almost all bishops refrained from actually following the motu propio and instituting lectors and acolytes. This was at least in part so that women could be included also as “emergency substitutes”. (I’m not making a judgement on whether women should be – just saying ‘rules for thee, but not for me’ is a problem.) In any event, abolishing the minor orders meant that, while previously seminarians would be clerics from tonsure (typically received after one year of a six-year formation period), now they are only clerics once they are deacons (after five or six years). For one thing, this means seminarians have absolutely no status or recourse within the juridical structures of the Catholic Church until they are almost priests. And additionally, this incentivizes bishops to wait and let questionable seminarians cook for a few years, and then to be increasingly picky and trigger-happy the longer a seminarian is in formation. Tl;dr: 1. The bishops of Vatican II call for a reform of the minor orders. 2. In 1972 the reform is made to abolish the minor orders. 3. Seminarians lose clerical status for most of their formation (including some clerical rights and responsibilities – oh look fewer responsibilities! Yay, we hate those!). 4. The bishops find themselves in a position where they are in a more significant relationship imbalance and actually incentivized to let a man whom they won’t be ordaining remain in formation longer. 5. No one does anything about it. I would add that liability-traumatized diocesan and seminary administrators try to sell this as a good thing. “Come try out seminary and see if it’s for you” is the literal sales pitch I heard repeatedly. That is nonsense. Church administrators tell themselves that the reason priests do bad stuff is because we make them feel too much like they were committed as seminarians. (This analysis is quite similar to the lack of commitment which is being sold by a degraded culture as ‘the good life™’ to our young men and women, encouraging less marriage, fewer kids, more casual sex.) My read is that young men today are desperate for commitment, identity, and reliable structure in their lives. It is the seminarians who all want to wear priestly garb in public. It is the boomer priest administrators who don’t want to ‘let’ them. The whole idea of the authorities seeing priestly clothing as a privilege they can permit seminarians to wear is backwards in the first place. Clerical dress was an obligation of the clerical state, not a privilege to be extended or withdrawn. No one is going to stop any lay person, Catholic or otherwise, from walking around dressed like a priest. But you get into seminary, and there alone, they will assume the authority to ban a man from wearing it. No boundaries on the exercise of authority, right? The Company Line Now bishops and formators might point us to the directives of the Program Of Priestly Formation, that the Lord has establishing a hierarchy, the need for order, obedience being directed to God through superiors, protection from error through the Church, the bishop as father, the need for docility, etc. To this I ask, what good parent arrogates to himself the notion that he can with full confidence assume complete freedom from error or questioning because God made him a parent? What kind of teacher or parent, when questioned by their student or child, reflexively reverts to the disparity of their relationship? The hierarchical relationship exists, if not for the sake of, then at least within a broader context. The goal here is that every man and woman reach that union with the Blessed Trinity which God seeks them for. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, that is, discipline and control is necessary to start a child along the path to God, but the only way to continue on that path is for the child to discover something that is worth seeking, to desire the good and beautiful. Vatican documents oft refer to the need to adapt priestly formation to the changing needs and increasingly unique experiences of men entering formation, but for some Church leaders, their instincts on the formation of priests seem to draw inspiration from the darker impulses of the Feenyites or the SSPX or TFP or perhaps some other religion which solely prioritizes submission... I observed in seminary (as elsewhere) a pattern in how some authority figures respond to challenges. When faced with a seminarian who questioned or struggled, their instinct was to increase control. But control and discipline is not the only or appropriate response to all situations. Some things will shatter if you hold them too tightly. I mentioned Cardinal Krol in Part 2 for a reason – he epitomized this approach. I think Krol’s theological instincts, his liturgical preferences, his love of the tradition were largely well-placed, but you cannot force a person to be good. You can force him to ape goodness, to be compliant. God himself gives man free will. A man who does not choose the good is not a good man. A moment from my final semester at seminary epitomized this disconnect, when a priest formator whom I deeply respected said in a gathering of seminarians “I see my role as protecting the bride of Christ from bad men.” This caused me distress, but I was not sure why. On reflection it struck me that this is not what a good teacher tells his student or a good father his child. This is not the first role of a formator. God has given you something incredibly precious. These un-formed men are the very ones he is calling to serve him most intimately. Every priest entrusted with the care of vocations should see nurturing the growth of seminarians as a special and privileged opportunity. A father who sees his role as protecting his wife or the world from his own child has failed. Through my seminary years, I encountered a surprising (to me) blitheness and confidence with which some priests and bishops would exercise authority. A confidence that divine appointment guarantees correct judgement. There can be a profound disconnect between the fact that you are the authority and the equally factual possibility of exercising your authority in error. Authority cannot finally be unbound from responsibility. Every person in authority will not escape being uniquely accountable for the actions he takes with his authority. And there is no guarantee that any bishop, diocese, local church institution, or temporal authority is safe from complete loss of integrity and dis-union with the Lord. There is very little standing in the way of finding yourself alongside Bishop Michael Martin, worshiping at the denuded altar of his lord and savior Michel Foucault. PART 7 – DIS-HARMONIOUS CHAIRS (BUTTERING BREAD IN EPISCOPAL BED) As intimated in my historical musing, the malaise in the church goes to the top of the Catholic hierarchy. There seems to me to be a real problem of the politicization of episcopal sees. Some spirit inclines bishops, even popes, to be politicians over pastors. The name if this game is “the episcopal transfer”. Let’s be real, this is only ever done for the “good of the faithful”, but it has rendered me faith-fed-up. My own vibrant Virginia diocese has never had a native bishop. We have only ever had bishops from Philadelphia, Chicago, and Connecticut. One of our bishops was transferred from a diocese so tiny that we had parishes with more registered parishioners than his entire diocese, yet the ‘salvation of souls’ in Virginia obviously required this. We haven’t had a bishop from our metropolitan territory, Baltimore, the oldest see in the English USA – because Philly and Chicago have more political clout at present. Philadelphia, a collapsing relic, has 15 living and 8 active bishops, while Harrisburg (a suffragan) has an additional 3. Of these 11 active bishops, 5 hold the sees of dioceses which they were not ordained for. Does this matter? A previous bishop of my diocese (transferred from elsewhere) was well-regarded by the priests and faithful – but only after many years in office, when he (to his credit) understood and adjusted to the local culture. I do see myself as a victim of a bishop (Burbidge) whose first allegiance was to the men and institutions of his original diocese, rather than to my own. Bishop Burbidge’s administration of my diocese is also much more akin to the outmoded northeastern model he was raised in, rather than present-day Virginia. I recently encountered a similar phenomenon in Europe. While episcopal politics in the US lands career-hunters in the more populous and growing sees, in Europe, it also tends toward the historic seats of power. While in Bavaria (a place to which I have affinity, as a descendant of German-speaking Catholics) I was struck by the fact that Munich, the prize see of conservative Bavaria, is held by progressive Cardinal Reinhard Marx. Why would a bishop from a different, less conservative, less Catholic part of Germany, be foisted on the people of Munich? Because it is a prize. Why did the convicted Philippe Barbarin, ordained for Paris, end up as Archbishop of Lyon, “Primate of Gaul”? Why is the current Archbishop of Paris from Dijon? Here is an case for progressives: In Utrecht a few years ago, I attended Mass at the sparsely-attended Catholic cathedral. In the mid-20th century, The Netherlands, was predominantly Catholic and Church attendance high, but the episcopal leadership in was extremely progressive. John Paul II (peace be upon him) transferred the ideologically conservative Bishop Adrianus Simonis of Rotterdam to fill the (primatial) see of Utrecht. Here is a timeline of Mass attendance in the Netherlands: • 1965: ~55% of Catholics • 1983: ~18% of Catholics when Bishop Simonis is transferred • 2007: ~7% of Catholics when Bishop Simonis retires • 2024: <3% of Catholics At the same time, the proportion identifying as Catholics declined. About 1.4 million Dutch people attended Mass regularly when Simonis arrived in Utrecht, about 300,000 when he retired, and about 170,000 now. Somehow Utrecht is still a primatial see, and Philadelphia is an archdiocese, despite a similar number of souls attending Mass on a typical Sunday in my own diocese as in the entire country of the Netherlands or in the archdiocese of Philadelphia. The point of this anecdote is that if we normalize episcopal political games, we encourage everyone, up to the pope, to view bishop power plays as the solution to problems in the Church. It is certainly true that sometimes you need an outsider, for healthy cultural exchange, to clean up a mess (Chaput was transferred to Philly for this reason). The trouble is that too many bishops are accustomed to view episcopal sees as prizes on a tier list, and to measure success as a bishop in terms of how high up the list they can climb. Priests and people suffer the consequences. If the reason for a bishop’s transfer is “he earned it”, you are doing it wrong. I was greatly cheered in 2017 by an appointment in Allentown. They unexpectedly lost their incumbent bishop (to a transfer), and one Msgr. Alfred Schlert was appointed administrator by Allentown’s own senior priests (College of Consultors). Months later Schlert was named the new bishop of Allentown. That one’s bishop might to be chosen from the capable and respected in his own diocese is a thing I profoundly wish were more common. PART 8 – STEPS FORWARD (MY ADDRESS TO LAY PEOPLE, PRIESTS, BISHOPS, AND THE VATICAN) I will speak extremely frankly here. I would love discussion and pushback, but am putting down some reckless impulses to start a conversation. --- Dear lay christians, do not assume that you can trust your church leaders to be transparent with you. While there are outstandingly transparent and honest leaders (the great Archbishop Chaput being one), there is a serious culture (one might say a “spirit”) of avoidance of responsibility and a reflexive, unthinking concealment of absolutely everything which could come back to put accountability on the doorstep of leaders in the Church. You need to hold church leaders accountable. Find where the money is going, and don’t accept that anything is being ‘taken care of’ if you cannot see with your own eyes. If a bishop or chancery or press office makes a statement about a significant or surprising change of... • Priest assignment • Lay staff/school leadership • Program usage (especially around ‘safeguarding’ types of issues) • Diocesan policies • Local scandals connected to any priest or lay staff person connected to the diocese ...assume that there is a reason and ask for it. This might require asking in a public forum, because (as has been abundantly shown in the concealment of scandals like sexual abuse by clergy) the public forum is the only place where church leadership consistently responds. You are the only ones who can do this – the priests cannot. Rev. Vincent De Rosa, respected pastor at Mother of God Parish in Washington, D.C., in December 2024 wrote an open letter to his parishioners apologizing for the Archdiocese of Washington’s lack of transparency around financial accountability – including to its own priests – along with his frustration at the situation. For the horrifying crime of actually being transparent with his parishioners, Fr. Da Rosa was summarily booted from his parish and sent to chaplain at a hospital. The parish didn’t even get a replacement pastor, being assigned to a priest who already had another parish. --- Dear priests, you are the closest to Jesus’s flock, and they love you. Be assured of their profound need and gratitude for you. Be willing to acknowledge a disconnect between what it seems like your people need and what you sometimes experience and are required to do by your legitimate authorities. (Take Fr. Da Rosa as a caution and put things in writing only if you are confident it won’t come back to hurt you and your parishioners.) Be transparent with the laity, while trying to engender respect for your local bishop as possible and appropriate. If you find yourself on the wrong side of a confusing demotion or assignment change, know that you aren’t alone in that, and it can be a serious cross. Know that your bishop and the pope are not perfectly independent, self-aware moral actors – there is a culture of avoidance of responsibility in the Church hierarchy. --- Dear formators, yours is a hard job. Thank you for doing it. But be empowered to bring change where it is needed. Additionally (calling out to bishops as well) rely on your own F****** judgement of character and don’t try to farm out your responsibility to external authorities like psychologists, treating them like the Oracle of Delphi. You have a broader training and vision than any external “professional” and certainly the responsibility to make hard decisions yourselves, based on your own judgement, and take ownership of this. Incorporate external expertise, but rely on your own judgement. No seminarian should ever be told “sorry we’re letting you go because an external secular person said we should.” --- Dear bishops, learn how to fall on your own swords. Read some of Catherine of Siena’s thoughts on bishops and church leaders. Don’t beat up your priests because they are the only ones you can really ‘control’. Don’t convince yourselves that your priests all trust you completely. (The Pillar has done some excellent reporting on this topic, and there’s a lot of relevant psychological literature about those findings as well.) Share the load – attempting to completely hide and resolve genuine problems on your own (like priests with issues) isolates you and makes things harder on you. Also, divest control of diocesan finances so that the lawyers don’t constantly convince you to hide from accountability. Stop hiding behind programs, secrecy, and internally-commissioned investigations to avoid accountability, Cardinal Joseph Tobin. You are in a hostile world which hates the truth and the gospel and you as a leader of the Church. Rather than consolidating power in your own person and hiding behind secrecy, be open with your fellow christians and courageous against the world. --- Dear Vatican peeps (and Cardinal Pierre), 1. Stop the episcopal farm system. The cultural and spiritual disconnect between bishops and their priests and flock is being greatly exacerbated by this. Most sees in the United States are held by men who were ordained for a different diocese. Consider restricting transfers outside of metropolitan areas. Go back and read the Apostolic Canons, Nicaea, and Constantinople. You have allowed the western church to devolve into a power-grabbing political game, where influence-hungry archbishops ordain lots of little auxiliaries so that they can send them out to carpetbag younger, more vibrant sees. There is an obvious political game of ‘you pat my back, I’ll pat yours’. In 2016 my diocese gets Bishop Burbidge (originally of Philly, but most recently) from Raleigh. Burbidge’s backfill in Raleigh is an auxiliary sent by a certain Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta (who himself was originally from Chicago). And (who would have thunk it!) Burbidge’s vocation director is selected to be the new auxiliary in Atlanta. Stop enabling this. The status quo is a system of politicized managed decline, where the oldest, most decrepit sees in the developed world stretch out their greedy withered fingers to prey upon the Church where it has the most life. 2. Overhaul and enforce the way in which the selection and formation of priests in the western church is run. Draft an advisory board of religious order priests and parochial vicars with at least 10 years of pastoral (no administrators!). The decision board should involve bishops and religious superiors who are not from Europe or North America (and not all from the Latin Church). The Church needs good administrators, but I think many failures of the post-Vatican II era can be pinned on letting administrators tell pastors how to pastor. 3. Write and enforce some rules on financial transparency and episcopal divestiture. The 19th and 20th century trend to consolidate all assets under the direct control of the bishop was a mistake. It’s not healthy for the bishops, and it makes them and the diocese legally vulnerable in a manner which encourages them to shirk accountability and push responsibility down the chain. 4. Recognize that the Church historically had political resistance from external entities like the state (as we still see in China). This was a threat, but also played a role in keeping men in the Church honest (as in the US secular legal action have proven to be the only thing capable of holding Church leaders accountable). Additionally, the Church in the west had for a thousand years strong religious orders, which are now mostly gone. Ecclesiastical power is predominantly in the hands of the secular clergy. In many regards, western Church leadership now finds itself in a serious bubble. I have thought at times that if France still had a king, there would not have been a Novus Ordo. (No judgement on the Novus Ordo.) PART 9 – CHANGING THE FORMATION OF SECULAR PRIESTS (OBSERVATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS) I would see secular priestly formation collapsed into two categories: formation of the mind (academic) and formation of the heart (everything else). Obviously a man is a single integrated person, and I don’t want these to be apart, but I think the current canonical rules are inappropriate, vague, and mis-applied. Current USCCB language gives us intellectual, spiritual, human, and pastoral “pillars” of formation. In my experience, the current seminary system does not serve any of those particularly well. Human: The post-collegiate men with whom I entered seminary tended to be at least as ‘normal’ and well-formed humans as the formators we were assigned to. If you want men to mature, give them time and responsibilities around normal adults – the laity as well as priests in active ministry. Life in glorified daycare the seminary doesn’t provide this. Pastoral: What could be more pastoral than...a parish? If you want to develop serious pastoral skills among the new clergy, and ease the transition into active ministry, create a structure which gives the opportunity for real, sustained pastoral activity, accompanying active clergy, carrying real obligations, and developing serious relationships with the flock. The current US model bounces seminarians through one shallow experience after another. The only real thing it tests is the seminarian’s ability to be “nice”. We only give men serious ministerial opportunities after ordination to the diaconate. (If you are a bishop, worried about whether a guy can function as a priest, why wait until you’ve ordained him to find this out?) Spiritual: My experience of the Propaedeutic Year was awesome. (Thank you Abp. Chaput!) I participated in a version based on a novitiate. We were a small community with a live-in priest, and daily visitors from the seminary community. The focus on prayer, community, and separation from the world, was tremendously freeing for me. The relationships I built there were similarly wonderful. This was, however, dramatically different from ‘normal seminary’. Academic: Secular men and women who got to grad school do so through passion and dedication. Especially in the non-STEM fields, a PhD is a path to perpetual poverty (high debt and low wages) and takes a lot of genuinely hard work – even more work, more hard to get a tenure-track position. With notable exceptions, the priest professors I encountered were voluntold off to CUA or Rome and largely rubber-stamped to a degree their diocese paid for. If the academic pillar is about academics, those two ecosystems aren’t comparable. The seminary lecture method in a supposedly graduate-level system is also wrong. Academically, the seminary system is already 200 years outmoded, and that gap will increase rapidly without adjustment. --- The way things actually work in the seminary system is that the academics and canonically-mandated time frames become hoops to jump through. Who cares if the academics are poor, the other aspects of formation are not being served by it, and the application of the rules bears a tenuous connection to what a seminarian actually needs? It’s not like there’s some goal we hope to achieve, is there? This is about the rules! Seminarian, squeeze into your darn box! Here are some thoughts: • Start off with the “Propaedeutic Year” (I hate fancy language) –call it the spiritual year. The focus here is holiness. • Cut the academics – Seminary is too long, especially since dioceses are increasingly taking older candidates. If a man has qualifications in a relevant subject, waive required studies and allotted time. • Consider exam-based rather than time-based elements of the academic evaluation system. Let men learn at their own pace. • Transfer some academics to be formal continued studies in between a priest’s ministry. (It could even serve as a nice canonically-enforced sabbatical for many overworked priests.) • Move some studies out of the seminary classroom. Word on Fire, The Augustine Institute/FORMED, Ascension, The St. Paul Center, The Thomistic Institute, Dynamic Catholic, etc. provide more valuable and practical catechesis and training than the seminary. Take half the academic years out of the seminary and embed the seminarians in parishes (in their home dioceses). Have them come together to study and discuss online classes two days a week. Mix the order of classes so seminarians will spend some time studying with men ahead and behind them in formation. • In addition to/aside from the seminary rector and formators’ recommendation, add a recommendation from a randomly-selected group of the seminarian’s own diocesan clergy. Also add a recommendation from a randomly-selected group of mass-attending catholics from a parish in which the seminarian has conducted substantial ministry. • Change juridical rules to be clear and simple. The current state of things is florid and vague. Conflating a rule and its justification is a way to avoid the exercise of judgement and to confuse the goal with the process. Make the rules and exceptions as clear, simple, and goal-oriented as possible. Don’t tell me “this shall be done towardasmuchas such and such niceness blooms”. Keep it clear that the rules (restrictions) are there to serve a positive good, a goal. On community: I have never felt the draw to most religious orders, largely because I always wanted to be with normal people, working adults, families, and to serve among them. By my final year in seminary, I was the only seminarian from my diocese in my year. How am I being prepared to be a priest for Arlington, with all of my formation being with priests and seminarians from other places, whom I will never live around again? Take some serious thought about the ideal and the practical reality of the secular priesthood. If the ideal is something more akin to a religious congregation or to canons, start changing parish structures NOW to accommodate that. This will be far more complicated than the formation revisions I request. But if it’s necessary, do it. If we aim toward the practical, where many priests are almost alone in their rectories, we need a different model of formation and preparation. We need to stop preparing men for clerical community to then consign them to a life of lonely hermitude. On discipline: Ditch the ‘discipline uber alles’ military-seminary style. I have been to USMC officer school – it is 10 weeks long. An enlisted soldier attends boot camp, typically for 3 months, then The Basic School (or equivalent) for another ~6. Even if we wanted that sort of formation for our priests, why subject them to 7-9 years of military school play acting when the real military can do it in 9 months? Not only is this bad for the priests who are supposed to be leaders – it trickles down the chain. I recently attended Sunday Mass at a Franciscan TOR parish, where the ~30-year-old priest preached about what rules Catholics should and shouldn’t follow. This is what the modern seminary environment breeds – rule-following administrator types. This won’t spread the gospel and it cannot be the goal of the christian life. On abgnegation and gifts: During seminary, I was told by different priests that in another time such-and-such a religious order would have been a good fit for me (most oft the Society of Jesus). We need formators, bishops, etc. to realize that many men following a call to the priesthood in the US have almost never seen a religious order priest. Growing up in Virginia, I never had a chance to say “I like the Augustinian’s community”, because I had never seen an Augustinian. Nor “the of Servants of Charity do good work”, because they never came that far south, and aren’t around any more.. The secular priesthood is the only option for many, and for now it must cater to a broad audience. The attitude I would wish for formators to adopt toward each seminarian is “what are this man’s unique gifts from God and how can those be oriented toward the life and work of a priest?” As noted, at St. Charles any seminarian who possessed outstanding qualities, was viewed with suspicion by some formators if he sought to employ those talents. A Philly spiritual director once said to me “if Caruso had entered the seminary, they would have barred him from ever singing at Mass.” Great. Better go bury those talents in the ground, Caruso. This attitude among formators fits my historical gloss: In the first Christian-era dark age, conservative extremist iconoclasts chopped the noses, hands, and phalluses off of beautiful statues. In the late medieval darkness prior to the Reformation, conservative extremist churchmen hoarded the Scriptures and literacy. In this passing dark age, conservative extremist formators saw it their role to diminish the souls of men. To quote the near-inimitable Greta Thunberg, “How dare you!” In seriousness, how dare a formator consider it his prune away the most splendid and beautiful aspects which God has bestowed upon a person in their charge? Iconoclasts defaced statues, medievals grasped at God’s word, but you are breaking God’s very image. Perhaps a priest who is an excellent administrator and good with kids will need, by the exigencies of this world, to be sent to work in a hospice. That is the call to abnegation which the Lord calls us to, not a destructive forced mediocrity imposed on all by petty and selfish formators. How many men and women have failed to accept the gospel of Jesus because the priests they see are too remarkable? PART 10 – ON CATHOLIC SHUNNING AND MY MOTIVATIONS It has been painful for me to watch the ongoing saga of Bishop Strickland, formerly of Tyler, TX. Guilty, among other things, of making some particularly Boomer-ish tweets about Pope Francis, containing particularly conservative boomerish thoughts, he verged on schismatic if taken seriously. Bishop Vigano demonstrated a much more extreme and persistent version of the same strain of thought. It seems to me that Cardinal Burke and other conservative bishops tread the borders of this territory at times. But I get where Strickland is coming from. Being effectively shunned in the Catholic ‘priest world’ is really confusing and isolating, especially if one’s expulsion is not for some obvious malfeasance or misbehavior. I want to make it really clear that I acknowledge the legitimate authority of my bishop to kick me out of the seminary. I told him so in the meeting when he kicked me out. I acknowledge his authority in the diocese where he is bishop and I don’t think he is some illegitimate pawn of the devil. It has been a really terrible experience for me and perhaps I fully deserved it, but that doesn’t mean sowing disorder and disunity is a solution. But am I effectively sowing disorder by writing this essay? There are probably men in the Church who would say so. I might agree that were I in seminary or a priest, I should not share what I have. I think I did a good job of making the church, my seminary, and my diocese look good while I was a seminarian, despite seeing some ridiculous and disheartening things while there. Gosh, the first time I was back at my home parish as a fledgling seminarian I was walking from the rectory to the church for Sunday Mass and a person driving by rolled down their window to yell at me “how many kids have you abused today?” It wasn’t always great fun. And it has taken more than seven years for me to write down some thoughts. I think, however, that hiding the church’s internal problems serves no one well. No more whitened sepulchers. Bishop Burbidge said to me something I found odd during my dismissal meeting. He told me reassuringly that the fact that I was being dismissed by him from priestly formation (rather than for any other reason, such as rule violation or voluntary departure, I suppose) would, of course, be kept private. My thought in the meeting was “why would the reason for my departure be kept private?” But I may have still been in tears at that point, and had not thought through what all of this meant. No one had given me an indication of what the meeting was for in advance. In reflecting on that comment afterward and since I have wondered what it served. If I have done something wrong I want to know and I prefer it to be public that the bishop kicked me out. If I haven’t, I also want it to be public that the bishop kicked me out. I didn’t know and wasn’t told at the time of my dismissal that if I ever wanted to be a priest anywhere for anyone in the future, any previous dismissal would need to be thoroughly addressed and discussed anyway, so whom does this protect? Could it be a case of…not wanting to take responsibility for the exercise of authority? On the shunning point: In the immediate aftermath of being dismissed, I reached out to a few priests whom I had contact with as a seminarian who had bona fides in canon law. I did not know what “dismissal” was, or what it meant juridically or for my future or if there was any recourse. They were all afraid to talk with me. Period. No one would not even do me the courtesy of explaining to me what a dismissal was. So there you have it. I, once a seminarian for the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, was dismissed from priestly formation by Bishop Michael Burbidge in January of 2018. I wasn’t given a reason in person or in my dismissal letter (which I only ever received by email – because why follow the Church’s rule that it is supposed to be a physical letter?). The bishop assured me in our conversation that if I worked through some things, perhaps there would be an opportunity to have another discussion in “a year or two.” Well it turns out that dismissal involves a two-year ban on admission to formation, meaning I would need to wait at least two and a half years. Additionally, I initiated multiple conversations with the Arlington vocation director (roughly every two years since) and have learned there was no truth in Bishop Burbidge’s statement at all. Maybe in the moment he believed it himself. I am sure any mouthpieces of the Arlington Diocese or St. Charles Seminary would be deeply saddened by any pain any dismissed seminarians or priests may have suffered. I trust that their hearts would ache for any who have experienced upset and they would commit themselves to listening with compassion. The Church is, of course, a place of healing, not harm and each Diocese, every seminary is, of course, fully pledged to full transparent accountability…offer sincere prayers…commitment to dignity…[lawyer checking notes – “Hmm, have we covered everything we need to for legal and press purposes. Can’t take liability or responsibility for anything here…] blah, blah, blah, healing…blah, blah, blah, programs have a tremendous track record… Oh, wow, that actually makes me *feel* amazing, and my life is now back on track. (Those programs particularly impress me.) Perhaps could I be invited to be a lay-member of a new commission to study and make recommendations about seminaries and formation? I would prefer it to be a commission from which I can get disgruntled and quit 10 months later when I realize it doesn’t actually do anything…well except maybe take the appearance of responsibility away from bishops. That sounds great. I want it to be clear to everyone reading this essay that I struggle with bitterness. It is a wound which began while I was yet in formation when I saw those whom the leaders and institutions of the Church were failing. It tears again whenever I run into someone whose good heart and intentions have been met with abuse and neglect by Christian leaders and organizations. I hope any reader will interpret this essay through that lens. In conclusion, it is one thing, for the good of the church, to avoid airing all of our dirty laundry. It is another thing to so assiduously avoid taking responsibility for the possession and exercise of authority in the Catholic Church that our leaders (that’s you, bishops) are insulated from being accountable for anything. You cannot hide from your consciences and God, and at the end of the day, that is what matters. Things can be concealed for while in the dark, but morning follows evening. To draw my rambling narrative to a close, I want to propose another reason why parishes pray the St. Michael prayer. We are still working through the Catholic Church’s long response to the chaos of the industrial revolution. Leo XIII, who mandated the prayer, was the first post-Vatican I pope to work a response and leadership which that truncated council was unable to complete. Perhaps we need to keep the St. Michael thing going at least until that task is finished. Maybe another Leo can move the ball forward. Why is this posted as an image on Substack? I wanted formatting options beyond what that platform can offer. How else was I supposed to use comic sans every time I wrote Monsignor?")
