How well are seminaries doing in forming the priests we need to reform the Church—one dominated by a lavender mafia? A useful assessment is the recently-published 171 page study “Evaluating the Church’s Practices in Assessing the Suitability of Candidates for Holy Orders,” by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University and the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. The study reports on how satisfied bishops, vocation directors, seminary rectors, seminary formators and spiritual directors, and mental-health-care professionals are with the formation seminarians receive.
The overall satisfaction by bishops with respect to the formation seminarians received was good to very good. There were, however, some areas for which there was an alarming amount of concern. As reported by OSV (all information in this essay comes from the OSV article):
The report found three areas where it said both bishops and vocation directors were “least likely” to express great confidence in their seminaries. Just 19% to 21% were “very confident” in their formation of seminarians’ “healthy management of one’s neuroses or minor pathologies,” “healthy living with medical concerns or physical limitations” (17%) or “dealing with learning disabilities” (16% to 17%).
It distresses me that it is considered positive that “32% to 43% of these three survey groups said they were confident of seminaries’ ability to enable seminarians to form healthy relationships with others and to seek treatment for mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.” The bar is too low.
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