Cross Keys Shopping Center where I worked during my seminary years
Let me preface what I am writing by stating up front that my years at St. Mary Seminary and University in Baltimore between 1976 and 1980 were the best years of my life that prepared me for the priesthood of the 1980's until this day. But with 20/20 hindsight, I can critique some of what happened while in no way throwing the seminary under the bus for what was happening throughout the Church of that period.
What precipitates this essay is a conversation I had last night with the retired pastor of my parish while driving back from a 50th anniversary celebration of one of our diocesan priests in Americus, GA, near that famous place called Plains, GA. Let me tell you later about the time I had lunch with Miss Lillian back in the early 80's, but I digress.
Both Msgr. Cuddy and I were trained by Sulpician priests in Baltimore, but in entirely different eras of the Church. His seminary training was very strict, structured and disciplined. It was a monastic experience. The bell rang to get up and it rang to go to bed and after grand silence you couldn't leave your room legally for anything, not even the bathroom down the hall. Young men in their 20's were treated like children, needing permission for everything and living by the schedule and the bell and the threat of expulsion if they misbehaved and broke seminary rules.
By 1970, the Sulpicians had experienced a seminarian uprising in Baltimore and elsewhere. Seminarians were demanding of all things a pay coke machine in the seminary! But they wanted all kinds of other freedoms too. So within the course of an overnight meltdown, centuries of seminarian discipline came to a screeching halt. By the time I got there, within the course of six or seven short years everything had changed. But at 22 years old, I thought six or seven years ago was ancient history.
So what was it like for me in the seminary in the late 1970's?
Well, at 22 years old, I had more freedom than I had ever had in my whole life. I had gone to a secular college full time, lived at home and had a nearly full-time job working my way through college. I didn't have much time for fun and games. My parents had rules that I had to abide by if I was to live under their roof and their roof was cheap!I didn't pay anything.
So when I got to the seminary, I didn't have a full time job and yes, no money! But I had freedom. I could come and go as I pleased with my seminarian buddies. There was no such thing as grand silence. We'd go out to eat, to the movies, visit Washington, DC, Philadelphia, PA and get back to the seminary around 3:00 AM in the morning--no questions asked. I loved it. But they still had a very strict academic regimen, but not working a full time allowed me to devote my new found time to my academics.
We didn't have a dress code. I can remember guys wearing bib overalls, without a shirt mind you, shorts, t-shirts and flip flops to class. And yes, I smoked like a chimney and all of us would smoke in class including the priest-professors. It would be like a fog in the classrooms there was so much smoke. We called the priests including the rector by their first name. We had whatever food or drink we wanted in our rooms, with tvs, stereos, refrigerators, beer, wine and booze. No problema!
We could have visitors to our rooms of either sex. No problema.
By my second year, I was desperate for money since I didn't have a full time job, so I got a job while in the seminary.I didn't bother to tell my bishop because heck other seminarians were working jobs too with their bishop's permission. I was 23 years old, had worked since I was 14 and I wasn't going to ask someone for permission to work! I worked at a local drug store, Cross Keys Shopping center, sold condoms,other birth control, Playboys and Hustlers at the cashier, delivered drugs to little old rich Jewish people in a rather swanky Jewish part of Baltimore. I loved it.
In my third year I had a field placement in a parish in Baltimore, St. Isaac Jogues. Our classes at the seminary always ceased by 12 noon on Friday. So I'd depart soon thereafter, go to the parish and stay through Sunday night. It was great!
I loved it. My close friends and I were from secular colleges, worked in the real world and knew how to handle our freedom. But there were others who took advantage of it and did not fare as well as we did and their priesthood sometimes ended in shambles.
Today, things are a bit more disciplined, but adult men in their 20's are not treated like children and that is good. I think the seminaries today are much healthier than they were in the pre-Vatican II times and certainly more healthy than they were in the chaos of the 1960's and 1970's. But by the grace of God, I survived and prospered and got a very good liberal Catholic seminary education there and that has helped me immensely over the years. Thank you St. Mary Seminary and the Sulpicians and other faculty members there.
5 comments:
It's amazing what someone can do with a sense of purpose and direction. The Diocese of Savannah is a better place with you in it. You know though, when Pope Paul VI said the "Smoke of Satan had entered the Church"- I think it wasn't the only place during the 60's and 70's.
I can only imagine, but the seminary must be a place where the less than fully committed must self eliminate. This is a good thing if done under the right circumstances. But I see a lot of people who have obstacles presented to them that chase them from the Church and therefore increase the distance they are from Grace. This is the same sin that I perceive in the 'sex scandal'. It has nothing to do with sex as that is only one of many battlefields in the war against Darkness.
Your result was from your desire to live in the Light of Christ. Good for you. Good for us.
Having never lived through the experience it is difficult to judge, however my inclination is to believe that all Catholics, but Priests and Religious especially, are called to be "In this world, but not of this world", and for that purpose the Seminary experience should be something that prepares the prospective candidate for that type of existence. In that light more of the discipline and less of the freedom is in order. Grown men (or women in the case of convents) in their 20s they may be, but learning humility is the first real step in learning to serve.
Seminaries in the 70's, both Protestant and Catholic, were frightening places. They are even more frightening in retrospect...
I appreciate your reflections. Your thoughts resonate in my past priestly formation before Vatic an II. I was ordained 1967 in the seminary run by the Vincentian Fathers. I also critique my past training for growth and renewal.
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