When I entered St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore’s swanky Roland Park suburb,, I was 22 years old.
I had never experienced progressive, or what was called then, liberal Catholicism, although I read about it in Our Sunday Visitor and National Catholic Register newspapers available in my home parish in Augusta, Georgia. That parish was a bulwark against liberalism, but embraced the new vernacular Mass, but kneeling for Holy Communion remained in place even when I went to the seminary in 1976–no Eucharistic ministers or standing for Holy Communion until the early 1980’s.
1Peter5 has an article on the liberal/progressive decline in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. When I was there, we had the retired Cardinal Shehan but the liberal, quite liberal new Archbishop was Archbishop William Borders, a nice, gentle man but hell bent on the spirit of Vatican II and allowing all kinds of experimentations.
What the article in 1Peter5 does not indicate nor the summary of a book on Baltimore they provide is the impact that Saint Mary Seminary and University had on the archdiocese and way beyond, like the Diocese of Savannah.
It was there that I saw wild experimentation with the liturgy, priests celebrating the Mass their way and each having a particular style. One priest, a Biblical scholar, felt the Liturgy of the Word was the most important part of the Mass. So after the entrance song, he did not begin the Mass with the Sign of the Cross. He simply said “the Lord be with you” and then Let us Pray for the Collect and we sat down for the the Liturgy of the Word—it was a fast way to get to it, no?
But in many ways our seminary was heterodox and subversive in bringing to the Baltimore Archdiocese and beyond its particular version of Catholic Lite, heterodox Catholicism.
And poor old Pope Paul VI and then Pope John Paul II were excoriated for their vision of the Church and unwillingness to ordain women, promote inclusive language and embrace the sexual revolution and make homosexual sex and relationships on par with heterosexual ones.
Our seminary saw liberal theologians there and elsewhere as a parallel magisterium and just as authoritative as anything the popes in Rome were teaching as backwards as they were.
Today, Baltimore is a mere shadow of what it was even in the 1970’s. Many prospering parishes at that time, even with the liberal upheavals, are now closed, religious orders gone and many institutions shuttered too. Those Catholics who attend Mass and are faithful are a mere shadow of the number of Catholics who no longer attend Mass, have their children baptized, let alone get married in the Church and have Catholic funerals. There is no longer the old saying about cultural Catholics, being hatched, matched and dispatched!
Press the 1Peter5 title for their full article—it gave me PTST:
4 comments:
If the Church had been run by businessmen instead of clerics, there would have been a major course correction in just a few short years after the Council. The businessmen would have booted out the loonies directing this failure and restored the old order. The liturgical reform has been a massive, flop and only the contumacious and corrupt see it otherwise. Thank God younger priests and bishops get it.
As for the current state of the Archdiocese, without denying the woes, I will note that there are twelve men slated to be ordained to the priesthood nexts year (there were five this year). So not all the news is bad.
I should have mentioned that St. Mary’s started to tighten things up by the mid 1970’s when I entered. They really ran off the rails beginning in 1968 through about 1974. After I departed in 1980, Fr. Bob Leavitt became rector and for a couple of decades and he was a very solid theologian and helped the seminary get back on track. Certainly too, the archbishops after Borders tightened things up too. It’s great to hear how many new priests the Archdiocese has produced. While I might seem right wing now, I actually loved St. Mary’s during the time I was there and learned a lot. The saving grace for me is that theologians like Frs. Bob Leavitt, Howie Bliechner (who teamed taught us systematic theology) John Kleselman, and Raymond Brown would teach us what Vatican II opened the doors to and changed compared to how certain things would have been taught prior to Vatican II—it was a great comparison and I hope they still use that method. Of course, too, Mt. St. Mary’s, pre-Vatican II as we thought when I was at St. Mary’s, always remained conservative and reactionary too, which might account too for the increase in vocations in Baltimore. But when you compare Baltimore with fewer Catholics to Chicago with many more Catholics, Chicago, I think, only ordained one new priest this year which is shocking to say the least.
Yet Pope Lei keeps that monumental failure Cupich in Chicago, two and a half years past his sell date
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