I remember reading an essay by a fellow ex-seminarian critiquing our former institution and its late rector for alleged failures to provide adequate emotional support to young men, for its rigid notions of masculinity, and other such micro-aggression. Coming from a center-left place, his article only differed in details, but not in essence, from the right-wing critiques of seminaries as dens of sodomy yielding the monstrous priest-predators of recent memory. Such critiques, left and right, pose the question of how seminaries might be improved. They do not call into question the institution of the seminary as such. But requiring candidates for priesthood to complete programs in higher learning—collegiate and post-graduate—in an academic setting prior to ordination is not a necessary or even common practice in Apostolic Christianity considered over its longue durée.
To be sure, the seminary represents the culmination of the trend increasingly visible in the Latin West in the twelfth century and ramping up in the thirteenth: the intellectualization of Christianity. The application of the Germanic genius to Christianity meant the subjection of a faith characterized by paradox to a dialectical mentality. From this perspective, paradox in belief was a problem to be resolved by means of the synthesis of objection and counter-objection using the tools of grammar and logic. This was the spirit of scholasticism that flourished in the high medieval universities, reveled in contradictions (only ever apparent), and made of faith a science.
In the High Middle Ages, as in no time before or after, intellectual elites benefitting from this university education participated in a shared culture characterized by a common idiom (Latin) and method (scholasticism). And it was also in the Middle Ages, as in perhaps no time before or after, that higher education served as a true engine for social advancement. This was true meritocracy: a cobbler’s son obtaining a university education could end up as the pope—so long as the cobbler’s son could find financial resources to support years of study. Fortunately, there were scholarships available through the Church. Ecclesiastical authorities could endow promising students with the revenues from church properties, thus enabling their pursuit of higher degrees, but at the same time obliging them to the service of the Church (and hence also to celibacy). The pastoral care owed by the student was generally outsourced to some poor unbeneficed priest who received in exchange a pittance from the student’s scholarship, thereby freeing the latter to pursue the degrees that would enable him to take a position at the higher echelons of the Church, in the courts of kings, or to remain within academia.
This was not a bad system; it served the needs of its time. It also resulted in an informal bifurcation of the Latin clergy. On the upper level of this two-tiered system, the higher clergy (the bishop and his clerical retinue, diocesan administrators, canon lawyers, professed regular clergy and hyper-literates) was made up of these learned and celibate beneficiaries of university education. The inferior and preponderant level of this system consisted in the lower clergy—parish clergy; hungry, unbeneficed clergy trying to find a post somewhere; the “basic infantry” of Christendom upon whom the cura animarum–the care of souls—fell most squarely. The educational obtainments of these men were frequently modest, to speak charitably; some may have had some fleeting exposure to the university or its masters; they had at least basic literacy, which meant the ability to read their way through the Latin service books necessary for the ministry of the altar and the sacraments. Nevertheless, by virtue of the laying on of hands these priests were just as able as their university-trained counterparts to take bread and wine and make God present to the people. The parish priest stood close to his flock, with whom he shared a common origin, common hardships, and a way of life. This lifestyle was usually agricultural—the default mode of existence for men in sedentary civilization since its beginnings—and involved all of its necessary supports, including a woman to share his toils and his hearth. When the priest and parishioner encountered each other in the mystery of confession they stood on remarkably level ground. The penitent saw in his priest a fellow peasant, though endowed with the awesome powers to liberate men from their sins and to transform bread into God. Meanwhile, the priest read his penitent’s heart not through a distorting lens of philosophical categories learned at school, but in the solidarity of shared experience.
There were no seminaries then. These priests had learned their vocation as boys through apprenticeship—by following at their priest’s elbow (often enough their actual father) as he visited the sick and celebrated at the altar. The formation of boys for priesthood naturally involved letters: at least basic literacy, by which was meant Latinity, was a prerequisite for sacred orders. But in the main, the candidate for priesthood learned his craft by standing at the liturgy, by fasting and feasting with the Church, and ministering to the people—not by sitting in advanced courses on metaphysics. The parish priest’s formation was moral, liturgical, ascetic, and pastoral; a formation more of the heart than the head for a man sent to meet mortal sinners in taverns and save their immortal souls from hell rather than lecture them on natural law. When the candidate for orders was deemed ready and had reached canonical age, he was presented to the local bishop who, if satisfied, would lay hands upon him and raise him to the priesthood.
This art of forming “run-of-the-mill” priests (as though any priest, whose vocation is to call down fire from heaven, could be “run-of-the-mill”) had advantages which become clear in retrospect. In the first place, instead of years spent in academic leisure studying recondite texts and not progressing beyond a collegiate mode of life, candidates for orders might spend their time learning something about the lives of the men and women to whom they will have to minister. Moreover, in this “grassroots” style of priest-making, where young men learn priest-craft at their home parish, not only do the candidates for orders get to learn about their people; the people get to know their future priests. This has great advantages. Who are in a better position to know whether there is something dangerously off or crooked in a young man than his fellow parishioners, who have known him since he was a boy, whose children and grandchildren he will be marrying, baptizing, and confessing? Certainly not distant hierarchs, “formators,” or professors, whose acquaintance with the candidate is institutionalized and superficial. In-parish, localized formation of priests encourages the sanctity of the parish—lax and tepid parishes that don’t inspire young men to sacred orders can’t expect a priest to be imported in from elsewhere; they simply won’t get new priests and they can fail—and a great deal of money can be saved. How many young men are deterred from sacred orders by the prospect of paying for up to eight years of collegiate and post-collegiate study at minor and major seminary—sums that dioceses might be willing to pay, but only to forgive on condition that the young man actually goes through with getting himself ordained. Even worse, this arrangement might exert pressure on insolvent but unworthy young men to go through with an ordination for which they have no calling.
The academic seminary and its imposition of higher studies on candidates for holy orders is a legacy of the Council of Trent responding to concerns that average priests were not sufficiently educated to cross swords in exegetical and apologetical battle with their bookish Protestant adversaries. The day of the “Protestant Threat”—itself arguably a byproduct of the academicization of the faith (Luther and Calvin were university men)—is over. Magisterial Protestantism poses no serious threat to the Catholic Church. We live in a world where all traditional Christians—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox—are thrown together in solidarity against forces and adversaries with whom they do not share a common metaphysical framework. In other words, no adversary to the Christian faith is going to be defeated by appeals to natural law or the five ways of Thomas Aquinas. Nor will such appeals break through the slavery of sin ensnaring souls. With all due respect to scholasticism, it has never made anyone holy. But fasting, prayer, and charity have made men holy, and this is what has the greatest potential to change hearts and minds: the beauty of holiness. The world craves saints, not academics. Priesthood should be practiced as a craft, not reduced to a science. So abolish the seminaries. Let candidates for orders be formed in the parish through immersion in the liturgy, personal asceticism, and pastoral care. And if they are going to be celibate, they should probably also learn something about cooking.
Charles C. Yost, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Medieval History at Hillsdale College.
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