Reform in the Seminaries

Few students are more pious, humble and industrious than the young men who study for the Roman Catholic priesthood. And perhaps no archbishop in the U.S. is more sympathetic to the plight of the meek than Boston's mercurial Richard Cardinal Gushing. Now students from St. John's Seminary,* barely a stone's throw from Cushing's residence, are rebelliously demanding reform. Cushing, suddenly stiff-necked, has expelled eight of them. The battle between liberal prelate and freedom-seeking students symbolizes one of the unresolved problems of the new spirit of freedom in the Catholic Church: reformation of a seminary system basically unchanged in centuries.

Focus of the student protest in Boston was a stiff new regime imposed on St. John's by Monsignor Lawrence Riley, whom Cushing named as rector last summer. A conservative in church matters, Riley rejected a list of outside lecturers the students wanted to hear, and reinstated the all-Latin Mass. Both Riley and Cushing ignored letters, signed by 20 senior seminarians, asking for a discussion of the changes.

"Freedom Now." One day last month, while the cardinal was addressing a group of Boston pastors in St. John's auditorium on the meaning of Vatican II, 125 seminarians organized a silent protest march outside. One carried a sign that read "Freedom in the Seminary Now." Earlier, seminarians also circulated a statement criticizing Cushing as an "intransigent cardinal-archbishop" living in "an aura of Byzantine splendor." Cushing angrily responded by warning the students that they could not dictate any changes in the rules, and from among the picketers chose the eight men he expelled -- six of them only a year away from ordination after seven years of study.

Lay Catholics last week twice picketed the cardinal's residence and the near by seminary, and organized a four-day Easter prayer vigil on behalf of the seminarians' demands. "The cardinal has a bull by the tail now," said the mother of one seminarian, "and he doesn't know what to do."

The crisis at St. John's came at a time when many other U.S. bishops have taken steps to head off such incidents in their dioceses. In dozens of American seminaries, rectors have agreeably recognized student councils, emphasized new courses in pastoral psychology and sociology instead of medieval philosophy, dropped lectures in Latin for small-group, give-and-take seminars, ended compulsory curfews. Many seminaries now have regular courses in modern Protestant theology.

Touring the Bars. Once strictly segregated from the world, seminarians have been given more opportunity to study the secular culture they will be living in after their ordination. At Chicago's St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, once among the nation's most straitlaced, students can now have their own radios, are encouraged to attend plays, concerts and lectures in town. With their rector's permission, two seminarians from St. Patrick's of San Francisco periodically tour the city's homosexual bars with vice-squad cops for a sociological survey.

In effect, seminaries are becoming more and more like Catholic colleges, which, in turn, are becoming more and more like secular universities--institutions in which an adherence to church doctrine is no barrier to free intellectual inquiry. Last week this new ideal of the church was summed up by the Very Rev. Pedro Arrupe, Father General of the Society of Jesus, who spoke at a convocation honoring the 125th anniversary of the Jesuits' Fordham University, during a 17-day visit to the U.S. "The university must be free to analyze not only ungrounded attacks upon the faith, but formulations, defenses and practical orientations which only bring the faith into derision," said Arrupe, whose own worldwide seminary system has shared in the aggiornamento. "Where such freedom fails to flower, invaluable sectors of human experience are inevitably cut away, and the dialogue the Church must continually carry on with the changing world of human culture is seriously crippled."

* No academic kin to troubled St. John's University in New York City.

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