U.S. Catholic seminarians evaluated

February 06 2009
By Julia Duin

I wanted to call attention to a little piece of news that snuck past us in recent weeks.
Which is that, last month, the Vatican put out a report on its apostolic visits to 229 U.S. seminaries, chiefly to ferret out how some of these institutions of learning have become such centers of gay men that they're called "pink palaces" and how other seminaries have been a little light when it comes to good doctrine. What? You've not heard a report was released? That is because the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops did not post a press release about it in early January when the news came out. Instead, they posted the letter from Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley and the report itself on the "Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations" page of usccb.org. I could not find it by clicking about, so I finally got it through a word search here.

Essentially, the 20-page Vatican document, dated Dec. 15, spelled a few weaknesses that need to be corrected. They include teaching on the doctrine of the priesthood (page 5), a reminder to seminary rectors to not travel outside the seminary so much (page 6), faculty members who are contemptuous of church teaching (page 7), concerns about the lowering of standards for seminarians due to the vocations crisis (page 10), cases of homosexuality "here and there" (page 11) along with "ambiguity" about it and, on the same page, an observation that in "not a few seminaries," educators have not a clue as to what seminarians do when they are off campus. the rest