Celibacy & the future of the priesthood: seminarians today.

Sociologists Dean Hoge and Jacqueline Wengerhave recently reported that young priests are increasingly likely to view themselves and their peers as "men set apart," essentially different from laypeople (Evolving Visions of the Priesthood. Liturgical Press, 2002). In 2000, I began a study in nine U.S. seminaries to discover how candidates for the priesthood are being trained to live celibately. Interviews and observations were conducted with faculty and students in the Midwest and on the East Coast. As part of the project, I spent a semester completing a case study of a Midwestern seminary where I was granted complete access to students and faculty.

Priestly training in the seminaries I studied tended to impart a "clerical difference," a sense of specialness that led the seminarians to see themselves as not only separate but also superior to laypeople. I will outline here some of the ways students internalized a priestly identity that elevated them above the laypeople they were preparing to serve.

I found that how a student interprets celibacy is central to how he understands his role and status in the church. Students saw celibacy as integral to their priestly calling of a life completely dedicated to God and ministry. They tended to judge romantic or erotic urges as inherently selfish. Being attracted to physical beauty was frequently seen as making their love less selfless. One first-year theology student said he had avoided dating while in high school because dating led him to treat people differently, depending on their physical attributes. Despite decades of the church's more positive evaluation of married love following Vatican II, these students tended to see loving human relationships as involving lust and sexual desire rather than mutuality, communication, and collaboration. It is little wonder that the students I spoke with tended to see exclusive relationships as a distraction from intimacy with Christ.

Seminaries today recruit students who are in search of structure and meaning, while fleeing from a secular, shallow consumer culture. The seminarians I interviewed had frequently found shelter in an intense prayer life. Of his seminary's communal recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours, one student remarked, "I live for the Hours." It is easy to understand why seminaries, as highly organized, religiously saturated subcultures, are appealing to these exiles from a vapid, self-indulgent secular world. Students at St. Mark's (a pseudonym for one of the institutions I studied) readily gave themselves to a daily schedule organized around sessions for communal prayer. In my study, seminarians often complained about their class work, formation conferences, and field-education placements, but prayer was mentioned as the most appealing part of seminary life. When asked what they looked forward to as priests, the students mentioned having time for personal prayer and for leading others in prayer. Seminarians conducted the communal Liturgy of the Hours and usually performed the liturgical ministries of reader, cantor, acolyte, and sacristan at the celebration of the Eucharist. Teaching a religion class or running a food pantry, activities that priests also engage in, weren't favorite activities among St. Mark's seminarians, and they did not identify such activities with holiness or priesthood to the same degree.

Nor did their coursework make seminarians feel their "priestliness" to the same degree that communal prayer did. Lay-ministry students, enrolled in classes with seminarians, faced the same academic expectations from professors, yet a seminarian who earned only modest grades could still feel a "priestly difference" simply by attending prayer.

Perhaps the most important feature of priestly formation today is the requirement that students live together on campus. Their lives can be managed and organized in ways that starkly contrast with the lives of their lay-ministry colleagues. U.S. seminaries retain a quasi-monastic character. Seminarians live in a single-sex community that is structured by a shared schedule of prayer, study, meals, and recreation. The students I interviewed spoke enthusiastically about "community living" and the easy sociality it provided.

The communal life of seminaries also works to inoculate seminarians against other influences and loyalties. Residential seminaries become the students' physical home, providing not only room and board, but also emotional support from peers. Seminarians depend on faculty members and, to a lesser extent, their peers for advancement toward their goal of priesthood. The seminary's activities provide the underpinnings for the religious-symbolic universe seminarians inhabit. This makes students highly dependent on the seminary and the church for their sources of satisfaction, advancement, and self-worth.

While seminaries insist that candidates learn to relate positively to women, the homosocial character of the seminaries' exclusively male residential communities provides far more opportunities to interact with, develop trusting relationships with, and derive emotional support from men rather than women. In addition, while there may be female faculty members, administrators and those in charge of formation are almost always men, making seminarians especially dependent on male authority figures in order to be ordained. Thus, though they no longer experience the same isolation from women that earlier generations of seminarians did, today's seminarians continue to rely on other men as the primary source of their emotional support and the most powerful authority figures in their lives. Students learn to be most comfortable with those they hope to share priestly status with. After ordination, they continue to live and work in environments where men hold all the highest positions of authority. It is worth asking what effect such factors may have on how newly ordained priests interact with female parishioners, who usually outnumber men in parishes.

The current dearth of priestly vocations also leads seminarians to think of themselves as markedly different from other people. That they are entering a profession for manifestly altruistic purposes and lofty ideals likewise adds to their understanding of themselves as special or different from most other people. I found that this sense of specialness was also heightened by a feeling that their services would be in great demand following ordination. The day would come when men and women, a generation or more their senior, would address them as "Father" and kneel before them for a blessing.

While doing research at one seminary, on three separate occasions I observed a photographer taking pictures of the seminarians for a vocation campaign. These photos were widely distributed on posters, brochures, advertisements on buses, and even in movie trailers in theaters in the local metropolitan area. The archdiocesan newspaper frequently ran stories featuring the seminarians. Entering the seminary made some of these men small-time "celebrities" in a media blitz. This attention only added to the aura of specialness seminarians developed about themselves.

While students enjoyed spending time praying and socializing together, my research made me question how well some seminarians were actually being prepared for the diocesan priesthood. Their sense of uniqueness and desire to spend large periods of time in prayer cultivating a personal relationship with God could even be detrimental to their future work. Students who frequently engage in individualized spiritual practices and private devotions run the risk of being oriented toward their own sense of fulfillment rather than toward serving the church's mission. While conducting research at one school, for example, I spoke with a priest who was the supervisor for a third-year student assigned to his parish as an intern. The pastor was concerned that this student was inflexible, blocking out long periods of the day for prayer. Habits learned in seminary are not always helpful in later parish assignments.

The social networks created in seminary led to loyalty to the church and a sense of personal satisfaction. However, such strengths also produced deleterious effects, as we have seen in the clerical sexual-abuse scandal. Priests failed to "police" themselves and to develop professional standards of accountability. When abuses were reported to bishops, they in turn failed to deal with them, sometimes discounting victims' stories while accepting the word of abusers. Perhaps if seminarians resided in parishes for extended periods before ordination, they might more easily learn to cultivate supportive friendships and collaborative relationships with laymen and -women.

My study made me grateful that today's seminarians are eager for a strong spiritual life nourished by daily prayer. Still, vocation directors and those in charge of formation must make it clear that applicants are preparing for the active, pastorally oriented diocesan priesthood. While the priestly calling is distinctive, seminarians are more similar to laypeople than some of them realize. In addition, candidates need to learn how to sustain themselves spiritually and emotionally outside the highly structured life that seminaries provide. Priestly identity must be rooted in the person and ministry of Christ and the church, not in a search for superior status. After ordination, those whose priestly identity is too bound up with the regimentation of a seminary schedule, its communal prayer life, or the affective support of an all-male residential community are likely to feel lost, lonely, and ordinary, with no one to sustain their sense of specialness.

Rev. Paul Stanosz, a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and a pastor, is the author of Reproducing Celibacy, to be published next year by Crossroad.