Those darn seminarians

More complaints about orthodox seminarians.

"I am concerned, and I don’t want to isolate this clericalism to Rome," said the Rev. Tom Splain, an American professor of cultural anthropology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. "It’s on the increase in all of our seminaries. Kind of a return to piety, kind of a superficial piety. … What happens in Rome is you have a greater percentage of those types."

Splain, who teaches many of these students at Gregorian, believes the church should discuss issues like ordaining female priests and permitting condom use. He and other critics, including some cardinals, worry the strict doctrine enforced by John Paul has left the church increasingly out of touch with modern realities, especially in the developed world, where in some countries church attendance fell during his 26 years as pope.

The young seminarians and priests who come to study in Rome are "careerists," he said, who spend very little of their careers in contact with regular parishioners and their problems.

The Rev. Gerald O’Collins, an Australian professor of theology at Gregorian, said he had noted a "shift to the right" among students.

"I think there is a doctrinaire feeling among a lot of seminarians," said O’Collins, who has been teaching 35 years and, in spite of his anxiety over the seminarians of today, is not a particular advocate of liberalism. "And a bishop sending someone here is going to pick the reliable, safe ones. … I think pastoral experience is a great reality teacher. They can’t live like that. In the pastorial situation, they’ve got to be wise and helpful."

You would think by the opinions of these men that believing what the Church actually teaches is some kind of disease. Orthodoxy is passed of as "those types." If these professors had their way "those types" of seminarians would be forced when walking through the streets to shout our "unclean" as they go. To the modern mind what is more leprous than orthodoxy, the contagion to be avoided an any cost. That "pastorial experience" will cure them of silly ideas about fidelity, chastity and the moral teachings of the Church.

It is no surprise that Newsday takes a sneering approach to the seminarian interviewed who gave what they say is the "party-line approach" and "spoke as one voice." They must have been especially frustrated that the seminarian from the Sudan would not bite on the question about condom approval. "

One young deacon, from Ireland, forcefully told a reporter that he didn’t think an interview should focus any longer on the issue of condoms and HIV.

I do wonder what they consider forcefully as, I doubt if it would coincide with mine.