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Forced Spiritual Crisis

St. John's Seminary Before Mahony

By Robert Kumpel

Editor's Note: In our March issue, we examined the current state of St. John's Seminary in Camarillo in an article entitled, "It was Us Against Them." In this issue, a former professor at St. John's seminary suggests that the questionable formation of priests was already under way during the tenure of the late Timothy Cardinal Manning.

Irving Miller (not his real name -- he wished to maintain anonymity) taught at St. John's Seminary in the early 1980s. According to Miller, even in the early 80s, seminarians were afraid to display their orthodoxy before professors whose classes often departed significantly from Catholic teaching.

Miller said he knew of one professor at the seminary who was encouraging students to read Church documents to find out what the Church really taught. Yet, this professor's influence was not decisive: "In their arguments with other teachers," said Miller, "the teachers were driving [students] into having more and more orthodox positions. The students were shocked by the strangeness of some of [the faculty] views."

As students gained confidence in their faith, they were less vulnerable to a seminary policy that still sickens Miller -- a deliberate, contrived effort to bring second-year seminarians to question all they believed in -- a forced spiritual crisis. "By a certain weekend in October, they wanted every single student to deny and question everything they believed in, even God's existence," Miller remembers. "They wanted everything to fall apart and then help the student put things back together again -- but [the result was that the students] would be much weaker and wouldn't have any certitude about their positions. This was part of their spiritual formation program."

Miller believes this practice was the seminary administration's way of creating a mindset of moral relativity in future priests. "I think that they view the ideal priest as one who is, supposedly, 'compassionate' -- someone who is very gentle and won't rebuke anyone. If a person believes that certain things are right and wrong, they won't have that 'pastoral' attitude or behavior. I think it's a mistaken notion about what it means to be truly pastoral. They wanted to break the spirit of these young men instead of fostering or channeling them, to make them agnostics, to say, 'none of us can prove the things that we hold and we all just hold them because they're our views. So you have to accept everyone else for their views.' What it does is set students up so they (the faculty) can supply whatever they're supposed to hold. It's like wiping out your memory in a computer and reloading it with whatever you want."

When another faculty member, a Baptist woman who taught Spanish, discovered what was happening at the seminary, "she was aghast," said Miller. "She didn't necessarily want everyone to be a Catholic, but she didn't think you should try to destroy a person's faith, whether they're Catholic, Baptist or anything else. It's sheer lunacy."

Perhaps it's only a coincidence, but Miller points out that, like many other major seminaries in decline throughout the country, St. John's Seminary is run by Vincentian priests. "They've taught in Boston, St. Louis, Denver and L.A. Now there are many good Vincentians, but this is the way they proceeded at St. John's and that's my only experience with them."

If a strong faith threatened the faculty, traditional devotion was one practice that was intolerable to them. "They have a beautiful chapel at the seminary," said Miller. "The problem with most seminary chapels is that they're effeminate, but the chapel at St. John's is very masculine. The figures are embossed in concrete and it has a real strength to it. (One of the problems I had at the seminary was that they were trying to promote feminine virtues and discourage masculine virtues.) I popped in the chapel day and night when I could. One night, it was pitch dark and I went in for a quick visit and said a few prayers. The only light was the sanctuary lamp. Suddenly, I heard voices and thought it was odd. I began to walk up the aisle, wondering who was in there -- it's a rather large chapel. I was halfway up the church and I heard voices in a pew. I looked over there and saw some startled seminarians with their faces flickering in the candlelight saying the rosary. So I knelt beside them and finished the rosary with them and they just looked at me nervously. Afterwards, I asked what was going on. They told me that every night at nine o'clock they prayed the rosary. I said, 'But the chapel's dark. Why are you doing this?' They said they didn't want anyone else to know about it.

"They had made a pact that every night they would pray the rosary to survive the seminary," continued Miller. "Their goal was to simply survive. I thought that it was so tragic that they needed to learn so much and they were trying to simply get to the goal -- not necessarily flourish or excel -- just survive. Many of them were very careful about what they said in class to teachers and what they did, simply because they were afraid that something could be used against them. As a matter of fact, before I left, I warned certain ones to be very careful. Many students were never able to be ordained simply because of the one moment where they let down their guard. You could see those students talking in the hall. They would be looking around to see if anyone could hear them and they would lower their voices. There was a certain nervousness. It was like living in a totalitarian government where there are informers and consequences for holding views contrary to what the government would allow you to hold."

Again, the Gulag-like atmosphere of intolerance often had the reverse effect of what was intended. "It forced those students to develop more of a prayer life and to look up those things on their own," said Miller. "They had a kind of distrust for many of the teachers, and many of [the students] became quite orthodox. I've heard about a lot of my students who graduated and went on to do really great things, and I think part of it was that terrible crucible that they had to go through. They were refined through that terrible furnace. But it would have been much better if they had a good formation in all their classes. I think many of the classes were rather silly."

At Mass, Miller said, "they wanted all of us, faculty and seminarians, to stand around the altar during the canon of the Mass." Some of the students thought it was silly to stand up there, but they said, 'If I want to get ordained, I got to play the game.'"

Miller believes St. John's hired what orthodox faculty they did hire as a ploy to keep up a mainstream Catholic appearance. "They wanted to fool pastors and parents and, ultimately, the chancery. Rome was talking about doing an investigation (in all the American seminaries). The solution at St. John's was to get a few token orthodox people that would give a veneer of orthodoxy to the institution."

In Miller's eyes, love of power has been the most common source of corruption at St. John's. "A lot of the faculty members that I encountered were radicals in the 60s who had rebelled against their authority figures," he said. "By the 80s they were the authority figures and were very intolerant of any kind of opposition to that. Much of it was political rather than a certain kind of religious bent."

Miller points out that these problems occurred before Mahony was archbishop, but is careful not to blame it all on Manning. "I think if Cardinal Manning had had greater leadership there, [these problems] probably wouldn't have happened," said Miller. "There were other bishops who sent their students there, like Fresno and Tucson, but those bishops would visit their students and took great interest in them. Manning, as the host, in some ways, pulled back from that, probably in what he saw as a conflict. He was less influential than someone else who was more involved was. Manning's distance created a certain kind of vacuum that allowed things to happen, and they weren't held in check."

Miller also thinks the ongoing decline in the number of seminarians and priests may come from the parish priests of the Los Angeles archdiocese and their own distrust of St. John's. Miller said that he had heard that in the 70s, "the administration invited the pastors from the archdiocese to come and explain why they had reservations about having their parishioners go to St. John's. When the pastors started to give their concerns, they (the administration) got very defensive and nothing came of it. It just broke off. I think one of the reasons there are so few seminarians is, in part, because the pastors do not enthusiastically encourage students to go to St. Johns -- or maybe even discourage students from going there. I've heard stories about pastors trying to discourage them as word of what was going on in the seminary got back to them."

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