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SEMINARIES and PUZZLED PROFESSORS ORDINATION A COMMENCEMENT
IN A RECENT ISSUE OF “THE PRIEST,” a “PUZZLED PROFESSOR” PROFESSED DISMAY AT WHAT HE CALLED “THIS AGGIORNAMENTO BUSINESS.” What bothered him especially was the feeling that almost 30 years of seminary teaching had been wasted. He was disturbed at the statements of the late Father Gustave Weigel to the effect that the parish priest “doesn’t have to have any theology at all;” that “all over the world, not strictly in the United States, the average priest who goes through a seminary is totally innocent of all theology;” that “this is no criticism of his seminary at all. If only he were to know that this is so and keep his big mouth shut, then we’d be happy . . .”
I’d like to dispel the professor’s confusion. First of all, no school – grade, high, college, university, seminary – can give anyone an education. It can give the beginnings of one, and that’s all. It can equip a mind with a few tools, open up some intellectual vistas, maybe whet a taste for learning, and that’s about the extent of it. If a given mind chooses to explore thoroughly the newly opened (for him) territories, he is free to do so. He is also free not to do so. What he does with his free will and his God-given intelligence is up to him. You can blame neither the intellectual development nor the lack of it on either the professors or the seminaries. When William Jennings Bryan www.agribusinesscouncil.org/bryan.htm was an old man, he is said to have begun a commencement address at an eastern university with the words: “Fellow students!” He knew what he was talking about. Commencement address is a very apt expression.
A parish priest, it is true, has to contend with some formidable obstacles to his intellectual development – with the same obstacles, in fact, that St. Thomas Aquinas would have had to contend had he accepted the archbishopric of Naples. If he had accepted, we would have no Summa Theologica. www.catholic-forum.com/saintS/saintt03.htm His attention would have become so absorbed in matters of administration – social, liturgical, ceremonial – that his growth would have been arrested. Thomas realized this, of course. This was why he chose to continue a way of life that allowed him more intellectual freedom: freedom, that is, to grow in knowledge and wisdom and in the science or art of expressing it.
This growth wasn’t effected in the seminary, needless to say. St. Albert the Great www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/ALBERT.HTM helped cultivate the soil of Thomas’ soul and planted a few seeds; but the rest of the crop and subsequent harvest represented the post-graduate work of Thomas on his own, cooperating with the grace of God.
A quaint new discovery in the educational field has recently been termed “programmed learning.” It has been designed for students who have the disposition and capacity to go it alone. Instead of restricting the student to a classroom routine, a program of study is provided which enables him to proceed at his own speed. If he has exceptional ability or a will to work, he will soon outstrip his classmates. What is significant is that his progress is made not in the classroom but in the privacy of his own home. He has access to libraries, it is true, and to persons who can answer his questions and give him directions; but the intellectual achievement is mostly personal. He is at liberty to feed, digest and grow at a pace that suits his capacity and his disposition.
Unless a priest dies intellectually on the day of his ordination, this has to be the method of his intellectual growth. He has to “program” for himself a course of studies which should be geared to the intellectual development of his people as well as himself. This also means spiritual development, since intellectuality is spirituality – at least on the natural level. The expression:
“No one can give what he does not have”
may be a cliché, but it is also a truth. Father Weigel’s statement to the effect that the priest engaged in parish work “doesn’t have to have any theology at all” was ridiculous. We might even use a stronger word – like idiotic or asinine. Parish priests, after all, don’t have a monopoly on asininity. A species of so-called professional theologian abounds in it.
Our puzzled seminary professors should relax. The feelings of insecurity and frustration result from lack of knowledge of their limitations – and of the limitations of the finite human mind.
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by REVEREND PAUL M. ZELLER
There was a young lad named McSweeney Who in Paris drank too much Martini. The Paris police Cabled his niece: “Nous regrettons que Sweeney est fini.” |
