Vatican urges radical renewal in seminaries

National Catholic Reporter, June 16, 1995 by Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY -- Seminaries must improve the way they train priests to work with families and must ensure that their students will uphold Catholic church teaching on marriage and sexuality, a new Vatican document said.

"Families need expert spiritual guides and sound doctrine," said the document, released June 6 by the Congregation for Catholic Education, which has responsibility for seminaries.

The 21-page document, "Directives on the Formation of Seminarians Concerning Problems Related to Marriage and the Family," called for "a radical renewal of the preparation of future priests for the family apostolate."

Despite church leaders' increasing focus on the family as the priority for church pastoral work, very few priests have the theological, doctrinal, spiritual and practical training needed to help modern families, the document said.

An ambivalence toward, or outright rejection of, church teaching on marriage and sexuality among professors, seminary staff and the students themselves seems to be the main reason ministry to families is not given the attention it deserves in seminaries, it said.

"The danger in the church is that we will have guides who are not secure in their own thinking" regarding church teaching "and therefore can't guide the church with security," Cardinal Pio Laghi, prefect of the congregation, told a Vatican press conference.

Offering courses in moral theology to examine issues related to sexuality and training priests to celebrate weddings and to understand canonical laws regarding valid marriages are not enough to prepare a priest to help modern families deal with all the problems they face, the document said.

The church's concern for families and its conviction that its future depends on healthy families must permeate every aspect of a seminarian's education and formation, it said. "We must conclude that this subject matter is not being treated with that accuracy and fullness which is necessary in order to provide the church with pastors who are well-prepared for this field of the apostolate," it said. "On the subject of the family and married life, in fact, objections to the magisterium of the church are not rare," the document said.

At the press conference, Laghi rejected arguments that the church's ministry to families would improve greatly if married men were ordained to the priesthood.

"We, too, come from families," he said. "We, too, have families and were born and raised in them."