Enrollment at St. John's Seminary, Boston has doubled over the last two years in a major turnaround for an institution that seemed destined for closure in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisisThe Boston Globe reports that the stone hall in Brighton, where two generations ago hundreds of young men prepared for the priesthood, is still strikingly quiet.
But the pews of the Romanesque chapel are now about one-third full, as fresh-faced young men from around the world help to revive a 125-year-old institution that teetered on the brink of extinction just a few years ago.
Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, who resisted calls from priests to close the Catholic seminary when he arrived as archbishop of Boston five years ago, has made preserving St. John's a top priority for his administration, and has cajoled bishops from New England and beyond to send young men to Boston to prepare for the priesthood. This fall there are 87 men studying theology at St. John's, up from 42 two years ago.
They are men like Eric Cadin, 28, of Weymouth, who thought about becoming a priest when he was a second-grader, and then pushed the idea aside until he felt a strong call as an undergraduate at Harvard.
"There was something for me lacking, and this powerful encounter with the living God, with Jesus, who transformed my life," he said. "I am compelled."
And then there is Tom Macdonald, 24, of Westford, who acknowledged that many of his own friends and family wondered why anyone would become a priest today.
"The men here have had to overcome a lot of cultural hostility to be here, sometimes from their own friends and family," he said. "I understand that faith is a gift, and faith opens up new understandings, and those understandings aren't available to those who haven't received that gift yet."
The seminary's reversal of fortune is not a solution for the archdiocese's growing shortage of priests, because many of the seminarians will return home to serve the dioceses where they grew up.
But church officials say the seminary is worth preserving as an important church institution in New England, and that the enrollment uptick sends a positive signal to prospective priests.
The seminary is now doing better in part because several New England dioceses that had been sending students to other seminaries around the country have redirected their seminarians to St. John's.
It is also because of an influx of students from a new international Catholic movement called the Neocatechumenal Way, which encourages participants to renew their connection to the church by immersing themselves as adults in intensive study.
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(Source: CTHUS)