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Seminary A Search
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1983
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April 24, 2025
A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF SEMINARY LIFE IN THE 1960s
Journalist and professor Paul Hendrickson (b. 1944) wrote in the first chapter of this 1983 book, “I was in the seminary seven years. I had gone in a few months after my 14th birthday. Then … in 1965, I… went home to Illinois… I was no longer Brother Garret, student for the Catholic missionary priesthood… For all I knew, my leaving was an isolated act… my departure had come at almost the exact midpoint of a confusing decade… What I had heard of on a July day in 1965 was something called the Second Vatican Council… At the moment of my leaving, the council that Pope John XXIII started in 1962 had just begun to slap at the seminary walls. In the next five years would come floods of change.” (Pg.17)
He recounts his last day: “I wondered if I had lost my faith, my belief in God. I didn’t think so, but it was a scary thought… After lunch I said goodbye to my classmates… I shook hands, moving around the room… Somebody… whispered, ‘You won’t have to slur the middle one,’ and immediately I understood. It was a joke about the three religious vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience. We always said that on Profession Day, when it came time to kneel at the altar and cup hands with the superior, we were going to slur the middle vow so it came out ‘charity.’” (Pg. 19-20)
He notes, “Close to nine hundred boys went through my religious Order’s seminaries in the forties and fifties and sixties. Almost all of us are out in the world now. Some got to the major seminary, were ordained priests, only to jump from the boat later… Of all of us who were there, for however long, maybe 8% made it to the priesthood, maybe 2% are priests now. Any cost accounting would be brutal, though that of course is irrelevant: dollars are earthly.” (Pg. 25-26)
He recalls, “Grammar schools were the seminary farm team in the fifties, and sisters were the scouts. In a way, getting into a school for the priesthood at thirteen or fourteen was as easy as gliding down a stream on a raft---all you had to do was get on and go with the current.” (Pg. 37)
He states, “It seems insane now, from the haughty vantage point of three decades, but in many ways the fifties Church was a child-centered religion, a kiddie ministry. In 1930 there were 187 schools for the Catholic priesthood in America, but by the middle fifties… they were rising like factories after a war, which is what some of them seemed: assembly lines for clergy. By 1958… 381 Catholic seminaries, major and minor, would exist in the country; within twenty years 259 of them would fold. The fifties proliferation was answering, I think the baby boom and the Catholic rise to the middle class and a general post-WWII premium on higher education…” (Pg. 41)
He reports, “There were about half a dozen missionary brothers assigned to the minor seminary, and they were not in training to be priests. They were many manual and clerical workers… who lived the vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, plus a life of obscurity. They got to wear the religious habit and sleep in the faculty wing… but they weren’t priests… and few bones … were made about their subservient status. Later, in the sixties, some of them would tell the priests to fix their own damn leaky toilets..” (Pg. 94-95)
He states, “In June, a year wiser, another year of seminary under our belts, we spiritual mariners would come back to our home parishes with a certain sly status. We were the parish’s little priests, forbidden fruit not to be touched by the town’s girls, who therefore eyed us with curiosity if not quite lust… Chief among the do’s: attendance at daily Mass. Chief among the don’ts: attendance at ‘mixed’ parties.” (Pg. 152)
He suggests, “I now suspect that most of the ‘fruity’ things going on among us were simply adolescent rite and passage. Was it more than this? Was some of it what clinicians call ‘transitory’ homosexuality? I don’t know; I am not a
clinician.” (Pg. 164)
He recounts, “Every seminarian was required to have a spiritual director… Toward the spring of my first year, 1959, feeling I needed more personal attention than I was getting… I went to a priest and asked if he would be willing to direct me in my spiritual life… About six weeks after I began going to this priest, something odd and ambiguous began taking place… Having thus systematically provoked myself to the ledge of mortal sin, and letting myself teeter there, I was now just as systematically talking the temptation down…. I participated in the ritual, more or less willingly, from the time I was nearly fifteen until I was past twenty and getting ready to enter my year of novitiate… I began to view it just as he promised I would: as a legitimate tool in helping me control my impure thoughts and desire, which seemed to be raging out of control… as many times as I performed this scene over nearly 6 years… I never once saw or felt him studying me with what seemed like the least erotic urge or lustful desire.\.. most of us who went to him… uncannily kept it a secret.” (Pg. 166-172)
He notes, “I doubt seriously if the losses my old Order was to sustain in the latter half of the sixties and into the seventies (whole classes wiped out, several years passing without a single ordination) were any worse on a percentage basis than the losses other Catholic religious groups were sustaining… It was just that the smallness and newness … of my religious group… made the eventual departures more painful, the chaos more glaring.” (Pg. 281)
He continues, “The seminary would remain open for thirteen years, until 1973… In the end the enrollment would be down to a pathetic forty-three… By then, too, odd stories would have begun to circulate: the school WAS, some feared, turning into a floating fairyboat. Toward the end, some priests were getting into the seminary cars and going out to recruit girls to bring them back to the school for weekend interaction with the seminarians.” (Pg. 285)
He concludes, “It is nearly immaterial to me now whether an ecumenical council or an encyclical on birth control really caused the Church’s general disarray a decade and a half ago…. Some will insist it was Pope John’s council, that well-meaning attempt at modernization… Another theory holds that it was really the encyclical on birth control that did in the Church… In 1966, before the encyclical, the resignation rate of priests in America was practically nil… In the two years following the encyclical…3.5% of diocesan priests and 5.2% of religious order priests in the country departed the rectory and mission… It now seems clear that Pope John’s Vatican II was merely accelerating , legitimizing, changes that had begun a decade or more earlier. Pope John’s council let a secret out of the bag: that a church can change, that a church HAS to change.” (Pg. 319-320)
This book may interest those studying seminaries and priestly formation in the 50s and later.
Journalist and professor Paul Hendrickson (b. 1944) wrote in the first chapter of this 1983 book, “I was in the seminary seven years. I had gone in a few months after my 14th birthday. Then … in 1965, I… went home to Illinois… I was no longer Brother Garret, student for the Catholic missionary priesthood… For all I knew, my leaving was an isolated act… my departure had come at almost the exact midpoint of a confusing decade… What I had heard of on a July day in 1965 was something called the Second Vatican Council… At the moment of my leaving, the council that Pope John XXIII started in 1962 had just begun to slap at the seminary walls. In the next five years would come floods of change.” (Pg.17)
He recounts his last day: “I wondered if I had lost my faith, my belief in God. I didn’t think so, but it was a scary thought… After lunch I said goodbye to my classmates… I shook hands, moving around the room… Somebody… whispered, ‘You won’t have to slur the middle one,’ and immediately I understood. It was a joke about the three religious vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience. We always said that on Profession Day, when it came time to kneel at the altar and cup hands with the superior, we were going to slur the middle vow so it came out ‘charity.’” (Pg. 19-20)
He notes, “Close to nine hundred boys went through my religious Order’s seminaries in the forties and fifties and sixties. Almost all of us are out in the world now. Some got to the major seminary, were ordained priests, only to jump from the boat later… Of all of us who were there, for however long, maybe 8% made it to the priesthood, maybe 2% are priests now. Any cost accounting would be brutal, though that of course is irrelevant: dollars are earthly.” (Pg. 25-26)
He recalls, “Grammar schools were the seminary farm team in the fifties, and sisters were the scouts. In a way, getting into a school for the priesthood at thirteen or fourteen was as easy as gliding down a stream on a raft---all you had to do was get on and go with the current.” (Pg. 37)
He states, “It seems insane now, from the haughty vantage point of three decades, but in many ways the fifties Church was a child-centered religion, a kiddie ministry. In 1930 there were 187 schools for the Catholic priesthood in America, but by the middle fifties… they were rising like factories after a war, which is what some of them seemed: assembly lines for clergy. By 1958… 381 Catholic seminaries, major and minor, would exist in the country; within twenty years 259 of them would fold. The fifties proliferation was answering, I think the baby boom and the Catholic rise to the middle class and a general post-WWII premium on higher education…” (Pg. 41)
He reports, “There were about half a dozen missionary brothers assigned to the minor seminary, and they were not in training to be priests. They were many manual and clerical workers… who lived the vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, plus a life of obscurity. They got to wear the religious habit and sleep in the faculty wing… but they weren’t priests… and few bones … were made about their subservient status. Later, in the sixties, some of them would tell the priests to fix their own damn leaky toilets..” (Pg. 94-95)
He states, “In June, a year wiser, another year of seminary under our belts, we spiritual mariners would come back to our home parishes with a certain sly status. We were the parish’s little priests, forbidden fruit not to be touched by the town’s girls, who therefore eyed us with curiosity if not quite lust… Chief among the do’s: attendance at daily Mass. Chief among the don’ts: attendance at ‘mixed’ parties.” (Pg. 152)
He suggests, “I now suspect that most of the ‘fruity’ things going on among us were simply adolescent rite and passage. Was it more than this? Was some of it what clinicians call ‘transitory’ homosexuality? I don’t know; I am not a
clinician.” (Pg. 164)
He recounts, “Every seminarian was required to have a spiritual director… Toward the spring of my first year, 1959, feeling I needed more personal attention than I was getting… I went to a priest and asked if he would be willing to direct me in my spiritual life… About six weeks after I began going to this priest, something odd and ambiguous began taking place… Having thus systematically provoked myself to the ledge of mortal sin, and letting myself teeter there, I was now just as systematically talking the temptation down…. I participated in the ritual, more or less willingly, from the time I was nearly fifteen until I was past twenty and getting ready to enter my year of novitiate… I began to view it just as he promised I would: as a legitimate tool in helping me control my impure thoughts and desire, which seemed to be raging out of control… as many times as I performed this scene over nearly 6 years… I never once saw or felt him studying me with what seemed like the least erotic urge or lustful desire.\.. most of us who went to him… uncannily kept it a secret.” (Pg. 166-172)
He notes, “I doubt seriously if the losses my old Order was to sustain in the latter half of the sixties and into the seventies (whole classes wiped out, several years passing without a single ordination) were any worse on a percentage basis than the losses other Catholic religious groups were sustaining… It was just that the smallness and newness … of my religious group… made the eventual departures more painful, the chaos more glaring.” (Pg. 281)
He continues, “The seminary would remain open for thirteen years, until 1973… In the end the enrollment would be down to a pathetic forty-three… By then, too, odd stories would have begun to circulate: the school WAS, some feared, turning into a floating fairyboat. Toward the end, some priests were getting into the seminary cars and going out to recruit girls to bring them back to the school for weekend interaction with the seminarians.” (Pg. 285)
He concludes, “It is nearly immaterial to me now whether an ecumenical council or an encyclical on birth control really caused the Church’s general disarray a decade and a half ago…. Some will insist it was Pope John’s council, that well-meaning attempt at modernization… Another theory holds that it was really the encyclical on birth control that did in the Church… In 1966, before the encyclical, the resignation rate of priests in America was practically nil… In the two years following the encyclical…3.5% of diocesan priests and 5.2% of religious order priests in the country departed the rectory and mission… It now seems clear that Pope John’s Vatican II was merely accelerating , legitimizing, changes that had begun a decade or more earlier. Pope John’s council let a secret out of the bag: that a church can change, that a church HAS to change.” (Pg. 319-320)
This book may interest those studying seminaries and priestly formation in the 50s and later.
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