Seminarians Today

Seminarians today come with attitudes and abilities that are new because of their time and place, their enslavement and culture, and their originality. They engage in the art of theology and philosophy. They engage in this adventure with Jesus, our friend and companion and Savior, and his friends, especially Mary and Joseph. They are blessed with these years of preparation for their mission as priest-servants of Jesus in his Catholic Church for his world. They are to make present Jesus, offering us his Word and Heart to be heard and held, and his Body and Blood to be offered and received and approached as the food and drink that our heart and conscience need. They are to be good Samaritans, merciful neighbors to us in our misery.

Seminarians are becoming more philosophical and theological during this time with their teachers, companions, classes, and books. To this they direct the classic formation of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, of thinking, expressing, persuading in speaking and writing. They catch more the vision of the whole and the parts of our human and graced ongoing conversion as friend and witness of Jesus in his Catholic Church for his world. They catch more his fire. They get in touch with the Bible, with masters like Thomas Aquinas and John Newman, with Teresa of Jesus and Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, with the teaching of Vatican II and the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, guided by our chief shepherds, philosopher John Paul II, theologian Benedict XVI, and pastoral Francis.

"The Good Samaritan," by Aimé Morot, via Wikipedia 

Seminarians are living their hidden life in preparation for their public life with, like, and through Jesus, and with and like his friends, especially Mary and Joseph. This is a time of growing more traditioned and more creative in their words and deeds. The rosary, meditating the joys, lights, sorrows, glories of Jesus, to be reflected and echoed in us his friends, is a helpful devotion during their concentrated engagement in the art of theology and philosophy. Each day of the Church year, centered on Jesus energizing and encouraging us with his Word and Heart and Body and Blood in his sacramental sacrifice, moves them forward and onward in responding to their call to be priests of the new evangelization in the revolution of mercy.

People need seminarians today. People want them. Jesus needs and wants them to be ordained presbyters in his present mercy movement.

Father Don