Trainees 'Should Be Separated from Other Students'

By Paul Melia and Colm Kelpie
Irish Independent
March 21, 2012

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/trainees-should-be-separated-from-other-students-3056308.html

TRAINEE priests should live in separate buildings -- away from other clerics or students -- to help prepare them for the priesthood, the report from the Vatican investigators said.

Only seminarians or those involved in their training should be allowed enter the dedicated buildings, and one set of standards should be developed and used to assess if candidates were suitable for joining the priesthood.

The report makes seven recommendations on improving the seminaries, including focused classes for trainees on child protection and training in helping victims of sexual abuse and their families.

It also says church leaders should take more of a hands-on role in the running of the seminaries, and that "more consistent admission criteria" should be developed to "examine and decide admissibility of candidates".

The report, headed by the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, expressed concern that trainees were not "conforming" with church teaching.

Senior clerics needed to show "greater concern for the intellectual formation of seminarians", ensuring it was in "full conformity with the church's Magisterium", it said. It is understood that this refers to celibacy.

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Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said the measures did not mean that seminarians would be "locked up".

"It isn't cloistered life," he said. "In a seminary, there must also be that space where the specific formation of priest can take place and that requires a certain period of time and formation and community."

The 65 students at the country's largest seminary, St Patrick's College in Maynooth, are already separate from the rest of the 8,000-strong student body at the adjoining National University of Ireland.

President of the national seminary Monsignor Hugh Connolly said trainees needed a place to pray and study, and to have "balance" with their day-to-day lives and preparing for the priesthood.

"Seminarians should continue to have a broad range of experiences. They need to have a place to call their own but not to withdraw them from the world," he said.

Msgr Connolly also said the way forward was "not to change the current discipline of celibacy".

Christine Buckley, of the Aislinn Centre for abuse survivors, said: "We are going right back to the 1930s and 1940s, and exalting the church as if they were so much more important than us laity."