UNITED STATES
Whispers in the Loggia
While several Stateside seminaries have reported upticks in enrollment over the last decade, the largest of the bunch remains across the Atlantic… and as the trend has only served to bolster the Pontifical North American College’s standing as the lodestar of priestly formation (and a good bit else) back home, this Monday brings the accordingly consequential word of a change at its helm.
At this hour atop the Gianicolo, the 156 year-old seminary is slated to introduce Fr Peter Harman, 42 – a priest of Springfield in Illinois who’s served since 2013 as the NAC’s top pastoral formator – as its 23rd Rector. The choice formally made by the Congregation for the Clergy, which accepted the recommendation of the college’s 15-bishop Board of Governors, the appointment takes effect on February 1st. In the post, Harman succeeds Msgr Jim Checchio, who returns to his Mom and clan in South Jersey after a ten-year tenure that’s significantly solidified the the NAC’s resources while likewise growing its enrollment by some 60 percent. (The duo are shown above, with Harman at right.)
For purposes of context, it’s no stretch to say that when the NAC sneezes, the US church catches a cold… and, indeed, a good chunk of global Catholicism starts sniffling, to boot. Even beyond its current 250-plus seminarians – a high over recent decades – the reach of “The Hill” is even more tellingly explained in the students’ presence from nearly 100 dioceses, comprising a majority of the nation’s Latin-church outposts, as well as a handful each from Australia and Canada. (An additional 75 priests in graduate studies live at the college’s Casa Santa Maria, the NAC’s original home in the city’s core until the Gianicolo compound opened in 1953.) Yet whether they come as theologians preparing for ordination or advanced degrees afterward, its alums have formed the modern backbone of American hierarchical leadership: today, no less than two-thirds of the nine Stateside cardinal-electors – including three of the four who lead dioceses – are products of the college and/or the Casa, along with a heavy plurality of the nation’s bishops and a wider network that leaves practically no church entity on these shores untouched. Borrowing from another field, it’s a profession-wide impact comparable to having the graduate pools of Harvard Law and Yale Law rolled into one.
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