November 6, 2025- How well are seminaries doing in forming the priests we need to reform the Church—one dominated by a lavender mafia?

• by Professor Janet E. Smith

How well are seminaries doing in forming the priests we need to reform the Church—one dominated by a lavender mafia? A useful assessment is the recently-published 171 page study “Evaluating the Church’s Practices in Assessing the Suitability of Candidates for Holy Orders,” by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University and the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. The study reports on how satisfied bishops, vocation directors, seminary rectors, seminary formators and spiritual directors, and mental-health-care professionals are with the formation seminarians receive. 

The overall satisfaction by bishops with respect to the formation seminarians received was good to very good. There were, however, some areas for which there was an alarming amount of concern. As reported by OSV (all information in this essay comes from the OSV article): 

The report found three areas where it said both bishops and vocation directors were “least likely” to express great confidence in their seminaries. Just 19% to 21% were “very confident” in their formation of seminarians’ “healthy management of one’s neuroses or minor pathologies,” “healthy living with medical concerns or physical limitations” (17%) or “dealing with learning disabilities” (16% to 17%).

It distresses me that it is considered positive that “32% to 43% of these three survey groups said they were confident of seminaries’ ability to enable seminarians to form healthy relationships with others and to seek treatment for mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.” The bar is too low.

Those who had day-to-day contact with seminarians were not confident that the seminaries help those in formation:

• manage neuroses or minor pathologies (with 11% to 23% saying they were “very confident”),
• grow in understanding what the survey termed their “sexual orientation” (8% to 22%),
• soundly manage their unhealthy or addictive behaviors (4% to 22%), or
• manage past unethical behaviors, including dishonesty and financial mismanagement (16% to 17%).

Respondents to the survey identified several topics that likely deserve greater consideration:

• Relations with self or others, including severely damaged relations that preclude healthy interactions and leadership.
• Pervasive developmental disorders that could lead to behaviors incompatible with priestly ministry.
• Inclination or behavior that could presage sexual activity with, or other harm to, minors.

These areas of concern are very serious. Rather than producing confidence, they erode it. Also corrosive to confidence in the ability of seminaries to evaluate themselves well is that less than one-fifth of mental-health professionals agree with the optimism of about half of formation/spiritual directors and two-fifths of rectors who thought the benchmarks for formation are working and that good use is made of the initial psychological exams in designing individualized formation programs.

These areas of study researched, I suspect, are the result of the times in which we live. Someone, someday, has to do a survey on the profile of young men who came into seminaries decades ago when we have some reason to believe many, if not most, were mature personally and spiritually and eager to achieve the virtues needed for the priesthood. Thus, seminaries largely focused on helping them learn the theology of the Church and its history. Personal formation would largely have been a matter of polishing already fine young men who likely had a somewhat realistic view of the priesthood from uncle priests or priests for whom they served at Mass. 

We know now that perhaps the vast majority of the seminarians who have entered after the societal collapse of sexual morality of the ’60s have participated in that immorality; many have grown up in divorced households, and many have little knowledge of the Faith. They need an enormous amount of help to shed bad habits and to fully understand the priesthood. Since the ’60s, seminarian formation—until somewhat recently—did not provide that help but largely exacerbated the problems by tolerating, if not facilitating, both heterosexual (dating was encouraged in some seminaries) and homosexual relationships (overlooked in most seminaries). Teaching the theology advanced by dissenters which justified such behavior as masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, and fornication was another log on the fire. 

To read more of this article on Crisis Magazine, click the following link:

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/seminaries-blood-oaths-and-manly-priests