The front-page story on a modern seminary in the Times today struck me as an important one. It echoes what others are telling me – that, in fact, today’s screening process is far better than it used to be, that more openness is slowly ending the celibacy and sexuality closet, and that better – if far fewer – priests are the result. I hope this trend gathers pace – but it suggests that, in an odd way, the current crisis is less about today than about the seminaries of a generation or so ago. It took time for the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s to be assimilated into the Church’s pastoral training of priests. While priests were living in a world where celibacy was increasingly seen as morbidly weird, the Church forgot that it needed to aggressively reach out to men for exactly those reasons. So it left them to cope on their own – with occasionally disastrous results. Now the Church beginning to deal with this issues – candidly and forthrightly. Far better than simply ratcheting back the clock fifty years, assuming celibacy is a given and needn’t be discussed at length, and pretending the world is as it was in the era some Church conservatives so admire.
THE OSCARS: Who cares?
The Dish 