"To Work for the Whole People": John Ireland's Seminary in St. Paul (review)

This is a substantial and illuminating history of one of the major theological centers of the upper Midwest. St. Paul Seminary has exercised a powerful influence not only on the dioceses it has served over the years, but on the entire American Catholic Church. From its hallowed halls have come distinguished figures (faculty and alumni), such as historians Humphrey Moynihan, Patrick Ahern, and Marvin O'Connell, liturgists William Busch and Jan Michael Joncas, scripture scholar Jerome D. Quinn, bishops Edwin V. O'Brien and Raymond Lucker, and perhaps the greatest of all, John A. Ryan, the patriarch of American Catholic social thought and action. Something very good happened at St. Paul Seminary. Mary Christine Athans shows us how it happened.

The author begins with the initial efforts at seminary education advanced by the first two bishops of St. Paul, Joseph Cretin (1850–1857) and Thomas Langdon Grace, O.P. (1859–1884). These early endeavors soon gave way to the grand building schemes of Archbishop John Ireland (1884–1918), whose good fortune it was to have the devoutly Catholic Mary Theresa Mehegan Hill—wife of railroad tycoon James J. Hill—among his flock. "If it hadn't been for a woman . . . ," as Athans relates in her careful account of the funding and design of the seminary, the diocese would not have been able to construct and maintain (Hill left an endowment) the seminary.

The chapters proceed chronologically, detailing the changing rectors, faculty, curriculum, and patterns of priestly formation throughout the seminary's long and distinguished history. Athans relates the special care that the eloquent and cultured Archbishop Austin Dowling gave to the construction of the seminary chapel. Archbishop John Gregory Murray turned over a great deal of control to his hand-picked rector, William O. Brady, a self-assured man who brought his own brand of decisiveness to the post. Brady must have liked the job immensely, because he eventually returned as archbishop and appointed himself rector again. Archbishops Leo Binz and Leo Byrne navigated the seminary through the shoals of Vatican Council II-inspired change. Byrne in particular faced the collapse of priestly vocations and the increasing financial demands of the St. Paul Seminary. The ultimate solution to a declining seminary enrollment and mounting costs would be a fortuitous affiliation between the seminary and the diocesan-run College (today University) of St. Thomas in 1986. This was brokered by Archbishop John R. Roach.

Athans makes good use of available documentary materials in archdiocesan records. She must have waded through hundreds of linear feet of official papers, financial reports, and routine correspondence in order to select truly illuminating passages, phrases, and comments from various archbishops, rectors, faculty, and alumni. She supplements this conscientious archival work with a deft use of oral history, securing from some now superannuated clergy memories dating as far back as the 1920's. This blending of documents with recollections delivers the text from the sometimes enervating repetition of seminary history, especially during the period of Romanization and centralization, when seminaries in the United States seemed virtually interchangeable in terms of curriculum and practices of priestly formation. We learn what the seminarians read, what their sporting activities were, what movies they watched, and who from the "outside" was brought in to remind these future priests that their ministry was to be done "in the world" and not in the cloistered milieu of the seminary. At a time when Roman officials and local bishops are re-examining seminary formation procedures as part of the overall investigation into the roots of the tragic sexual abuse crisis, Athans' attention to the minutiae of seminary life provides an important window into the structure of the so-called clerical culture—which may or may not have contributed to later clerical dysfunction.

Like any good book, Athans' study provokes more questions than it answers. Particularly interesting is the author...