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  • The Seminary and Western Culture:Relationships that Promote Recovery and Holiness
  • James Keating

“The fault line of our culture … is that we have been willing to sacrifice objective truth in order to save subjective freedom, understood particularly as freedom of choice by an autonomous self. … This fault line will eventually erode our civilization from within, just as the willingness on the part of Marxist societies to sacrifice personal freedom for social justice (… brutal equality) eroded those societies.”1

This quote from Cardinal Francis George, echoing ideas of St. John Paul II, highlights the corrosive effect the autonomous self can have upon culture when such autonomy is that culture’s supreme principle. In contradistinction, he raises the example of Marxism, as well. These remarks from Cardinal George were written in 2008; and by our current time, not only had the North American population been long tutored in autonomy by the popular culture, but also its government and professions had begun tutoring the populace in Marxist principles as well. For example, the United States Government promulgated the Affordable Care Act, undermining religious freedom as it sought to impose a universal duty for employers to provide abortifacients, as well as other contraceptives, in their health care benefits. A weakening of religious freedom was also recognized within the culture as government leaders [End Page 1099] narrowed their articulation of such from the “right to religious freedom” to the “right to worship.”2 Similarly, the triumph of gay marriage in the US Courts created a cultural condition wherein individuals find it more burdensome to refuse to cooperate with same sex weddings, leaving private businesses exposed to punishment for not assisting homosexuals with the supplies or services they need to legally wed and celebrate such a wedding.3 In Canada, further individual freedoms were sacrificed for “justice” when the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons declared that physicians had to refer women to doctors who would perform abortions if, in conscience, the referring physician could not himself or herself perform such a procedure. It was declared by the College that referring clients to such abortion providers was not cooperation with evil, since no woman should ever be refused an abortion and be given no alternative for her “care.”4

In the area of the triumph of the autonomous self, it has become a sign of “intolerance” to make moral judgments about the sexual behaviors of others. When the archbishop of San Francisco attempted to update his teachers’ moral clauses as contingent upon further employment, 80 percent of the teachers employed by the archdiocesan school system revolted. Apparently, even if one is employed by the Church, subjective freedom trumps truth.5 [End Page 1100]

This strangely divided culture where the autonomous self reigns alongside governmental and institutional attacks on the individual conscience in the name of “justice” calls for a profound deliberation on the part of seminary formation staff. What kind of formation is needed today so that these future priests may preach the Gospel to such a culture and, at the same time, “recover” from such a culture themselves? Such recovery may be necessary due to a man’s exposure to either the ideology of subjective freedom over truth or an understanding that “justice” warrants the undermining of freedom of conscience (or to both). Beyond these two distortions of public life, recovery may also be needed because of the personal “wounds” present in seminarians as they disentangle themselves from popular culture to enter formation: gaming addictions, addictions to pornography, effects of parental divorce upon maturation, drug or alcohol use, a history of unchaste behaviors, resistance to authority, and so on. Men interested in entering the seminary should, of course, not be admitted if addictions are present or serious emotional wounds remain from aspects of their upbringing. However, even those not-so-burdened may carry the marks of a culture that gives a man little or no guidance on personal freedom or how to appropriate a way of life marked by spiritual discipline.

This article will first look at the Catholic understanding of culture and its importance for forming character and then notice what unique features of seminary formation offer ways to both engage culture and...

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