Welcome to one of the series of blogs on the Second Vatican Council. Each piece reviews one of the 16 documents produced by the Council Fathers during the extraordinary occasion in Church history. Vatican II, which drew together the world’s bishops, opened fifty years ago in St. Peter’s Basilica, October 11, 1962.
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| (Photo courtesy of Catholic News Service) |
Bishops voted for the changes urged
by the Second Vatican Council, but it would be the clergy who would have to
bear responsibility for their implementation in the parish communities. Thus, the
Council’s “Decree on the Training of
Priests,” Optatam Totius (Desired of the Whole), though one of the
shorter documents of Vatican II, is arguably most significant.
Renewal of the seminary system proved vital, for the church needed priests prepared to guide greater participation of the laity in the Church’s mission. The decree laid down the basic principles for priestly formation which have guided the formation of priests since then. The watershed document of Pope John Paul II in 1992 on priestly formation, I will give you Shepherds, expanded on the decree and stressed the human formation necessary for priestly formation today.
The decree called for bishops’ conferences to establish local seminary norms so priests could meet the pastoral requirements where they minister. The Pope and his assistants in Rome provided general regulations from which all local conferences of bishops established the local rules. In the United States, the Conference of Bishops promulgated the first Program of Priestly Formation in 1971. It has been revised four times since then and the Bishops’ Conference continues to review and revise the norms to insure top formation for priests.
The Council emphasized spiritual
formation in seminary training so that seminarians would “learn to live in
intimate and unceasing union with God the Father through his Son Jesus Christ,
in the Holy Spirit,” the decree said. This requires faithful meditation on the
Word of God and regular participation in the Mass, confession, the Liturgy of
the Hours and devotions to the Blessed Virgin. Seminarians are to be taught to
seek Christ “in the bishop by whom they are sent and in the people to whom they
are sent, especially the poor, little children, the weak, sinners and unbelievers.”
The Council emphasized the primacy of Scripture in intellectual formation. The relationship between the Scriptures and the doctrines of the Church, a theme treated in the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, finds expression here. “Students should receive a most careful training in holy Scripture, which should be the soul, as it were, of all theology,” the decree noted.
An emphasis on pastoral training reflected
the Council’s overall concern for effective engagement with the world. Such
training demands a willingness to listen to others and the capacity to open
their hearts in a spirit of charity to the needs of other people. The decree
noted that seminarians must learn the art of the exercising the apostolate not
only in theory but in practice, with pastoral work as part of their studies. Given
the rapid growth in the cultural diversity of the Church in the United States in
recent decades, the current norms of the Program
for Priestly Formation strongly encourage seminarians to develop language
skills and intercultural competency to be more effective pastoral ministers.
Finally, what is implicit in the decree
but made explicit in Pope John Paul II’s I
Will Give You Shepherds, is the need for human formation. Blessed John Paul
stated that future priests are to cultivate a series of human qualities, both for
their own good, and also with a view to the priestly ministry. These qualities enable
them to be balanced, capable of bearing the weight of pastoral responsibility
and to have the requisite affective maturity to live and cherish the gift of
celibacy. The seminarian’s capacity to relate to others as a “man of communion”
is essential for the priesthood in our day.
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Archbishop
Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City is a consultant to the U.S. bishops’Committee
on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations.
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