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July 15, 2006

Diocese, Thy Name is Irony

This is around the time of year for the seminary's annual appeal to the diocese for funds. The seminary seems to feel the best way to accomplish this is to send someone from there to speak to all the parishes, just not all in the same week. As a result, I heard this appeal twice since I went to a different parish today. They honestly would have been better off had I not heard this particular pitch.

It was one thing last Sunday when the homily was simply replaced by the appeal, which the speaker there, a layman I'm pretty sure, simply kept to an appeal. Not so this time, where the layman chose to homilize at the same time. It doesn't say very much for a seminary when they are explicitly breaking the rule against lay homilies, particularly when the speaker has an administrative capacity there. Still less so when the pastor reveals he used to be a police officer. Hopefully this guy didn't take the law so lightly in his previous job as he is now.

That said, it wasn't even a very good appeal for the seminary. I think he managed to go on for nearly 15 minutes, during which time, not one mention was made of the priesthood, which one would think is the most important group of people a seminary is supposed to teach. Instead, there was simply a generic reference of ministry and graduate students, though he did reference deacons a couple times. The height of irony was the claim that they were in continuity with 2000 years of Catholic tradition, which is a little dubious given his homily and given the word of mouth that is spread about the seminary's somewhat "middle-of-the-road" approach to orthodoxy.

Bookending this experience was meeting the former president of a local Catholic college, a religious sister whom I would never have guessed for one except for her being introduced as such. Not only was there no habit, but not even a token symbol such as a cross on her. Later on, a priest came from behind and asked why I hadn't said hello to a priest, since he has at least seen me around before. I would have loved to have asked him why he didn't look one bit like a priest, but opted to say I hadn't recognized him.

And that in a nutshell was the seminary's way of appealing to me for funds this year. A recently ordained priest who can hardly ever be seen dressed as one, an elderly religious sister with no hint of Christian identity about her, even in conversation, and a lay administrator of the seminary giving a homily in a parish that reeks of the same tired program of flattening Christian ministry by blurring the lines between priesthood and laity.

I feel like sending them $.02.

- Posted by in Catholic at 9:33 PM