uriah
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Posts: 25
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Post by uriah on Dec 16, 2011 23:49:17 GMT
Sanlorenzo, I agree with much of what you say. Could you imagine the reaction of the authorities in the college if seminarians had insisted on wearing clerical dress on a day to day basis?
There was one dean there at the time, that I met years after I left. He had moved on by then and was serving as a PP. He told me that while he was in Maynooth, he had been greatly concerned by the falling numbers of 'manly' men that were joining and the increase in effeminacy in the seminary. What he was really referring to is not difficult to understand.
Hibernicus - I never came across or heard of any occult activity. That's not to deny that it was there, only to say that I never came across it.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Dec 17, 2011 20:12:28 GMT
My information on occult activity comes from the period c.1987-1990. I don't know how advanced or widespread it was - only that it happened. One point I'll make - there was a bit of a pandemic of occultism among lay students, from whose company the clerical students were not insulated.
Uriah - the former dean who made the point you quote, would that dean have been vice-president for part of his time, with an interest in rugby? If it is who I think it is, it doesn't surprise me that he was thinking that way, but unfortunately other deans had other ideas - in particular I am thinking of another who would have been still around for the first year or two you were in Maynooth.
Sanlorenzo, the homosexual subculture in Maynooth was low-key. It manifested itself in 1990, when there were a couple of expulsions, but it went underground again after that. But I agree with you that alcohol was a problem. Though I'm told the worst period for alcohol in Maynooth was when Mgr Olden was president between Cardinal O Fiaich and the con artist formerly known as Mgr Ledwith.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 17, 2011 21:51:17 GMT
Maynooth has had problems as long as it existed - student riots in the 1820s; tragic deaths in the 1850s (one source I read said those came on the foot of dabbling in the occult too); the scourge of TB in the late 19th and early 20th century; and the total breakdown in the late 60s.
The folklore of student Maynooth outside the seminary in the period Beinidict refers to is laden with references to scéances and reported exorcisms. Does anyone think the clerical students could escape?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 17, 2011 23:06:50 GMT
There was a good deal of unrest among students in the 1870s as well, because the Governing Body economised after the government grant was withdrawn (at the same time the Church of Ireland was disestablished) and the first thing they economised on was the seminarians' food! I have seen quotes from British government officials who visited Maynooth in the 1840s and said the students' living conditions were like those of convicts in British prisons (they noted BTW that the students were always put one to a room or three to a room, never two - presumably to guard against homosexuality). There is a lot of hot air nowadays about the "triumphalism" of the late-Victorian architecture at Maynooth (the College chapel, for instance) but this becomes more understandable when it is realised that it was built/financed by clerics who could remember the sort of conditions I have described above. Has anyone any comments or recollections of the old provincial seminaries? (My understanding is that these traditionally trained priests for service overseas rather than in Ireland.) St Peter's in Wexford seems to have gone to the dogs completely in its last decades as a seminary, to judge from the number of staff who were subsequently prosecuted. [Addendum - I know Archbishop McQuaid tried to maintain Clonliffe as a more orthodox alternative to Maynooth - did any trace survive of this after his retirement? THe article on church art with particular reference to Clonliffe in the new essay collection on Cardinal Cullen states at one point that the chapel in Clonliffe was pretty thoroughly wreckovated in the 1970s.]
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 18, 2011 19:26:38 GMT
Michael Harding the writer and ex-priest has a navel-gazing column in the IRISH TIMES and recently has a couple of references to his Maynooth experiences, in which inter alia he compares priests to old-style landlords' agents riding around the country extorting money from the people. In one of these columns he refers to charismatic meetings as providing opportunities for clerical students to come into close contact with girls. He reminisces about students having women in their rooms and hiding them under the bed or in a cupboard when authority figures visited, and he mentions one dean who made a point of dropping something on the floor to give him a chance to look under the bed. He then rather spitefully recalls the same dean having a drink problem and on other occasions assuming a prone position because he had passed out drunk in front of the doorway of the building where he lived. I've said it before and I'll say it again - the fact that Mr Harding was not only admitted to seminary but got through to ordination (he was a curate in Co. Fermanagh for a couple of years) is a very strong sign of how reckless the policy was on admissions in the 1970s and how heedless they were in examining the attitudes of seminarians. Admittedly, he was probably not as utterly contemptuous towards Catholicism then as he is now (he now attributes his former faith solely to emotional neediness) but he has repeatedly and directly stated that he never thought he was signing up to a lifetime of celibacy and always expected that the celibacy requirement would be abolished in a few years, until "the cold wind from Poland" - i.e. Pope John Paul II - blew in. Did Mr Harding really have no inkling that this might not happen, and did the seminary authorities never become aware of his attitude? (Not to mention that by his own account he not only disbelieved in celibacy but in chastity, and saw nothing wrong with pre-marital sex.) Did he take a solemn vow never intending to keep that vow, but seeing it just as an empty formality? If he is to be believed, that is precisely what he did. What would he have done if the Latin Church had adopted the Eastern discipline, i.e. ordaining married men but no marriage after ordination? I have never seen any indication anywhere that he ever thought there might be any positive dimension to priestly celibacy at all, or ever saw it as anything more than the product of fear-filled misogyny, a view which he put forward ad nauseam for years. What sort of seminary education fails to weed out someone with that mindset?
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uriah
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Posts: 25
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Post by uriah on Dec 18, 2011 23:06:04 GMT
Beinidict, you have the right man in mind. Your message was correct. I think that he felt a somewhat isolated in his last years there. He's now a PP.
What is the solution to Maynooth? Train seminarians abroad?
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Post by losleandros on Dec 19, 2011 10:57:50 GMT
Regading hibernicus on Mr. Harding, is there anything as low life or beneath contempt than Harding's constant self-justifying articles in the media ( I think they even allowed him a piece in the Furrow - open to correction there ), laced with his contemptuous vitriol against the Church. I have no problem with him discovering that Priesthood was not for him, but to use his experiences in Maynooth to bad mouth people in such a manner, is the lowest form of humanity. What a sad & pathetic individual.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Dec 19, 2011 20:15:20 GMT
A couple of points:
1. Michael Harding. I don't recommend anyone read his collection of short stories 'Priest', but if someone took the trouble to read the novella within that collection, it is a good picture of student life (particularly seminary life) in Maynooth in the 1970s and it has a certain value from that point of view. The writings of Father Pádraig Standún (who still is a priest) give a picture of Maynooth in the late 60s and early 70s.
2. Other seminaries. There were a few experiments in the 80s and 90s, first to regionalise through the country and then to centralise in Maynooth. Nothing really succeeded. St Patrick's College, Thurles maintained a very conservative ethos - cassocks in the seminary and black suits outside (the traditional dress for Irish seminaristswho are not either deacons or solemnly professed religious in the street is a black suit with a white shirt and black tie) and solemn liturgies in Latin (Ordinary Form of course). This died a death when Mgr Bill Lee became Bishop of Waterford and the seminary died a death soon after. Most of the big seminaries had their homosexual cliques - as I mentioned this affected the religious orders too and I heard a rumour of such a subculture in Miltown Institute. The most dramatic thing about St Peter's in Wexford was that it went from ultra-strict to ultra-lax almost overnight.
3. Deans. The point that Uriah is putting across is that some deans in Maynooth (and deans have a lot more influence than professors) were good - the one himself and Beinidict are talking about was very good. Conversely, some deans were bad. I can think of one there for almost two decades between the 70s and the 90s who seemed to advance the careers of the worst students and attempt to kick out the best. Very uneven.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Dec 21, 2011 13:23:14 GMT
If anyone looks inside page three of the current Catholic Voice, they will see an abject apology to Father Michael Collins (Killaloe Diocese), a director of formation (as they now call deans) in Maynooth. A September article alleged Fr Collins physically pulled a kneeling seminarian into standing position during the Eucharistic Prayer, something CV now accepts did not happen.
So, we have to be careful about what we say and what we listen too on this topic.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 21, 2011 15:10:47 GMT
Indeed - I saw that apology too. CATHOLIC VOICE should really exercise more editorial caution. This is one reason why I prefer to comment on public-source statements like IRISH TIMES articles, Garry O'Sullivan's IRISH CATHOLIC editorials, and the ACPI website. OTOH I don't know of many written accounts of some of the matters we are discussing here, so we have to try to keep each other informed.
On St. Peter's - I don't think the problem was just the move from a strict to a lax regime; the rot went deeper. One of the priests discussed in the Ferns report had been detected abusing a student in the 1960s, was sent to England for therapy by Bishop Herlihy, allowed to come back after a few years and to continue teaching in the seminary on the grounds that he deserved a second chance, with the inevitable result.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 18, 2012 9:59:29 GMT
Anyone see Fr Kevin Hegarty's letter in this morning's Irish Times (18 January 2012) under the title 'Cloistered Seminarians' (most likely a sub-ed's title, not Fr Hegarty's: Sir, – I was disappointed to read in Noel Whelan’s column (Opinion, January 14th) that the few seminarians in Maynooth are to be locked in behind newly erected doors, seemingly on foot of a recommendation of the apostolic visitors that Pope Benedict sent to Ireland last year.
Today’s seminarians are usually so rigidly pious and theologically conservative that, I reckon, they require regular exposure to secular reality rather than incarceration in a spiritual ghetto, even if that is where they prefer to be. Should these seminarians be eventually ordained, they will have to minister in a complex world, not in an incense-filled cocoon. – Yours, etc,
Fr KEVIN HEGARTY,
Carne, Belmullet, Co Mayo. At least Fr Hegarty recognises what most present-day seminarians are like - he probably doesn't realise they are reacting towards his generation of priests in a way they did towards the previous generations.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 18, 2012 19:54:53 GMT
Yes, and certain people on the ACPI site are insinuating that seminarians who favour orthodoxy, traditional liturgy and priestly dress must be repressed homosexuals: www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie/2012/01/michael-commane-dominican-the-new-missal/#comments[These are comments 20 and 21. For earlier examples of ignorant rants by Mary Burke in the ACPI comboxes, see the ACPI thread] Martin January 13th, 2012 at 3:02 pm Come on Eileen! I know a couple seminarians in Maynooth. I hear that in the hot summer months they see young couples and immodestly dressed girls relaxing on the expansive lawns. Now those areas have apparently been sealed off. I suppose some Swiss Guards might also be flown in to provide extra security during peak periods. Mary Burke January 13th, 2012 at 10:32 pm Martin, are you based in the US? Anyone who knows anything about Irish seminarians knows that the issue of immodestly dressed girls is most likely to be the least of their concerns.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 18, 2012 19:58:08 GMT
Noel Whelan's column was interesting - and depressing - in its own right because it held up the 70s mingling of the seminarians in the social life of the university as exemplary, without enquiring whether it might have had a down-side (for which see the discussion of Michael Harding earlier in the thread), and because it claimed that secluding seminarians from the lay world and encouraging them to form a priestly espirit de corps was responsible for the clerical abuse cover-ups; i.e. any attempt to revive traditional semi-monastic forms of seminary life will be accused of preparing the way for more abusee, and the rational behind it will be dismissed out of hand.
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Post by shane on Jan 19, 2012 0:03:06 GMT
Unfortunately I fear Mary Burke may have a point, at least from what I have heard.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jan 19, 2012 11:26:50 GMT
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