A Concord Pastor Comments: St. John's Seminary: my alma mater

The allegations against Archbishop Theorodre McCarrick are both tragic and troubling as once again the Church faces the trauma of sexual abuse in its own house and the victims it has claimed. Now comes the news that my own alma mater, St. John's Seminary in Brighton, is being investigated for some of the same elements found in the McCarrick story.

Both of these revelations leave me stunned, unsure of what to say or write except to express my sorrow that there seems to be no end to what which drains our Church's energy and spirit and to pray for the healing of those who have been abused.

With my ordination in 1973, I left St. John's. Since then I've not had much contact with the seminary but I'd agree with those who frequently observe that over the last four and a half decades St. John's has become, in many ways, an increasingly more conservative institution where a particular brand of orthodoxy is both taught by its faculty and expected of its students.

The reports of the McCarrick story and now this development at St. John's suggest or explicitly charge that seminaries are and have been long been homes to a gay subculture tolerated or even promoted by faculty and administrators. My seminary experience is as dated as it is limited but seminaries have always been known to be small communities where the rumor mill is always grinding and there are few secrets. So it's with some degree of confidence that I can say that such a culture wasn't the seminary world I lived in for eight years (two years at Cardinal O'Connell Seminary in Jamaica Plain (closed in 1970) and six years at St. John's in Brighton).

I don't write here to defend what may well come to be proved to be indefensible. Nor do I presume to speak to the experience in other seminaries or predict what truth will and must be uncovered in all of these stories. I can only pledge my own prayer, and ask for yours, for any who have been victims in these situations and for reform and renewal in seminary administration and in truly pastoral priestly formation that will benefit the work of the gospel and the spiritual lives of the people of God.