Faith: Future priests more committed

WASHINGTON, April 17 (UPI) -- The Church has overcome near-collapses many times in the last two millennia. In the Reformation era, for example, much of the northern German countryside had turned pagan again, while in other parts nunneries were de facto brothels for traveling nobles, and often contained more children than sisters.

Now, as U.S. cardinals prepare to meet with Pope John Paul II in Rome to discuss the pedophilia scandal, their denomination actually seems to be on the mend.

The abuses were rooted in the bygone era of "a highly sexualized culture," according to head of the oldest Catholic seminary in the United States.

Meanwhile, an entirely new crop of divinity students is currently preparing for the ordained ministry, the Rev. Robert F. Leavitt, president and rector of St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, told United Press International Wednesday. St. Mary's was founded by French priests in 1791.

"At an average age of 30, they are older and more mature than their predecessors," he said in an interview.

"For many, this is the second career. They tend to be tough men. Many made this decision in the face of a lack of understanding by their families, who opposed it."

Like instructors of divinity schools -- Catholic or Protestant -- on other parts of the world, Leavitt sounded pleased with the new, "centrist kind of seminarians" in his school that currently has 100 students from 28 dioceses in the United States, Europe and Africa.

"They are open to modern theological thought. They are not afraid of new ideas. At the same time, they want to be rooted in Catholicism and its tradition."

According to Leavitt, "this new profile of a seminarian is recent. It took shape in the 1990s -- in some cases perhaps already in the late 1980s." The rector, who reaches fundamental theology, attributed this development especially to the "witness of the present pope."

"His moral and spiritual courage has won him much respect because it stands in contrast to the Clinton way of doing things. John Paul II doesn't take polls before he acts."

This special quality of the current pontiff, who will turn 82 next month, still seems to be rallying young people around the world.

"Name one period in history when such an old man was capable of mobilizing millions of boys and girls wherever he showed up," the Rev. Jean Joncheray, vice rector of the Catholic Institute (university) in Paris, once challenged this columnist.

"A generation ago, things were different," St. Mary's president Leavitt allowed, pointing to an "eccentric interpretation of celibacy as something that did not include chastity."

He criticized advertisers of that period for "lowering the threshold of the sexuality of children and presenting children as sex objects."

Leavitt called this and "the gay movement's hostility to the teachings of the Church" factors that contributed to the pedophilia crisis now plaguing U.S. Catholicism.

But, said the rector, the new, more mature and serious seminarians, who are about to enter the priesthood, "welcome the obligation to celibacy and chastity. They see it as a challenging sacrifice and virtue."