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All is quiet on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Seminary in the sultry, waning days of July with the seminarians off campus on their summer pastoral assignments.
Msgr. Peter Vaccari, rector of St. Joseph’s, expects things to be quite different in a few weeks time when the seminarians return joined by lay students, religious men and women, and candidates for the diaconate to begin studies for the fall semester.
“In total there will probably be between 250 to 300 students—seminarians, candidates for the permanent diaconate and those who are going to be involved in terms of master’s degrees,” said Msgr. Vaccari of the influx of students he expects at the four campuses that now comprise the inter-diocesan seminary partnership, which came into effect in November 2011 as a result of a joint operating agreement signed by Cardinal Dolan, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn and Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre.
St. Joseph’s in Dunwoodie, Yonkers, now the site for the training of all major seminarians from the Archdiocese of New York, the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Diocese of Rockville Centre, will welcome some 95 seminarians for graduate level study. Cathedral Seminary House of Formation in Douglaston, Queens, hosts the program for priestly formation of candidates at the college level. The Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington is home for graduate-level theological programs for laity and permanent deacons and for ongoing formation.
A fourth campus has been added this year in Poughkeepsie, on the site of Our Lady of Lourdes High School, for lay people who wish to study for their master’s in theology and don’t want to travel all the way to Yonkers.
St. Joseph’s Seminary is the single degree-granting institution. This spring St. Joseph’s was re-accredited by two agencies, the Association for Theological Schools and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. The re-accreditation process involved visits to St. Joseph’s as well as to the campuses in Huntington and Douglaston.
“The re-accreditation visits really represented the first fruits of the inter-diocesan partnership, the vision of Cardinal Dolan, Bishop DiMarzio and Bishop Murphy,” explained Msgr. Vaccari, who is a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn.
It wasn’t always thus at the three seminaries that now comprise the partnership. On their own, they were pretty quiet year round with perhaps a few dozen souls rattling around the halls even at the height of the academic year.
“It’s going to be quite different than it was four years ago,” Msgr. Vaccari told CNY during a recent visit to the verdant campus on the edge of Yonkers. “Prior to the partnership, here in Dunwoodie and Huntington, the number of seminarians enrolled in each program obviously was less.” Msgr. Viccari said one obvious benefit of bringing all the seminarians together to Dunwoodie for their priestly formation was the positive social and fraternal impact it would have on the men.
“Now you have the experience of seminarians living within the same seminary, praying together here, worshipping together here, studying together here,” he explained. “Their social life, their sense of building a fraternity within the presbyterate is directly impacted in the way in which they study together. They have a much greater sense of the world in which we live. At the end of last year I started to look over the statistics and profiles for this year. We have 19 different countries of origin. So the seminary is a very good sampling of what has been a history of the Church in the United States in general and in New York in particular.
“It’s an immigrant church,” Msgr. Vaccari noted. “And that immigrant experience is seen from the life of these seminarians. Their pastoral work gives them a better appreciation for the life and the needs of the Church throughout the New York region whether it’s in Suffolk County, or in Orange County, or in Kings County or in Manhattan. They’re all becoming kind of more familiar with the needs of the Church, with the issues that the Church confronts.”
And this year the New York seminarians will be joined by other seminarians from the Dioceses of Bridgeport and Albany. Last August Bridgeport Bishop Frank Caggiano sent three of his seminarians to study at Dunwoodie and at the end of last year he announced he would be sending three more this August. He also announced that he would be sending his permanent deacon candidates to St. Joseph’s for their theological training. The Diocese of Brooklyn has also decided to run its deacon program through St. Joseph’s academic offices. Albany Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger will also be sending three of his seminarians here to study, renewing an historic relationship with St. Joseph’s dating to the late 19th century.
“So when we open in September we’re going to have New York, Brooklyn, Rockville Centre, Bridgeport and Albany as dioceses,” Msgr. Vaccari said. “In addition to that the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, we refer to them affectionately as the CFRs, who have been sending their men here for many years, will continue to send them here along with the Piarists who have sent their men here for a number of years, and the Idente Missionaries. And we’re very happy that Thomas Mar Eusebius who is the bishop responsible for the Syro-Malankara Catholic Apostolic Exarchate in the United States and Canada is also sending his seminarians. So in the seminary not only do we have a very good vision of the universal Church, we also have that universal Church reflected in both the Latin Church and the Eastern Church!”
All these seminarians will be interacting with the lay students, the diaconate candidates and the men and women religious on campus. Msgr. Vaccari said this cross-pollination of ideas and backgrounds is beneficial to the priests-to-be.
“I think it’s healthy because this is the church that these men are moving into in the future as priests,” Msgr. Vaccari noted. “If they are sitting in an elective and they’re talking about questions maybe that pertain to faith and culture, they’re with lay people, people who are candidates for the permanent diaconate. People who are concerned and are as interested as they are in big questions concerning faith and culture, faith and science, all these issues.”
Students on all campuses this year will again be able to video-link via teleconferencing technology for lectures and special presentations. Ryan Williams, assistant dean for the Huntington and Douglaston campuses, says it is important that the three campuses be fully integrated. He said he is excited by what’s going on at Huntington and Douglaston.
“At Huntington we have a big cohort of lay students,” Williams said. “One of the things that’s been exciting for me is that for the last few years we’ve been giving single credit workshops that are open to everyone, even people who don’t have an undergrad degree. Those have been really well received getting upward to 25 people per subject.
“Over at Douglaston we have two new, exciting programs. In the last several years we’ve developed the master’s of arts in Catholic philosophical studies. All seminaries in the United States require their seminarians to study philosophy in advance of studying theology. The second new, exciting opportunity has just happened this year when the Diocese of Brooklyn decided to also run its deacon program through our academic offices. So now, not only at the Huntington campus but at the Douglaston campus we’ll be having cohorts of deacon candidates for the Diocese of Brooklyn studying theology.”
Last year St. Joseph’s formed a partnership with America magazine, the award-winning Jesuit weekly, to sponsor a lecture series. That partnership will continue this year. The theme will be on Latino Catholicism in America. Seminarians will also be visiting the United Nations this month to gain an appreciation of the work of that world body. They will be addressed by the Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the U.N. Archbishop Bernardito C. Auza on the role of the Holy See in an institution such as the U.N.
It is all part of what Msgr. Viccari sees as an opening up of St. Joseph’s Seminary to the wider world. “Things have changed,” he said. “The life of a seminarian to be trained as a future priest can’t take place in isolation. There has to be this fundamental outward thrust. Programs that we have so men can better appreciate hospital work, prison ministry, service to the poor, all this has to be included.
“If a priest is going to follow Jesus his heart has to be formed into the heart of a shepherd present to everybody, the sick, the poor, the marginalized. The priest has to be there for everyone. He can’t pick and choose the people he wants to serve. Jesus doesn’t say that anywhere.”
