Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Cloistered seminarians

Letter in today's 'Irish Times'

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.

No comments:

Featured Post

Manchán has moved on. We will miss him terribly

Róisín Ingle’s piece in The Irish Times yesterday. In all our lives there are moment of sadness, despair, pain, anger too. Reading Ingle’s c...