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A lengthy article
featuring S. Katarina Schuth appears in the November U.S.
Catholic, a special issue on education. The interview briefly
scans Katarina's background and early studies, including a
doctoral degree in cultural geography, researching literacy in
rural India, studying moral theology, and teaching at a
Minnesota college. Her work on seminaries "just fell into
her lap," she says. Her first book on seminaries, Seminaries,
Theologates, and the Future of Church Ministry (1999, Liturgical
Press) and, more recently, Priestly Ministry in Multiple
Parishes (2006, LP), earned her status as a national expert on
theological education. For fifteen years she was a
formation adviser at St.Paul Seminary School of Divinity of the
University of St.Thomas in St. Paul, MN, where she also teaches.
Katarina praises the seminary's teaching parish program, which
gives seminarians a taste of parish life: each seminarian is
placed in a parish where the pastor and staff, along with twelve
laypeople, form a team that works with the seminarian for four
years. "I would say it's been quite successful," Katarina says.
The article
continues in a discussion comparing seminary experience now and
50 years ago ("like night and day"), and critical areas of
formation: academic, pastoral, spiritual, and human. The
interviewer asks how the seminary helps form a man for the
priesthood, the kind of back-tracking seen with some men, the
internationals making up about one-third of today's seminarians,
what "middle Americans" want in their priests, and the effects
of the abuse crisis on today's men studying for priesthood. How
are these men taught to be pastoral when they go out to a
parish, and how do they learn collaboration rather than an
"in-charge" manner?
Finally, Sister
Katarina reviews briefly the reasons for fewer priests today,
and ends by expressing her own hopefulness for the Church: "I'm
a person of hope--
our faith is utterly resilient...I believe deeply in the
Eucharist, and that would keepme in the church no matter what
happened, that and the social teachings of thechurch as
proclaimed in the Gospel...It's an unshakable part of my life." |
