“Disciples are learners” (PPF 263).
The intellectual life is not ancillary to formation, it “is integral to what it means to be human” (PPF 261). But the intellectual life – love of truth, the desire to understand, delight in study and contemplation, the acquisition of wisdom – is distinct from mere ‘academic work.’
While applicants to the Pre-Theology Program come to the Seminary with varied academic backgrounds, they are nevertheless often “narrowly educated.” Their expertise, in other words, is confined to a particular area, but they frequently lack “the humanities, which would enable them to study [philosophy and] theology effectively, and make pastoral connections with the lives of the people whom they serve” (PPF 266a).
The Discipleship Stage of the Pre-Theology program entails a robust education in the philosophical disciplines.
Before engaging philosophy, however, Pre-Theologians in the Propaedeutic Stage are given the opportunity to approach study in a contemplative mode, divorced from preoccupation with grades, and self-imposed expectations of achievement. In other words, they learn to love study for its own sake, an attitude they meant to carry into the subsequent stages of formation.
Study is a major part of the seminarian’s life and it cannot be neglected without serious harm to his vocational pursuit. “It is necessary to oppose firmly the tendency to play down the seriousness of studies and the commitment to them” (PDV, 56).
“The study of philosophy is not just part of intellectual formation but is also connected to human, spiritual, and pastoral formation. Issues about priestly identity and the apostolic and missionary dimensions of priestly ministry are ‘closely linked to the question about the nature of truth.’ Philosophy serves ‘as a guarantee of that certainty of truth’ which is the only firm basis for a total giving of oneself to Jesus and to the Church” (PPF 281, quoting PDV 52).
Common Components
The Pre-Theology Program places as much emphasis on the content of study as it does on the habits acquired through its disciple.
The intellect is a spiritual faculty, and its cultivation constitutes a uniquely human perfection.
Although the diocesan priest is rarely meant to be a professional academic, the Church nevertheless deserves wise priests, whose minds have been healed from intellectual diseases and positively formed to adhere to the truth, and to teach and defend it.
Intellectual diseases – relativism, materialism, crass ignorance, mental sloth, confusion etc. – are prevalent in the culture. Curiosity, likewise, is a vice: an intellectual intemperance that gratifies the appetite for inquiry at the expense of wisdom. To properly cultivate the intellect, the seminarian cannot feed his mind on just anything and in any what whatsoever; he must choose what is important and ordered, according to the unity that befits his vocation.
The technology fast offers the seminarian an opportunity to step off the information superhighway, and to foster the temperance that restores the natural operations of the cognitive faculties, both sensitive and intellectual, to their proper ends. The fast aims, in part, to counter the overstimulation that begets a distracted mind, and to cultivate a mind at peace.
With its focus on sustained, careful reading of Scripture, doctrine, and literature, the Propaedeutic Stage aims to develop the habits of attention, creative imagination, memory, and wonder – which precede the fruitful study of Philosophy. The Discipleship Stage, in turn, focuses on the intellectual habits of understanding, judgment, and reasoning, seen in the seminarian’s capacity to make distinctions and connections, analyze wholes into parts, and synthesize parts into wholes. Writing, therefore, is more appropriate to the Discipleship Stage, since it presupposes the habits of good reading.
Features of the Propaedeutic Stage
Features of the Discipleship Stage
