Tale of two seminaries

The day started with a visit to Coin to celebrate the Eucharist for nine people in the Eglesia de Cristo chapel. I then drove back to La Cala to pick up Linda for a special outing to Malaga. On the way we collected John Le Page, the retired but still very active Church Army Captain, who is a member of the Chaplaincy ministry team. After the Week of Praye for Christian Unity meeting in Malaga Cathedral back in January, Mgr Jesus Catala Ibanez, the Archbishop, promised to invite all the non-Catholic pastors working in his diocese to meet for lunch. One personal blessing of being a locum priest here for the past three months is being around long enough to see that promise fulfilled.

The meeting was to be held at the Archdiocesan Spirituality Centre, a substantial complex of buildings out in the suburban hills up and behind the coastal plain. With the help of Linda's satnav, we negotiated the winding streets down and uphill from the urban Autovia and arrived punctually where we were meant to be, joining a group of thirty odd lay and ordained people in ministry to expatriate communities, Anglicans, Presbyterians, various European kinds of Lutherans - Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch and German, being welcomed by the Archbishop and by the present Rector of the seminary, who was giving an historical talk outside the main entrance to the chapel when we arrived, before we went in to worship.

A first-fruit of Rome's response to the protestant reformation, founded in 1597, just after the Council of Trent, the entire establishment was once the seminary for educating and training priests for mission in a post mediaeval world, a hundred at a time, looked after by a community of nuns in a convent on-site. Now, there is no more than a tenth of that number of candidates in training. Very few nuns remain, and the convent is transformed into a retreat house and conference centre. On the same campus there are also church schools. 

The vast expanse of buildings, some dating back to the end of the sixteenth century, face south, and overlook a bowl of wooded hills which aren't built upon, so the environment feels secluded, peaceful and rural despite being surrounded on all sides by urban development. Given the modern appetite for land, it's amazing the church has resisted encroachments of this rather special oasis.

After the introductory historical talk, we gathered in chapel, a striking building with architectural forms that come straight from mediaeval Andalusian Arab architecture. There we were treated to a biblical reflection from the Archbishop on the theme of Christ the 'Good Shepherd', to whom the seminary is dedicated. 

He pointed out that this role model was one which all Christian pastors (male and female, he stressed) were inspired by and committed to follow. Our unity in service of others was found in the pastoral identity of Christ - a little masterpiece in the art of reconciling ecumenical theology. We learned that the seminary's founder had been beatified, but also that the Rector and a deacon seminarian (Blessed Juan Duarte of Yunquera) had also been beatified as martyrs of the Spanish Civil War a few years ago, murdered during that conflict in the 1930s. 

These historical fact no doubt help shape the priorities of the diocese when holding on to and adapting afresh for mission a four hundred year old institution facing a secularising society coping with new pathological expressions of extremist ideology. It represents a persistent expression of conviction that the church still has a vital offer to make in a changing world, and cannot do so without Good Pastors. Here´s a photo that was taken to mark the occasion.

The commitment to reshape this place of learning for a new future I found inspiring. Even more so after an email arrived on our way home after the meeting, telling me of the intention to close St Michael's College Llandaff for residential training in the near future - and this after all the enterprise and innovation undertaken by the Principal and Staff team over the past decade to re-shape its residential and non-residential training offer. 'Can't afford it', is most likely to be the excuse for termination. 

I believe our leaders and their expert consultants have lost the plot. Or they've lost the will to insist that life at close quarters for a year or more in a learning praying community is the only way to get people to understand in their own skins how to live and work together with others utterly different in temperament and faith priorities from themselves, whose company they haven't chosen. That's how generations of pastors have found out how to be 'good pastors' towards everyone they meet, not just those who agree with them, and go along with the quirks of their religiosity. I don't think the same can be achieved through short periods of residential training inserted into a largely home based programme, as it's always possible to avoid hard challenges, with the necessity of returning to the routine of parish life and distance learning. 

I believe that as a result, the church will suffer even more from loss of identity and purpose with an ensuing collapse into individualism and competitiveness, the opposite direction from the missionary demand for partnership and collaboration. I foresee that what gets demolished is destined to be re-invented in another forty years. Such a pity it has to be like that.