Two posts in the last few days from Commonweal about Leo:
"CTU is attached to no university, but it offers graduate degrees in theology and ministry. It was formed in 1968, after the Second Vatican Council, when men’s religious communities like Pope Leo’s Augustinians responded to the Council’s reforms by combining schools that trained men for the priesthood into CTU. Those schools wanted their candidates to be in a bustling city, near the University of Chicago, in conversation with people from other faiths, and attending classes with laypeople. "
That pretty much summarizes my article on his seminary education. What this article gives is the precise details of what was going on at that time:
"When Pope Leo attended CTU between 1978 and 1982, scholars on CTU’s faculty were leading the development of contextual theology. As Pope Francis described it in 2023, a contextual theology is one that begins from the lived experiences of people in many different places and cultures and searches for God within those experiences—where, indeed, God always can be found.
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"Because CTU trains men from many religious communities, those communities send students from all around the globe—some sixty countries as of this writing. Once I taught a class of twenty-two students who, themselves, represented twelve nations. CTU is an unusual environment that way, and students often raise vital questions about theological constants: “What will this mean to the people in my home country?” “
"This is the CTU that Pope Leo would have known in the days when Schreiter was teaching. He would have heard those questions being asked, and he would have watched his professors working to answer them. Pope Leo met the global Church at CTU."
"At the heart of all Pope Leo’s journey is a theological vision rooted in contextuality. This is important. In recent decades, contextual theology has become a little controversial. The calls for doctrinal clarity coming from more traditional voices in the Church prefer to emphasize constancy—more of a one-size-fits-all theology than an accommodation for the diversity of human experience."
My Comment: What the author is calling contextual theology is what I, and others such as Guitterez would call spirituality. Guitterez got into a lot of trouble about his book on Liberation Theology. He did not get into trouble when he wrote We Drink From Our Own Wells on the spirituality of the poor. A far more accessible and less controversial book. The Church is full of spiritualities, Augustinian, the desert solitaries, Benedictine, Ignatian. Not only can these very different spiritualities live together in community they can live together in the same person as the last three have done in my own life.
"To be Augustinian is to be shaped—like Augustine himself (not the order’s founder but its inspiration)—by a deep sense of both interiority and community. Augustine is known for writing the first personal memoir and the first soliloquy (a word he invented). He was always surrounded by a community of friends, and he articulated a deeply ecclesial understanding of Christ. Where some mystics have a personal, almost individualistic sense of the afterlife, Augustine famously described heaven as a city.
The Augustinians are shaped by this interiority and communality, by their origins as hermits called to community. And so the Constitutions of the Order St. Augustine states, “we always turn back to ourselves, and entering within, diligently work toward perfecting our heart.” But it also states that “community is the axis around which Augustinian religious life turns.” Grounded in a rich interior life, the Augustinian friar is called into a “communion of life.” His restless heart is always yearning to be with God and neighbor.
This combination of interiority and communality is not for the good of the order alone. It is also a means of evangelization and an attitude toward the world at large."
My Comment: The Church has just had a strong dose of Ignatian Spirituality; now it is likely to get a strong dose of Augustinian spirituality. They are similar but not the same. They are not incompatible. Aquinas has a treatise on states of perfection which includes both being a bishop and being a religious. What happens when a religious becomes a bishop. While he is no longer bound by his religious role, it is fitting that Benedictines who become bishops promote the Divine Office, Franciscan who become bishops exemplify poverty even if they no longer have a vow of poverty. We have not elected many religious to the papacy in modern times, maybe doing so would promote the universality, diversity and catholicity of the Church which are all one.
"Pope Leo met the global Church at CTU."
ReplyDeleteThat is a powerful summary of his experience at CTU.
Given his experience of his own religious order's spirituality along with that of many other religious orders in his fellow seminarians along with a diversity of cultures, and his experience across cultures as the head of the order, he has been ideally formed to be a leader of unity within diversity, and of course values synodality, walking together in our diversity.
That's interesting, I didn't know about CTU
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt he has multicultural immersion. His time in Peru was considerably longer than his time in seminary. He also spent a dozen years as head of the Augustinian order, a role that presumably required world travel. And he spent a couple of years in Rome prior to his election as pope.
ReplyDeleteI imagine all of that was formative. But I wonder if the formation that reaches the deepest is the first 14 or so years of his life in the Chicago Archdiocese. If so, then perhaps it's fair to consider him as essentially American.
Our life experiences during the high school, college, and graduate school years (i.e., from age 12 up to about age 30) have a disproportional weight in shaping our world views. People who experienced the depression, or World War II, or Catholics who experienced Vatican II during those years tend to keep those frameworks, even when substantial life changes occur later.
ReplyDeleteLeo’s minor seminary formation, a left over from pre-Vatican II together with his religious family upbringing may have given him an American Catholic conservative bent. He may not, however, had the opportunity to make formative personal decisions there that would shape his future. It is not just what you experience in your sounding but how you react that shapes you for the long term.
However, he went to Villanova because Augustinians no longer had a separate college seminary. There he lived in a part of a dormitory reserved for Augustinian candidates but went to classes mostly with lay students including women. In that Post Vatican II environment, he was likely encouraged to develop credentials (e.g. math major) that would prove useful if he decided not to enter the order. He most important decision from these years was his decision to enter the Augustinian Order at the end of college.
His theological formation at CTU was likely critical. He experienced a global church of diversity or religious orders and countries of ministry as well as women students and women faculty. I see his decision to go to Peru as a direct result of this theological formation.
His career thereafter seems to be an interplay of going back and forth between continued development of roles in Peru and roles in the larger church.
The CTU formation experience was both American and Global which set a path for a life lived both in the first world and the third world. Because it was and is so unusual it may point the direction to future seminary reform. If CTU can produced a papal candidate maybe there should be more CTUs!
I haven't attended a seminary, but much of my diaconate formation took place at University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL, which is the seminary of the Chicago Archdiocese. I had opportunities to observe seminarians, although it wasn't as close as one might assume: they kept the seminarians carefully segregated from us, perhaps because we were always with our wives; guessing they didn't want to expose the seminarians to men enjoying a happily-married life (!) This was not the same era as when Leo was at CTU; my formation was during the Cardinal George era. Even in the cafeteria for meals, a divider was pulled across the dining room so the seminarians could have half the dining hall to themselves, including their own food line. It was all rather monastic for them.
ReplyDeleteGeorge, like Prevost, was the head of a worldwide religious order for a time, and some of that cosmopolitan background was reflected in the faculty; there were professors from a number of countries. But on the whole, I don't think the experience I observed was like what is described here at CTU. But Mundelein was prepping men for diocesan service, which is quite different than religious order life in some ways.
Prevost would have experienced seminarians from many different cultures who had to interpret Catholicism for their own cultures. The article makes it clear that from the beginning the faculty at CTU were challenged by this situation to rethink theology. Leo would have observed them doing so during his formative years.
DeleteSocial science thinking about formative years says that it is not only what people see going on around them but how they react to it that is formative. Prevost by his choice of going to Peru obviously chose to become involved in interpreting Catholicism for another culture. He went to a part of Peru which had a heavy Opus Dei contingent of priests but chose not to use their traditional approach which was less sensitive to culture. All this says that the CTU approach had become part of his own thinking.
I don't know the exact years, but I think Prevost would have experienced CTU during the Bernadin era in Chicago. Bernadin used CTU to foster Black and Hispanic formation. I suspect that Mundelein like many large diocesan seminaries in the East has had a strong clerical culture that has been difficult to remake them into institutions responding to modern pastoral needs.
DeleteI believe Leo was at CTU from 1978-1982. That was just before Cardinal Bernardin arrived in Chicago (which was in August 1982). So it would have been during the Cardinal Cody years. But CTU was/is a religious order seminary; I don't know how much practical influence a diocesan bishop would have exerted over it.
DeleteI like your notion that our religious order popes bring aspects of their orders' spiritualities to the papacy and inject them into the mainstream of the church. I think we're blessed to be experiencing a renewal of the papacy. I hope it continues.