MY NEW BOOK FOR BISHOPS, PRIESTS AND SEMINARIANS

Cover Photo - The Bishop and Presbyterate of the Diocese of Ogdensburg, New York

AVAILABLE ON "AMAZON BOOKS" IN A FEW DAYS

 

INTRODUCTION 

This is a collection of live presentations, published magazine articles and addresses to specific groups, presented and written over several years. I decided to publish them in their original form as they were written and presented at the time, rather than trying to update them as if they were written as part of an academic cohesive whole which is evidenced by some repetition of the presented matter. 

In June of 2001, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops published their book  “The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests” as a follow-up to Pope John Paul II’s 1992 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation “I Will Give You Shepherds.” 

During that time, I was the Vocation Director for the Archdiocese of Louisville from 1998-2003. I was very much influenced by both books – to the point that I practically had them memorized or at least heavily marked up. 

While I was Vocation Director, I was influenced so much by the USCCB’s “The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests” that when I was invited by the monks of Saint Meinrad Archabbey to address the whole community during a Day of Prayer on any topic I chose related to vocations, I chose to talk about Chapter Three of The Basic Plan, “The Ongoing Formation of an Entire Presbyterate.” I focused especially on this quote at the end of the book: “To pursue the ongoing formation not simply of priests, but of a presbyterate as a whole, brings us to new territory. The corporate sense of priestly identity and mission, although not fully developed even in official documents, is clearly emerging as an important direction for the future.” This quote gave me my direction for the future. 

In my two presentations, entitled “A Modest Proposal,” I asked the monks to consider adding a post-ordination ongoing formation program as serious and focused as the initial formation of their seminary. At that time, both the seminary and most dioceses were offering haphazard, hit and miss, stand-alone, often repetitious, day-long programs.  

The monks thought it was a great idea, but they said they did not have the funds for such an ambitious program. A year or two later, as I was finishing my stint as our archdiocesan Vocation Director, the Lilly Endowment announced their “Making Connections” grants. hearing of my “modest Proposal” to the monks of Saint Meinrad Archabbey, they invited us to apply for one of those grants. We ended getting an almost $2,000,000.00 grant. 

At the end of my term as Archdiocesan Vocation Director, and right before the monks hired me to develop the grant application, I wrote a small book in 2004 entitled “Intentional Presbyterates: Claiming Our Common Sense of Purpose as Diocesan Priests.” I simply gathered as much material as I could find about “presbyterates” from church documents and published articles and put it in that little book. 

With funds from our Lilly Endowment grant, we mailed out free copies of that book to every bishop in this country and Canada. many bishops followed up with orders of multiple copies to give to their priests as Christmas presents. It has been re-printed several times and has even been translated into a couple of languages (Spanish, Vietnamese and Swahili). 

Bishop Edward Burns of the Diocese of Dallas, when he was a priest serving as the Executive Director of the Secretariat for Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations at the USCCB in Washington, D.C. from 1999-2008,sent me a note saying that “the title of your book itself has captured the imagination of priests and bishops across the country.” 

When Saint Meinrad Seminary received the large “Making Connections” grant from the Lilly Foundation and we started designing our new ongoing formation program for priests, I was adamant that it be called “The Institute for Priests and Presbyterates” so that it clearly included not only the formation of individual priests after seminary, but the ongoing formation of presbyterates as a whole as well. 

For individual priests, I personally developed and taught a pre-ordination “Introduction to Presbyterates” class in Second Theology and “Transition Out of Seminary and Into ministry” class in Fourth Theology in the School of Theology. Our Board of Directors helped design several programs like: “Settling into Priesthood,” “Gearing Up to Be Pastor, “First Pastorates,” “World Priest Program,” “Mini-Sabbaticals,” “A Cruise Retreat for Busy Priest,” “Pre-Retirement” and “Retirement” programs.  

During this time, for presbyterates as a whole, I was committed as part of the grant to design and lead six Presbyteral Convocations in several American dioceses. In all, I designed two Presbyteral Convocation models: Intentional Presbyterates I: “Made Holy by Our Shared Ministry” and Intentional Presbyterates II: “Claiming Our Responsible Freedom as Individual Priests.” I presented well over 100 of these convocations in dioceses in ten different countries: all over the US and Canada (sometimes returning to do both models), as well as Europe and the Caribbean. I was so busy in those days that I turned down invitations to India, Nigeria, Singapore and Tonga in the Pacific region. 

During this time, in 2011, I put together another book entitled “A Bishop and his Priests Together.” It contained my own reflections as well as the reflections of several US bishops. Complimentary copies of this books were mailed out to bishops, mostly those in English speaking countries, around the world. I was also invited to address the body of USCCB Bishops at their spring meeting in Florida (2007) and the Bishops of the Antilles Bishops’ Conference in Trinidad (2016) on the subject of how bishops could build more unified presbyterates. 

Retired now, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to offer, in print, many of the presentations and published articles that I wrote on presbyteral unity over the years and put them in one book for those who might be interested and find them useful even today.