Seminary Town

Every weekday, at 15 minutes past noon, the bronze doors of Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University swing open. Four hours of lectures in Latin have just ended, and as the 2,600 students at the world's largest Roman Catholic seminary pour down the marble steps of "the Greg," a babble of a dozen languages fills the air. Germans, known in Rome as gamberi rossi (red lobsters) because of their flaming scarlet cassocks, mingle with purple-clad Scots, Latin Americans in black robes and blue sashes with seminarians from the U.S. in black soutanes with red-andblue cinctures.

Every year more than 7.000 clerical students are in residence in Rome, Catholicism's foremost university town, studying for baccalaureate, licentiate (roughly equivalent to a master's) or doctoral degrees in philosophy and theology. During the mornings, they listen to lectures at either the Greg, the smaller Lateran (1,500 students), Urban (900) and Angelicum (700) universities, or at one of the eleven assorted institutes and "athenaea" operated by the church's big religious orders. The rest of the day they work, study and pray at 39 residential colleges maintained by national hierarchies and religious congregations.

Changes on the Way. In Rome, as always, tradition counts for more than innovation, and the kind of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council has been slow to catch on in the seminaries. Changes are, however, on the way. At many of the colleges, the rigid discipline of the past has been relaxed to give more adult freedom to the seminarians. In February, Pope Paul named France's progressive Archbishop Gabriel Garrone as second-in-command of the conservative Congregation of Seminaries, which keeps a close watch on the curriculums of the Roman schools. Last week another hopeful change took place: the venerable Greg got a new rector, French Canadian Jesuit Herve Carrier, 45. Sociologist Carrier, who studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne, has a number of changes in mind for the university's regime, including the substitution of discussion groups for some lectures and the introduction of more field research.

Rome's seminary system began to take shape after the 16th century Council of Trent, which ordered every diocese to support and properly train its own priests. In 1552 St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, set up the Gregorian. Eventually, Catholic prelates from other countries created col leges in Rome so that their brightest seminarians could study under the Greg's good Jesuit teachers or with the Dominicans at the Angelicum (founded in 1580). Once back home, graduates soon found that a degree from Rome was the sort of clerical credential that led to quick promotion. Study at the English College, founded in 1578, is all but essential for elevation to the English hierarchy, and one-third of the 300 U.S. bishops were trained in Rome.

Of the 500 U.S. seminarians now studying in Rome, more than half reside at the North American College, founded in 1858 and now occupying modern quarters on the Janiculum Hill overlooking St. Peter's. Until recently, the North American had just about the stiffest discipline of any of the national colleges: students could not talk at meals or visit each other's rooms, were only allowed to leave the college in groups of three. "It's like the Russian guards in Berlin," explained one seminarian. "If one tries to get away, the other two can shoot him." Things have gradually eased up since the Most Rev. Francis Reh, formerly Bishop of Charleston, S.C., took over as rector in 1964. Reh has abolished such restrictive rules as compulsory lights-out, given seminarians full freedom to leave the college premises whenever they want to--providing that they are home for dinner.

Capital Ways. For the seminarian, the years in Rome constitute a unique opportunity to learn the subtle ways of Catholicism's capital and to study under some of the church's best minds: English Jesuit Frederick Copleston, a distinguished historian of philosophy, or German Redemptorist Bernard Haring, generally considered Catholicism's top moral theologian, who teaches at the Academia Alfonsiana (a branch of the Lateran). Otherwise, the training is not much better--and in some ways worse --than what they would receive back home. While U.S. seminaries have all but abandoned Latin for lectures and brought their curriculums closer to those of secular liberal-arts colleges, the courses at Roman universities are still heavy on dogmatic theology and canon law, and the emphasis is on rote learning rather than creative thinking.

Pope Paul has frequently expressed his conviction that the training of priests must be brought more into line with modern pedagogy--and the appointment of such men as Archbishop Garrone and Father Carrier is a step in that direction. The changes will come none too soon for the seminarians, who have lately displayed signs of restlessness at the archaic rules that still determine their training. Last year one group of students at the Greg circulated a petition demanding an updating of the curriculum, began to boycott classes when the administration gave a temporizing response. As it happens, Father Carrier is much in sympathy. One of his first acts as rector will be to set up a new liaison committee with the seminarians to give them a greater sense of participation in the government of the school.

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