Big news came out this Thursday! The St. Joseph House of Formation is getting a new name: St. Philip Neri Seminary.
This is a great step for our diocese, and it’s a great moment for us here at St. Joseph Parish. While the seminary no longer bears the same name as us, it will bear our imprint on the diocese. Our parish has a privilege that no other parish in our diocese has: we host the seminarians every Sunday of their school year. While they all come from a parish, they also get to share in ours. They sing with us, pray with us, get annoyed at my silly dad jokes with everyone else, and listen to our babies crying. When they’re with us at the 9:30, I sometimes think of the Exsultet, the wondrous prayer chanted about the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil, which proclaims,
“Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,
arrayed with the lightning of his glory,
let this holy building shake with joy,
filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.”
Additionally, when people ask us about our parish, we can say that there is a seminary on our grounds, and if they’re not from around here they won’t be confused anymore by trying to figure out what a House of Formation is.
In practice, nothing will change at the parish due to this. You will see some new signage on the House of Formation Seminary buildings. The seminarians will still attend Mass with us. They will still engage in their apostolates both here are in other parishes during the school year. The biggest difference is that they won’t share our name anymore.
We priests first got wind of the move from House of Formation to formal seminary after last school year was winding down. As you might have read in the Catholic Advance, Bishop Kemme asked us to send any suggestions for names to Fr. Chad. So, as you might know about me, I decided to give him my two (or three) cents in person. After telling him he should just keep the name and call it “St. Joseph Seminary”, I also said “St. Matthew Seminary” would be great too. (Gotta represent for my guy!) I also told him there were a few names I really didn’t want to see for the seminary. My serious suggestion to Fr. Chad was to name it after St. Ambrose. In early June, Bishop communicated with us priests about the new name, St. Philip Neri Seminary, and he asked us to keep this private until the announcement in August. If you read the articles in the Advance, Bishop and Fr. Chad have given some good insight into why this is a great name for the seminary. I particularly love this quote from Fr. Chad: “St. Ignatius Loyola tried to get St. Philip Neri to become a Jesuit. St. Philip Neri resisted, saying, ‘The world is your parish, but my parish is my world.’ That’s really how we want our diocesan priests to be: The parish is the world where we live and love and serve and sacrifice ourselves.”
Just so you know, that is how every pastor should feel about his parish, and I’m not afraid to tell you that St. Joseph is my world. It’s where I am called to be, to minister, and to become a saint by sacrificing myself for all of you.
I will close with one of St. Philip Neri’s maxims: “The love of God makes us do great things.”
May we here at St. Joseph Parish and the seminarians at the (soon-to-be) St. Philip Neri Seminary be set on fire with God’s love so that we can do great things.
Thanks,
Fr. Matt