Here I am!! Classes started yesterday… yes on Labor Day. That was a little odd. I kept checking the mail and wondering when it was going to be in, the I realized it was a federal holiday but I still had my normal Monday schedule. I have now had all of my classes that I will have for this quarter (they run on a 10 week quarter system here instead of on a semester system.
My first class was on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The CCC is a wonderful book that condenses all of the major teachings of the Church. There have been various catechisms though the history of the Church, but this one was released in 1992… after a period of time for people to digest the works of the Second Vatican Council so that they would be able to expand on it in a more modern/relevant way. This doesn’t mean that they catered to modern society, just made it more readable and applicable to the further understanding that comes with time that the Catholic Church has had to develop over its 2000 year history. This class is taught by a priest who previously taught in a college level seminary but has just returned from 5 years of running orphanages in Latin America.
The second class that I had was my philosophy seminar 1 which is taught by a priest who has been teaching here and running the “pre-theology” program here for nearly 25 years. The Church wisely believes that we need to study philosophy before we can really get into the study of theology. Philosophy has many definitions (which philosophers tend to debate) but we are approaching it from the aspect of having to deal with whole knowledge that is applicable to many/all aspects of life. It is said that Philosophy is the base from which all knowledge grows… we’ll see how I grow to understand it.
The last class that I have on the Monday/Thursday rotation is my Choir class. This is a requirement at some point during our studies, and I figured I’d take it now to get the basis growing. It isn’t as if the inability to sing well would prevent ordination (as is obvious at churches throughout the world) but it would be nice to be able to improve my singing ability so if God continues to call me towards the priesthood it isn’t painful for people to listen to me (as it would be at this point).
After classes last night we had our first Rector’s Address of the year. This was just an introduction talk for the year and a welcome to all. Msgr. Lyle (the rector) gave a brief introduction and welcome to the new faculty for this year, then gave a little reflection and spoke about some model priests which he had been reading about. This was kind of a thing to get us motivated towards growing in the direction of becoming good priests. This address was followed by a social to chat with others in the seminary community.
Today I started my classes with a class on Introduction to Spiritual Life. Obviously we all should have a spiritual life before starting here but this is just a guide on ways to grow in our spirituality. I will get into that more in the future as I get a better feel for how it is being taught.
My next class of the day on the Tuesday/Friday rotation is Anthropology, or more specifically philosophical anthropology. So basically the study of what it means to be human and the way that thought has developed over the years. This is taught by the same professor/priest who teaches my philosophy class so it appears that they will work together very closely.
The last class that I have is Latin 1. Although they will readily say that we won’t be fluent in Latin to any extent they require a whole year (3 quarters) of Latin. This will give us a better basis of understanding theological texts and ideas that were originally written in Latin. There are obviously translations available to those, but we will be able to look at the original Latin writing to better understand the nuances in the wording that may not come through in the translation. At a later time I will be taking two quarters of Greek to be able to look at the scriptures in the same way.
I think that I am really going to enjoy my class load this quarter… the Latin will most likely be the most difficult, my head was swimming after this the first session, but it does seem that the priest who teaches that is very good at explaining, and repeating so that we can learn well.
As I have said in a previous post Wednesdays have no classes as we will have a field education. I had hoped to be assigned to jail ministry for this, but so did a pretty good portion of my class so I ended up being assigned to a nursing home. I am actually pretty excited about this too, as I don’t have a whole lot of experience in this setting. That doesn’t actually start for a couple of weeks yet, but will continue for the whole academic year (aside from breaks).
In addition to class we of course have daily Mass and prayer time. I will write more about that aspect in a future post.
Peace,
Adam
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