Cardinal Urges Seminarians to Rely on Authentic Catholic Teaching

Catholic News Service – September 10, 2012

WASHINGTON (CNS) — In a letter to seminarians of the Archdiocese of Washington, Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl encouraged them to rely on authentic Catholic teaching in their preparation for the priesthood, so that they will be able to share the truth of the church’s teachings with the people they will one day serve. He urged them to look to the Catechism of the Catholic Church as a sure guide on what the church teaches.

“Your need to be well grounded in authentic Catholic teaching is important, first for your own participation in the great, living teaching tradition of the church,” the cardinal said in his Sept. 3 letter to the archdiocese’s 74 seminarians.

“One reason why you are required to take so many courses in Catholic teaching, history and philosophy is so that you are not only aware of the immense gift of the great Catholic tradition, but that you are also well prepared to access it, understand it, appropriate it and share it,” he added.

The cardinal titled his letter “Faith Seeking Understanding in the Life of the Seminarian.” He said that as priests, they will be ministering to people in a materialistic, secular world who, in their worldly culture and by alternative voices claiming to be Catholic, have been taught things that are counter to church teaching, especially in the area of sexual morality. The cardinal noted that Pope Benedict XVI has warned of college and university theology teachers who have presented “teachings that were never accepted as part of Christ’s Gospel,” as new teachings “in the ‘spirit’” of the Second Vatican Council, and those theologians’ false teachings have been amplified in the secular mass media. Cardinal Wuerl likewise warned of theology teachers, even at Catholic institutions of higher learning, who are “reproposing Christ, his church and his teaching.”