Ordination Is Not a Remedy: The Ongoing Work of Accompaniment and Discernment

A man is ordained after six years of formation. His formators noted warning signs — persistent loneliness, an unresolved attachment pattern, a tendency toward isolation under stress — but the diocese needed priests, and the problems did not seem disqualifying enough to hold him back. Within three years he is broken by celibacy he was not prepared to live and by parish life that exposed every wound formation had left untouched. The diocese got its priest. The man paid the price.

A recent University of Notre Dame study from the McGrath Institute for Church Life, "Do You Know Them to Be Worthy?," frames this scenario as a structural problem rather than an individual failure.[^1] The report calls for stronger psychological screening of seminary candidates, regular therapy and assessment throughout formation rather than a single pre-admission evaluation, and an explicit institutional commitment to vocational quality over filling vacant rectories.[^1] Those recommendations rest on a claim about what priesthood is and what a man must actually be capable of before he can exercise it.

The freedom that celibacy requires

Celibacy lived as priestly gift is an act of love — total, sustained, specific. John Paul II's theology of the body teaches that authentic self-donation presupposes personhood: individual identity and psychological integration are necessary preconditions for the capacity to give oneself to another.[^2] A man who has not worked through significant attachment wounds, or whose anxiety is still governed by what Benedict Groeschel called "driven need," pathological desire functioning as a mechanism for discharging anxiety, cannot freely give what celibacy asks of him.[^3] He can comply with its external requirements for a period. He cannot give himself through it.

Screening exists not to protect institutional reputation but to determine whether a candidate possesses, or can genuinely acquire before ordination, the freedom in love the vocation demands. That determination requires more than one evaluation at admission — it requires ongoing accompaniment through formation, since the purgative work of those years is where unresolved conflicts surface most forcefully. Groeschel's account of spiritual development holds that pathological desire does not disappear when a man enters seminary; it relaxes its grip only as anxiety recedes through genuine interior work.[^3] Skipping that confrontation defers the conflicts into ministry, where the pastoral stakes are far higher.

What formation cannot substitute for

Thomistic psychology draws a clear line between virtues genuinely acquired and the external performance of virtue. Titus, Vitz, and Nordling, writing in the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, note that acquired moral virtues are built through intelligent effort and virtuous practice, and that some people "experience difficulty in their works, by reason of certain ordinary dispositions remaining from previous acts" — Aquinas's own language for the drag that unresolved habitual dispositions exert on moral action even after a person commits to change.[^4]

Ordination does not supply what formation failed to build. The sacrament confers office and grace for that office; it does not retroactively install the stable dispositions years of seminary life were meant to cultivate. This is precisely why Vatican II's decree on priestly formation, Optatam Totius, insisted that firmness in candidate selection must be maintained "even if a deplorable lack of priests should exist," since those not qualified are to be guided "at an early date," and in a fatherly way, toward other paths.[^5] The staffing shortage does not override the formation standard.

The mercy that honest accompaniment offers

Fr. Benedict Groeschel, who worked pastorally with priests who left ministry, pointed to loneliness and vulnerability as the warning signs seminaries most often failed to address.[^3] His observation aligns with the Notre Dame study's call for ongoing psychological support: a single pre-admission screening identifies gross contraindications but cannot track a candidate's interior life across years of formation. Standardized testing instruments have real diagnostic power at a point in time, but they are not formation tools; formation must be the sustained structure within which psychological and spiritual integration happens, with professional support available continuously rather than as a single gate at the entrance.

The framing that treats exclusion from Holy Orders as cruelty gets the logic backwards. Honest accompaniment, which may conclude a man is not ready or not suited for ordained ministry, is what the Church's care for him actually requires. Guiding him toward another path, with genuine pastoral support, preserves the freedom he brought to discernment in the first place. Ordaining him over unresolved wounds, to serve a logistical need, exposes him to a foreseeable and public fall. The mercy is in the honesty, not in the ordination.

Quality as the condition of gift

The Notre Dame study's most consequential finding is institutional: U.S. seminaries have, in some cases, allowed the pressure of priest shortages to lower the effective threshold for advancing candidates.[^1] Groeschel named the same temptation decades earlier in The Reform of Renewal, arguing that the easy answer to vocations shortages, relaxing clerical discipline and standards, had been widely adopted in American Catholic life.[^6] The parallel, separated by decades, suggests the pressure is chronic rather than episodic.

If celibate love is a free gift of self, freedom is the condition under which the gift can be given at all.[^2] A man formed to that freedom, through genuine psychological work and the stable dispositions Aquinas understood as the architecture of moral action, is the priest who can give himself to a parish for thirty years without breaking.[^4] He is rarer than dioceses would prefer. He is also the only kind of priest who can actually do what the Church is asking him to do. The study is an invitation to build formation structures equal to that demand, and to extend to every candidate the most fundamental pastoral act available: the truth about where he is, offered with enough time and support to let him respond to it freely.

References

[^1]: Matthew McDonald, "US Seminaries Need to Improve Screening and Support for Priesthood Candidates, Study Finds," National Catholic Register, July 17, 2026; Fr. Thomas Berg and Timothy Lock, "Do You Know Them to Be Worthy?" (McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame, 2026); Jack Figge, "Report Highlights 'Startling Disconnect' Between Seminary Formators, Psychological Experts," The Pillar, July 16, 2026.

[^2]: John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Pauline Books & Media, 2006).

[^3]: Benedict J. Groeschel, Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development (Crossroad, 1983).

[^4]: Craig Steven Titus, Paul C. Vitz, William J. Nordling, Matthew McWhorter, and Christopher Gross, "Fulfilled in Virtue," in The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Divine Mercy University Press, 2020), pp. 249–305.

[^5]: Second Vatican Council, Optatam Totius: Decree on the Training of Priests (1965), §§6–7.

[^6]: Benedict J. Groeschel, The Reform of Renewal (Ignatius Press, 1990).