Kenrick-Glennon Seminary

Skilled craftsmen from various construction trades are busy carrying out the renovation and expansion of Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in Shrewsbury.

The recent "Faith for the Future" capital campaign for the seminary is providing resources for much-needed improvements. The campaign has supported updates and repairs to the building and directed funds to an endowment.

The project includes remodeled student rooms and common areas, extensive library renovations and additional faculty offices and classrooms.

National Vocation Awareness Week, observed this year Jan. 9-14, is the annual celebration in the United States to promote vocations to the priesthood, diaconate and consecrated life through prayer and education, and to renew prayers and support for those who are considering vocations.

When John Stearns talks about vocations he makes sure to remind people to ask others -- even single professional men who may seem settled in their career -- if they would consider a vocation.

We can easily view the seminary as some mysterious fortress or institution into which we shall likely never set foot and which has little, if anything, to do with our lives. On the contrary, the good news is that it is our place, and it has so much to do with us all.

The seminary is God's gift to us.

It has long been said that to measure the vibrancy and the heartbeat of a diocese, we can look to its seminary. It is our future. Candidates for the priesthood are the shepherds Our Lord is raising to lead us in the future of the Church, the "shepherds after His own heart" (Jeremiah 3:15).

It's not easy to feed and house a few strapping young men. How about 113?

That's the enrollment at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, the archdiocesan seminary that has prepared men for the priesthood for more than 100 years. Just as the seminary gives to the people of the archdiocese, so the ordinary Catholics in the pew can give back through the annual Christmas collection, a longstanding archdiocesan tradition that provides significant help meeting ongoing expenses all year long.

Enrollment at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, the seminary of the St. Louis Archdiocese, is stable, with 113 current seminarians, said president-rector Father John Horn, SJ.

"We are stable, with relatively the same numbers, following a significant dramatic increase in recent years. In the last few years we have had between 110-120 seminarians enrolled," Father Horn said. Enrollment was at a 20-year high in 2010, according to seminary records.

WASHINGTON -- In his first months as rector of Theological College in Washington, Father Phillip J. Brown has been confronting a problem that the national diocesan seminary for the U.S. Catholic Church "has not had for a long time" -- it is bursting at the seams.

Enrollment is maxed out for the 2011-12 academic year at 90 seminarians. Five of those seminarians are back in their dioceses this year gaining pastoral experience, but a Sulpician seminarian and five priests from other countries also live there, bringing the total number of residents to 91 plus faculty members.