The Collar: A Year of Striving and Faith Inside a Catholic Seminary

Sacred Heart, located in Hales Corners just outside Milwaukee, is America's largest Catholic seminary specializing in second-career priests: men who have already held jobs and, in some cases, married and raised families. A generation ago, when priests were plentiful, such older men would not normally have become candidates for holy orders. In Sacred Heart's entering class of 2002, however, the average age was 45. Englert, a Columbia School of Journalism graduate and Catholic convert, spent a school year trailing five of the seminary's 80 students—a hyperactive ex-Marine, a blind proponent of social justice, two middle-aged divorcés and a widowed septuagenarian—chronicling their classes and their downtime, their conflicts and their hopes. Most but not all would complete the course: "The aura that drew people to the profession couldn't necessarily sustain them through the steps that were required to join it." Throughout the account, Englert remains invisible: this is the seminarians' story, not his own. Occasionally his comprehensiveness turns tedious; not every conversation or classroom lecture moves the story along. Nevertheless, readers will find his portrayal of priestly formation both compassionate and eye-opening, and it should be required reading for anyone thinking about becoming a priest. (Apr.)