Propaedeutic Stage

Kenrick School of Theology

Seminarians who enter Kenrick’s Propaedeutic Stage come with a variety of backgrounds in education and work experience. Many have completed college degrees and have basic skills in providing for themselves as adult men. Yet they may lack skill in properly understanding their temperament and personality, the dynamics of their family background, their capacity for building relationships, and their own psychosexual history. The Propaedeutic Stage is designed to explore these areas within the context of community living. This setting helps a seminarian become aware of his own gifts, talents, and personal history in ways that can be properly ordered towards a priestly identity. To gain this interior awareness, it is often necessary to retreat from the busyness of daily life and the consumeristic mentalities of our contemporary culture.  Therefore, periods of silent prayer, reflection, and spiritual reading are helpful for a man understand his interior life with greater clarity. Without this basic awareness of oneself, it is difficult to achieve proper integration of the interior life and can leave one feeling fractured, in which certain interior aspects remain unexplored or unrelated to Jesus. 

This interior exploration is not a solitary experience. Formation advisors, spiritual directors, and counselors assist each seminarian in acknowledging his personal history, doing so upon the establishment of a caring relationship of trust. As this relationship deepens with greater vulnerability, a seminarian gains the skills necessary to reveal himself in transparency before God and the Church, while also remaining docile to the promptings of those entrusted with his formation. In this process of self-discovery, it is hoped that a seminarian comes to appreciate his identity before God as a beloved son.  

  • During the Propaedeutic Stage, human formation consists chiefly in acquiring self-knowledge through trusting and vulnerable relationships forged in prayer, spiritual direction, formation, counseling, and friendship (PPF 6, no. 119).

    Components of the Propaedeutic Stage include:

    • Communal living

    • Formation Meetings

    • Growth Counseling

    • The Formation Agreement

    • Fraternity Days

    • Solitude and community

    • Technology fast

    • Chores

    • Process Groups

    • The Propaedeutic Seminar

    • Growth Reflections

  • “The seminarian is called ‘to live in intimate and unceasing union with God the Father through his Son, Jesus Christ, in the Holy Spirit.’ This is the foundational call to discipleship and conversion of heart. Those who aspire to be sent on mission, as the apostles were, must first acquire the listening and learning heart of disciples. Jesus invited these apostles to come to him before he sent them out to others” (PPF 6, no. 226).

    Components of Spiritual Formation in the Propaedeutic Stage include:

    • Daily Mass

    • Daily Recitation of the Divine Office

    • Spiritual Direction

    • Days of Recollection

    • Annual Silent Directed Retreat

    • Lectio Divina

    • Marian Devotion

    • Promotion of a rich devotional life

  • Intellectual formation in the propaedeutic stage at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary provides an “ideal opportunity to acquire an initial and overall familiarity with Christian doctrine by studying the Catechism of the Catholic Church” (PPF 6, no. 268). In conjunction with the technology fast, the features of the intellectual formation program aim to “familiarize the seminarian with the great schools of theology and the spiritual masters” (PPF 6, no. 269).

    • Catechism Series

    • Catholic Culture Seminar

    • Salvation History Timeline

    • The Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

    • Christian Anthropology

    • English Grammar and Writing

  • The end of spiritual, human, and intellectual formation at the seminary is pastoral charity. Although parish work more properly befits the Configuration and Vocational Synthesis Stages of formation, the practice of pastoral charity begins in both the world as well as in the seminary, with concern for the spiritual and temporal welfare of one’s brothers.

    • Service to the Poor

    • Service to L’Arche - Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

    • Pastoral Care of the Elderly

    • Poverty Immersion and Christ in the City

    • Sunday Night Dinner

Next

Discipleship Stage