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Dear Father Angelo, Holy Vigil of the Lord’s Nativity,

With joy I am here to write to you about a concern that has entered my heart, can you explain the need for detachment from the family for a young person who is about to enter the seminary?

Thank you very much for your always timely response.

I pray for you.

Priest’s answer

Dear friend,

1. To avoid misunderstandings, it is necessary to distinguish between those who enter the seminary and those who enter a religious institute.

Those who enter the seminary feel the call to diocesan priesthood, under the authority of the bishop and at the service of the faithful in various parishes.

2. Those who enter the seminary are not strictly required to detach from their family but rather to prepare to receive intellectual and spiritual training that keeps them away from their family for a certain period and makes them suitable to be a good priest.

In some ways, however, they always remain at home.

If you’ll allow the comparison, even footballers have to stay away from home due to retreats and daily training.

A similar thing happens also for those who for study reasons have to move away and settle returning home only for Christmas, Easter, and the summer period.

3. In some way, they leave their family when, now a priest, they are assigned to this or that parish.

It is a detachment similar to that of someone who gets married and leaves their family.

With this difference, however: while married children go to live elsewhere and in some way uproot from their own family, the priest, when he returns home to his parents, returns to his own home, where he still has his room, his bed, and many of his personal effects. That continues to be his home.

4. Different, however, is the case of those who enter consecrated life, that is, into a religious institute or convent.

For them, material detachment from the family is also required because they follow the Lord like the apostles, leaving home, father, mother, brothers, sisters, and fields, as the Gospel says.

Their condition is different from that of the secular or diocesan priest. He not only is the living image of Jesus the good shepherd but in a more radical way chooses the same form of life taken by God when he became incarnate. And that’s shown through the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

5. However, it should be immediately specified that the detachment from the family is only material and not emotional because the bond with relatives, especially with parents, remains: it is a blood bond.

6. But perhaps you were asking something else, namely detachment not only from the family of origin but also from forming a family.

The Second Vatican Council in this regard gives an answer that is still relevant.

Here is what it says: “Celibacy has a many-faceted suitability for the priesthood.

For the whole priestly mission is dedicated to the service of a new humanity which Christ, the victor over death, has aroused through his Spirit in the world and which has its origin «not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man but of God» (Jn 1:13).

Through virginity, then, or celibacy observed for the Kingdom of Heaven, priests

are consecrated to Christ by a new and exceptional reason.

They adhere to him more easily with an undivided heart (1 Cor 7:32-34)

they dedicate themselves more freely in him and through him to the service of God and men, and they more expeditiously minister to his Kingdom and the work of heavenly regeneration, and thus they are apt to accept, in a broad sense, paternity in Christ.

In this way they profess themselves before men as willing to be dedicated to the office committed to them-namely, to commit themselves faithfully to one man and to show themselves as a chaste virgin for Christ (1 Cor 11:2) and thus to evoke the mysterious marriage established by Christ, and fully to be manifested in the future, in which the Church has Christ as her only Spouse.

They give, moreover, a living sign of the world to come, by a faith and charity already made present, in which the children of the resurrection neither marry nor take wives.” (PO 16).

7. The priest, although renouncing his own family, does not remain without family and affections.

He experiences how true is Christ’s promise: “Everyone who has given up house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.” (Mt 19:29).

Thank you for the promised prayer. I gladly assure you of mine.

I bless you and wish you every good.

Father Angelo