Chicago closes its seminary high school. Good.

By educating young men who would later become priests and bishops, law enforcers and political leaders, Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary helped shape a city and a church.

But in the end, the same shrinking enrollment and escalating costs that have plagued other schools in the archdiocese brought down the historic high school seminary.

On Tuesday, the archdiocese announced Quigley would close its doors in June 2007, marking the end of an era and signaling a significant shift in how the American church is drawing young men to the priesthood. [...]

A majority of families chose Quigley for its college preparatory curriculum. Even Cardinal Francis George has pointed out that Quigley has produced more lawyers than priests.

I know what you're thinking. The American church is drawing young men to the priesthood? (Rimshot.) Seriously, I hate to stomp on the ashes of a beloved institution, but this is a wise choice by the Chicago archdiocese. There's something disturbingly arcane about steering boys toward a demanding lifetime vocation at an age where some malls won't let them in alone.

Besides, I've resented Quigley since the time I happened to meet five of its graduates at a church mixer. All of the young men were married or engaged (you guessed it--not priests.) When I wondered aloud about the odds of meeting five seminary graduates who ended up choosing lay life, they corrected me: as it says above, most Quigley students don't end up choosing the priesthood. One of the guys, with creditable diffidence, mentioned that he and his parents made the choice because "it's basically a good deal": any boy with "sincere interest in the priesthood" can get financial help to attend Quigley.

Obviously this begs the question: Sincere interest? THEY'RE LIKE 12. In effect, the Archdiocese of Chicago has been offering a free or discounted Catholic education to any child--oops, male child--who agreed to "consider" the priesthood. So now that it mostly turns out lawyers and aldermen, they're closing the school--the investment no longer bringing desired returns. Despite the emotional cost to some in the community, it's a worthy gesture of respect to the laypeople whose dollars keep the archdiocese working.

Dorothy Day on Married Sex

A commentor asked why people in marriages where one spouse has AIDS shouldn't just practice abstinence. It reminded me of this great vignette from Dorothy Day's (also great) biography by William D. Miller:

Dorothy invariably greeted the arrival of her grandchildren with joy and in her notes, at least, seemed not overly stricken when the persistently fruitful Tamar [Dorothy's daughter, who was married, very poor, and eventually had eight kids] would inform her that another was on the way. Once a priest, though, offended her mortally with a saturnine rejoinder when Dorothy told him of the onset of Tamar's fourth pregnancy. . . . His rejoinder was "not much control there." "Having heard this from other Jansenist Catholics, I could control myself to a certain extent," said Dorothy, "but for a priest to say such things . . . Do you know the facts of life, I wanted to say. Instead I said meekly,'Once a year may produce such a result.'"

Day was dismayed at this priest's thoughtlessness about marital relationships and plenty steamed about his slight of her daughter. Not only did she publish their conversation in the Catholic Worker the next month, Miller says, she recounted it in the same space 24 years later.