DOUBTS HAVE been raised as to whether the Irish College in Rome will continue as a seminary for the Irish Catholic Church.
The college was founded in 1628.
Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said yesterday a recent announcement that three priests on the college’s formation staff were to return to Ireland had been “related to the ongoing future of the Irish College . . .”
He had been asked by The Irish Times whether the announcement was related to last year’s apostolic visitation to the college, as to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, by Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York.
“I’d say it’s related to the ongoing future of the Irish College, rather than directly with the visitation. The big question the visitation never addressed was how can Ireland at the moment maintain two seminaries,” Dr Martin said.
There are 23 Irishmen studying for the priesthood at the Irish College in Rome, out of a total of 58 seminarians there. The remaining 35 candidates for the priesthood there are from 22 different countries.
At the moment there are 72 seminarians in Maynooth.
“For me the question for the Irish College isn’t the staff, it is where are we going to get the students for it? If it’s going to be a vibrant seminary then you need the candidates,” he said.
“We have to find a way in which we’ll have a sufficient number of seminarians to make it a viable seminary . . . it could become a postgraduate house or some of it could be a postgraduate house . . . At the moment the Irish are in the minority [there].”
Asked whether there were cost factors, he said: “There is a financial question involved because costs are going up, like everywhere else. If numbers go down . . . you buy less food, but the basic maintenance of the place and staff would be there . . .”
Of the three priests at the college who are to return to Ireland, he said one had been there a long time and it had been suggested that another may have requested a return to Ireland.
Besides, “it isn’t a bad idea to change,” he said.
Their replacements would be Irish, he added, while the newly appointed rector there Fr Ciarán O’Carroll “has my full support and I think from everybody else. I think he is doing a good job”.
Speaking “personally, as somebody who lived in my early years in Rome in the college of another nationality I have only reason to be eternally grateful. It opened my mind to a totally other world and I still draw the benefits from it.”
He lived at the Teutonic College then and recalled that “its best days were when there was a good strong core of Germans”.
However “there was one particular period when there were many nationalities [and] it began to lose its identity,” he said.