Archives: Product Reviews

“Msgr. Murphy believes that priestly formation is at a crossroad. He views the recent American seminary visitations and important new publications on priesthood, both sociological and theological as the impetus to look more closely at how our priests have been and are being educated. Msgr. Murphy has been the rector of the North American College in Rome. The creation of this book comes from both his personal experiences in seminaries and from his good scholarly research.

Msgr. Murphy begins with a look at seminaries from their very beginnings. The 16^th and the 17^th centuries were pivotal in the creation of seminaries in their modern sense. Although the first directives of the Council of Trent were directed at poor, uneducated men desiring priesthood, they soon expanded their perspective to promulgate decrees that these youths be nourished and religiously educated in the disciplines of the Catholic Church. The first chapter also reports the important contributions to the creation of the modern seminary by Saint Charles Borromeo.

Msgr. Murphy relates the story of the other developments of the 16^th and 17^th centuries especially in France where the concepts of priestly spirituality were added to the current academic, ‘scholastic’ model. Saint Vincent de Paul and Saint Philip Neri and the establishment of the Society of Staint Sulpice are discussed.

Msgr. Murphy jumps to the Second Vatican Council and the concepts of Christian community and its mission to the world with the impact on seminaries and the formation of a different priest. Ratio Fundamentalis and Pastores dobo obis are explained in detail.

The last two chapters deal with the new seminaries established to form priests for this new mission of the Church—conversion, community, and mission. The book ends with a look at an experimental seminary begun in Paris in 1985. Here is also a section titled ‘Implications’ that looks at the future.

This is an interesting work for all those involved in priestly formation, both seminary faculties and vocation committees in parishes. It gives us an excellent picture of where seminaries have been and where they may be going.”

This is the first new English translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Garden of Roses and Valley of Lilies in four hundred years, and it is enchanting. The instruction and inspiration of the author of the perennially popular Imitation of Christ have been rendered into language that is fresh, lively, and perfectly suited to Thomas’s aphoristic style.

Griffin’s [translations] are books you can actually use as devotionals. Take them into your prayer closet and read them as they were meant to be read, slowly, a chapter or two at a time, as you think and pray about your life in God. You won’t be hearing the distant and thus irrelevant voice of a remote and impossibly pious saint.  Through Griffin’s brilliant recoveries of the originals, you are going to hear a wise and intimate voice speaking to you in shockingly contemporary and sprightly terms about ultimate things—things you know in your heart.

With Griffin, not only do inaccessible Christian classics become extraordinarily readable and personal, but we discover how much our own age has to learn from the past in terms of wisdom, devotion, and practicality.