AMBLER, Pa. (OSV News) — A newly built campus for a historic seminary in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia reflects the “mentorship and accompaniment” crucial to seminarian formation in the 21st century, Auxiliary Bishop Keith J. Chylinski of Philadelphia told OSV News.
“Formation today is very different than it was 50 years ago,” said Bishop Chylinski, rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in the Philadelphia suburb of Ambler. “I think the focus today is really on forming the whole man in a deeply individual way, in a deeply holistic way.”
Emphasizing community and communion
In addition, he said, “seminary formation invites us today to foster a sense of living in community, and being a man of communion.”
Those principles are embodied in St. Charles Borromeo’s new structures, which — after a decade-long process of discernment and development — welcomed seminarians to a modern, light-filled and what Bishop Chylinski called “right-sized” campus this September.
Nestled on approximately 15 acres adjacent to Gwynedd Mercy University (which was founded by the Sisters of Mercy), the exterior of the seminary’s buildings — designed by Voith & Mactavish Architects of Philadelphia and New York — evokes California’s iconic Franciscan missions.
The resemblance is not lost on Bishop Chylinski, who like Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Pérez and Pope Francis, consistently exhorts the faithful to become missionary disciples in sharing the Gospel.
The new campus of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Ambler, Pa. (OSV News photo/Gina Christian)
The new campus: A place of hope
Natural light “pervades the whole” of the seminary’s buildings, said Bishop Chylinski, who recently gave OSV News a personal tour of the campus, the land for which was purchased for $10 million (aided by a $3 million gift from the Maguire Foundation to Gwynedd Mercy University). Construction costs totaled $54.5 million.
The former location, sold to Main Line Health for $43.5 million, will be redeveloped over the next 10-12 years as a health and wellness campus comprised of senior living facilities, a hotel and medical offices.
The design of the new site, completed by liturgical art old and new — including several stained-glass windows plus altars and other consecrated items from the former location — creates “a beautiful weightiness to the campus,” said Bishop Chylinski. “There’s a sense of worthiness, a sense this is a place really set apart to form men. I think the guys are very encouraged by that.”
That reassurance has been much needed, admitted Bishop Chylinski, who found himself “managing a lot of grief in the community” as it prepared to relocate from its longtime home, which also saw visits from St. John Paul II and Pope Francis, as well as three cardinals who would later become pope: Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII); Cardinal Giovanni Montini (St. Paul VI) and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). St. Teresa of Kolkata and Mother Angelica both received honorary doctorates from the seminary, which produced more than 80 bishops.
A historical transition
Yet the latest transition is far from the first for St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, which since its founding in 1832 by Bishop Francis P. Kenrick has been a kind of “seminary on the move” for almost two centuries. The original campus in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood quickly proved too small, even with the purchase of an additional building. St. John Neumann, the fourth bishop of Philadelphia, expanded St. Charles Borromeo to the Philadelphia suburbs, with a minor seminary for high school students as well as college freshmen and sophomores.
In the 1860s, a tuberculosis outbreak among the seminarians and young priests led the saint’s successor, Bishop (and later Archbishop) James F. Wood to consolidate the campuses and relocate the entire seminary to a more rural site outside of the city. Ultimately, the bishop — a former banker — was able to secure the 137 acres that became St. Charles Borromeo’s Overbrook, Pennsylvania, campus.
By the 1920s, however, the seminary had outgrown its initial buildings at the Overbrook location, prompting then-Archbishop and later Cardinal Dennis Dougherty — nicknamed “God’s bricklayer” by Catholic historian Charles R. Morris — to construct a college building and additional chapel. The project enabled the seminary to accommodate almost 600 seminarians during the 1960s, amid a postwar population boom that saw the number of Catholic priests in the U.S. hovering around 60,000.
Bishop Chylinski said the expansion under Cardinal Dougherty was “a real providence.”
“After World War II, those were the numbers,” he said. “We actually needed all of that space to form the future priests of the archdiocese and beyond, due to the baby boom, when you had that real spike in population and in vocations.”
In the ensuing decades, though, “there began to be a slow but steady decline” in seminary enrollment, said Bishop Chylinski.
According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, there were 59,426 total priests, diocesan and religious, in the U.S. in 1965, a number that dropped to 34,092 in 2023. Priestly ordinations have fallen about 44% from 1970 to 2023.
Now, said the bishop, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary has “about 140” on the new campus, with room for “another 20” in its propaedeutic house, where men first entering the seminary live in community with priest formators.
Addressing the decline in vocations
The downturn of vocations has an upside for seminary formation, said Bishop Chylinski, who holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology and specializes in the integration of seminarians’ human, spiritual and psychosexual development during the formation process.
“There’s much more individual attention, frequency of meetings and a real sense of mentorship,” he said. “Fifty years ago when you had 600 seminarians, you weren’t getting that kind of individual attention. It was hit or miss whether the priests really knew you on a deep level.
“They would see how you behaved, they would see how your attendance was, they would see how your grades were and all of that. And the priest would know you to a certain extent, but the way that the documents frame formation today, it goes into a much, much deeper, integrated level, looking at our psychology, our spirituality, our whole person.”
Bishop Chylinski also noted that “a good, qualified priest faculty” is essential for such formation — although “with some of the vocation crunches that are happening in different dioceses, that’s harder to find,” he added. “But we’re very blessed here in the archdiocese and with our sending dioceses, who have been very helpful to us in that regard.”
Building strong relationships
Along with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, seminarians at St. Charles Borromeo hail from the dioceses of Allentown, Harrisburg and Greensburg in Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Arlington, Virginia; and Lincoln, Nebraska. “We’ve had a very long and fruitful relationship with the Diocese of Lincoln for many years,” said Bishop Chylinski.
The seminary also has a close relationship with the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, which has sent several of its seminarians to St. Charles Borromeo in recent years.
Regardless of their home diocese or eparchy, men pursuing a priestly vocation are on a path that requires the love and support of the church as a whole, said Bishop Chylinski.
“The word that the Holy Father uses often is a very good one, especially in the context of formation — ‘journey,’ because it really is a journey that a young man takes as he’s leaving the world, his school and maybe future career plans,” said the bishop. “All of a sudden he’s leaving that environment and coming into this very intentional environment to discern the priesthood. And it’s a journey that really means the accompaniment of priests and lay faculty and a whole team from the seminary — both faculty and staff, who really help to invite the seminarians into a sense of safety, a sense of belonging, really a sense of family.”
That experience, which the seminary’s new campus is designed to nurture, can then translate into effective pastoral ministry, Bishop Chylinski said.
“If you’re a good brother, a good son … and you know how to relate to people in all these different contexts, those are the skills that you’re going to need as you go into parish ministry, because the parish truly is the family of God. It’s the local place where we are united around our Eucharistic Lord, that living together in communion,” he said. “A priest needs to experience that. He can’t just isolate in his room and not engage. And with a smaller scale setting, that really helps to foster that. You know, a guy can’t just hide, he can’t just isolate. He has to really, in a very tangible way here, experience the fact that he belongs, and that we love him, that we care about him, and that he truly belongs to the kingdom.”
Celebrating new beginnings
With Archbishop Pérez set to bless the new campus on Oct. 12 amid a two-day grand opening, Bishop Chylinski and the St. Charles Borromeo community are ready for the next chapter in the seminary’s history.
“I felt like I was managing a funeral last year (with the relocation). But having moved here now, I feel like I’m celebrating a baptism,” said Bishop Chylinski. “There’s just this new life, this energy and excitement and realization that the Lord is still with us.
“The Lord is not confined by a building,” said the bishop. “He’s truly present, and he’s gone before us, and he’s graced us with this very beautiful new place to continue the mission that the seminary has to form missionary disciples, future priests, shepherds after the heart of Christ.”
