In May 2024, I will complete my fifth year on the full-time faculty at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & School of Theology (MTSM). This is in addition to the three years I taught as an adjunct. These have been the most satisfying eight years of my professional career. I should say “careers,” because there have been a few, some of them running parallel.

After completing my Ph.D. in theology at Boston College in 1993, I taught theology for five years at St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, TX, then made a career change. In August 1998, my wife and I packed up our five young children and moved from San Antonio to Durham, NC, where I enrolled at Duke University School of Law.

My initial intention was to return to teaching at a university or law school, but after finishing my law degree in 2001, I accepted a position at the Cincinnati office of a very large multinational law firm. This enabled my wife and (by this time) six children to return to our native southwestern Ohio. Since 2001, I have held multiple positions at two large firms, as in-house counsel at a local company and, finally, as a sole practitioner. So, I’ve had many interesting and challenging jobs.

But teaching at MTSM is special. It is a privilege and honor to teach at an institution tasked with the grave responsibility of educating and forming future priests, permanent deacons and lay leaders in the Church. Teaching at MTSM is more than a mere profession. Before one can teach theology here, one must obtain a mandatum from the archbishop, certifying that one is academically qualified and there is no known reason one is not otherwise fit to teach future priests. Upon accepting the position, in accord with the mandatum, one confesses an oath before the faculty that one will remain faithful to the magisterial teaching of the Church and obedient to the local ordinary.

Together, these steps indicate that the position is one of stewardship, and this includes teaching and other academic duties. My faculty colleagues and I recognize that we do not merely communicate the Church’s doctrine, but are also entrusted to guard and advance it. We are stewards of the doctrines of the Church. We are committed to both the explication of the

Church’s teaching and its protection. These are not to be taken lightly, a mindset I’ve embraced these past five years.

And what a five years it has been at Mount St. Mary’s! It has culminated in this academic year’s enrollment, the seminary’s largest in its history. This includes men from our archdiocese as well as from several others in Ohio and other states. We are especially blessed to serve as the seminary for the Diocese of Charlotte, NC (that other Queen City).

This spring, 16 MTSM graduates will be ordained to the priesthood, seven each from Cincinnati and Charlotte, one from Toledo and one from Louisville. These numbers are part of a positive trend in enrollment and ordinations over the past several years, a trend that does not appear to be abating. Needless to say, we are very grateful that God has blessed us with this increase in the number of men responding to the call to priestly vocation.

But the success and importance of MTSM is not measured merely by the numbers of its priest-graduates. Having taught each of this year’s ordinands for multiple classes, I am confident that these men are thoroughly prepared academically, morally and spiritually to fulfill the heavy burdens they will face in their ministries.

Through their years at MTSM, these men have developed a deeply robust prayer life. For them, prayer, in both private and liturgical settings, is not an obligation but a joy. Their days are ordered around the rhythm of prayer and liturgy. The discipline they practiced here will sustain them as they face the challenges set before them.

And they are academically prepared to articulate and defend the fulness of the Church’s teaching, in all its rich variety. They have learned to “think with the church,” which means having reverence for the Church’s doctrine consistent with its development. They have a dynamic and reflective approach, bathed in Scripture and guided by Sacred Tradition.

Finally, I am confident that the 2024 ordinands — like their recent predecessors — have the hearts of pastors. They know that truth and love can never contradict one another. But they also recognize that the articulation and application of truth must be guided by charity and its attendant virtues. These include humility, hospitality, patience and kindness.

May is the month of the Blessed Virgin Mary, graduations and ordinations. Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & School of Theology ties them all together in a season of joy and blessings.

Dr. Kenneth Craycraft holds the James J. Gardner Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and is the author of Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America

This article appeared in the May 2024 edition of The Catholic Telegraph Magazine. For your complimentary subscription, click here.