The goal of the Spiritual Formation Program is to form future priests to be men who continually work to establish an intimate relationship with God the Father in Jesus Christ His Son through the Holy Spirit.

As the Program for Priestly Formation makes clear, “The seminarian is invited to put everything he is and everything he has at the service of the Gospel...His interior life gradually draws him deeper into the priestly, self-sacrificial path of Jesus” (PPF, 228). As the intellectual formation program seeks to give candidates to the priesthood a thorough understanding of the Church’s heritage of theological insight into the revealed word, and as programs of liturgical and pastoral formation prepare future priests to bring that heritage to expression in worship and service, spiritual formation helps each seminarian to appropriate the Catholic tradition by grounding himself in a personal relationship with the Triune God who is the point and purpose of all ministry, study, worship and service, and to the Church and its mystery of ecclesial communion.

At Saint Joseph’s Seminary, the goal of Spiritual Formation is to form seminarians who will have a confident sense of their identity as diocesan priests, for whom personal fulfillment and a fruitful ministry will be derived from a vital relationship with Jesus Christ, and who will nurture that relationship by good habits of prayer, reading and self-discipline.

Holiness of life and human maturity yield an inner freedom essential to lifelong celibate commitment to serve the Church. Often, priests must respond readily, calmly, and consistently to innumerable and often complex demands. The challenge is met successfully by priests who are daily renewed by an active interior participation in the Eucharistic mystery and by the rhythms of private and communal prayer.

A happy and healthy priest interiorizes the demands of pastoral charity, chaste celibacy, simplicity of life, and obedience to ecclesiastical authority. These demands are intrinsic to his relationship with Christ the Priest.

Spiritual formation at Saint Joseph’s is designed to assist a seminarian in his vocational discernment with increasing clarity and conviction in each stage of formation. It also helps in the establishment of a routine of prayer that can sustain priestly life and ministry.

Spiritual formation contributes to a seminarian’s growth in human virtue, emotional maturity, self-possession, inner freedom, detachment from self, concern for others, especially the poor and the suffering, and a deep love for the community of Faith, the Church. The Spiritual Formation Program places great importance on personal responsibility for one’s own interior growth. The seminarian’s life of prayer will deepen as he comes to love the Scriptures, value silence, and cherish a personal relationship with the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus and of the Church.

The seminary requires every seminarian to join with the community at the daily celebration of the Eucharist and Liturgy of the Hours. Seminarians are encouraged to use the Sacrament of Penance regularly and frequently, and the spiritual directors offer regular opportunities for Confession in addition to the celebration of the sacrament offered in the midst of spiritual direction itself. Another essential moment of spiritual formation is both communal and personal periods of Eucharistic Adoration, where the seminarian encounters “the source of pastoral charity, the love that animates and directs those who walk in the footsteps of the Good Shepherd, who gives his life for his sheep so that they may live” (PPF, #229a).

Seminarians participate in a spiritual retreat at the beginning of each semester (an in-house retreat in August and a five-day retreat in January), a day of recollection each semester (on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and the Solemnity of St. Joseph), and canonical retreats mandated before diaconal and presbyteral ordination. Spiritual formation conferences form an important component of all stages of formation. The intellectual dimension of also includes a course in the history and literature of spiritual theology, which is taken by all first-year seminarians in the Configuration Stage.

An essential part of spiritual formation is the relationship of each seminarian to their spiritual director. Every seminarian is required to choose a canonical spiritual director and will meet with him bi-weekly (PPF, 229d) The spiritual director works with the seminarian to help guide him in the interior life and develop a personal routine of daily prayer that includes time for private meditation, an examination of conscience, spiritual reading, the recitation of the rosary, and time before the Blessed Sacrament. The development of a close and trusting relationship with the director helps the seminarian to give concrete application to the principles and ideals of priestly formation, arrive at a better self-understanding, meet his own particular challenges to spiritual or human growth, review his use of time, examine his study and recreational habits, reflect upon his interaction with others both in and out of the seminary, and interpret his own interior life and discernment.