We are trying to restore the Mass; we are trying to restore the formation of the Catholic
priesthood; we’re trying to restore the soul in the hands of God.
The importance of this project is basically the essence of the Society of St. Pius the
X, according to the desire of Archbishop Lefebvre, the Society’s main goal is to form priests.
They’re going to have to have a very strong and solid formation and a place where they
can come back to when they’re being beaten by the world; they need a refuge and that
refuge will be the seminary.
If you have a good, solid building, it can help inspire the seminarian, no doubt about
it.
We are human beings; we are dependent on our senses; we receive all the information through
the senses and it’s definitely, let’s say, the place where we live will have a certain
influence.
A man is influenced by his surroundings because of the creation he lives in; God is the master
of man’s life.
He has created all the material realities that surround us and we live in harmony with
those surroundings.
The surroundings of a cloister, just like the surroundings in a seminary is to form
the spirit, to turn away from the world, to be protected from the influences of a materialistic-type
of world, and to turn the soul towards God.
With a Seminarian entering a seminary, he’s being formed by the walls around him, by the
acoustics around him.
The architecture is very, very important in that regard.
Practicality is the first, really, goal in any kind of construction – the rains falling,
so you need a roof, but there’s also a spiritual dimension that we cannot neglect.
And that spiritual dimension is to be able to speak to the people that live there on
a daily basis of God - and that’s the importance of this project: it’s enabling man to talk
to God.
The structure has to be there, the practicality has to be there, but it has to be a building
that speaks of God; it has to be a building that lifts the soul to God.
The Church expresses the beauty of God through the material building.
And that’s the idea of a seminary is to make them live in the spiritual realm.
The cloister means silence.
It’s a place inside; it should be, let’s say, surrounded by the walls and so it’s
kind of a courtyard inside where the silence should reign.
So helping to the prayer, helping to the meditation.
And definitely that’s also an element of the priesthood.
The challenge is maintaining the structure in all its soundness, and refusing to neglect
the spiritual realm and all its beauty.
This project is special because of the building itself; it’s a unique building, nothing
has been built like this in the United States in hundreds of years.
This is a project where the design is meant to last 500 years.
It’s perhaps the most important project right now in the whole Catholic Church because
the work of Archbishop Lefebvre was to restore the priesthood and to preserve the priesthood,
which is in such attack today.
The battle of the Society of St. Pius the X is to fight against today’s modern errors
- and that’s forming beautiful souls by their environment, by the cloister, by the
seminary, by lifting them up through the architectural style to touch God.
We just can’t put a price tag on the value of one good priest.
It has clearly great importance because that’s the place where we build the next generation
of priests.