July 2021 Print

What is your background?

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where I attended an independent traditional Catholic school for grades 1-12. Then, I spent five years at the University of Louisville to get a Masters in Engineering in 1998. After two years working in the field, I started my seminary formation and was ordained in 2006.

When did you join the seminary? Which seminary? Were you surprised of the appointment?

I was assigned to Holy Cross Seminary in Australia three years after I was ordained. Both Fr. MacPherson, the current rector of Holy Cross, and I were stationed in Saint Mary’s. It was the summer of 2009 and we had both traveled up to Winona for the ordinations, but from different directions. Shortly after I arrived, he pulled me aside and told me I was being transferred to the seminary in Australia! It was definitely not something I had anticipated but the practical circumstances were unambiguous: Fr. Griego had been my superior in Saint Mary’s for two years before being appointed rector at Holy Cross, he requested my transfer the following year, and the request was granted.

Could you tell us an anecdote you wish to share?

After I learned that I was being transferred to the seminary in Australia, I called the seminary to ask for details about the assignment. No one answered the phone, so I left a message, something like, “Hello, this is Fr. Paul Robinson calling from the USA. I wanted to speak to Fr. Griego about my transfer to Holy Cross, so if he could give me a call back, that would be great.” Well, Fr. Griego was away and none of the community knew that I was coming! You can imagine the questions and head-scratching that this message caused, especially among the priests, who were wondering if one of them was getting replaced.

Here is another anecdote I learned from Fr. Iscara, who had been also assigned to the Holy Cross Seminary years earlier. He had asked Fr. Schmidberger, the current Superior General, how long he should expect to teach there, and his answer was at least 10 years, mentioning time required to develop, stability, and all that. Well! 10 years was the time I myself would spend in Australia, but dear Fr. Iscara spent more time chasing after an Australian visa than teaching there. Before the year was over, he was transferred to Mexico, although his next move to the U.S. Seminary proved more lasting. . . he is still there after 28 glorious years. That’s how it works with SSPX assignments!

Was this move to the antipodes a promotion or did you feel you had your wings clipped?

To be honest, it felt like a wing clipping on both sides of the ocean. Before I went, I discovered that I was to be the sixth priest at a seminary that only had about ten major seminarians and twenty minor seminarians! Once I arrived in Australia, the reality completely lived up to the expectations. We were out in the bush with little apostolate, the duties were light, and the seminary seemed to be holding onto its existence by a thread. What a contrast to my three years immersed in the work at that thriving traditional Catholic metropolis that we call Saint Mary’s!

The greatest challenge, at the beginning, was supernaturalizing my perspective of an assignment that, on the natural level, did not seem to make sense. I had just spent three years in the SSPX’s busiest district, I had tasted the frenetic pace of the apostolate, and I knew that so many of my confreres were there laboring away in the trenches. Meanwhile, here I was in a remote, quiet, bucolic setting in Australia, sometimes not leaving the building for an entire month, teaching classes of three seminarians or two or even one, admiring exotic birds and the stunning Southern Hemisphere night sky, and certainly wondering if I might not be put to better use elsewhere.

I knew that the spiritual view was an entirely different one. It does not quantify man hours and seek for a most efficient and equal distribution of resources. It rather sees the formation of priests as the most important work, one that ultimately results in the salvation of more souls than the labors of the active apostolate, precisely because priests are necessary for those labors. I could almost say that my new assignment was forcing me to make my priorities more like those of St. Pius X and Archbishop Lefebvre! Both of them made the formation of priests their highest priority.

In the end, all priests understand that they are giving their lives when they are ordained. They are not giving their lives to do this or that; they are giving their lives to do whatever Providence ordains for them. From this perspective, any merely natural assessment of the value of one’s work or one’s assignment is meaningless. The fact that a thing is assigned is what makes it valuable, not the fact that it is “important” or “unimportant” work.

What I cherish most when I look back on my ten years in that monastic setting is the fact that I was able to provide weekly spiritual direction for eight seminarians who went on to become priests.

What’s the most advantageous thing you gained from being a seminary teacher?

Teaching; passing the heritage of doctrine and life; contemplation; seclusion. . .

You ask for one advantage, but there were many. The first and most important was a deeper prayer life. I have that strong American tendency towards activism, which results in a priesthood where prayer is often not sought for its own sake, but is performed as a perfunctory duty. Life at a quiet seminary forced me to pray at a slower pace, to choose prayer and, yes, to relish it.

The seminary also deepened my ability to study. I had always loved reading, but I had never had the occasion to become immersed in a subject, where you assemble all of the writings you can on a given topic, read them and take notes on them until you reach the point that you are an expert on the subject. Preparing for seminary classes, especially ones that are taught for multiple years, provides an opportunity to do all of the work necessary to master a topic. The fruit of this work is clarity, a better ability to communicate, as well as more material for contemplation.

Besides this, I ended up using a fair bit of my free time to write. It is a very different skill from researching, but it is related, because it involves translating a mental word into a spoken word. What I learned, through writing a book at the seminary, is that writing is one of those skills where “practice makes perfect.” You attain a greater facility for collecting your thoughts and composing them in a text simply by doing it over and over. This facility, in turn, reaps dividends in the constant communication that a priest must undertake, from his sermons, to his emails, to his Angelus interviews.

Was your transfer to an active apostolate traumatic?

It was pretty brutal. I taught my final class at the seminary on a Monday (they were still in the midst of their Southern Hemisphere school year), arrived in Denver on Tuesday, visited the Archbishop of Denver with our District Superior on Wednesday, and then began my new triple charge of prior, principal, and parish priest on Thursday. There was no real transition of power process and I had to learn all of the ways of the priory and parish through experience rather than instruction.

Father with Dominican Sisters in Samoa.

How did your long years of teaching prepare you for the present apostolate?

Well, a priest needs to know how to pray and communicate, the main benefits I mentioned above. I failed to mention the many missionary travels that I was able to make in Oceania and Asia, which provided a broader experience.

What my seminary professorship did not and could not prepare me for was the duties of an intensive leadership role, administrating a parish and school. There could have been a more graduated stepping into my current duties.

I also have to mention how different my own country and the world at large look after ten years being away from them. It was during that time that the smartphone took over everyone’s lives (I did not even have a cell phone for most of my time in Australia!). There seems to be more restlessness, insecurity and meaninglessness today than in the world I left. As life becomes increasingly artificial and less human, we do not have the same strength as before to undertake normal human goals such as pursuing a career and starting a family. Our technology makes us psychologically weak and society is waging open war against the family. This poses a problem for our youth and also for the priests who are meant to encourage them to embrace the state in life that God desires for them.

Do you have any final last words?

At some point during my ten years at Holy Cross when, to be honest, I was chafing under the monotony of a humdrum assignment, I decided that I needed to act as if I would be stationed there for the rest of my life. This helped me to make the best of the seminary environment and invest my time in deeper studies and projects. Now that I am back in the apostolate, I am able to see how important that decision was for my current pastoral work.

In the end, the priest of the Society of the St. Pius X has to be extremely flexible, because he could be asked to go or do just about anything. The important thing is that he grow in whatever assignment he is placed. There is an edifice of holiness to be built and it must be constructed using the materials at hand. The materials are always there, but they must be put to use.