The Pope’s new apostolic exhortation on the family calls for seminaries to include a wider engagement with marriage and family life in the preparation of candidates for the priesthood. The rector of Oscott welcomes these ideas and considers ways in which they can be put into practice

When they were first established, seminaries sought to form the spiritual life and resilient character needed for priesthood. Priests were to be missioners, prepared even to lay down their lives. That same spirit was evident when Oscott prepared Francis Martyn to be ordained in 1805, the first man to be fully trained for the priesthood in England since the Reformation. Some suggest that nineteenth-century seminaries were isolated and set apart from real life. However, in front of the college stands the statue of Our Lady of Oscott, not looking inwards to the seminary but outwards towards the great city of Birmingham, six miles to the south.

This statue is the perfect image of what we strive to do at Oscott in a twenty-first-century formation community. Formation ponders and appropriates the Lord’s word so that our newly ordained priests may be witnesses to the Gospel and Christ-like in their ministry. There have been many changes since the Second Vatican Council and the publication of the apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis in 1992.