Letter from Frs. Wegner and le Roux on the Important Work of the US Seminary
Below are excerpts from the joint newsletter written by Fr. Jürgen Wegner and Fr. Yves le Roux on the relationship between the US District and St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary.
Fr. Wegner:
The relationship between U.S. District of the Society of Saint Pius X and St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary is a symbiotic one. While it is our chapels and schools that supply young men to the Seminary, it is the Seminary that provides new clergy to minister to the faithful throughout the U.S. District. Moreover, because of its size and growing resources, the Seminary also trains missionary priests who leave these shores to fulfill the Great Commission by making disciples of all nations (cf. Mt. 28:16-20).
This relationship, my friend, is indispensable to the Society’s apostolate. For without the seminary, particularly a seminary as sweeping and grand as the one in Virginia, the fight to restore Catholic Tradition would be exponentially harder. Each year I am faced with numerous requests for the Society of Saint Pius X to send priests to an ever-growing list of locales where Catholics starve for the traditional sacraments and catechesis. As always, I must weigh these requests against the reality of our resources and the hard reality that, even as the total number of Society clergy worldwide continues to grow, a number of our longer serving members are beginning to show the effects of age and need to slow down or curtail their work.
Fr. le Roux:
Prayer is oxygen for the soul. It is what fuels our seminarians through many years of formation and gives their vocations vitality up until their ordination and beyond. And with prayer there is the need for silence, periods of recollection where seminarians can meditate upon their studies and draw closer to God. We need to complete this administration building so that we can restore the natural order and the silence of the seminary that is so necessary to the spiritual formation of our future priests.
Our seminarians, your future priests, deserve a proper, contemplative environment in which to grow, before going forth to serve in chapels, schools, and retreat centers throughout this country and the world. I ask you, in solidarity with Fr. Wegner, to contribute to the completion of our administrative building. Should we be able to raise the money needed for its completion, we can begin making use of the building as early as this November.
