Stories

These words, spoken at the Presentation of the Book of the Gospels in the ordination of deacons and often echoed for priests and bishops on retreats, offer a fitting doorway into the mystery of Lent and Ash Wednesday. They do more than outline a ministerial job description; they sketch a path of conversion that every future priest must walk before he dares to lead others along it.

Ash Wednesday in most Catholic seminaries, and especially in mission territories of the Church, is not just the beginning of Lent; it is the moment when future priests step more deeply into the Paschal mystery they will one day preach, celebrate, and carry into some of the most fragile corners of the world.

A quiet freedom: choosing what to give up

In All Saints Seminary Ekpoma in Edo State, Nigeria (where I had my Priestly training), the community table remains full on Ash Wednesday and throughout Lent; no one goes hungry, and full meals are served as usual.

What changes is invisible: each seminarian must freely decide what to renounce—food, comfort, leisure, or media—so that his sacrifice is not imposed from outside, but offered from within as an act of love for Jesus and for the people he will serve. St Thomas Aquinas makes this clearer by explicitly linking the value of Christ’s own sacrifice to its voluntary character. He explains that Christ’s Passion was a true sacrifice precisely because he “offered himself up for us” and “this voluntary enduring of the Passion was most acceptable to God as coming from charity.” By extension, any act of self-denial becomes truly sacrificial when it is done freely out of love, not under compulsion.

In this atmosphere, fasting is no longer a spiritual “exercise program,” but the first language of pastoral love: the seminarian begins to experience that he can freely and truly carry others—including the poor, the sick, his future parishioners—in his own body, through hunger, fatigue, and the deliberate acceptance of inconvenience for their sake.

The spiritual director’s Lenten word

On Ash Wednesday morning, before the ashes are imposed, the spiritual director at All Saints Seminary gathers the house for a conference that sets the tone of the season.

Drawing from the Scriptures of the day—“Return to me with all your heart” and “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites”—he invites the seminarians to see Lent not as a test of willpower but as a renewal of their first love and right intention before God. Then, right before the breakaway sessions—when seminarians will meet in smaller groups with their spiritual directors, formators, or classmates—this shared word becomes a common compass: the questions are concrete, almost disarming.

“How will you pray? How will you fast? How will you love? What is your plan?”

The entire house’s Lenten program is simply a way of taking those three questions seriously, day after day, in community.

Confessions and the school of mercy

Long lines for confession are one of the quiet signs of the working of grace in a seminary. On certain evenings of Lent, the walkway at All Saints fills up as seminarians wait, often for more than an hour, to bring the weight of their hearts to Christ’s mercy. For the confessor, this can be both exhausting and deeply consoling; it is no wonder that a wry line, often attributed to Fulton Sheen, likens hearing nuns’ confessions to “being stoned to death with popcorn” — a reminder that even seemingly “small” sins, multiplied many times, can be surprisingly draining to listen to with patience and charity. Yet what looks small from the outside can be monumental from within; the concerns of personal failure before God can press so heavily on a seminarian’s conscience that only the humble act of confession finally lifts them.

Part of what makes these lines so meaningful is the Church’s insistence on the sacredness of the internal forum. The seminary dissuades men from confess their sins to their rector, formator, or vocation director, precisely because the Church wants his conscience to be free and uncoerced before God and wants to ensure that decisions about fittingness for holy orders would never be able to be perceived as made based on what a priest formator heard in confession. Canon law insists that the sacramental seal is inviolable. Church discipline likewise keeps the internal forum confidential, lest there ever be the impression that what was shared there has influenced external decisions about a seminarian’s future. For that reason, spiritual directors make themselves generously available, and confessors from outside the house are invited for penitential services, so that each man can open his heart without fear that what he says will later appear in an evaluation or a faculty meeting.

On one of those Lenten afternoons when the weather turns unexpectedly mild, the community often brings the penitential service outdoors. Individual confessionals are improvised under trees or along the edge of a garden, with enough space to safeguard anonymity and silence while the rest of the community prays nearby. The scene is almost sacramental in itself: long lines of young men, many destined for difficult mission territories, waiting to entrust their sins and their discouragements to the Lord who never tires of forgiving. There, the priest who feels “stoned to death with popcorn” by a hundred small, repeated faults, discovers again how wide and patient the mercy of God must be.

Stations of the Cross and the art of Holy Week

As the weeks pass, the Lenten rhythm at All Saints Seminary deepens.

Every Friday, the community gathers for the Stations of the Cross. Seminarians take turns leading the meditations, carrying the cross, and giving the brief reflections that link each station to their own lives, to the missions, and to the sufferings of the people beyond the seminary walls. In my days, the Rector would allow us to write our own reflection for each station. It is often touching to hear your peers’ interpretations of Jesus’s pain.

Here, the seminarians learn, almost unconsciously, to speak about the Passion not in abstract terms but with concrete images: the weight of the wood, the dust of the road, the tears of the women, the loneliness of the condemned — what these images mean within their lived context.

At the same time, liturgical formation intensifies. Seminarians rehearse the roles of Holy Week: the proclamation of the Passion, the solemn intercessions of Good Friday, the preparation of the fire and the Exultet at the Easter Vigil. They study the rubrics, but more importantly they learn the inner meaning of gestures—silences, genuflections, processions—so that when they stand at the altar they are not mere functionaries but transparent servants of the mystery.

Learning to sing in the Church’s mother tongue

Part of this formation is musical.

During Lent, special attention is given to learning and polishing the Latin chants that have carried the Church’s memory of the Passion across centuries: the simple, grave tones of the Gregorian chant Mass XVII, the haunting “Parce Domine,” the ancient responses of the Good Friday liturgy. Singing in Latin is not nostalgia; it is an apprenticeship in universality. A Nigerian or African seminarian who learns to sing “Crux fidelis” or the “Pange lingua gloriosi” is stepping into the same soundscape that will echo in cathedrals and mission chapels around the world during the Triduum.

In this way, Lent becomes a school not only of doctrine and devotion but of “Catholic” instinct: the young man realizes that the mystery he celebrates in his own language, culture, and music is the same mystery sung in Latin in Rome, whispered in small mission stations, and carried by martyrs and confessors across the centuries.

Staying in the desert until the Alleluia

Perhaps the most demanding part of the seminary’s Lenten practice is simply this: they stay.

There are no home visits, no early Easter trips. From Ash Wednesday until the end of the Triduum, the seminarians remain in the seminary, walking step by step through the Church’s great annual “retreat” without fleeing to any comforts and distractions of home. Only on Easter Sunday evening or Easter Monday do they go back to their families, carrying with them the Alleluia they have waited so long to sing.

By then, something quiet but decisive has happened. The seminarian has discovered that Lent is not primarily about what he can endure, but about how far Christ has gone to meet him; not about what he has given up, but about the love he has received and is now ready, in some small way, to share. He has learned the taste of hidden sacrifices, the sound of ancient Latin hymns, the feel of a wooden cross on Friday evenings, the mercy of a confessor, and the steady gaze of a spiritual director who holds him to live the truth.

In a few years, when he stands under a burning sun in a mission outstation on Ash Wednesday, tracing a cross of dust on the foreheads of the poor, all of this will come back to him. He will know, from the inside, what he is asking them to live—because he first learned to live it himself, in that intense Lenten school of charity and Paschal mystery that is the seminary.

When a seminarian learns to “believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you teach,” he is not only being formed for his own sanctity; he is being fashioned for the Church’s most rugged frontiers. The hidden sacrifices of Lent in the seminary—the quiet fasts, the long confession lines, the careful study of the rites, the patient learning of the Church’s ancient chant—are really God’s way of preparing a future priest to carry the Gospel, and the sacraments, to places where the Church is still young, poor, and in need of shepherds.

This is precisely the task of the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, one of the four Pontifical Mission Societies: to help form those future priests and religious in mission territories who will one day preach, celebrate, and live the Paschal mystery for God’s people. Without seminaries like All Saints and without the material and spiritual support that sustains them, the “school of charity and Paschal mystery” described here would be impossible in many parts of Africa, Asia, and other territories. The generosity of Catholics throughout the world, particularly in the United States, makes it possible for a young man to stay in the “desert” of Lent, to learn the language of mercy and the art of sacred worship, and then to go out under the burning sun of a mission outstation, tracing crosses of ash on foreheads and placing the Body of Christ into hands that have waited a long time.

If this glimpse into seminary life has moved you, I invite you to see yourself as part of this story. Please pray regularly for seminarians and novices in the missions, especially during Lent and Holy Week. Fast that they might learn to hunger for what God hungers. And consider an alm to the Pontifical Society of St. Peter the Apostle, so that tuition, board, books, spiritual formation, and modest stipends do not become obstacles to God’s call in poorer dioceses.

In supporting the Society of St. Peter the Apostle, you stand quietly beside these young men in the chapel, in the confessional line, on the Way of the Cross. You help them “believe what they read, teach what they believe, and practice what they teach” for the sake of Christ’s little ones in the missions. One day, in a village chapel far from here, a newly ordained priest will lift the Host and whisper the words of consecration—carrying you, and your sacrifice, with him into the heart of the Paschal mystery.