Bishop Wayne Kirkpatrick, auxiliary bishop of Toronto, St. Augustine's Class of 1984
The seminary is really a great place but my first impressions were not positive.
When I was in high school, I think it was Grade 10, someone proposed that I might have a vocation and suggested I attend a vocation awareness weekend at St. Augustine's, which I did. My first impressions were not positive in the sense I found that there seemed to be a lot of negativity expressed from the other people who came and that turned me off. I remember saying I'll never be back here but I was wrong.
While attending university in Waterloo I had lived in a seminary formation house. Through interacting with priests on a day-to-day basis I began to see them as very human and not just the figure that you see in church on Sunday. Seeing priests in that light opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe I too could serve as a parish priest; I never thought or had intentions of becoming a bishop.
After discussing the possibility with the bishop of St. Catharines at the time and a member of the staff from St. Augustine's, it seemed reasonable to come to the seminary to try it out.
When I arrived at the seminary that year, it was in 1980, that sense of negativity I had felt before wasn't there. Once you are in something and you begin to establish relations with people you see beyond the negativity and see only the good in people.
During my years as a seminarian there were many opportunities to serve by preparing liturgies and that sort of thing. That was a great thing for me later on with ceremonies and things like that.
More than that though, St. Augustine's is a house of prayer, it's a house of study and there is a community there. All of those things help one prepare to become a priest and helped me become a bishop.
Fr. Swords attended during a time of hope for change
Fr. Brian Swords, moderator with Scarboro Missions, Class of 1969
When I entered the seminary it was shortly after the beginning of Vatican II and Vatican II kind of offered hope for change. We felt that hope for change in the seminary.
Fr. Swords
It was something that carried a lot of us through because if we didn't like something we felt it could change. That was the kind of attitude in the atmosphere as I remember it.
The one thing that we knew wouldn't change, though, was the very orderly and strict schedule we had to adhere to compared to life elsewhere. You had to adjust to it, it didn't adjust to you. It was just the way. It was their system and you joined their system.
My earliest memory of being a seminarian at St. Augustine's is when we, Team Scarboro Missions, won the track and field day in 1963, the same year I entered the seminary. There was a variety of different dioceses that sent people to study there so Scarboro Missions was just one group of eight or nine people.
I thought that was good because you got to know people from different parts of Canada who were studying there. As a missionary priest that experience was helpful in understanding how to respect and appreciate people's differences.
I also have fond memories of the book store that we ran at Scarboro Missions. People used to smoke outside in the courtyard and the book store was there so people just congregated. It was kind of the place to be.
Hockey brought a sense of fraternity
Fr. Wojciech Kuzma, Vocations Director for the Hamilton diocese, Class of 2005
I remember getting lost in Toronto on my way to St. Augustine's as a freshman in 2000. I was just so excited to be going to the seminary that I wasn't paying attention to where I was going. I was kind of day dreaming about the seminary.
Fr. Kuzma
Immediately I was struck by the fact that I was entering a building that has all of this history that is connected to the life of our Catholic people here in Toronto and all across Canada. It was just a really peaceful, joyful and surreal experience walking in there and saying I'm becoming one of those many men who's come before me and I'm going to be trained in the same style, the same genre and the same traditions as so many have before me.
Living at the seminary was primarily a great lesson in growing up as a human being, as a Christian and as a man. How the seminary assists us in all of that was primarily through the community that we were living in.
We played ice hockey every Friday afternoon and even though I skated before I came to the seminary I had never played hockey before. This was a way for me to experience the community in a different way, in a non-religious way. There was a real sense of fraternity when we would do that, not that there wasn't fraternity in other parts of our lives such as prayer, but this was just a way of showing me that the fraternity extends to all aspects of my life. I realized that once I became a priest it is not just going to be unity with other priests when you are at Mass together but you will be united in a very real way in all aspects of your life with these priests who will become your brothers.
Where priest discovered Church's presence to world
Fr. Vito Marziliano, pastor at St. Clare parish in Toronto, Class of 1982
Fr. Marziliano
When I was in high school I went for vocation weekend and I remember the very first impressions of St. Augustine's as being a very prayerful place and a community place. Those were my first two impressions which actually carried with me throughout my whole stay there.
Right after graduating high school in 1974 I entered the seminary and was excited to meet others who were journeying along the same path towards priesthood.
Soon after arriving at St. Augustine's I met Fr. Andrew Cuschieri who was the spiritual leader for my group. He was a Franciscan at the time, I believe he joined the diocese later on, so there was that elementary of Franciscan spirituality and Franciscan community. That really touched my life.
There were several moments where he impressed me with his ability to listen. It was not that he was there necessarily to answer my questions, but he was there to listen to my questions and journey with me as I found my own answers so to speak. Also he was an immigrant himself and having come from an immigrant family I could relate much more to him. That particular aspect sort of helped me understand more of the actual presence of the Church to the whole world.
I came to realize the diversity in the Church and the way in which a number of gifts come forward through that diversity. That was one of the biggest impacts it had on me.