In 1937, leaders of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis established a philanthropic foundation created to support Christian seminaries.
Lilly Endowment Inc. recently announced 45 recipients of its Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, which aims to help theological schools in the U.S. and Canada strengthen their abilities to prepare ordained and lay pastoral leaders.
Several Catholic schools were awarded funds to work on large-scale collaborative projects, including Loyola University Chicago, St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota, and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.
Notre Dame received more than $5 million to make two different forms of theological education accessible to future church leaders, said Holy Cross Father Kevin Grove, associate professor of theology.
“The master of divinity forms lay ecclesial ministers in person alongside Holy Cross seminarians and brothers,” he told OSV News. “The MA (provides) ministers who are already in the field and in need of continuing education the opportunity to take online courses during the year and spend modules at Notre Dame during the summers.”
According to a Dec. 2 press release, St. John’s received $10 million from Lilly Endowment Inc. to prepare and form ministerial leaders in rural and mission dioceses, including a regional institute dedicated to the ongoing support of permanent deacons.
St. Mary Seminary and Graduate School of Theology in Wickliffe, Ohio, received nearly $9 million. The seminary educates 60 seminarians for the dioceses of Cleveland and Youngstown in Ohio, and offers advanced theological degrees for laity and clergy. In addition to providing ongoing endowment support, the grant will expand the seminary’s “Mary, Mother of the Good Shepherd Institute.”
“We realize that if we’re going to help people grow into missionary disciples who can share the good news with authenticity, we need to be able to do that outside of the walls of our seminary,” said Father Andrew Turner, president-rector of the seminary. “So this (enables) the development of a certificate program that is going to take place in parishes all across our diocese where people can take classes (at) a college level.”
The funds also will go toward giving young Catholics an opportunity to explore careers within the church.
“(We’d like to offer) paid internships for college-age students to be able to intern in a parish or in a diocesan institute like the youth ministry office or catechetical office, to spark interest in careers in parish leadership,” said Father Turner. Many of the diocese’s urban parishes don’t have the money to pay for a large staff, let alone an intern, he said, so this program could be especially beneficial for them.
The Catholic University of America’s School of Theology and Religious Studies in Washington received a $7.1 million grant for a number of initiatives.
One is the Gregory the Great Bishops’ Institute, a continuing education program for bishops, said Susan Timoney, associate dean for graduate ministerial studies.
The institute will likely be an annual two- or three-day workshop for bishops to explore pressing pastoral issues impacting their ministries, such as medical ethics or gender dysphoria. Professors and other topic experts will help bishops explore the theological principles underpinning the issues and help them think about the best pastoral application of those principles. The institute will probably launch by the end of 2026, said Timoney.
Additionally, the grant will create a six-seminary pastoral laboratory tasked with equipping seminarians with the tools to better run a parish.
“We have been talking for a number of years about really revising our pastoral theology program and putting a greater emphasis on the preparation for leadership, because priests are made pastors sometimes within two or three years of ordination and so many of our graduates say they simply were not prepared,” Timoney told OSV News.
The seminaries will work together to have the curriculum better address the day-to-day management of a parish, including how to best work with the parish and finance councils and how to hire and supervise staff.
Participating seminaries include Theological College, Catholic University’s national seminary; Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis; Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland; St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania; University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois; and St. Patrick’s Seminary and University in Menlo Park, California.
The Lilly grant has allowed seminary leaders to expedite a solution for this longstanding problem, said Timoney. “I feel like the revision of the pastoral formation program at the seminary probably would have taken us 10 years to do because we just don’t have the bandwidth to engage the expertise of the kind of people we would need,” she said. “I feel like this gives us the opportunity to be able to do it in three to five years rather than 10.”
