“Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” (Rv 19:9)
Jean Khoury
Summary: The parable of the wedding feast contains a question that seminary formation too rarely dares to ask: how does a man enter priestly ministry without the wedding garment, that is, without union with Christ? This article argues that spiritual formation is not one department of seminary life set alongside the intellectual, liturgical, pastoral and human, but the integrating principle from which all the others receive their proper orientation. It proposes a way through the apparent impasse between the sacredness of conscience and the seminary’s responsibility to form, by distinguishing three realities too easily collapsed into one: the internal forum, which must be protected absolutely; spiritual direction, which is bound by confidentiality; and spiritual formation, which must never be treated as a private matter beyond the reach of accompaniment. It then argues that the Sermon on the Mount, rightly understood as the living form of baptism and read according to its Trinitarian structure, must stand at the very centre of priestly formation, as it stood at the centre of St Augustine’s own preparation for ordination, because it alone holds Scripture, dogma, sacrament, morality and mission together as one undivided reality.
Introduction
In the parable of the wedding feast, the king enters to see the guests and finds a man not wearing a wedding garment. He asks him a single, piercing question: “My friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” The man is silent, because there is nothing to say. This is the same address the Lord uses for Judas in the garden — “my friend” — and it should stop us. The question is not primarily about clothing. It is about union. The wedding garment is the wedding itself: to have been purified, to have been clothed in the garment of the marriage, to belong, in truth and not merely in appearance, to the feast one has entered.
I want to ask this question of priestly formation directly, because it is not a question we like to ask. If the priest is to serve the guests — if he is to serve those invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb — he must himself have celebrated the wedding. He can only give what he has received from Christ, and what he has allowed Christ to transform in him. What he gives is Christ in him. But which Christ? The fullness of the stature of Christ, or something less than nothing? This is the question that ought to trouble every seminary, every house of formation, every diocese responsible for the men it sends to the altar.
We know how to assess a seminarian’s academic study. We set examinations, we grade essays, we measure his grasp of dogmatic and moral theology. But we do not know how to assess the growth of Christ in him. We consider it too difficult, even impossible, and so we hand the whole question over to a private process belonging to spiritual direction — a process about which, we are told, the spiritual director cannot say anything to those responsible for formation. And so a strange silence settles over the very centre of formation. We do not give this growth every opportunity to succeed, because we have persuaded ourselves that we are not permitted to look at it at all. “My friend, how did you get in here without the wedding garment?” The question is addressed to priestly ministry itself: how does one enter it without being united to Christ? This is the criterion, and there is no other: to know Christ and to be known by Christ.
This article sets out, in three movements, how I believe this question must be answered. First, I want to show why the current impasse — between the sacredness of conscience and the seminary’s duty to form — is a false dead end, and how it can be resolved without touching the internal forum. Second, I want to place at the centre of the whole discussion the text which I believe must become the true charter of priestly formation: the Sermon on the Mount, understood not as a moral code but as the living form of baptism, structured according to the Trinitarian life it opens to us. Third, I want to draw out what this means in practice for those who form seminarians — for rectors, spiritual formators, novice masters, superiors and bishops — so that the wedding garment is not merely spoken of, but given, worn, and handed on.
I. The False Dead End: Conscience, Direction, and Formation
Spiritual formation is one of the five dimensions of priestly formation, alongside the intellectual, the liturgical, the pastoral and the human. But it is not one dimension among the others. It is, on the contrary, the fundamental tool of the whole, because it concerns the very centre from which every other dimension acquires its proper orientation: the seminarian’s relationship with Christ and his growth into conformity with him. Human formation asks who the man is becoming. Intellectual formation concerns what he understands and how he communicates the faith. Liturgical formation concerns where his configuration to Christ is sacramentally enacted. Pastoral formation concerns the mission for which he is being prepared. Spiritual formation concerns the life of Christ from which all these dimensions draw their meaning.
And yet we are stuck, and the reason we are stuck is a real one. We rightly hold that the internal forum must be respected: the human conscience is sacred, canon law protects the seal of confession and the confidentiality proper to spiritual direction absolutely, and nobody disputes this. But we have allowed ourselves to conclude from this that spiritual formation as such must therefore be left entirely aside, as though the only alternative to violating conscience were to say nothing about spiritual life at all. This is a false dead end. The problem arises when confidentiality is interpreted to mean that nobody responsible for formation may ever know anything about a candidate’s spiritual progress. That conflates two distinct realities: the sacredness of conscience, and the privacy proper to spiritual direction. They are not the same thing, and once we distinguish them, the apparent impasse begins to dissolve.
The Monastic Model: Novice Master and Spiritual Director
The monastic and religious tradition offers a model that the seminary badly needs to recover. In a monastery or a religious convent, there is, on one hand, the master of novices — and later the master of students — who is responsible for spiritual formation among the other dimensions of formation; and on the other hand, there is the spiritual director. The Church recommends distinguishing very clearly between these two functions, unless the candidate himself freely asks the master of novices to also be his spiritual director. This distinction protects the sacredness of the internal forum: nobody is forced to disclose anything to the master of novices that belongs properly to the conscience.
But both ministries deal with spiritual life, and they do so in genuinely different ways. The spiritual director enters the internal forum: the person may disclose his conscience, his temptations, his interior struggles, his prayer and the movements of grace, with a freedom that must be protected absolutely. The master of novices, however, carries responsibility for formation. He teaches the spiritual life, accompanies its development, observes the candidate’s manner of living it, and can legitimately ask, in general terms, how the candidate is progressing — never forcing disclosure, but sensing and performing a genuine form of check-up on how things are going, without touching what is properly personal. This is not surveillance. It is not an inspection of conscience. It is the ordinary exercise of a formator’s responsibility.
St Teresa of Ávila’s practice with her mistresses of novices illustrates this beautifully. The mistress of novices teaches them how to look at God, how to look at Jesus. She is therefore very close to what I would call the spiritual conscience — as distinct from the moral conscience — orienting her novices toward God and toward Christ. If the novices are open with her and speak of their challenges and difficulties, she can then direct them more effectively. This happens in daily life, and it happens spontaneously; there is no checklist to be worked through. Her art consists simply in directing them, as the occasions present themselves, toward God.
The same distinction appears in the traditional role of the superior. In the Carmelite system, the prioress is the spiritual mother of the community, and St Teresa wanted her to function as spiritual director. In the Benedictine system, the abbot is described as the spiritual father. Neither arrangement abolishes the possibility of another spiritual director: a nun may still seek help from a priest during a retreat or through other legitimate means; a monk may still confess to someone else in the monastery, or exceptionally outside it. But the existence of another spiritual director does not empty the superior’s own spiritual responsibility toward the person entrusted to him or her. These are two distinct, complementary functions, not two competitors for the same territory.
Toward a Ministry of Spiritual Tutoring
Seminary formation would gain enormously by moving away from an attitude that tries to protect, at all costs, the entire domain of spiritual life as private, toward a position that distinguishes clearly between what must remain confidential and what belongs to formation and accompaniment — a form of spiritual tutoring, if that expression may be used. To refuse altogether to speak with the seminarian about his spiritual formation leads nowhere. It leaves unaddressed the one factor that is the catalyst of every other dimension of formation, and this weakens the whole structure enormously.
Spiritual formation cannot be measured the way philosophy or theology is measured. One cannot set a seminarian an examination in “union with Christ” and produce a numerical result. But it does not follow that spiritual formation is therefore immeasurable, or that it cannot be assessed at all. What can be observed is the gradual integration of the spiritual life into the person’s actual existence: his fidelity to prayer, his relationship with Christ, his capacity to listen to the Word, his growth in obedience, his capacity to recognise and respond to God’s will, his charity toward others, his capacity to receive correction, his freedom from self-centredness, his growth in virtue, his liturgical life, and, above all, the increasing conformity of his life to Christ. None of this requires access to the conscience. All of it is genuinely observable.
The spiritual formator, on this model, is neither a spiritual director who interrogates the conscience, nor an inspector who tries to penetrate the internal forum. He is a tutor of spiritual life. His task is to teach the seminarian what the Christian spiritual life actually is, to establish the conditions in which it can grow, to accompany its development, and to discern whether the candidate is truly appropriating what he is being taught. The candidate remains entirely free to protect what belongs to his conscience, while being expected to speak sufficiently about his spiritual life for the formator to know whether formation is actually taking place. This is not a formal examination; it is the ordinary art of spiritual formation exercised within daily life, exactly as St Teresa exercised it with her novices.
The decisive question, therefore, is not “how can we measure a seminarian’s interior life?” That question begins from the wrong premise, and it is the premise that has produced the false dead end. The right question is: “how can we responsibly accompany, teach and discern the development of spiritual life while fully respecting the internal forum?” Once the question is put this way, the seminary recovers a legitimate ministry of spiritual tutoring. The seminarian takes responsibility for his own spiritual formation and communicates sufficiently about his progress, difficulties and needs; the formator does not demand disclosure of matters of conscience, nor does he seek information from the spiritual director; he simply asks the seminarian about his spiritual life in the way that a good tutor asks a student about his intellectual development. The purpose is not surveillance but formation, not control but accompaniment, not the penetration of conscience but responsibility for growth.
The crucial distinction can be stated simply. Conscience, spiritual direction, and spiritual formation are three realities, not one. The conscience is sacred; the sacramental seal is absolute; the confidentiality proper to spiritual direction must be protected without exception, and no one should ever try to extract from a spiritual director information about a seminarian’s interior life. But spiritual formation itself is not secret. A seminarian is being formed precisely so that he can become a priest, and the seminary has a genuine responsibility to know whether the formation it offers is actually being received and is bearing fruit. The internal forum protects freedom of conscience; the refusal to privatise spiritual formation ensures that the Church actually fulfils her responsibility to form the man entrusted to her. The spiritual director and the spiritual formator are not rivals. They are two complementary ministries serving the same vocation from two different perspectives: the director guards the mystery of the person’s conscience within the freedom of the internal forum; the formator helps the person grow into the form of Christ within the responsibility of the seminary.
II. The Sermon on the Mount as the Charter of Baptism
If this is the right way through the impasse of assessment, the further question follows at once: assessed against what? What is the concrete content, the actual charter, against which spiritual formation is to be tutored and accompanied? I want to answer this without hesitation. Priestly formation must first of all focus on the Sermon on the Mount: the charter, or better, the covenant of baptism, the agreement between the seminarian and Christ. This is precisely what St Augustine did during his retreat in preparation for ordination — he was led by God to meditate for forty days on the Sermon on the Mount — and I believe this remains the best formation available to us. We should not go astray from it.
The reasoning behind this claim rests on the actual theology of baptism recovered by the Second Vatican Council: there is nothing beyond baptism, in the sense that we never leave it behind as we mature. The seed of baptism is destined to become a great tree, but it remains that same seed throughout. We do not move away from it; our task is to cultivate it, like a good gardener, so that everything already contained within it can grow to its fullness. The Sermon on the Mount is precisely this seed. It contains everything. It is the living form of baptism.
This is why, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the risen Lord explains exactly how disciples are to be made: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all the commands I gave you” (Matthew 28:19–20). Baptism gives the sacramental beginning; the Sermon on the Mount gives the form of life into which the baptised person is to grow. Baptism and teaching go together, as the couple they form throughout Matthew’s Gospel, and the teaching in question is the Sermon on the Mount — the teaching that makes the impossible possible.
This impossibility must not be softened. Considered simply as a set of moral commandments, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be lived. If the heart has not been transformed and purified, it is not possible to fulfil it. Its radical demands — love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect — exceed natural human capacity, and they are meant to. “You have learnt how it was said… but I say this to you…” Something genuinely new is being given: not a refinement of the old law but the new law, the law of the new covenant, written not on tablets of stone but in the transformed heart. The very structure of the Sermon exposes the futility of merely human effort in order to reveal the necessity of grace. One cannot simply decide to fulfil the Sermon on the Mount. One must receive the grace by which the heart itself is changed.
Read also: The Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount
III. The Trinitarian Structure of the Sermon
The Sermon on the Mount can be read, in a remarkably precise way, according to the Trinitarian shape of Christian existence. Its first part, Matthew 5, centres on the Son. Its second part, Matthew 6, centres on the Father, and contains the Our Father itself. Its third part, Matthew 7, centres, more subtly, on the Holy Spirit — and there is a striking correspondence here with the Pauline greeting that opens the Mass: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The same threefold movement is present in both.
St Irenaeus calls the Son and the Holy Spirit the Father’s “two hands.” This image illuminates the whole structure of the Sermon. The Father is, so to speak, in the middle — chapter six, where we are taught to say “Our Father” — holding us through his two hands: the Son, who reveals the Father’s will and gives us the form of the new life in chapter five, and the Holy Spirit, who makes that life actually possible within us in chapter seven. To be held in the two hands of the Father is our dwelling place. To be clothed with Christ, with the white garment of baptism, is our dwelling place. And whether we remain within these two hands, allowing ourselves to be transformed by the grace they communicate, depends on us — on how we correspond to that grace.
This is the deepest reason why the Sermon on the Mount cannot be separated from the Holy Spirit. The commandment becomes possible only because the one who receives it is being transformed. The Sermon reveals what the baptised person is called to become; the Spirit gives the grace by which he can become it. The Son gives the form; the Father holds us within the covenant; the Holy Spirit makes the life of the Son possible in us. The whole of seminary formation, on this account, is nothing other than learning to remain within this Trinitarian movement — not moving beyond baptism toward something else, but remaining in it so deeply that the seed can become the tree.
IV. The Sermon as the Unifying Centre of Theology
What makes the Sermon on the Mount irreplaceable as the heart of priestly formation is that it holds together, in a single text, everything that our curricula divide into separate modules. It has the dogmatic element, because at its heart lies baptism, and therefore the Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — presented not as an abstract doctrine but as the very structure of Christian existence, since the Father holds us with his two hands through what chapters five and seven reveal, and therefore we can pray the Our Father in chapter six. It is a fundamental biblical text, one of the great foundational passages of the New Testament. It is profoundly moral, because it contains the new law, which is not concerned with external actions alone but requires the circumcision and purification of the heart — the very core of Matthew’s teaching. And it is profoundly apostolic: if I do not live my own baptism, if I am not allowing myself to be held by the Father, I cannot baptise anyone else. The principal function of the priest is to baptise, to introduce people into Christian life, and to teach them to observe everything Christ has commanded. If he has not experienced the impossibility of living these commands by his own strength, and therefore the necessity of the Holy Spirit, how can he teach others to live them?
Scripture, dogma, sacrament and liturgy, moral theology, and apostolic mission are therefore not five separate subjects that must be laboriously reassembled after being studied apart. In the Sermon on the Mount they are already one. Every passage can be read simultaneously from all five dimensions at once, and this is exactly what our present theological formation has lost: today each branch of theology is a separate module, taught by a separate professor, examined separately, and the unity that ought to hold them together is left to the student to discover for himself, if he ever does. The Sermon on the Mount restores what fragmentation has broken. It unifies theological and intellectual work with liturgy, with the human struggle involved in actually trying to live what Christ commands, and with the discovery — which is itself the beginning of docility to the Holy Spirit — that this cannot be done by our own strength alone.
This is exactly what St Augustine did before beginning his ministry: led by God into a prolonged retreat, he spent forty days meditating on the Sermon on the Mount. It became, in effect, the school in which he was formed for the priesthood. He was not simply given information about Christianity; he was brought into the very form of Christian existence he would later be responsible for communicating to others. There is nothing arbitrary about this precedent. It shows what happens when a future priest is allowed to encounter the Sermon at the depth it demands, rather than as one moral topic among others in a syllabus.
The priest can teach others to observe only to the extent that he himself is learning to observe. He can lead others into baptism only to the extent that he is himself living from the grace of his own baptism. He can transmit the life of Christ only to the extent that Christ is becoming his own life. The formation of the priest and the mission of the priest are not two separate realities, joined together only afterward. The Sermon on the Mount is not one part of priestly formation among others. It is capable of becoming its integrating centre.
Practical Consequences
These principles have direct and, I believe, urgent consequences for anyone responsible for priestly and religious formation.
- Place the Sermon on the Mount, properly and spiritually understood, at the structural centre of the formation programme — not as one topic within moral theology, but as the text to which every other discipline is referred and from which every other discipline can be read: biblically, dogmatically, sacramentally, morally and apostolically.
- Build into the formation calendar a sustained retreat on the Sermon on the Mount, modelled on St Augustine’s forty days of meditation before ordination, rather than treating it as a single homily or a week of lectures.
- Establish, alongside the spiritual director, a distinct and explicitly named ministry of spiritual tutoring, exercised by the formator responsible for spiritual life — the seminary equivalent of the novice master — whose task is to teach, accompany and discern the seminarian’s spiritual growth without ever seeking access to matters of conscience.
- Protect the internal forum and the confidentiality of spiritual direction absolutely and without exception; never permit a formator to seek from a spiritual director any information about a seminarian’s interior life.
- Require of every seminarian, as a normal part of formation and not as an intrusion upon it, a regular and sufficiently honest account of his spiritual life — his fidelity to prayer, his growth in obedience, his capacity to receive correction, his freedom from self-centredness, his charity — given to his spiritual formator, distinct from and without reference to what he discusses with his spiritual director.
- Assess spiritual formation by its observable fruits, never by an inspection of conscience: growth in prayer, in obedience, in charity, in humility, in liturgical life, and in the capacity to receive correction are all genuinely assessable without touching what belongs to the internal forum.
- Form the formators themselves in this distinction, so that superiors, rectors and spiritual directors understand clearly where their respective competencies begin and end, following the model the Carmelite and Benedictine traditions have preserved in the distinct roles of prioress, abbot, novice master and confessor.
- Teach the Sermon on the Mount as a Trinitarian text — the Son in chapter five, the Father in chapter six, the Holy Spirit in chapter seven — so that seminarians grasp from the outset that its demands are not a moral ideal to be achieved by willpower, but a life to be received through the Father’s two hands.
- Resist the fragmentation of theological formation into wholly separate modules with no point of unity; use the Sermon on the Mount, precisely because it already unites Scripture, dogma, sacrament, morality and mission, as a recurring integrating text across the curriculum rather than confining it to a single course.
Conclusion
“My friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” The question the king asks in the parable is the question every seminary must learn to ask again, not as an accusation, but as the very definition of its task. The wedding garment is not an accessory to priestly formation. It is priestly formation, understood rightly: union with Christ, purification, the clothing of the man in the very life he is being ordained to hand on to others.
We have seen that the path to this garment does not require, and must never require, any violation of conscience. The internal forum remains sacred, and spiritual direction remains confidential without exception. But between the silence we owe to conscience and the silence we have wrongly imposed on spiritual formation as a whole, there is a real and legitimate space: the space of spiritual tutoring, in which the seminarian is taught, accompanied and gently held accountable for his own growth in Christ, exactly as a novice is formed by a mistress of novices who teaches her how to look at God.
And we have seen what must fill that space, what must be taught, accompanied and discerned. It is the Sermon on the Mount — the seed of baptism, the charter of the new covenant, the text in which the Son gives the form, the Father holds us in the middle, and the Holy Spirit makes what is commanded actually possible. It is the text in which Scripture, dogma, sacrament, morality and mission are not five subjects but one undivided life. St Augustine knew this, and gave forty days to it before he dared to be ordained. If we want priests who can say to those they baptise, “observe what I have taught you,” we must first lead them, patiently and without fear of the interior life, into the same school. Only then will the man who enters the wedding feast be wearing the garment it requires — and only then will he be able, in his turn, to clothe others in it.
Read Also:
The Meaning of Sapiential Formation in Priestly Formation
The Meaning of the Sermon on the Mount
By Their Fruits: Rethinking the Measure, the Root, and the Method of Priestly Formation
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