Most of my critiques have to do with my experiences of how formation is done in major seminaries. It is very insular and contributes to this attitude among many young priests when they leave the seminary of wanting to do things alone without the laity, a growing trend as recent polls show. I also see seminaries reinforcing a clerical separation that, although real, is overemphasized. Then I could point to the “band of brothers” attitude that created the abuse crisis and the fact that polls showed little concern among priests for the victims themselves. I think that comes from lack of contact with the laity during formation. A lot of the liturgical training done in seminaries focuses around following the rubrics correctly. While that’s important, that is only half the battle. The other half is learning methods of fostering full, active and conscious participation among the laity. I don’t see that happening. The emphasis is all: “if you do these things then the mass is said correctly,” as if the validity of the mass is all that matters, rather than it producing its full effect of actualizing the body of Christ on earth. Some of the problems I think boil down to the reservation of all internal forum matters to a spiritual directer, so that the rector is operating only with the knowledge of external forum knowledge. That fosters an atmosphere of suspicion and politics, where all attention is placed upon external practice rather than internal growth.