‘There are a lot of memories here.’ Father James Anguiano, the seminary’s rector : Kneeling to Pressure : After 4 Decades, High School Seminary in Valley Is Closing Next Year

MISSION HILLS —  In the spring of 1954, an 18-year-old from North Hollywood graduated from the newly opened high school seminary campus here and continued through the Los Angeles Catholic seminary system to become a priest, bishop, and eventually head of the nation’s most populous archdiocese.

But it fell to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles to announce this month that he must close his alma mater next year. In part, that was because so few teen-age boys nurtured in the seminary are following in his footsteps all the way to the priesthood.

A church study showed that rising costs were surpassing financial resources to operate Our Lady Queen of Angels High School Seminary. And no more than 5% of the freshmen expected to enroll in the next decade could be counted on to complete the 12-year training for the priesthood.

Queen of Angels was already one of the last of the nation’s so-called junior, or minor, seminaries.

In 1968, there were 133 Catholic high school seminaries in the United States. But when the Mission Hills campus shuts down July 1, only nine will remain, none in the Western states.

“They certainly have been a dying breed,” said Father John Klein of Chicago, president of the Assn. of High School Seminaries.

“What has happened is that the resources become scarcer, and this is one place where the cuts occur,” said Klein, head of the high school seminary for the Chicago Archdiocese.

“It’s ironic, because for the first time in 20 years our enrollment collectively was up last fall, and I anticipate that it will be up again this year,” Klein said.

Indeed, at the Mission Hills campus the enrollment is 155, slightly more than five and 10 years ago, and well above the late 1970s, when there was a perilous drop to fewer than 100 students.

“We had 79 students in 1979, and a committee recommended we close,” Mike Crowley, the school’s athletic director, told the archdiocesan newspaper, the Tidings. “But Cardinal (Timothy) Manning said no, and enrollment shot up the next year. I thought this time the same thing would happen, but I was wrong.”

The Jan. 17 earthquake forced the archdiocese to assess its financial resources for recovery. An archdiocesan committee recommended that the high school seminary be closed and that new projects be launched at parish and private Catholic high schools to encourage young men to consider the priesthood.

In September, the seminary board endorsed the recommendation in a 9-2 vote.

Father James Anguiano, the seminary’s rector, told a meeting of parents and students Oct. 9 that it was possible the school would close at the end of the 1994-95 academic year.

The next day, the priests’ council, an advisory body to the cardinal, gave unanimous approval to the proposals, and the cardinal made it final.

Students and faculty “were pretty much saddened,” Anguiano said. “There are a lot of memories here.” As for parents and alumni, “some were understanding and some were unhappy,” he said.

Anguiano and Jerome Porath, superintendent of Catholic schools, have pledged to help seven lay teachers and 20 staff workers find new jobs and to relocate about 100 students to other Catholic schools.

Not all the students are from the Los Angeles Archdiocese, which covers Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Fifty-nine of the 155 students are from the Orange County Diocese, one from San Diego, one from Riverside and two from Florida.

Sister Leo Francis O’Callaghan, who teaches chemistry and is dean of students, was philosophical about the impending closure.

“If it had to be some time, it was best this year because we have a very small class of juniors--only 17 students,” she said. The 37 seniors will graduate next year, while the sophomores and freshmen should be able to adjust to new schools, she said.

O’Callaghan indicated that the logic of the shutdown is inescapable. “Finances are only a part of the picture,” she said.

Graduates who intend to become priests of the Los Angeles Archdiocese go from the high school to spend eight years at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. The trouble is, not enough of them do.

If they don’t make it through the system of training for priesthood, “then maybe there’s a better way,” said the nun, as she leafed through several lists of past graduating seniors, counting no more than two each year who actually became priests.

Even the current president of the school’s student body, Matthias Mendez of South-Central Los Angeles, is having second thoughts.

“I found that I’m not ready yet,” Mendez said, standing in the hallway of the seminary’s Spanish mission-style building.

“Being a priest requires a lot of sacrifices and self-discipline. It’s not totally out of my mind; it’s still possible.”

The Queen of Angels seminarians get only a partial taste of what it might mean to lead the priestly life. They live on campus Sunday through Thursday nights, then leave for the weekend after Friday classes.

“It has been an opportunity to appreciate our families and our homes more, and at the same time get a sense of brotherhood by living most of the time with other seminarians,” Mendez said.

Jacqueline Cranham, business manager for the seminary for most of the last 30 years, said that times have changed.

“Thirty years ago, boys came here intending to become priests,” she said. “Today, it’s a discerning process for them: ‘Do I really want to be a priest?’ ”

The seminary’s enrollment hit 362 in 1965; the mid-1960s were a high-water time in the number of those becoming priests and nuns and in most other measures of Catholic commitment. The ensuing decline coincided with church controversies over reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and the American sexual and social revolutions.

Although the high school’s enrollment has rebounded in recent years (partly due to an influx of minority students, including 55 Vietnamese now enrolled), the man in charge of priest recruitment for the archdiocese says that church leaders hope to reach even greater numbers of young men while spending less money and using fewer personnel.

“It’s going to be hard to replace the kind of peer support you get at an actual school,” said Father Richard Martini, who was rector of the seminary before becoming vocations director this year.

The vocations office hopes to establish nurturing groups at high schools and periodic retreats, among other strategies.

“The new plan would call for groups of a minimum of 50 students in each of the five regions of the archdiocese, which would mean that we would be dealing with 250 students, compared to the 150 or so in the seminary now,” Martini said.

“It’s a risk--we know what we had before and we liked it,” the priest said.

“I guess some things you leave up to God,” he said. “But we really won’t be able to make comparisons until 18 years from now.”