The great Saint John Eudes had no greater concern during his long and fruitful life than the formation of priests: very few did as much as he did to implement with intense zeal that most magnificent of the Tridentine foundations, the Seminary.
His final foundation was the Seminary at Caen, in his native Normandy, the city in which he died. The seminary survived everything: the licentious 18th century, the Revolution, the upheavals of the 19th century, the early-20th century anticlerical laws, two world wars... Buildings destroyed, buildings taken over by the government, persecution - it may have closed, but it always reopened. Unfortunately, only the aftermath of the crisis of Catholicism that began in the early 1960s with the "razing of the bastions" and the embracing of worldly values could do what neither Robespierre nor Émile Combes could do.
Aggiornamento: thy name is death.
With barely any seminarians, and no assurance of professors, the Seminaire Saint-Jean-Eudes de Caen is being closed down by the Bishops of Lower Normandy: the remaining seminarians will be moved to the Saint-Yves Seminary in Rennes, Brittany. (Source; via le Salon Beige & Yves Daoudal)
