The Archdiocese of Boston, which has already made severe budget cuts in the face of dwindling contributions, announced yesterday that the four-year undergraduate college at St. John's Seminary in Brighton will close at the end of this school year.
But the program is a casualty of changing times, not the clergy sex abuse crisis: Just 25 students are in the four-year liberal arts program, down from more than 100 three decades ago.
Even so, the savings will help the archdiocese in its scramble to regain fiscal stability. For the archdiocese, the decision will end postsecondary school preparation for the priesthood that began when the seminary opened in 1884.
David Castaldi, a former archdiocsean chancellor who is on the seminary's board of trustees, said the committee that recommended the decision was formed in 2001. ''The subject has been on the table for years and years as enrollment kept declining, declining to such an extent that everyone felt that it was not the best possible preparation for the priesthood and had become an inappropriate use of resources,'' Castaldi said last night.
The decision to close the seminary's College of Liberal Arts was made at a board meeting Tuesday night.
Bishop Richard Lennon, the seminary rector, noted in a statement issued yesterday that the four-year graduate program in theology, which leads to ordination, has 79 men enrolled. But there are just 25 in the undergraduate program.