Powołanie do istnienia i rozwój Seminarium Duchownego w Diecezji Warmińskiej
Establishment and Development of the Diocesan Seminary in Warmia

Summary/Abstract: Cardinal Stanisław Hosius, implementing the resolutions of the Council of Trent, founded in 1565 the college and seminary in Braniewo and entrusted its operation to the Jesuits. However, it was until 1567 that it started teaching 10 candidates for the priesthood. This was the first seminary to be established on the Polish territory. One of the Jseuits, a prefect called Regens, was in charge of education and the clerics where educated in a gymnasium (middle school) where theological and philosophical subjects were taught (from 1592). It is not known whether all candidates for ordination completed the five-class education, because the comment in „litterae dimisoriae” only pointed out the candidate had „scientia debiata” (required knowledge). In around 1808, due to a scarce number of clerics in the seminary the lectures were conducted irregularly and as professors neglected them, they were discontinued in 1811. Scarcity of priests in the diocese of Warmia urged this problem to be solved, because already at that time did not suffice to educate future priests in a „handicraft way”. Therefore, in 1818 the Prussia king established at the Gymnasium in Braniewo an independent unit called Lyceum Hosianum, or departament of philosophy and theology, which operated in symbiosis with the seminar between 1818 and  1912, and then between 1913 and 1945 with the Royal Academy. The new principal of the seminary, Fr. Joseph Scheill († 1835) developed a new style of running the seminary in Braniewo and as a result it approached the status of a university. In 1932, bishop M. Kaller (until 1947) quickly built a new seminary building which, however, was destroyed during air raids in 1945. After the war, in 1947, the seminary of the diocese of Warmia was re-established in Olsztyn where the diocese administrative centre was set up. From 1974, Warmian seminarians, with the consent of Rome, coulddefend their master’s theses at the Catolic University of Lublin, from 1981 at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, and in 1999 the seminary, as the Faculty of Theology, became part of the nascent University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn.

• Details
• Contents