Conservative Catholic Book (4 of 5): Seminary system.

From Michael S. Rose’s “Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations from the Priesthood” (2002) (pp. 96-97):

[A priest] said in his [1996] taped remarks [about Chicago-area St. Mary of the Lake seminary in Mundelein, Illinois], “Many of the younger students would be placed into situations in which they compromised their sexual integrity.  This would be used against them by older students for favors.  And these older students actually had faculty members who would request from time to time a friend who would come and visit them because they were lonely.  And these students would supply fresh meat.  So there were madams, pimps, and prostitutes all in a major seminary system that, from the outside, if you were to walk through, would look very holy.”

...[A] seminarian at the Chicago-area seminary during the 1998-99 school year, confirmed that [this] portrait of the sexual immorality and shenanigans remains unchanged at the dawn of the 21^st century.  “I won’t go so far as to say that some of the members of the formation team at Mundelein were literally ‘pimps,’ but one or two in particular certainly facilitated Chicago priests meeting the ‘cute’ seminarians.”

. . .

“One hall in the seminary dorm,” related [that same seminarian], “is nicknamed the ‘Catwalk,’ known as the residence of the more fashionable gays.”  ‘Catwalk,’ he explained, was a reference to the runways of fashion models, but also reflected the campy, feline-like personalities of those who lived in this certain area of the seminary...

According to [him] and several other seminarians who attended Mundelein during the 1990’s, one of the big events at the seminary was whenever a seminarian would “come out” as being a homosexually-oriented person.  The openly-gay-seminarian-to-be would do so by telling one of two of his closest friends; and sure enough the word of another “orientation proclamation,” they said, would travel quickly throughout the halls of the seminary, especially to the formation faculty members.  Oddly enough... once a seminarian would “come out,” he would soon be wined and dined – literally – by certain faculty members.  “In my opinion,” [the disgruntled seminarian] said, “it’s highly inappropriate to wine and dine any favorite students, orientation aside.”  But the special status given to openly gay seminarians, he said, is beyond the pale.

. . .