St. Joseph’s Seminary and College Receives a Nearly $1 Million Lilly Endowment Grant
By: The Good Newsroom
Funded through Lilly Endowment’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, the center will strengthen St. Joseph’s Seminary’s capacity to form healthy, resilient Catholic leaders
St. Joseph’s Seminary and College has been awarded a grant of $999,440 from Lilly Endowment Inc. to establish The Redemptor Hominis Center for Holistic Health on the seminary’s main campus in Yonkers.
Funded through Lilly Endowment’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, the center will strengthen St. Joseph’s Seminary’s capacity to form healthy, resilient Catholic leaders by providing comprehensive, multi-component, holistic health programming aligned with both its historic mission and the new guidelines of the USCCB’s Program for Priestly Formation (2022).
Key activities of the center will include:
- Providing individual wellness assessments for all seminarians in each stage of priestly formation (propaedeutic, discipleship, configuration);
- Enabling early identification and overseeing consistent wellness services to address seminarians’ holistic (mental, physical, and emotional) health needs;
- Supporting recently ordained alumni with workshops and fraternity programming intended to strengthen satisfaction and success;
- Empowering graduate students, diaconate candidates, deacons, and lay church leaders through workshops and conferences on wellness topics intended to strengthen their ability to meet parishioners’ needs.
Named for Pope John Paul II’s first encyclical, “Redemptor Hominis,” the center expresses St. Joseph’s Seminary’s commitment to holistic priestly formation rooted in Christ, who heals and restores our humanity. Led by a full-time director and supported by seminary faculty, the Redemptor Hominis Center for Holistic Health will position St. Joseph’s Seminary at the forefront of human and pastoral formation in the United States.
“This center,” said Bishop James Massa, rector and president of St. Joseph’s Seminary, “will help cultivate the affective maturity and priestly character that our people expect to find in their priests. Our purpose is forming men of communion who live healthy and holy lives and help others to do the same.”
Founded in 1896, St. Joseph’s Seminary and College is commonly known as “Dunwoodie” due to its location within the Dunwoodie section of Yonkers.
Lilly Endowment Inc. is a private foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company.