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Creighton University

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Spiritual Formation Certificate

Icon of Jesus with Sacred Heart.
“Our communities must become genuine schools of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help, but also in thanksgiving, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly falls in love...it would be wrong to think that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life.”

— Pope John Paul II
Novo Millennio Ineunte, 33

The Spiritual Formation graduate certificate will prepare you to teach Christian prayer and discernment. It can equip you to be a major contributor in the Catholic Church’s mission of the new evangelization. You will be able to assist in awakening hearts to taste and see Trinitarian and Marian love at work in everyday faith.

 

A Christian anthropology of the heart is provided, grounding the practice of lectio-divina prayer and a foundational understanding of pastoral diagnostics.

 

The program is directed by Rev. Richard Gabuzda, S.T.D., a specialist in sacramental theology and diocesan priestly spirituality. Your experience culminates in a personal appropriation of God’s grace through encountering Trinitarian and Marian love in and through the rich living tradition of “The Spiritual Exercises” of Saint Ignatius Loyola.

 


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Courses & Benefits

 

Courses

 

Semester Hours

IPF 501

Christian Prayer & Virtue

1

IPF 502

Christian Spirituality & Sexuality

3

IPF 503

The Spirituality of Diocesan Priesthood

2

IPF 504

The Mystery of the Liturgy: Receiving in Celebration & Life

3

IPF 505

Theology of the Body

2

IPF

Integration Seminar: Holy Spirit

non-credit

IPF 707

The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola: Theory & Practice

5

 

Benefits
  • Helps fulfill the priest’s desire to be an effective teacher of prayer and to live in a way that evangelizes human hearts, setting them ablaze with God’s love in Jesus the Christ.
  • Builds up local parishes as schools of contemplative healing prayer and discernment.
  • Strengthens the interior life of prayer and further equips seminary personnel in their call within a call to labor in the spiritual formation of future priests, pastors.
  • Provides local bishops, directors of seminarians, and vocation personnel with a creative means to teach, interact with and impact their seminarians.
  • Cultivates inspirational educational interactions between seminaries, bishops and vocation personnel in spiritual formation by affording opportunities to create localized satellite centers of spiritual formation where distance learning and on-line courses interact with desires for substantive spiritual and pastoral years within seminary formation.