Memorial for a candidate Print

Dear Brother! 

We welcome your desire to serve God and His people through the priestly ministry. We also hope that this desire comes to you through God's inspiration. To test the depth and maturity of your desire, and your own strengths and capabilities, we invite you to participate in our entrance examinations. We look forward to seeing you after you have successfully passed these examinations, as a student of the Drohobych Seminary of the Blessed Martyrs Severyn, Yakym and Vitaliy, Priest-Monks of Drohobych, of the Sambir-Drohobych Eparchy.
To facilitate your preparation we would like to present our Admission Requirements. We want to see in a candidate for the Seminary several key features:
a) Spirituality. Our understanding of this is that the candidate leads an intense Christian life, which consists of prayer, Church attendance and reading spiritual literature. The first part of the interview, as an preliminary to the exam, will be devoted to these issues. There may be questions about certain prayers in terms of not only knowing how to recite them but also how to understand them. Questions also cover the importance and meaning of various Church services and the Church building itself. Based on the literature given below you may be asked about some famous saints of the Ukrainian Church or about some episode from the Bible, Church History or contemporary issues of church life. In order to prepare yourself well in all these areas we recommend you read:
The Bible, the Catechism, “History of the Ukrainian Church” by Fr. Fedoriv, and the church magazines «Meta», «Viruju», «Zhyva Voda»
b) Intelligence. The second part of the interview is devoted to clarifying your intellectual level. Our questions may be about the so-called humanities: the history of Ukraine, literature, national culture, as well as your opinions about current socio-political, economic and international issues. We will base out questions on the knowledge that you should have gained while studying in high school, as well as information on current problems, received from the media. Therefore, read newspapers, watch news on television or listen to it on the radio, use the Internet - in short, be an interested, concerned person. And then you will have no problems during this interview.
The oral exam will also include an examination in music, designed to discover your listening and vocal capabilities. Singing and chanting occupy an important place in the liturgical celebrations of our Church. Therefore we have a separate music exam. If you love to sing and you have sung in a church choir before, you need not be afraid of this exam.
There are two written exams or tests - the Catechism and Liturgics.
Each test contains fifty questions, the final mark will be based on the number of correct answers. To pass these tests requires a good knowledge of the Catechism (study the appropriate book and ask your priest to explain to you anything you don’t understand). For an in-depth understanding of the liturgy a good book is Fr. Fedoriv’s "Rites of the Ukrainian Church". Use these two books as textbooks (work through them and make notes) - and you will be ready to take the tests.
Besides these tests, there are two more marks that you will be given on a piece of written work chosen from three proposed topics set for the exam. One of the marks will be given for literacy, and the second - for theme development. We will never ascribe to the idea that a priest in the Church may not be able to competently write and speak his own native language and we believe that the education received in secondary school is absolutely sufficient for the elimination of this problem. We hope that you have already solved the problem of literacy at school.
To summarize the examination; to the seven marks you have been awarded, we add one more - the so-called average rating school performance mark (5 points maximum).
Therefore, your perfect total score can be 40 (5 points x 7 exams plus average rating point).
We will accept 10-15 students into our Seminary. We hope that the level of your preparation will be enough to get into the top group.
If you do not succeed this year, do not consider it to be a tragedy. The grace of God’s calling in conjunction with your hard work might bring the desired result at the exams next year.
We wish God's blessing with the prayer, "Thy will be done."