Uprooting of Seminaries

3. But now We are faced with a recent disaster. The upheavals of public events which disturbed all of Europe beginning in the previous century have overturned institutions as by a storm and torn them apart root and branch; both the royal and the ecclesiastical authorities had provided these institutions for the growth of faith and doctrine. When the Catholic Universities disappeared with their colleges, the seminaries for clerics languished because the fullness of learning, which had come from the great schools, gradually withered away. Moreover, they could not maintain their former estate because of internal wars and the mobs, which from time to time brought to nought the studies and intellectual strength of the citizens.