hanuman wrote:Taurus2 wrote:I think you're wrong about all the seminary institutions being located in church territory. Maikel seems to have spent his entire career in Charis, apart from the traditional Temple pilgrimage.
Exactly. Besides, if we go by the practice of the various Catholic, Orthodox and Coptic churches, which the CoGA seems to be based upon, then a substantial proportion of the priesthood will be trained not in the seminaries, but in the monasteries.
Most Catholic priests were in-fact trained in the seminaries that each diocese maintains (in some cases multiple seminaries until recently). This is necessary due to the shear numbers involved rendering the logistics of a single training institution unmanageable (and this would be even worse in a pre-steam culture. It was rare for a monastic priest to be seen outside a monastery let alone in a parish church.
In Europe these formed the basis for the older universities with advanced Theology having other subjects tacked on later - like Medicine. Until the 1800's in Europe an university education required entry to the priestly orders for most of the students before graduation.
The textev on Safehold indicates that the priests joined their orders after initial local training. So loosing the central authority would have no more impact than the break of the Anglican church had from the Roman church (broadly disruptive but locally a non event in the short term (in the long term, doctrinal drift leads to other fractures without a central authority, give it a century and you will see everything from equivalent of the Puritans and Mennonites to the Holy Christian Jumpers (with the odd Methodist, Baptist and their fractals)).