Seminary Days : The old rules--and the student body’s ethnic makeup--have changed at St. John’s.

Tuesday the seminarians fought sleep.

But that was no surprise, really. This was May 14, and the two of them, Juan Torres and Phil Yim, had been keeping some strange hours out there on the Camarillo hilltop that holds St. John’s Seminary College.

Papers were falling due. Final exams were looming. Faith, commitment and celibacy were being considered and reconsidered. Burger-related curfew violations were in the works. Madonna was on the television. And the campus administration was in the heat of an unprecedented campaign to redefine the institution from top to bottom.

It was a great time to be a seminarian, if you had the constitution for it. And it was an opportune time to follow two of them through three days of seminary life.

As on every weekday, Tuesday’s services began at 7 a.m. Most of the men made it, wearing sweat shirts, jeans, slacks and tennis shirts, blinking away sleep, aiming one day to be ordained priests in the Roman Catholic Church. The burble of the chapel fountain scrambled their prayers while sunlight seeped through the stained glass above.

Torres rose, dressed and strode to chapel, leaving his Vibiana Hall dorm room in the usual seminarian’s disorder.

On the door of his room, someone had scrawled his nickname: “Butthead.” In the guts of his word processor, a history paper on Richard Nixon and Henry Ford awaited a conclusion. Elsewhere in the room: eight Bibles, a crucifix, walking staff, a 10-speed and a beers-of-the-world poster.

Yim dozed in nearby Bonaventure Hall, an hour from the new day’s first Marlboro Light, several pages from finishing a metaphysics paper. He missed services. But he got up in time for his first academic obligation.

“Senioritis,” diagnoses Torres later.

Juan Torres is 27 years old and above six feet tall. He comes from a Spanish-speaking household in a Los Angeles barrio, the middle child among nine. On visits home, he shares a bedroom with brothers ages 19 and 23. On long-distance runs, he prays. He wears braces on his teeth and speaks mostly when spoken to.

Phil Yim is 21 years old and 5-foot-6. He was born in Korea, raised mostly in Orange County. He has one older brother. He prays while listening to Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis, walks the campus in French jeans and Ralph Lauren shirts. Conversationally, he is a filibuster waiting to happen.

Contrasts notwithstanding, both hold B averages. Both will begin theologate studies in the fall. And both aim to join the new generation of Roman Catholic priests.

“There’s nothing special about it,” Yim said. “Except that somehow, through me, God’s working.”

The St. John’s campus is a quiet place, but not an uneventful one.

For more than 20 years, while the Vatican II reforms of 1962-65 resounded through the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, St. John’s Seminary College held onto its reputation as a conservative school. The campus, which moved from Los Angeles to Camarillo in 1961, was known as a place where seminarians were rigorously “formed” for priesthood, never indulged.

But last year, faced with a continuing shortage of priests worldwide and a widening cultural gap between nonwhite seminarians and their usually white teachers, church leaders took a bold stroke.

When St. John’s President-Rector Sylvester Ryan was promoted to the post of auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, church officials replaced him with Father Rafael Luevano. Luevano, 36, became the youngest leader in the institution’s history, its first Latino leader, and one of the youngest college presidents in the nation.

Luevano’s agenda: to make the place more sensitive to its students’ increasingly diverse backgrounds; to give seminarians an education that is neither cloistered nor casual; to stress individuality and responsibility in an institution that had long relied on conformity and obedience. That strategy is vital, Luevano argued, with a student body one-third Asian, one-third Latino and one-third Anglo.

In the last year, the administration stopped assigning seats for prayers and discontinued its formal Monday-night dinners. College officials started giving all students a variety of privileges they formerly earned when they became seniors.

The school has also opened the field of possible majors from two (philosophy and liberal studies) to four (philosophy, English, Spanish and liberal studies) and begun accepting mid-year transfers.

Sunday Mass is occasionally celebrated on Saturday night. The dress code, which discourages jeans in class, is often overlooked. The curfew, officially 11 on weeknights and midnight on weekends, is largely left to personal discretion. Televisions and microwave ovens now are tolerated in dorm rooms.

“I want to teach them to take responsibility for themselves,” Luevano said in a recent interview. “It means taking some risks, but they’re calculated, and carefully observed. I don’t think whether a guy’s wearing jeans or black pants in the hallway is going to upset the doctrine of the church.”

St. John’s, operated by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, is the principal educator of diocesan priests of Southern California. Earlier this year, a church survey found that the closing and shriveling of seminaries elsewhere has left St. John’s the largest institution of its kind in the nation.

Hundreds of campus alumni serve as the Roman Catholic Church’s general practitioners throughout California and the West, celebrating Masses, hearing confessions, training altar boys, performing baptisms, weddings and funerals.

An outsider might expect general rejoicing among current St. John’s students over a relaxation of seminary rules. An outsider would be wrong.

Before the rules changed, the 100-odd seminarians at St. John’s were leading lives the secular world seldom understood. Some of them had left more liberal schools to find the more ordered life that St. John’s was known for. Now they were treading on ground that no St. John’s seminarian had trod before.

“Instead of forming us extrinsically, he’s hoping that we’ll be formed intrinsically,” said underclassman James Woodstock one night, passing time in the hall. “But you give us an inch, and we’ll take a mile.”

Of course, inches and miles are measured differently in different places, and the standards at St. John’s would still scare off most secular students in a flash.

In fact, Woodstock, a 25-year-old transfer student, said he would be leaving St. John’s in the fall, in part because of his grades. He expected to fail his religion class. Three absences. Too many.

By 8:30 a.m., services and breakfast were done. It was time for metaphysics.

In their classroom seats, the seminarians nod and scribble. Up front, Father Thomas Anslow navigated the subtleties of hermeneutics, the science of literary interpretation. The class had been reading “The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity,” by Thomas Sheehan, a scholar who argued that the church has misinterpreted the books of the Bible.

Torres scoffed at Sheehan’s conclusions. For Yim, the book was more trouble than that. In two days he would have to lead a discussion on it. And he hadn’t yet worked out a persuasive way to discredit it.

“It’s a faith-shaker,” he said. “We get a few of those, like Nietzsche.”

Yim was born in Pusan, South Korea, and arrived in California with his family in 1976. In Korea, Yim’s parents were “holiday Buddhists,” but he had already spent time in Baptist and Presbyterian churches before an aunt introduced him, at age 9, to the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Sunday school wasn’t as much fun as the Presbyterian one. But Yim loved “the mysterious power of attending Mass.”

When he was a junior in high school, he was packed off by his parents on a Catholic youth retreat. A dozen St. John’s seminarians were along.

“I thought, God they must be miserable. They’re not going to get married. Miserable pay and all that,” said Yim. “And they were the happiest people I’d seen . . . And I was thinking, ‘Damn, I want that for myself.’ ”

He applied to St. John’s and got in. He arrived, 17 years old and fresh from a vacation in Mazatlan, in a tank top and shorts. His classmates were in coats and ties. Yim’s reputation was established.

“Ever since then, it’s been one big struggle with myself,” Yim said. “It’s been the hardest four years of my life, but also the best four years . . . . You’re forced to look at issues that other people don’t think about until their mid-life crises, or later: Who am I? What do I want from life?”

All right, then. Celibacy.

At 11:40 a.m., four seminarians gathered in Father Richard Krekelberg’s office. This was a “formation” group meeting, aimed at guiding students’ spiritual development. Alongside Krekelberg sat Janice Daurio, a married Catholic woman who advises St. John’s students on non-academic issues.

Before they closed the doors to speak in private, Torres said: “I struggle with celibacy. I think we all do.”

“On an hourly basis,” said Krekelberg, 43, and 18 years a priest.

“Before, I used to look at it as a necessary evil,” said Yim. Now, he said, he tries to see it as “a different way of loving.”

“When most guys say they have a problem,” said Daurio, “they don’t have a problem at all. They’ve noticed that women are women.”

As seminarians, the men are encouraged to practice celibacy and to make peace with the issue before they go further. Church officials discourage men who may be gay from joining the seminary, but, Torres said later, “there have been a few guys who have been blatant about their sexual preference.”

In Krekelberg’s office, that didn’t come up.

Krekelberg did, however, say that the church would consider it healthy for a seminarian to fall in love--so that he could learn to overcome the associated sexual urges. If a seminarian or priest does lapse and have an affair, said Krekelberg, counseling within the church could repair the situation. The fallen man could reclaim his celibacy and continue his career.

In any event, he noted, it’s clear enough that not all seminarians are cut out for the celibate life.

“We just had an alumni day two Sundays ago,” said Krekelberg. “And we had 162 guys up here with their families.”

At lunch, Yim leaned forward over his soup.

“You might not get caught breaking all the rules here. There are no patrolmen. But they can tell by your attitude,” he said.

After his sophomore year, Yim said, he was almost thrown out of St. John’s.

“Let’s just say, he seemed like he was at a secular college,” said Torres, seated at the same table. “He was one of the party-starters. He’s mellowed out a lot. He’s more into control.”

Now, if all goes according to plan, Yim will begin graduate school this fall in Belgium. He still hadn’t heard a formal acceptance message, and if the European plan falls through, he is prepared to attend St. John’s Theologate next-door, where Torres will be.

But the odds against ordination are still long. From 60 students in the freshman class of 1973, President-Rector Luevano can think of just five who went on to be ordained.

In St. John’s 1991 class, Torres said, enrollment fell from 25 to 14 over the last three years. Of the 14 remaining seniors, four have decided not to pursue the priesthood.

“I just hope and pray I can get to be one,” Yim said. “But until the morning the bishop puts his hands on me, I won’t know.”

Wednesday Mass was at 11:40 a.m. Torres was near the back, in his blue windbreaker.

“Santo, santo, santo,” the seminarians chant, now drowning out the chapel fountain. Holy, holy, holy.

The previous night’s studying had gone until 3 a.m., and the work was far from done. Torres finished a paper on a key adviser to turn-of-the-century Mexican President Porfirio Diaz. But Nixon and Henry Ford remain prisoners of his word processor, and then there was this other thing on Aristotle’s view of wisdom, and more beyond that.

“I can’t do what Juan does,” confided classmate Mike Sezzi later. “I’d panic after a while. It always gets done, though. And he always gets a better grade than me. That I don’t understand.”

Torres joined the seminary late. He had grown up in Los Angeles, part of a church-going family, but more committed to sports. After high school he went to Citrus Community College in Azusa and then to Cal State Fullerton, where he ran long-distance on the track team.

But when he was 21, he crossed paths with a priest who was “very charismatic, very in tune with the people. Up to that point, the only priests I had seen were old guys.”

With just one semester remaining before graduation, he left Fullerton and enrolled at St. John’s. Starting as a sophomore, he defrayed the $4,000 annual tuition with a part-time job washing dishes in the cafeteria.

That could have been the beginning of his happy ending, but it wasn’t. During his first semester at St. John’s, Torres’ father began to suffer seizures and lost his job. His sister was told she had cancer. And one of his brothers was arrested in connection with a stolen car.

“I was thinking, ‘I don’t belong here,’ ” Torres said. “I thought I was doing the right thing, and suddenly everything was going wrong in my life.”

At school, he wasn’t used to the near-constant stream of extracurricular meetings and the combination of spiritual and academic demands. On his first summer away he met a young woman, and for a month he didn’t know if he would be coming back. But he did, right on schedule.

Since then, his father has retired, his sister’s cancer has gone into remission, and his brother’s life seems to have settled down.

With Mass near an end, the seminarians rose to embrace and wish each other peace. Outside the door, Torres conferred with Yim--who had been up until 4 that morning--and headed back to commune with Ford, Nixon, and the word processor.

“A characteristic which can be attributed to Henry Ford and Richard Nixon,” the paper began, “is that they were both hard workers . . . . “

Two hours later, on the basketball court, Yim was still testing possible approaches to the metaphysics discussion.

Torres, done thinking about papers for the moment, was testing his high-arc jump shot. It reached closer to heaven than most two-story buildings, but was not accurate.

The game was three against three, with a reporter, two cafeteria workers and another seminarian filling out the teams. During a break in the action, a female jogger bounded past in a red top. Heads turned. Then it was back to the game.

Torres took the ball, drove toward the hoop against Yim, then pulled up to capitalize on his six-inch-plus height advantage. In went the shot.

“Where are your morals?” asked Yim.

It was now five days short of final exams, 10 days from graduation. Darkness gathered on the campus, as did strange voices, visions and furtive plans.

The voices were those of a community choir, borrowing the chapel loft. Backed by a pair of guitars, the singers hit high notes that resounded across the deserted courtyard.

“Salvation and glory are yours,” they sang, “For now and evermore.”

The visions were student actors, bearded and robed as ancient Egyptians, strolling the halls and waiting to their parts in the campus production written by one of the seminarians.

The furtive plans: Despite the official 11 p.m. curfew, there would be a midnight run to In-N-Out Burger.

As the hour drew near, half a dozen seminarians rendezvoused in the room of Torres and his roommate, Mike Gutierrez.

The television was on. Suddenly, there was Madonna on the screen, promoting her new movie. She stared out at the seminarians and the rest of her cable audience, and asked a simple question.

“How bad do you want it, babe?”

Her audience was unmoved.

“Yes, we want it,” said Jorge Barake, a junior from Honduras, dripping cynicism.

And then it was off to the burgers.

On Thursday, they made it to morning prayers.

It was no mean feat. They had stayed up all night, partly studying but mostly procrastinating, fueled by coffee, Cokes and burgers from In-N-Out. At 5:30 a.m., they went to Denny’s for Grand Slam breakfasts.

But here it was, 7:15, and Torres was settled into a pew near the back. Yim, who had arrived sooner, was up near the front.

“Make us servants of your peace,” they sang. “Renew our strength, remove all fear.” The fountain burbled. The sun seeped through the stained glass. Four days to finals, nine to graduation.

“If you come here, you are very serious about the priesthood,” said the rector in his office that morning. “A great deal of time, energy and money is invested in these guys. There’s no other place to get an education like this.”

And it continued. Yim still had his metaphysics paper to write. And Torres had Aristotle to reckon with. But in the long view--the prevailing view at St. John’s these days--they were well on their way.

“Last year, I didn’t know whether I’d go down to Theologate or not--whether I’d find the peace of mind,” Torres said. “And I found it.”

On Saturday, May 25, the St. John’s Seminary College Class of 1991 was graduated. That week, Phil Yim was accepted into a graduate program in Belgium. Juan Torres will attend graduate school at St. John’s.