Lisa Johnston/St. Louis Review

Jesuit Father John Horn has been named the next rector and president of Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in Shrewsbury, Mo., seminary of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, effective July 1.

Fr. Horn is the co-founder of the Institute for Priestly Formation (IPF) at Creighton University in Omaha and has more than 30 years of experience in Catholic education, spiritual direction, pastoral ministry and administration.

He has been serving as director of program development at the IPF, which has served more than 1,300 seminarians from 140 U.S. dioceses and 24 international dioceses since its founding in 1994.

Horn’s experiences have ranged from nursing home and parish ministry to high school teaching and field education for a suicide hotline.

Many years ago, he said, he felt the call to serve diocesan priests, one of Ignatius’s original works, in seminary formation. Ignatius “desired to serve diocesan priests because he knew if you affect one priest you affected an entire parish,” Horn said. “A great love of Christ compels me to want diocesan priests to have the best possible spiritual formation.”

Horn said Ignatian spirituality “helps us taste the presence of God at work in our hearts rather than have God be an idea and [just] talk about God. It invites us into the everyday experience of God’s presence in our lives. I can’t think of anything better to teach and form seminarians than this way of knowing God.”

For more about Horn, read the St. Louis Review article.

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