A bit more on the crash that killed two seminarians last weekend. The seminarian who was driving has been charged:

Robert Spaulding, 27, who attends seminary at St. Mary of the Lake University in Mundelein, was allegedly drunk last Thursday at 1:30 a.m. when the car he was driving through the seminary campus hit a tree.

"He’s now looking at a special Class 2 aggravated DUI, which is punishable by 6 to 28 years in the Department of Corrections," said Suzanne Willett of the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office.

Much more from the Chicago Tribune:

During the crash investigation, Ohio and local officials revealed that Rowlands was indicted in February 2000 on felony charges of bribery, perjury and failing to file a state income-tax return. The charges stemmed from an investigation into audits of the Fairfield County sheriff’s office, said Suzanne Schmidt, a special prosecutor who handled the case. The audits revealed that the sheriff’s office misspent about $300,000 in public money from 1994 to 1999, she said.

In exchange for dropping the felony charges, Rowlands pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of obstructing official business, Schmidt said. He was fined $400 plus court costs.

Rowlands hasn’t worked for the sheriff’s office for four years.

Officials at both the University of St. Mary of the Lake, the nation’s largest Catholic seminary, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago said Monday that they did not know about Rowlands’ legal troubles, even though two background checks are supposedly done on seminarians.

Rev. Gus Belauskas, vice rector of St. Mary’s, said students are subject to criminal background checks and psychological testing by their home dioceses, which are repeated by the seminary’s diocese.

….
Monsignor Francis Maniscalco, spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., said the church does not specifically call for criminal background checks for candidates to the priesthood but calls for adequate screening and evaluation techniques. State laws vary with regard to such checks, he said.

Maniscalco said that in some cases, men with prior criminal backgrounds might be admitted into seminary.

"The church does believe in redemption, so it is possible," he said. "Assuming the man was, in fact, guilty, considerations would be the nature of the crime, the amount of time passed since its commission and whether the man had paid his debt to society. I am sure some grave crimes would probably exclude a man altogether."

When asked if a drunken-driving incident would be grounds for dismissal from the seminary, Maniscalco said, "It would have been when I was a seminarian 40 years ago."

A reader writes in, regarding Msgr. Maniscalco’s comment about no criminal background checks for seminarians: No, we save those for the CCD teachers….