It is difficult to gauge reaction to the recent guidelines among seminary students and gay priests.
On a recent Thursday, the Kabirwala seminary was buzzing with activity.
For the first time in recent history, the Rochester seminary this year held a workshop in writing résumés.
Until recently, most seminaries avoided taking converts.
And that proportion could well rise; a third of recent graduates from SBC seminaries espouse doctrines that hark back to the reformer John Calvin, with the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, a particular source.
They included a seminary student and recent college graduates.
The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which was established in 1898 by elements associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, was soon taken over by Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants for whom the seminary was much too liberal.
"It sparked a bug in me," Bruce Pope, 44, a recent graduate of a Roman Catholic seminary in the Washington area, said at a recent Peace Corps recruiting session here.
"It was very clean, extremely clean," said Ted Resnick, a carpet dealer who got a recent walk-through of the Philadelphia seminary where Pope Francis will spend one night during his coming visit to the United States this week.
The recent comments by Bishop Williamson, who led a seminary in Ridgefield, Conn., in the 1980s and later moved to a seminary in Argentina, inevitably overshadowed the debate about traditional and liberal strains in the Roman Catholic Church.
