St. Philip's Seminary is a Catholic degree-granting seminary in Toronto, Ontario, run alongside the Toronto Oratory of St. Philip Neri.
St. Philip's Seminary is located at 1372 King St. West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Seminary coexists with an Oratory that runs two inner-city parishes, Holy Family and St Vincent de Paul. The Oratory is a company of priests and brothers devoted to prayer, preaching, and the sacraments, and to the pastoral work and life of two urban parishes and its seminary.
The Toronto Oratory was established on 1 November 1975. The present Toronto Oratory began in Montreal in the early 1970s, where it was canonically erected in 1975, before Cardinal Carter invited it to Toronto in 1979. St Philip's Seminary was founded in 1984. By an Act of Parliament in 1990, in consultation with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities of the Province of Ontario, the Seminary was established as a degree-granting institution in its own right. Until 2013, with the enactment of the Bologna Accord, the Seminary was also affiliated with the Pontifical University of the Lateran, and its degrees were recognized as equivalent to theirs. The Toronto Oratory's founder was Fr Jonathan Robinson, who was ordained in Rome in 1962.
The Act granted the Seminary the right to confer Bachelor's degrees on those studying philosophy and Master's degrees on those studying theology. The Seminary offers three different Bachelor's degrees in philosophy, providing significant flexibility for students from a variety of academic and linguistic backgrounds. The Seminary was established upon two principles: that seminarians need philosophy of a high intellectual calibre directed towards the subsequent study of theology, and a program focused on love of the priestly vocation. The fruitfulness of this approach is attested by at least 195 students who have persevered to ordination.
Admission routes include ecclesiastical sponsorship followed by application to the Seminary.