The new seminary soon became the most popular and first center of secondary education in the island. The number of students who requested to be allowed to take secondary education in the seminary but without any intention of pursuing priesthood was so many. Fr. Ildefonso Moral, who was reappointed rector in 1875, decided to open the seminary doors to lay students as had already been done in other diocesan seminaries. Thus the seminary lost its character of being a school solely and exclusively for priestly formation. But this adulteration of the Tridentine institution was partly due to certain historical circumstances.