Desperately seeking seminarians

A shortage of priests is forcing the Catholic Church to consider major changes

by Dorie Clark

On the day in 1962 when Father Richard McBrien was ordained, there were four priests assigned to his church. But today -- despite an increase in the parish's population -- the number of priests serving Our Lady of Victory in West Haven, Connecticut, is down to two. For Catholic churches nationwide, this shrinkage is neither surprising nor unusual. It is a fact of life.

Currently, there is a shortage of priests so dire that many are calling it a crisis. The results of the shortage strike at the very core of the Catholic faith: because some priests are now called upon to serve as many as six parishes apiece, traditional sacraments such as the Eucharist, or Communion (in which wafers and wine believed to be the body and blood of Christ are consumed), are being offered less frequently. The statistics are alarming: 15 percent of parishes nationwide lack even one resident priest. More than 20,000 clergymen have left the profession over the past 30 years. During the same period, the number of men entering the Catholic priesthood has declined. And the priests who have remained in the fold are aging. In fact, the average age of a parish priest is 59, and more Catholic clergymen in the United States today are over 90 than under 30. This means that as old priests retire and die, no one is coming up in the ranks to take their places. And because of a rash of bad publicity -- pedophilia scandals, financial improprieties, and ideological battles over sexuality and gender -- the Church, entering the new millennium at a crucial point in its history, is having a hard time recruiting new, young candidates.

This earthly law of supply and demand -- in a country where there is one active parish priest for every 2200 faithful -- is forcing the Church to learn Marketing 101. "Before, vocational offices would just wait for people to ring the doorbell," says Father Daniel Greenleaf, who is in charge of recruiting priests for the Diocese of Portland, Maine. Now, in addition to church bulletin notices and poster programs, some dioceses are even taking to the airwaves, placing commercials on MTV and Comedy Central to entice young men into the vocation.

But even that may not be enough to bulk up the roster. The Catholic Church may finally be forced to take a hard look at candidates it previously ruled out. Liberal advocates insist the only way to keep the Church going is to admit women, married people, and maybe even partnered gays into the priesthood. The 2000-year-old Catholic Church -- which claims lineage from Jesus's original disciples -- is about to enter a new era.

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In the 1960s, amid social upheaval and various campaigns for sexual freedom, many traditional social institutions lost the status they previously enjoyed. The Catholic Church, which underwent profound change from within, was chief among them. From 1962 to 1965, Pope John XXIII convened a conference of Church officials to update and re-examine Catholic traditions. These deliberations, known as Vatican II, drastically altered many aspects of Church practice, from its worship service (replacing Latin with parishioners' native tongues) to its philosophical outlook (declaring a new openness toward other faiths and traditions).

Perhaps the most notable change of Vatican II was to increase lay participation in the life of the Church. That decision, in effect, demystified the role of priests and ended their elevated status. "We were very important people at one time," says Father Don Whipple, a 72-year-old priest in Cocoa Beach, Florida, "but we're not anymore. You'd go into a restaurant, not having reservations, and the maitre d' would say, `Father, Father, over here.' That's gone." Whipple himself is untroubled by the change, but the feeling is not universal. "That kind of prestige was very important to some people," he says.

This loss of prestige took from the priesthood one of its biggest selling points. In the past, few things made a Catholic family prouder than having a son become a man of the cloth. But gradually the enthusiasm for the profession has dampened, among both potential recruits and their families. According to a 1997 study sponsored by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 67 percent of Catholic parents would not encourage their child to become a priest or a nun.

Widespread reluctance to enter the priesthood has other roots as well. Today's modern, birth-controlled Catholic families have fewer children, and are less willing to subordinate their desire for grandchildren to the Church's demand for clerical celibacy. And Catholic men have more opportunities outside the Church. Equipped with college degrees and facing less discrimination than in years past, they have a greater array of careers open to them. Priesthood is not the only path to the middle class nowadays -- and high-tech careers pay a lot better.

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Just as alarming to the Church as the shortage of new priests is the advancing age of today's clergymen. Only 298 priests in the entire country are under the age of 30 -- and current seminarians are, of course, only getting older. Sure, this year's Keeping the Faith starred hunky Edward Norton as a priest, and made Catholicism look downright sexy. But the reality is closer to what you'd find at the Pope John XXIII National Seminary just outside Boston. The 75 future priests playing ping-pong in the rec room or checking their e-mail in the library are graying on top and getting a bit paunchy. Some have full white beards; one was spotted walking outside wearing a fedora. They are all friendly, cheerful, and accommodating -- but not exactly young. The seminary doesn't even try to attract young men, and in that way it is somewhat nontraditional. Instead, it's geared toward men aged 30 to 60 who are entering the priesthood as a second career. The ranks of older students are increasing at traditional seminaries as well. Although they are helping to stem the shortage of manpower, the fact remains that they, too, are aging along with the priests who joined years ago as young men. And, according to professor Dean Hoge of the Catholic University of America, the Church is replacing only 40 to 50 percent of the priests it loses each year to death, retirement, or resignation.

What's more, men are leaving the priesthood in droves. Hoge notes that the number-one reason is the celibacy requirement: heterosexual men are leaving to get married. This is changing the face of the Church -- it is both grayer and gayer. Exact figures are impossible to come by, but professor Mark Jordan of Emory University, the author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2000), says that "the low end of the scale for [estimates of] gay priests is around 30 percent, the high end between 70 and 80 percent." Indeed, a new book by Father Donald Cozzens, The Changing Face of the Priesthood (The Liturgical Press, 2000), has attracted a great deal of notice inside the Church for its assertion that "the priesthood is or is becoming a gay profession."

This increasingly gay reputation is having a dramatic effect on the priesthood. It drives away some heterosexual candidates; others enter the seminary and find the environment alienating. "It's like someone wandering into a café and suddenly you realize you're in the wrong place because it's a gay bar," says Father Richard McBrien, now a professor at the University of Notre Dame. "It's not that you're surrounded by evil people, but it's just not your place."

It's true that the priesthood has long provided cover for homosexual men wishing to conceal their sexual orientation. "For some very closeted young men, the priesthood seems like the perfect closet, the perfect protection," says Emory University's Mark Jordan. "It's a way to be gay and not come out." It certainly filled that role for Father Don Whipple, who finally came out six years ago at age 66 and knows "lots and lots and lots of homosexuals" who are priests. But the contradiction of having a gay identity in the midst of an institution that has taken a stance against homosexuality, calling it "objectively disordered," sometimes has damaging consequences.

Father Whipple says that gay priests' unique needs are often left unmet. "They have to be trained," he says, "on how to get the intimacy you need as a human being and still live your vow of chastity, especially if you're a member of a male community." Without this training, the results have been disastrous. Jordan estimates that, of gay priests under 45, perhaps 40 percent are sexually active. The Kansas City Star, in a survey of 14 states, revealed that more than 300 Catholic priests have died from AIDS, and that priests are more than six times more likely to die from the disease than the general population in those states.

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