A Crisis Not of Vocation

Throughout American parishes today you are unable to escape the talks of a "priesthood crisis" where we together lament that there are not enough young men going through seminary to become priests. Following the homily at Mass talking about the lack of priests, all the old women of the parish corner every single person they can find who will listen and do their best to advertise for the seminary, most especially the young men. If a married couple has a son then the women tell them how their son should become a priest, they tell the girls how their brothers or their friends who are boys should become priests, and of course you have every male under the age of twenty cornered by these women trying to convince them to enter the seminary. Sometimes the priest himself joins in the attempted convincing. And even with all of this, somehow we are still in a crisis. If these methods actually worked, I would suspect the seminaries would be overpopulated now. But, somehow the very persistent old ladies at church aren't getting the boys into the priesthood.

In truth, we are in a crisis, and we are lacking priests. But those are separate issues, and I will speak on that in a moment. What you can't deny is that we have a lot of parishes across the country and generally we do not have enough priests to populate all those parishes. This was not always the case, is used to be common for there to be multiple priests at a singular parish, and to say that is rare today I would think a significant understatement. I come from the Diocese of Saginaw in Michigan, and for numerous reasons we started seeing a lack of priests before many of the other diocese in the United States, and I have been involved in or in proximity of the talks of how to resolve this issue. I was also a young man at my church once, and so I have been subject to the church ladies and their coaxes to the priesthood.

When we speak of the crisis with the priesthood it is a misnomer, because it's not a priesthood crisis, it is a vocations crisis. The problem is not that men are refusing to choose priesthood as their vocation, it is that both men and women are failing to choose anything. It used to be the case that people generally felt that they had a purpose in life, goals to achieve, and an end in mind, but no longer is this so. When someone tells the average man today that he should think about joining the seminary it is not as if he plans to get married but you're presenting the idea of the priesthood - no, men today wonder if they will marry, or if they should marry. A generation ago the men had the question of when, the men of today have moved to the question of if, and so many have moved onto the question of why. Why should I marry when it seems like every marriage ends in disaster - through divorce, or the couple stays together and hates each other - and it seems as if I am not what the opposite sex wants.

The relationship between the sexes is abysmal. I cannot think of a time where it has been worse in the history of the world. Even our first parents, Adam and Eve, they live in paradise then sin against God and get kicked out of the garden, there is blame-throwing amidst the situation, and they are naked and ashamed. But, the Church calls these two saints, so even after their first failure and bringing about the fall of the human race, they lived holy lives afterwards and attained glory in Heaven. Man and woman threw blame at each other then, but it is nothing like the situation today. There are only a handful of men out of the hundreds I have encountered in my life that say they do not want to get married - all the rest want a family, and so many of them are good men, but so many have been scarred by a woman or have no good women near them so they remain single. And the same for women, I have met so many good women who want a family but have been scarred or lack quality men in their proximity.

I don't intend to rectify the war of the sexes in this article so I will end my thoughts on the divide there, at least for now. What we are experiencing now is not a priesthood crisis, it is not even a vocations crisis in truth, we are living in a time where people are simply not choosing any path. This is an identity crisis. I do not mean it in the sense used by psychologists, I mean that people have no identity whatsoever. Either they were never given their identity, or their identity has been stripped away from them.

I could say much more, but I will refrain from doing so. Rather I will say this - presumably what the many of you are feeling when you read this is a wistfulness pervading your life, feeling lost and without a direction. Perhaps you know your next goal and that is to graduate school, or get that promotion, or buy that house. But, what is after that? That is where your vocation comes in. Life is about choices, and choices are what make you. The beginning of remedying this plague upon us is to make a choice, stop being paralyzed by fear. Seek out the religious order. Ask that girl out. Join the seminary. If these do not work out then that is okay, you tried, and that is admirable. But if things do "work out" then marry the girl, or take your final vows for the order, or finally become a priest. Commit. You will be happier for it.

Written for VME Catholic, by Ethan Hall