Catholic Church Surfs for Recruits

Jan. 9 -- Roman Catholic officials are going online to find a few good men to answer God’s call.

As the Catholic Church faces a shortage of priests in the coming decades, at least 25 dioceses across the United States have set up Web sites to attract young men to the priesthood.

“It sounds like a business, but we’re in competition for the best and the brightest with medical schools and law schools,” says Father John Acrea, recruitment coordinator at the Des Moines, Iowa Catholic diocese, where 84 priests serve a congregation of about 100,000 people.

“The Internet is the way young people find information, so we have to be there and get the word out,” he says.

Pulpits Coming up Short

Most of the 188 U.S. dioceses — the geographical area over which a bishop has jurisdiction — don’t yet face an urgent shortage of priests. But church officials who recruit men for the holy job say they expect numbers to decline because fewer men are training at seminaries.

“People entering the seminary do not equate the number of priests retiring or dying,” says Father Bill Kubacki of the Toledo, Ohio diocese.

Statistics compiled by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University show a sharp decline of graduate-level seminary students over the past three and a half decades, from 8,325 enrolled in 1965 to 3,474 last year. In the same time period, the number of Catholics in the United States has risen over 30 percent, from around 45 million in 1965 to about 60 million today.

From Joliet, Ill. to Pittsburgh, Pa., cyber recruitment has taken off to extend the church’s reach and complement face-to-face efforts.

“In the past, most guys have been recruited through personal invitation” from priests or other church staff, Kubacki says.

Acrea says in Des Moines, more traditional avenues of finding priests, such as a well-known presence at Catholic schools and local churches, have dried up over the years — a trend he attributes to an increasingly mobile society. Families relocating to a new town or state can cut short relationships that form between churchgoers and their clergy, he says.