COMMONWEAL
November 3, 2006 / Volume CXXXIII, Number 19  
EDITORIAL
Tomorrow’s Priests
The Editors

The Catholic priesthood in the United States stands at a crossroads. An increasingly sophisticated Catholic laity fills the church’s pews and staffs its ever-growing parishes, and yet the church has failed to produce a corps of new priests to match it-in either quantity or quality. True, some data suggest that today’s recently ordained clergy are happier than their predecessors, and this is good news for stemming attrition in the short term. But over the long haul, happiness won’t be enough.

Dean R. Hoge’s new study, Experiences of Priests Ordained Five to Nine Years (National Catholic Educational Association), paints a worrying portrait of the priests who will serve U.S. Catholics in the decades to come. Compared with the priests in Hoge’s previous 1990 study, today’s new clergy are not only fewer in number but also older, less educated, less thoroughly schooled in theology, and less likely to see its relevance to ministry. And they are more heavily burdened with responsibilities, especially early in their careers.

Problems in seminary training have been brewing for some time. By the late 1990s, as the work of sociologist Katarina Schuth, OSF, shows, candidates for the priesthood had become increasingly divided between two groups: one focused on “orthodoxy” and Roman control, and less inclined to collaboration with the laity; and another-greater in number, but quieter about it-less interested in orders from Rome and more committed to collaborative governance. As for the quality of individual candidates, the Keystone Conferences, which convened Catholic seminary faculties annually from 1995 to 2001, assessed merely 10 percent of their priesthood candidates as highly qualified, and estimated that roughly 40 percent exhibited educational shortcomings ranging from insufficient preparation to learning disabilities.