Catholic Church Recruits Clergy on the Internet

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. 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. 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. To keep up with the changing times and the dwindling reserves, the Des Moines diocese launched a Web site, www.dmdiocese.org, part of which was dedicated to recruiting men to the priesthood. This helped spawn a separate site dedicated solely to recruitment efforts for full-time or part-time priests, nuns, and Catholics in general. Vocationsonline.com lists e-mail addresses and phone numbers where Father Acrea can be reached. Since their inception, Acrea says the sites have registered more than 14,000 visits and at least 80 e-mails from men interested in the priesthood.