The Catholic Church Has a Manpower Problem: Fewer Priests Every Year
- Heal Our Church
- Oct 2
- 6 min read
David Luhnow Margherita Stancati Jon Emont hotography by Karim El Maktafi for WSJ
VENEGONO, Italy—One of Pope Leo XIV’s biggest quandaries is a question God himself asked: Whom shall I send? As in the book of Isaiah, few are answering “Here I am.”
The Catholic Church has a manpower problem, and it’s getting worse.
A sharp, decadelong decline in the number of young men who want to become priests has only accelerated since the pandemic. The lure of other career options and a growing wariness about a lifelong—and celibate—commitment is leading Catholics to turn away from a once honored path, even in the faithful global South.
“We live in a culture caught in the paralysis of endless options, where choosing one path feels like closing the door on countless others,” said Pietro Ferrera, a 30-year-old seminarian in Italy who has a degree in physics. It has had a cascading effect.
Since 1970, the global Catholic population has doubled, but the number of priests has dipped. As aging clergy die, the ranks of those waiting to take their place has dwindled, leaving some parishes with no leader. Seminaries are closing or merging across the Church’s European heartland, which for centuries trained most of the world’s priests and sent them to evangelize the furthest corners of the globe.
In an age of speed dating and short attention spans, some seminarians say their friends are wary of lifelong commitments. 'We live in a culture caught in the paralysis of endless options,’ says Pietro Ferrera.
The new pontiff, American Robert Prevost, has appealed to those considering the priesthood to not give up.
“Despite the signs of crisis that pervade the life and mission of priests, God continues to call and remains faithful to his promises,” Pope Leo told seminarians and priests in Rome in June. He spent much of his own adult life abroad as a missionary and parish priest in Peru.
Pope Leo called on believers to do more to attract young people to the Church. He’s doing his part: The pontiff this summer hosted Catholic social-media influencers at the Vatican and participated in a Catholic youth festival in Rome that was attended by around one million teens and young adults from Europe and beyond. Earlier this month, the church recognized its first millennial saint, the tech-savvy teenager St. Carlo Acutis.
From countless cardinals to a clergy crisis
Seminary enrollment in the West has atrophied for decades as the culture became more secular. In the past five years, the number of young men entering seminary to become priests has also consistently declined in Latin America and Asia, leaving Africa as the only region still growing. Globally, the number of seminarians tumbled by some 14,000 between 2011 and 2023 to 106,495.
St. Patrick’s seminary near Dublin, Ireland, once the world’s largest with room for 500 seminarians, is down to an average of 15 new seminarians a year. The 130-year-old St. John’s seminary in southern England, built to accommodate 100 seminarians, closed in 2021 after getting no new applicants.
The decline has also hit the Church’s traditional home in Italy, the wellspring of most popes and countless cardinals.
The sprawling campus near Milan testifies to the Church’s rich history in the country.
“Decades ago, being born in Italy was almost synonymous with belonging to the Church. That’s no longer the case,” says the Rev. Enrico Castagna, dean of the Archdiocese of Milan’s seminary in Venegono.
The sprawling campus in this small town outside Milan has a towering Basilica, two vast wings and rambling gardens. It was built a century ago to house about 600 students, including those at a parish high school.
Now, the high school is closed from lack of demand and one of the seminary’s two wings is shuttered. Castagna is considering turning the wing into a nursing home. Just 54 seminarians study here today—a third of the number a decade ago.
Castagna has come to terms with the new reality. “Our generation has processed a form of grief—grief for a certain type of Christianity,” said the 52-year-old, a jovial, father-like figure to Venegono’s seminarians. “But we shouldn’t live this moment as a defeat. No phenomenon is necessarily irreversible.”
There is some hope, he says: Last year’s incoming class was seven, this year, it’s 12.
The Rev. Enrico Castagna has watched the changes with grief, but he remains hopeful. 'No phenomenon is necessarily irreversible.'
For centuries, becoming a priest in Italy was, beyond a spiritual calling, a chance for an education and a lifelong job in a country where many were illiterate and poor. Having a priest in the family was a point of pride.
The Venegono seminary is a testament to that glorious past. It has a rich theological library with a collection of first editions and manuscripts, including a 15th-century pocket prayer book decorated in gold leaf. It even has its own small natural history museum with stuffed alligators and kangaroos and fossils.
Growing secularization, Church abuse scandals, the hardships of celibacy and more economic opportunities have all contributed to the shift away from religious work.
The seminary today has a total of 54 men studying to become priests.
Italy’s falling birthrate means families are less likely to encourage their sons to become priests than in the past, especially if they are only children. Priests have also lost their exalted place in society; surveys show the number of Italians who consider themselves Catholic has declined to two-thirds, down from nearly everyone 50 years ago.
“If you go on the metro wearing a priestly collar, people may swear blasphemously at you as you pass,” said Andrea Swich, an earnest 29-year-old who recently started his sixth and final year at Venegono. He gave up a career as a physiotherapist and a girlfriend to pursue the path to priesthood. His two sisters didn’t take it well.
Swich sees an upside to the diminishing appeal of a priestly life: “No one these days becomes a priest for the salary or because of social status.”
Seminarian Andrea Swich says he’s looking forward to the challenge of being a priest in contemporary Italy. ‘This is no longer a Christian climate, you don't take this path for granted, you choose it. And that has an added value.’
Out of the 20 seminarians who enrolled with him, eight have quit.
Marco Ammirabile was in his fifth year when he met a young woman and realized he had feelings for her. He started questioning his choice.
Thrown into crisis, Ammirabile spent part of the following summer at a silent retreat. His feelings grew, nurtured through WhatsApp messages and occasional in-person encounters. He formally quit the seminary in February. Weeks later, the young woman became his girlfriend.
“I thought that I could love God by dedicating my life to others by becoming a priest,” said Ammirabile, 28. “But that is not how he was calling me to him, through a priestly life.”
While his fellow seminarians were ordained a few months ago, he now teaches religion to middle-school kids. He is still dating his girlfriend.
The new pope has encouraged family members and others to support young people considering a life in the Church. To those considering vocations, he said: ‘Do not be afraid!’
Pressed priests
For the Church, the scarcity of vocations—a term that encompasses a range of ways to serve God in the world, and in this case applies to men who decide to become priests—means those who do answer the divine call must do more with less.
At St. Patrick’s church in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Rev. Eugene O’Neill is now the lone priest—the first time the parish has had just one priest in the past two centuries. The diocese is also dwindling. When O’Neill became a priest in the early 1990s, there were more than 200 priests in the Down and Connor diocese. Now, there are 97, a figure expected to decline to 27 in two decades’ time, O’Neill said.
The lack of manpower means less time for pastoral care. When he first arrived nine years ago, O’Neill and three other priests continued a tradition of visiting housebound parishioners—usually 80 or so people—at least once a month. That soon changed to once every two months, then just once a quarter.
“Now, even that’s not possible for me anymore,” said O’Neill, a talkative 57-year-old with an athletic build and trim beard.
He’s increasingly focused on training lay ministers to take communion to the sick, visit grieving families and participate in the school boards of parochial schools—all duties O’Neill no longer has time for.
“I’ve moved from seeing myself as the doer of everything to more as a convener or enabler of the priestly ministry of all baptized,” he said.
O’Neill says the lack of new vocations in Europe and other Western countries means the future of the priesthood looks more like its diverse global flock. When he took a vacation over the summer, his temporary replacement flew in from Uganda.
“Ireland used to send priests to the world. Now, they will have to come here,” he said.
A changing Church
The Church’s increasing reliance on new priests from Latin America, Africa and Asia marks a historic shift.
There are now more seminaries in the Democratic Republic of Congo than Poland, more in India than Italy, according to Vatican figures. At the recent papal conclave European cardinals were in the minority for the first time, said the Rev. Thomas Gaunt, a Church demographics expert at Georgetown University.
But as living standards rise in other parts of the world, the number of seminarians is starting to fall there, too. Vocations declined 1.3% in the Americas in 2023, and plunged 4.2% in Asia. Africa, the only region with a growing number of seminarians, rose just 1.1%.
