Analysis: Men of quality for the church

GURAT, France, April 14 (UPI) -- The holiest and most somber week in the church year brings good news for the future of Christianity: Catholic leaders in Europe and America report unanimously an amazing increase in the quality and commitment of young men studying for the priesthood.

This is not to say that the actual numbers of seminarians are going up all that much, at least not in Europe, the heads of divinity schools and ranking officials of national bishops conferences cautioned in interviews with United Press International Monday.

"It's quality over quantity," said Hans Langendoerfer, a Jesuit priest and secretary of Germany's Catholic Bishops Conference. "Quality matters more than quantity," agreed John McCloskey, director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington.

"Today's divinity students are deeply convinced and cultured," Richard Mathes, rector of the German Seminary in Rome told Figaro Magazine, a French publication. "It better to have a few men of great quality, whose words inspire, heal and reassure, then a slew of men without aura and fire."

According to Mathes, Langendoerfer and McCloskey, members of the former type rather than the latter are now preparing for the priesthood. Theologians of some mainline Protestant churches report similar developments within their own denominations.

"In Catholicism, the key figure in this development is Pope John Paul II, who after a quarter century in the pontificate has left an enormous imprint on the Church," explained McCloskey.

"Anybody under 39 has never been consciously aware of any other Pope," added Langendoerfer. "As pastor of the World, John Paul II has defined generations."

In France, which suffers from a shortage of vocations more than any other Western nation, mature men, often from noble families, have taken to enter the priesthood, Figaro Magazine reports. Many come from other professions -- medicine, architecture, and banking, for example.

Langendoerfer concurred: "I have just come from the Aachen Diocese's house of studies in Bonn, where I met the most recent arrivals. One is a 40-year old engineer, the other a former Protestant pastor, and the third a young man who had just completed his degree in philosophy. Gone are the days of 18-year olds in the first semester."

McCloskey, a former Catholic chaplain at Princeton University, reported similar stories from the North American College in Rome. "One of the students there, Harold Greeves, is a Princeton grad and a former attorney, who earned $250,000 a year; at Princeton he was also a first-rate Greek and Latin scholar.

"Another Princeton graduate in Rome is Carter Griffin, a former Episcopalian, who decided to become a Catholic priest after five years in the U.S. Navy."

Worldwide, the Catholic Church is also registering a slight but constant increase in new vocations, especially in developing countries but also in Italy.

According to the Vatican's Office of Statistics, 265,781 men entered the priesthood in the year 2000, up from 262,418 in 1999. At the same time the dropout rate of seminarians has declined from 5,014 in 1999 to 4,776 in 2000.

But this is less significant than the steadily improving caliber of the new seminarians and priests. As Richard John Neuhaus, President of the New York-based Institute on Religion and Public Life, kept saying during at the height of last year's revelations of sex scandals in the American church, "This is something of the past. Now we are seeing a new crop of very manly candidates for the priesthood."

This goes hand-in-glove with the growth of a new elite of Christian laity. For some years now, the Church in highly secularized Europe has experienced the phenomenon of very educated people who have had little or no catechetical training in their childhood becoming baptized as adults.

This coming Easter Night alone, 2,374 grownups will have this sacrament administered in Catholic cathedrals, churches and chapels around France. At the same time, Catholic and Protestant universities are filling up with students of all generations seeking a theological education, but not because they intend to use it for their careers.

"They are simply thirsty for theological knowledge," Jean Jonchéray, vice rector of the Catholic Institute in Paris, once told this correspondent.

This "thirst" concentrates particularly on traditional liturgy, explained Langendoerfer. This parallels a phenomenon in the United States, where Protestant theologians report a growing fascination of the young with liturgical practices such as the Gregorian chant, the Lutheran chorale, incense at vesper services and a strict adherence to the ancient rubrics of worship.

For all this fascination with tradition, Hans Langendoerfer observed that the future generation of clergy is quite different from all predecessors:

"These are people who have discovered their faith and their mission for themselves very much in an existential way." As a result, the standard curricula for divinity students have fallen by the wayside. Now everything seems tailor-made for each individual candidate."

While Langendoerfer sounded a little melancholy because there was no longer an esprit de corps among young priests, he did agree with his French and American counterparts that the extraordinarily high degree of commitment more than made up for this.

Thus, the new church, which especially in Europe may take decades to overcome of its past decline, according to McCloskey, will turn out to be an even more fascinating and powerful institution than ever.