Why have vocations to the Catholic priesthood collapsed across the West? There are plenty of theories. Traditionalists blame Vatican II and liturgical liberalism; progressives blame celibacy, clericalism and attitudes to sex; others point to the abuse scandals, poor bishops, weak catechesis or simply dreadful recruitment. And who could deny that all these things are relevant?
But none of them gets to the root of it.
To become a priest you have to believe in dogmatic Christianity rather strongly. It is not enough to reframe Christianity as heritage, ethics, community or a higher-brow cultural accompaniment to Christmas*.
A priest has to believe that God actually exists as a personal reality; that Christ actually died and rose again, inaugurating the New Covenant between God and humanity; that the sacraments actually mediate supernatural realities; that God might actually call you to spend your one life serving Him; and that celibacy, obedience and the surrender of an ordinary family life might therefore make perfect sense.
In former centuries it did not seem nearly so extraordinary because the world itself was enchanted. Parents believed, teachers believed, priests, neighbours and politicians inhabited a broadly Christian reality. The church stood in the middle of the town. The calendar was Christian. Birth, marriage and death were understood through Christian categories.
Nobody had to construct the supernatural world from scratch. Indeed, for most people it would scarcely have been imaginable not to inhabit it.
The decisive achievement of secularism was to make naturalism the default. Science — rational, empirical, cause-to-effect reasoning — explains the physical world; the body and mind; the sociology of behaviour. In Douglas Adams's phrase, we've mastered Life, the Universe and Everything. The concept of God, marginalised, blurs into Mystery: perhaps it's still there, a final defence against purposelessness, but not doing much explanatory work.
Deeply Catholic Poland is now struggling to generate priests and is importing clergy from Africa and Asia. If Poland cannot sustain its own clergy, it becomes difficult to blame the British collapse on Anglican competition, the French collapse on republicanism, or the German and Dutch collapse on liberal bishops. Poland had John Paul II, packed seminaries, immense clerical prestige and Catholicism bound tightly to national identity. But as Polish society belatedly entered the same late-modern cultural world, the same process began.
Here are some American figures. Among US ordinands in 2025, 92% had been baptised Catholic as infants, 89% had been raised by a married couple, 78% regularly practised Eucharistic Adoration before seminary, and 89% said somebody had explicitly encouraged them towards the priesthood. In the West, vocations now emerge disproportionately from very dense Catholic microcultures. The old society produced these almost automatically; the modern Church has to engender them explicitly, and that is so much harder.
The only thing really working for the church is the absent core of secular modernism itself: it's hard to really see oneself as an organic robot, here to turn the hamster wheel for the Man.
Religiosity says that that really isn't all there is. But the Catholic formulation of that insight draws one into a truly complex and heavy journey.**
* An unkind person would say we leave that to the Anglicans.
** “Every lifelong Catholic I've ever met is like "I think we're supposed to give this food to poor people" and every adult convert is like "the Archon of Constantinople's epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the eucharist clearly states women shouldn't have driver's licenses."
From a comment at Marginal Revolution.
