Call of Priesthood Still Sounds for Some : Religion: Numbers dwindle but two seminarians voice optimism in choice of vocation. Papal visit stirs hope that more might join.

Almost 100 years ago, 11 men of Irish descent became the first class of priests ordained at St. Joseph’s Seminary in this community just north of New York City. The Roman Catholic Church desperately needed them to minister to a new wave of European immigrants already flooding New York’s harbor.

A century later, not a lot seems to have changed.

This May, St. Joseph’s will again turn out fewer than a dozen freshly minted priests, again almost all of Irish American descent, again at a time when an immigrant wave--this time mostly Latino--is building not just in New York but across the United States.

That so few men still want to take the sacred vows at St. Joseph’s reflects a well-known crisis in the priesthood. Pope John Paul II recognized the challenge Friday as he encouraged 300 young men from seminaries around the country as they sat in wooden pews in St. Joseph’s small but elegant chapel.

“You need courage to follow Christ, especially when you recognize that so much of our dominant culture is a culture of flight from God, a culture which displays not-so-hidden contempt for human life, beginning with the lives of the unborn and extending to contempt for the frail and the elderly,” he told them.

The shortage of priests in the church has left 10% of U.S. parishes without a resident pastor.

By 2005, when the number of American Catholics is expected to peak at 75 million, up from about 56 million now, there will be only one pastor for every 2,200 parishioners. As recently as 1975, the ratio was half that.

Yet despite evidence of a diminishing and demoralized priesthood--thousands have left the church in recent years, many to marry--some young men still answer the call.

The faces of two who are studying at St. Joseph’s--Kevin O’Reilly, 25, and Richard Veras, 30--reflected hope and excitement and even idealism about their vocation as they prepared for the Pope’s visit.

O’Reilly, a graduate of Columbia University and son of a lawyer, decided to enter the seminary to follow the path of a beloved uncle, a pastor in parishes throughout Harlem. As a philosophy major at Columbia, O’Reilly spent weekends at his uncle’s church, helping at Sunday Mass and running bingo on Saturday nights.

“There was something so bereft at Columbia,” he said. “There were no transcendent values.”

During his senior year, O’Reilly, baby-faced yet with a patch of gray in his cropped hair, said he felt “almost a tap on my shoulder. God was calling me.”

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While his parents were supportive, some of his Columbia friends thought he was crazy, he said. “To be a success today is to make money. To join the priesthood is to be ‘other.’ ”

Veras, the son of a New York cabdriver, said he also had friends who did not understand when he signed up for the seminary. After graduating from Hofstra University and writing advertising copy for a few years, he turned to the priesthood “to find a community life.”

Both priests-in-training said the church’s ban on married men and its mandatory tradition of celibacy gave them pause during their years at St. Joseph’s but that, over time, they had made peace with these dictates in lifestyle.

“Living a celibate life is absurd,” said Veras, “unless you’re witnessing to something greater.”

Although experts agree the fastest solution to the shortage of priests would be to lift the ban on marriage and the ordination of women, the Pope gave no indication Friday that he was wavering from traditional teachings. Yet he seemed to acknowledge that learning to cope with the rigors of priestly life was part of the process to be learned over time at the seminary.

“The seminarian must ask himself: Is Christ calling me? Does he wish me to be his priest? If you answer yes, then the great work of the seminary is to help you to put off ‘the natural man,’ to leave behind ‘the old man’--that is, the unspiritual man who used to be--in order to experience the action of the Holy Spirit and to understand the things of the Spirit of God.”

In the late 1930s and into the 1950s, the sprawling gray granite main building of St. Joseph’s was overflowing with the sons of the church. In the early 1950s, there were 300 seminarians filling up the 40-acre campus atop Valentine Hill.

Today, there are only 70 seminarians in the program, and nearly one professor for every two students. At the same time, another seminary building has been given over to almost 200 laymen and laywomen who are enrolled in religious study courses, preparing to fill some of the gaps left by a shrinking priesthood.

But this week there was at least some expectation that the Pope’s visit to the area might spark a new interest in seminary life, according to Rev. Joseph Giandurco, St. Joseph’s dean of admissions and a professor of canon law.

“This is the sort of spiritual event that causes people to recognize something in themselves that might be a call to the priesthood,” Giandurco said. “We can only hope.”

After the Pope’s address, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles said young men could find success in the priesthood if they followed the Pope’s challenge to “emphasize spirituality. I feel there is a return to that ‘60s cooperative spirit among young people.”

He said he hoped more young men would be recruited to seminaries. “They just need to be asked,” he said, adding that the Los Angeles archdiocese was developing programs to find new recruits.

Veras said it had taken him a few years to fully understand the calling that he felt when he entered the seminary. He said the school’s new requirement that students spend their third year more or less in solitude, reading the great spiritual writers at a separate facility in rural Pennsylvania, helped him find the level of spirituality he believes he will need to continue in the vocation.

“I found after two years I was going through things without thinking about them,” said Veras, bespectacled and square-faced, with a strong accent of the Bronx, where he grew up. “I didn’t want to sit on a conveyor belt and get stamped ‘priest.’ ”

Veras also took an additional year off from the seminary and taught the Gospel of Mark at an adult education program in Minnesota. That year also helped get him back on track for the priesthood.

“I realized that I’m not throwing my happiness out the window so I can say no to something and wear black and withdraw from the world,” he said. “I’m embracing something.”

Shortly after O’Reilly, Veras and their classmates take their final vows in May, they will learn their parish assignment and then immediately go for the summer to study Spanish, probably somewhere in South America. With half of New York’s parishes conducting at least one Spanish-language Mass every weekend, the new priests must be fluent by the time they move into their rectories next fall.

Veras, who speaks better Spanish than most of his classmates, has already been asked to give talks to Spanish parishioners. When he was called from the seminary recently to deliver a homily in Spanish, he was struck by how demanding his vocation would be.

“I thought, ‘Wow, I’m a priest,’ ” he said. “There’s so much need out there. I need to be ready.”