With so many Catholics coming to Mass each week, with so many enthusiastic young people in our schools, religious education classes and confirmation programs, with so much vitality evident in every corner of our Church of Los Angeles (witness the thousands participating in the recent Religious Education Congress), why is there such a precipitous decline in the number of priests to serve our Church?

In the last two years, I have gone to deanery meetings in every part of the archdiocese, met with many principals, DRE's, youth ministers and catechists, attended lots of parent meetings, and at each I ask everyone the same question: "Why is this happening?"

The responses I hear include: Young people have trouble accepting celibacy today; Catholic families are smaller, thereby reducing the number of possible candidates; the age of maturity is delayed later and later in today's young adults; parents don't encourage their children to be priests and religious; seminary entrance expectations are unrealistic; the influence of our materialistic society is pervasive; aging or absent or overworked priests are unappealing role models; conservative Catholics believe that liberal thought has undermined the traditional Catholic values needed to sustain vocations; liberal Catholics decry the Church's refusal to ordain married men and women.

Whatever the explanation, everyone I listened to suffered a sense of frustration with this situation coupled with a sense of helplessness. How will we be a Catholic community if we don't have the priests we need to celebrate the Eucharist and the other sacraments?

I don't have the answer. But I will share with you some observations that may help us:

---No Easy Answers. Chronic problems lend themselves to magical thinking. "All we have to do is this one thing --- remove celibacy, or establish perpetual Eucharistic adoration in every parish, or import priests from other countries, or ordain women and married men --- then the problem will be solved." I wish this were true but multi-faceted problems demand multi-faceted responses. No single change will fill up the seminaries and convents, no matter how strongly we wish it would.

---Priests From Other Countries? This is perhaps the most tempting single proposed solution. After all, Los Angeles has always had a predominately foreign clergy. Think of how many Irish priests have served us over the past century. But times have changed. Almost every other nation is experiencing the same vocation crisis we are. Do we take priests from where they are already needed? And, if we do bring them to our shores, how will they assimilate to our American culture and local ecclesiology?

Our Church in America, particularly in Los Angeles, is vastly different than what these priests experience in their homelands. For an immigrant priest to adapt and flourish is not impossible. In fact, it is often done, and we have many fine priests from Ireland, Mexico, Poland, India --- to name but a few --- who serve here valiantly. But, as Cardinal Mahony has pointed out, why are we looking to other countries, rather than looking at our own parishes to see what we are or are not doing here at home?

---By The Numbers: I have yet to be asked, "Jim, what is the caliber of the men we are ordaining?" Rather, the question is always some form of: "How many have we got?" Quality is far more important than quantity, we all believe, but do we act like we really believe it? Of course, we all want both, but in this current climate, if we use the number of seminarians to determine how well we are or are not doing, we set ourselves up for inevitable frustration. We need priests who are mature, skilled, devoted and able to sacrifice themselves in the name of Christ for the sake of us all.

---Is Our Permissive Society The Problem? It is convenient to blame our vocation crisis on our society and its obvious moral and communal weaknesses but, while society certainly affects the vocation situation, James Davidson (Tidings, August 22, 2003) has noted that of the 12 major Christian denominations --- including the ones with declining membership --- all are experiencing an increase in the number of ordained clergy, all save one: the Roman Catholic Church. This vocation crisis is a particularly Catholic one.

---The Priesthood In Our Society. If I were to try and put into a nutshell all the reasons for the vocation crisis, I would narrow it down to obedience, poverty and especially celibacy. The priesthood lives in conflict with some strong cultural imperatives. Society calls for people to be their own independent person; the priesthood calls men to bend in obedience to another. Our world places such emphasis upon material success; the Church calls her diocesan priests to live a life reflecting a healthy disregard for such conspicuous objects of achievement.

Our culture also places an emphasis on living a full, active sexual life; the priesthood calls one to chaste celibacy. The priesthood is, as it always has been, counter-cultural --- not anti-cultural but clearly counter-cultural. The more counter-cultural our parishes and families become, the more likely it is that young people will want to live committed counter-cultural lives as priests and religious.

---It Takes An Imagination. A high school principal made, to my mind, the most telling comment. When talking to her about vocations and possible outreach to the students, she stated, "Good luck, Father. You priests do not live in the imagination of the young. They dream about being astronauts, or professional ball players, or rock stars, or even video game designers. But they don't dream about being priests. You're not even on their radar."

I think she is absolutely right. How can we get the priesthood and religious life back on their radar? I propose three steps:

1) Talk About It. If vocations are not on your radar, how can we expect that it will be on the radar of young people? Appreciate the priests and religious you have. Work with them so that the attractiveness of Catholic life in general and priestly and religious life in particular, are evident. If the priesthood sounds and looks like a "problem," it's no surprise that potential candidates keep their distance.

2) Make It A Pastoral Priority. Talk to your pastoral council or members of the parish staff about the importance of keeping church vocations in the spotlight in your parish. Vocation work can easily get crowded out if it isn't one of a parish's pastoral priorities. See if the pastor and the pastoral council would consider appointing one person to be responsible to do vocation promotion in your parish in an on-going manner.

This is not a new idea. Years ago, every parish with a school came equipped with at least eight parish vocation directors. They were called "nuns." These sisters regularly planted seeds and nourished desires on the parish level. Most parishes no longer have the benefit of that kind of vocational team and a new team must be put in place. Every parish should have a staff member and a group of willing volunteers dedicated to local church vocation awareness.

If your parish needs some help getting started, let me know and I'll come by to assist. I can bring seminarians to witness at Mass, or sisters to visit classrooms, or materials for teachers and catechists to offer their students, or nights of prayer for the youth, or parent-teacher meetings to discuss the role of the family.

3) Play To Our Strength. Nothing is more attractive than a disciple following the example of Jesus in his or her life, and a lot of that example was and remains counter-cultural. We must live by Jesus' different set of values, a life where "It isn't about me, it's about you," a life where there is something greater than the dollar or the status or the attention, a life worth sacrificing for the sake of others.

That will foster in some the needed desire to love the people of God --- to be with them when they are sick, to comfort the family when someone has died, to courageously champion the rights of those oppressed, to be willing to lay down one's life through care for God's people, even to the point of willingly sacrificing the happiness of being independent or having one's own family.

Father James Forsen is director of the archdiocesan Office for Vocations.