Choosing God, the second time around

A generation ago, older men typically would not be considered candidates for the priesthood. But that has changed in recent years as the number of Catholic priests has plummeted in the United States, creating an opportunity for men who have discovered their vocation later in life. In his book, “The Collar: A Year of Striving and Faith Inside a Catholic Seminary,” Jonathan Englert, a convert to Catholicism, chronicles the lives of five men in Sacred Heart, the largest Catholic seminary specializing in second-career priests. Englert writes about two divorced middle-aged men, an ex-Marine, a recently widowed father of four, a blind musician, and others as they face the challenge of answering their calling. Here’s an excerpt:

Introduction
The Collar had its birth on a rainy autumn evening somewhere between Columbia University’s main library and its journalism school. It was the direct product of a plea for vocations at Mass by a seminarian of the Archdiocese of New York and the indirect product of a profound conversion experience in my own life that had seen me move from curmudgeonly agnosticism to the Roman Catholic Church in the space of two years.

The question as I posed it to myself that evening was “Why would a man become a priest today?” As a single Catholic man, acutely aware of the shortage of priests, the question was both personal and universal. Could I imagine becoming a priest and embracing the rigors and sacrifice of religious life? What kind of man would? What was this “calling” that people spoke about? Was it even a question of a calling at all, or was it a conscious decision, even a sense of obligation, to make a commitment at a moment in history that seemed to demand it?

The Collar was born of such questions and never really departed from them. What began with musing and personal reflection soon tidied itself up into a viable journalistic exercise. The initial idea — one that promised a compelling nonfiction narrative with a strong dramatic backbone — was to follow two seminarians through a year or two of seminary. One man would continue on to ordination; the other would not. Their stories would serve as a springboard that would enable me to describe seminary life and education in  detail. There had been plenty of books — both liberal and conservative, published by the usual party organs — that dealt with the priesthood and  seminaries, but none without a distinct agenda and some hypothesis to be  inevitably proven in its pages.

My premise was simply to write as clear a  story as I could about two men who believed they had a calling and acted on  it. Early on, I remember Father Benedict Groeschel, the cofounder of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, cautioning me to avoid mere anecdote. This is good advice in general but would have been more applicable if I had been conducting a study and attempting to capture every hill and divot of the American seminary system. That was never my aim. Over time and many visits to seminaries and seminarians, the idea was refined into a richer concept. The cast of characters expanded, as did the scope, and many of my initial assumptions — both conscious and subconscious — were set aside.

One assumption in particular was not only set aside but firmly and painfully put down. I knew that there would be some reluctance on the part of institutions and individuals to be open to this kind of fly-on-the-wall observation. But I had naively hoped that my larger sense of purpose and commitment in telling what I believed — based on my extensive initial reportage — promised a positive and even inspiring story that Church officials, presumably interested in increasing the number of priests, would  embrace. I was wrong.

The book took almost three years to research and report because of access extended and then revoked by two different dioceses. Such obstacles composed a neat parallel to the sexual abuse scandal that enveloped the Church halfway through this process. Each revocation seemed to encompass the same cowardice, lack of accountability, and mere stupidity that plagued the most offending parts of the Church hierarchy during  this period. This version of the Church that I encountered (thankfully, not Roman Catholicism’s only version) was Church as risk-averse corporate monolith. I found it terribly sad and disillusioning. It was sad because I had met well-intentioned, intelligent men who wanted to share with others what they saw as their liberating and enlightened choice to pursue the priesthood.

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