A Priest Life ((((,,)))): The fetish for the “problematic.” This is how the seminaries have lost their vocation.

Friday, November 7, 2025

The fetish for the “problematic.” This is how the seminaries have lost their vocation.

19/10/2025

In the past few hours, Agenzia Fides has published the document “Statistics of the Catholic Church 2025.” Once again, the numbers reveal a bleak picture: vocations continue to decline. Yet there is an unspoken truth that no statistic dares to confront: the problem does not lie with young people, but with the places where vocations should be born and grow.

An archbishop who has dedicated decades to vocational accompaniment, visiting seminaries, listening to formatorsand priests around the world, confirms this. These days — he tells us — he is engaged in a series of visits to various seminaries in Rome and across Europe. His analysis is clear and unsettling: “The crisis of vocations does not arise from the absence of young people willing to give themselves, but from the toxic atmosphere dominating the very places where vocation should mature.”

Seminaries — at least in many cases — are no longer places of discernment, but of selection. And today’s selection is not oriented toward freedom and maturity, but toward docility and dependence. They welcome fragile, confused, often psychologically unstable young men, as if the institution needed patients rather than disciples. It even seems that the search is for “those who need to be healed,” in order to later “save” and control them.

The Cult of Fragility

In recent years, seminaries have stopped attracting balanced, creative, intellectually alive individuals. Not because such people no longer exist, but because — in a system that fears freedom — maturity becomes a defect. Many rectors and formators end up accepting only those with obvious troubles, those needing constant guidance, those willing to be “molded” according to uniform standards. The implicit idea is that a more fragile person will also be more faithful, more obedient, less likely to question authority. It is a pedagogical illusion that borders on ecclesial pathology: no longer forming the man, but manufacturing the dependent. Even aesthetics plays into this perverse game: preference is given to candidates who are unassuming, poorly groomed, under the belief that they will “cause fewer problems,” “draw less attention,” as though a lack of outward appeal guarantees a “safer” path, free of risk.

Behind this mentality lies an ancient fear and a subtle distortion: the fear that, should a priest one day fall, his fall would be all the more scandalous if he once inspired sympathy, charisma, or esteem. Conversely, if a young man is handsome, articulate, intelligent, socially adept, and perhaps has a following on social media, suspicion arises immediately: he will be too liked. Should he enter the seminary, his path will be strewn with obstacles — from unwanted attention to jealousy, envy, and accusations of “special friendships.”

Behind all this lies a criterion that is anything but Gospel-oriented yet deeply human: power prefers what it can control and distrusts what shines with its own light.