It’s no secret the Church is looking for a few good men. And it’s found some novel ways to recruit them.

From the Kansas City Star:

On the door of his room at Conception Seminary College in northwest Missouri, Adam Haake has a poster that reminds him of the other local men walking the same path toward priesthood.

It pictures 2007-08 seminarians from the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph.

Haake is one of them. He stands in the back row of the group shot, photographed last summer in front of the ornate altar of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church, next to Hallmark.

When he looks at the poster, Haake, 23, sees “a whole array of men who have answered the call,” he says. “So many people tell us that when they see the poster, it causes a great hope for them.”

Walk into any seminary and you’ll see posters like this from dioceses all across the country.

The posters have been around for years. They are marketing tools, used to encourage men to answer the call to the priesthood. They are a source of pride for church members who see the faces of their sons and brothers and neighbors.

And, as Haake said, they give hope to those same church members who worry about the church’s lack of priests.

Wait, the posters seem to encourage.

New priests are in the making.

The posters have undergone makeovers in recent years. Many have shed their informational, utilitarian — OK, let’s just say it — “churchy” formats and become more graphic, polished and modern.

As the posters evolve to appeal to a generation raised on cable TV and the Internet, vocations directors realize they are walking a line between appealing to and speaking the language of today’s youth and commercializing the call to the priesthood.

“I think you want something that is attractive, that is going to reach people and it’s going to speak to a target audience,” says Brad Watkins, assistant to the director of vocations in Raleigh, N.C.

“And frankly we would like to get younger people thinking about or considering or even just remaining open to the idea that God might be calling them to the priesthood, that God has a plan in their life, that God has a plan for all of us.

“And the reality is he is calling some men to the priesthood.”

Some of the posters wouldn’t look that out of place in a movie theater lobby. For example:

•In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh in North Carolina the faces of this year’s 20 seminarians appear against the black of a priest’s cassock and the words “Heroes of Sacrifice.”

•In the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston last year, seminarians were photographed holding a giant fishing net to illustrate a “Fishers of Men” theme.

•In Austin, Texas, photos of this year’s seminarians are displayed on a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-like treasure map. It exhorts: “Discover the Priesthood.”

Cool posters. Promotional videos. Web sites featuring seminarians’ blogs.

Think of it as Promoting the Priesthood 2008.

Jesse Garcia, programs coordinator for the Galveston-Houston Archdiocese, says he hasn’t had one seminarian say he decided to enter the priesthood because of a poster.

Instead, he says, “I think it’s part of an ongoing culture of vocations we’re trying to foster.”

The message is clear at the main Web site of the vocations office for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati:

“If your diocese does not produce a poster of the current roster of seminarians, call your Vocation Director and INSIST that he does this!

“As young men see these faces that look just like their own, they can see themselves in the program. Also, they begin to realize that they are not the only ones feeling this call, others will walk the road along with them.”

The Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas is said to have been one of the first in the country to create a poster 20-some years ago. In the years since, the posters have taken on a life of their own, says the Rev. Mitchel Zimmerman, vocation director.

“They’re really ubiquitous in every Catholic institution, church, school, parish,” Zimmerman says. “You won’t go into any parish without seeing multiple copies of the poster up everywhere.

“In some ways it’s our most basic marketing piece in that people look forward to looking at it and seeing who the seminarians are.”

This is the sixth year that the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph has produced a poster.

“We knew that other dioceses were doing it,” says Keith Jiron, director of the diocese’s vocations office. “We thought that it would be good to also let the people in the parishes know who their future potential priests are so that everyone is in the loop and everyone is pushing in the same direction.”

This year 24 men from the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese are studying at seminaries across the country, nearly triple the number just four years ago, an increase reported by other dioceses as well.

As seminaries report burgeoning freshmen classes, the faces of the posters seem increasingly younger.

“I’ve been in this work for about 15 years, and there’s been quite a change in the dynamic of guys doing this,” Jiron says.

“And I would say a lot of these guys, they would call it the John Paul II generation. These are the guys that grew up knowing no other pope than John Paul II. He was an excellent role model for them.”

Read on for more. It’s great stuff. And very encouraging.