Well, in New York City, the answer seems to be yes. A reader sent this my way, from the New York Daily News:

A clergy-starved Archdiocese of New York was facing a crisis – until Pope Benedict arrived.

For the first time in 108 years, St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers was preparing for a year with no new students.

But, after the Holy Father’s whirlwind city tour, dozens have heard the call.

“It’s been like a tsunami, a good tsunami of interest,” said the archdiocese’s vocations director, the Rev. Luke Sweeney.

“I’ve been meeting people all week and have a lot of e-mails I haven’t had the chance yet to respond to. It has been incredible.”

Only 23 seminarians are expected to be ordained into the city’s priesthood during the next four years, following decades of decline in the ranks.

In 40 years, the numbers of Catholic men of the cloth in the city has been cut in half, to only 648 – even as the number of Catholics has swelled to 2.5 million.

The city’s ratio of priests to congregation members is now among the worst in the country, according to a study carried out by the Catholic World Report.

And before the Pope’s visit, nobody had signed up for this year’s intake of trainees.

“We are facing a severe shortage,” said Sweeney, the mastermind of a recently launched recruitment campaign that uses the slogans “The World Needs Heroes” and “You Have To Be a Real Man If You Want to Become a Priest.”

“We were hoping the Pope would convince many who were considering the priesthood to make the next step. It looks like he did.”

In only three days since the Pope left New York after a visit that included speaking to 25,000 young people on the seminary’s grounds, dozens of prospective priests have contacted Sweeney.

“One said he came, saw the crowd, heard what the Pope said and then called us,” said Sweeney. “He said his questions and concerns were answered when he heard him speak.”

But wait. There’s more.

Check out this item on the same subject, from the Associated Press:

The crowd of 25,000 Roman Catholics burst into cheers when Pope Benedict XVI took the stage for a youth rally during his U.S. visit last week. Chanting “Viva Papa!” they pressed against security barriers and reached out to touch him.

Many Catholics and church leaders were happily surprised by the outpouring of enthusiasm. Now, they hope the experience will draw some of the young revelers into the priesthood.

Ever since ecstatic throngs began greeting the globe-trotting Pope John Paul II, analysts have been looking for any direct link between a papal visit and seminary enrollment.

The Rev. Donald Cozzens, a former seminary rector and author of “The Changing Face of the Priesthood,” said there’s no way to know the exact impact of a papal pilgrimage. But he said Benedict’s warmth and grandfatherly presence could inspire many to at least consider ordination.

“There’s a certain mystery to a call to ministry in the priesthood,” said Cozzens, who teaches at John Carroll University in Ohio. “Some people know they are destined to be a priest from their childhood and other people discover this call much later in life. Sometimes it’s awakened by a papal visit.”

Younger priests today tend to have more traditional views of the church than older clergy, and many attribute that trend to John Paul’s defense of orthodoxy. Others who study the priesthood say that new clergy candidates now tend to come from the most committed parts of the church, and would likely fill seminaries with conservatives no matter who was elected pope.

The Rev. Michael Morris, director of pastoral formation at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., where the youth rally was held, credits John Paul’s 1979 trip to the U.S. with moving him toward enrolling in seminary. But he said the pope’s presence was not the only reason he joined.

“There were a lot of guys from my generation, who entered the seminary in the early ’80s, we entered on the heels of the pope’s first visit,” said Morris, who teaches church history at the seminary. “I can’t say that it was just a visit that inspired us to become priests. But sometimes you need a nudge.”

He plans to talk about the pope’s visit, the priesthood and religious life in the local parish where he helps celebrate Mass, to encourage anyone considering the vocation.

The U.S. priesthood has been shrinking for decades. More than 3,200 of the 18,600 U.S. parishes don’t have resident priests, according to the Center for Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. More lay people than clergy work full-time in the churches.

Dioceses have been hiring recruiters to travel overseas to find clergy candidates. The number of priests from other countries has grown so steadily that some seminaries are adding English classes, hiring accent reduction tutors and providing courses on American culture.

International recruitment is motivated partly by the exploding demand for Spanish speakers for the Hispanic immigrants filling the pews. About 30 percent of the men ordained in the U.S. last year were from another country, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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