If you want to know what it takes to be a vocations director in a busy archdiocese, the Cincinnati Enquirer today offers a rare and revealing glimpse:
The Rev. Kyle Schnippel places his prayer book on the table and takes a seat, waiting for the future of the Catholic Church to arrive.
It’s an early Monday morning in November and Schnippel is among dozens of job recruiters preparing to make a pitch to students at La Salle High School. He hopes to find a few interested in the priesthood, but he knows he could be in for a long morning.
He’s competing for the teens’ attention with engineers who have built high-tech equipment, businessmen who run multimillion- dollar companies and military recruiters with cool gear and tales of adventure.
“They have better toys,” the priest says of his competition.
But if anyone can convince teenage boys to consider a lifetime of celibacy, prayer and a $24,000 salary, it’s Schnippel.
At 31, he’s one of the youngest priests in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He talks easily to teenagers, carries a BlackBerry and once earned the nickname “Rock Star Priest” from high school students impressed by his youth and shaved head.
Schnippel is part of a younger, more aggressive generation of priest recruiters determined to expand the ranks of a profession that in recent years has diminished in size and prestige.
Recruiters often travel hundreds of miles a week to schools and job fairs in search of young men who feel “the call” to the priesthood but need some encouragement to heed that call.
They use time-honored methods, such as heart-to-heart talks and meetings with parents, while at the same time embracing the modern tools of a corporate recruiter: PowerPoint presentations, informational videos and glossy handouts vetted by focus groups.
They also bring an unabashed passion to a job the Catholic Church had, until recently, taken for granted.
“I can’t emphasize this enough,” Schnippel told the La Salle students that morning. “I love being a priest. I love what I do.”
Schnippel’s mission – and the mission of recruiters like him across the country – takes on greater urgency as a worsening shortage of priests threatens parishes, programs and the spiritual life of the American church.
The number of Catholic priests in the United States has fallen by about 30 percent since 1965, from about 58,000 to 40,000, while the nation’s Catholic population has risen by 40 percent. In the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, the number of priests has tumbled from 466 to 278 in less than four decades.
The trend has forced the church to trim programs, move priests out of Catholic schools and end the practice of assigning almost every parish a full-time pastor.
The clergy abuse scandal made the recruiters’ job tougher, but the numbers had been falling for decades as smaller and increasingly wealthy Catholic families opted to send their sons to college instead of the seminary.
Cincinnati’s next archbishop, the Most Rev. Dennis Schnurr, has said reversing the decline will be a priority when he takes over sometime next year. He and other church leaders know they can’t sit back and wait, as they did in the 1950s and 1960s, for young men to enroll in seminaries already flush with students.
“I don’t think there’s any seminary that doesn’t have some kind of active recruitment plan in place,” said the Rev. Francis S. Tebbe, president of the Catholic Coalition on Preaching. “We didn’t have to do it before. We were filled.”
Schnippel’s daily calendar is a constant reminder that recruiting is a priority. As the archdiocese’s vocations director, he’s on the road most days and had a total of five nights off in October and November.
“I try to go where the young people are,” Schnippel said. “It’s a busy but exciting life.”
His visit to La Salle’s career day was typical of the events that pack his schedule. The 15 kids who attended the three half-hour sessions expressed varying degrees of interest, ranging from a boy who was active in his church to one who wasn’t even Catholic.
“That’s kind of a requirement for the priesthood,” Schnippel told the non-Catholic with a laugh. “But we’ll work around it.”
Patience and good humor are crucial because Schnippel can spend a year traveling the archdiocese’s 19 counties to find just a half dozen new recruits. The archdiocese has 28 students in its seven-year seminary program and averages five graduates a year.
Schnippel, who hopes to triple the number of graduates, wants to make sure potential recruits don’t dismiss the priesthood because of peer pressure, parental expectations or worries about how society perceives priests today.
He tells potential recruits that the call to the priesthood often comes quietly and can be drowned out by the noisy world around them.
“There are rarely trumpets or midnight visions,” Schnippel said. “If only it were that simple.”
Check the link for more.
Not only that: Fr. Schnippel has his very own blog, too.
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