Bearing the Cross in a Changing World

By Ines Novacic

“There’s a crisis in priestly vocations.”

That’s the general impression circulating through contemporary America.

It’s usually prefaced with concerns like: “the number of priests is dropping at an alarming rate since the recent clerical sex abuse scandals,” or: “of course Catholics are turning their backs on backward-looking church dogma.”

None of these observations are entirely accurate.

Deacon Joe Zwosta in the common room at the North American College seminary, Rome | Photo by Ines Novacic

Catholicism is still the largest single religious denomination in the United States. The Roman Catholic Church comprises almost 80 million members.

Last year, there were 467 new priestly ordinations; up two percent from 2002.

“Bearing the Cross in a Changing World” examines the passage to priesthood in America, through the eyes of one young man from Brooklyn.

Meet Deacon Joe, a seminarian at the most prestigious American seminary, the Pontifical North American College in Rome. Located a stone’s throw away from the epicenter of Roman Catholicism, on a hill overlooking St Peter’s Basilica, what’s happening this year under the North American College roof is symptomatic of the priestly vocation in the US: numbers are up, and men are increasingly conservative.

For the first time in almost 50 years, the seminary is full, and most of it’s men seem to be true pupils of Pope Benedict, a Holy See far more traditionalist than his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

“Bearing the Cross in a Changing World” unlocks some of the secret doors of priesthood, and grounds the experience of seminary formation in a largely secularized, American context.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2012 at 3:44 pm. It is filed under Features, Ines Novacic, Multimedia, View from Italy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.