MONTREAL –– Two years ago, Pope John Paul II asked North America's Roman Catholics to hold a conference on the shortage of priests and nuns. He couldn't have anticipated the challenges facing Catholic leaders when they finally met.
The Third Continental Congress on Vocations is convening as a sex abuse crisis consumes the U.S. church. Catholics are wondering how they can possibly fill their seminaries while the church's most prominent representatives are being sued, subpoenaed and publicly condemned.
"It's probably the biggest crisis of soul to have ever hit U.S. Catholicism," said the Rev. Ronald Rolheiser, a theologian who works in Toronto and Rome.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, 12 U.S. cardinals and Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, will attend an unprecedented Vatican summit on the crisis.
Boston Cardinal Bernard Law, whose handling of a pedophile priest has drawn intense scrutiny of the church response to abuse nationwide, will be among those at the meeting.
Even before this latest scandal, clergy felt their status in society diminishing. In a study last year, they ranked "the image and esteem of the priesthood" as their top problem, said Dean Hoge, a sociologist at The Catholic University of America who conducted the survey.
That decline in prestige and in numbers began in the 1960s.
After the sexual revolution, celibacy, once seen as a noble sacrifice, was viewed by many as simply odd. A growing distrust of authority led Catholics to also question their priests.
Around the same time, Catholics began learning about the growing number of gays in the priesthood. When some clergymen quietly complained of a homosexual culture in the seminaries, parents took notice, Hoge said.
In the 1980s, the first wave of clergy molestation lawsuits began drawing national attention, raising concerns about the church.
Now, with the second flood of lawsuits and the release of damaging court documents about priests accused of sexually abusing children, fears about the health of seminary life are even more deeply felt.
'Parents are asking, 'Do we want our children to join a profession where they may become victims themselves?'" said Sister Catherine Bertrand of Chicago, who helped coordinate the Montreal convention.
In Hannibal, Mo., church officials announced Friday that they would close St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, where former Bishop Anthony O'Connell recently admitted sexually abusing a teen-age boy in the 1970s. Officials blamed financial troubles and a low enrollment of just 27 students for the move.
Between 1965 and 2001, the number of diocesan priests dropped from 35,925 to 30,223, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. When priests in religious order are also added to the count, it comes to a current total of 46,075.
The decrease in the number of nuns is also dramatic, with membership in religious orders dwindling by more than 100,000 to 78,094 since 1965.
To ease the priest shortage, the U.S. church has partly relied on men from overseas. Last year, 28 percent of the men ordained in the United States were natives of other nations.
Yet, many of those seminarians are from countries also struggling to find candidates for the priesthood, which means the church cannot rely on foreign-born men to solve the shortage, said Archbishop Roger Schwietz, who led the U.S. bishops vocations committee for three years.
Liberals have proposed ordaining women and allowing priests to marry as one answer. However, the pope has refused to consider such changes, and his supporters note that Protestants – who allow their ministers to marry and ordain women in some cases – also have a clergy shortage.
The key to attracting new candidates, Catholic leaders say, is more programs that promote interaction between clergy and young people. Yet, vocations directors concede this strategy is difficult to pursue with the abuse crisis in its fourth month.
"Pastors have been more reluctant with young people," Schwietz said. "That's an education issue – helping pastors understand appropriate boundaries, like those for a doctor or lawyer."
Bertrand believes the crisis has not shaken the faith of young people who already have formed a close relationship with a priest or nun. She also expressed hope that the humiliation of the scandal would not lead Catholics to abandon their recruitment efforts.
"We need to be able to engage in some healthy self-assessment, but we don't want to become paralyzed," Bertrand said. "Some people are saying it's a terrible time to be doing this. But it's the only time we have."