In the past few hours, Agenzia Fides has published the document “Statistics of the Catholic Church 2025.” Once again, the numbers reveal a bleak picture: vocations continue to decline. Yet there is an unspoken truth that no statistic dares to confront: the problem does not lie with young people, but with the places where vocations should be born and grow.
An archbishop who has dedicated decades to vocational accompaniment, visiting seminaries, listening to formatorsand priests around the world, confirms this. These days — he tells us — he is engaged in a series of visits to various seminaries in Rome and across Europe. His analysis is clear and unsettling: “The crisis of vocations does not arise from the absence of young people willing to give themselves, but from the toxic atmosphere dominating the very places where vocation should mature.”
Seminaries — at least in many cases — are no longer places of discernment, but of selection. And today’s selection is not oriented toward freedom and maturity, but toward docility and dependence. They welcome fragile, confused, often psychologically unstable young men, as if the institution needed patients rather than disciples. It even seems that the search is for “those who need to be healed,” in order to later “save” and control them.
The Cult of Fragility
In recent years, seminaries have stopped attracting balanced, creative, intellectually alive individuals. Not because such people no longer exist, but because — in a system that fears freedom — maturity becomes a defect. Many rectors and formators end up accepting only those with obvious troubles, those needing constant guidance, those willing to be “molded” according to uniform standards. The implicit idea is that a more fragile person will also be more faithful, more obedient, less likely to question authority. It is a pedagogical illusion that borders on ecclesial pathology: no longer forming the man, but manufacturing the dependent. Even aesthetics plays into this perverse game: preference is given to candidates who are unassuming, poorly groomed, under the belief that they will “cause fewer problems,” “draw less attention,” as though a lack of outward appeal guarantees a “safer” path, free of risk.
Behind this mentality lies an ancient fear and a subtle distortion: the fear that, should a priest one day fall, his fall would be all the more scandalous if he once inspired sympathy, charisma, or esteem. Conversely, if a young man is handsome, articulate, intelligent, socially adept, and perhaps has a following on social media, suspicion arises immediately: he will be too liked. Should he enter the seminary, his path will be strewn with obstacles — from unwanted attention to jealousy, envy, and accusations of “special friendships.”
Behind all this lies a criterion that is anything but Gospel-oriented yet deeply human: power prefers what it can control and distrusts what shines with its own light.
The Flight of the Free
The prelate observes: “Let us ask why so many priests who cause real problems in our communities — those who spread gossip, division, and tension — also display an external and personal disorder. They are overweight, troubled, and suffer from their own condition. Yet no one dares say anything, though they represent the true drama of dioceses now on the verge of collapse. The atmosphere has become unbearable: not only do young men refuse to enter seminaries, but even those inside seek to transfer, while bishops no longer know how to govern such realities.
Often, these are the very same men who show inappropriate attention to seminarians or confreres and, once rejected, react with slander and innuendo, attributing to others what in fact describes their own behavior. Paradoxically, these are often the ones who love to cover themselves in vestments, hiding behind form the emptiness of substance.” For this reason, many truly called young men — emotionally mature, with healthy friendships, passions, and interests — choose not to enter the seminary or leave once inside. Those with critical thought, cultural tastes, artistic or athletic pursuits, or healthy relationships outside the Church environment, find the seminary not a place of growth but a cage full of serpents.
Where one would expect a journey of freedom, one finds a climate of suspicion: spontaneity is read as disobedience, freedom as rebellion, maturity as danger. Many priests now advise young men who express a vocation to stay away from seminaries, warning that they would “come out worse than when they entered.”
Thus, the numerical data on vocations is deceptive: it is not that vocations are lacking, but that trust is lacking — in the places meant to nurture them and in the people the hierarchy appoints as “guardians” rather than formators.
To Survive or to Live
Those who endure such environments do so out of authentic love for the Lord and His Church, but often at the cost of their own freedom. Others, unable to bear the hypocrisy, see no alternatives, and the hierarchy exploits this impotence, exercising subtle forms of abuse of power. Thus, seminaries end up deforming rather than forming men — stripped of autonomy, incapable of choosing or living without dependence. In the end, who truly survives in such settings? Usually, those who narrow their world to altars, vestments, and organs, nothing more. Formators hide behind a hypocritical logic: “After all, what harm is there? He bothers no one.” Yet when such men are ordained, and appear at Eucharistic celebrations in garments they should not even wear, the bishop’s comment is resigned: “Let him be. If wearing the purple cassock makes him happy, at least he won’t cause trouble.”
Thus the purple cassock becomes a way to sublimate deeper desires, and the outer form once again covers an inner void that no fabric can conceal. Better a liturgical aesthete than a free priest, capable of speaking to young people and preaching the Gospel in real life. This, ultimately, is the implicit message of such attitudes: as if Christian life were exhausted in the form of worship rather than in the living substance of faith.
No wonder many priests appear culturally barren, unable to interpret social or political reality, and lost outside the sacristy. And yet, when a priest cares for his mental and physical health, practices sport, cultivates sincere friendships, and lives his faith as a balance between body and spirit, he becomes an immediate target of criticism, gossip, and moral suspicion. The reason is simple: a free man is dangerous, because he cannot be manipulated.
Power Fears Freedom
Romano Guardini, in The End of the Modern World, wrote that “modern man fears freedom because he no longer knows to Whom to surrender it.” The phrase perfectly captures the current ecclesial condition. The problem is not merely moral or disciplinary, but theological: the Church has lost the evangelical sense of freedom as a gift of God, a sign of spiritual maturity. Instead of forming free men for Christ, the Church prefers submissive men loyal to the institution — achieved through psychological pressure, economic blackmail, and social isolation.
The Hidden Economic Violence
Public debate often discusses economic violence committed by some husbands against their wives. No one, however, speaks of the economic coercion some bishops and their entourages exercise against priests. In many dioceses, judicial vicars and priests turned amateur psychologists engage in manipulation built on financial threats: phrases like “If you don’t do this, you won’t receive your clergy support” or “You can go there, but you’ll have to find your own housing.” With a stipend of around €800 per month, losing even that means losing the means to live — and those in power know it well. If you are in the bishop’s favor, you’re guaranteed a stipend through a fictitious appointment just to balance the books; if you dissent, you can literally starve.
It is a subtle form of violence that exploits the priest’s lack of alternatives: he who has given everything owns nothing but his dignity — and that is precisely what the system seeks to break. Ensuring the ordination of a young man without professional formation, without external roots, and dependent on the institution guarantees lifelong subservience.
This is why those expelled from seminaries or who left the priesthood often return through the back door as religion teachers, simply because they have no other way to survive. This climate allows the hierarchy to silence dissenters quickly. A seminarian who resists is told to be “more docile”; a priest who disobeys is transferred, isolated, deprived of office, and left without income.
Freedom as Scandal
Ultimately, what frightens the hierarchy is not disobedience, but freedom. A free priest, capable of thought, affection, and relationship, becomes a mirror too truthful for a system that prefers mediocrity. Yet the history of the Churchshows that it was precisely the free men — not the submissive ones — who preserved faith in its darkest hours: the prophets, the saints, the restless spirits. He who dares to stand before God as himself inevitably becomes a threat to those who wish to control the conscience of others. Hence, every time a man of the Church shows any form of freedom, the system tries to take it away — through slander, marginalization, or imposed silence.
For a Possible Renewal
The crisis of seminaries is therefore not numerical, but anthropological and spiritual. As long as formation favors submission over truth, dependence over freedom, and blind obedience over enlightened conscience, no reform will succeed. We need places where intelligence is welcomed, where maturity is a sign of vocation, not of danger; where beauty is not suspect and freedom is not punished.
For — and this is the heart of the Gospel — God does not call us to be slaves, but sons. And a son, to be truly so, must be able to say “yes” in freedom, not in fear.
“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” — John 8:32
d.L.A.
Silere non possum