Milwaukee.- On a sunny afternoon in May, Zachary Galante sat in a conference room at St. Francis de Sales Seminary with other young men, talking about what it meant for them to choose the Catholic priesthood in 2024. The next morning, they would make lifelong vows of celibacy and obedience, and they seemed elated at the prospect.
“It’s a beautiful life,” said Deacon Galante, soon to become Father Galante.
There was a time when the church “maybe apologized for being Catholic,” he said later in the conversation. He and the other new priests agreed they were called to something different: promoting the Catholic faith, even the parts that might seem out of place in an increasingly hostile world. “The church is Catholic and we must proclaim it with joy,” he said.
At a time of deep divisions in the American Catholic Church, and of continuing pain over revelations of sexual abuse by priests spanning decades, there is growing unity among men entering the priesthood: They are overwhelmingly conservative in their theology, liturgical tastes and politics.
Priests ordained since 2010 “are clearly the most conservative cohort of priests we’ve seen in a long time,” said Brad Vermurlen, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston who has studied the rightward shift of the American priesthood. Surveys of priests’ views have found that, beginning in the 1980s, each new wave of priests in the United States is markedly more conservative than the last, Dr. Vermurlen said.
His and his colleagues’ analysis found that newer priests were significantly more conservative than their elders on issues such as whether homosexual behavior is always sinful or whether women should be allowed to be deacons as well as priests.
More than 80% of priests ordained since 2020 describe themselves as theologically “conservative/orthodox” or “very conservative/orthodox,” according to a nationally representative survey of 3,500 priests released by the Catholic University of America’s Catholic Project. Foreign-born priests in the United States — a significant presence as ordination rates remain below replacement levels — are less theologically conservative than their U.S.-born counterparts. But still, not a single priest surveyed who was ordained after 2020 described himself as “very progressive.”
Politically, the trend is similar: almost all priests ordained in 2020 or later describe themselves as moderate or conservative.
This represents a sharp contrast with priests ordained in the 1960s, about half of whom describe themselves as politically liberal, and an even larger share as theologically progressive.
In other words, in the near future, the liberal Catholic priest could become virtually extinct in the United States. The shift toward a more uniform conservatism puts new generations of priests increasingly at odds with secular culture, which has shifted to the left on issues of gender, sexuality, reproduction and the role of women.
The U.S. Catholic population itself has historically been politically diverse, and the faithful do not always support Church teachings on issues such as abortion, birth control and the meaning of the Eucharist.
The shift in attitudes will reshape parish life, where priests choose homily topics and have discretion over issues such as whether girls can volunteer as altar servers and lay people can help distribute Communion. It will also influence the leadership ranks of the American church, which already has a global reputation for conservatism and antagonism toward Pope Francis’ more pastoral tone in leadership. That divide is poised to harden as current bishops retire and die.
This shift partly reflects broader cultural changes, such as the fact that liberals are increasingly secular and having fewer children, said Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, a left-leaning newspaper. Today, “there are fewer liberals in pews with large families,” he said, adding that parents with more children are often more willing to offer one of them to the church.
Winters, who attended seminary for a few years in the 1980s before deciding not to be ordained, said he was concerned that some conservative priests had an overly nostalgic view of history, imagining a golden age when Church teachings were widely respected and obeyed. But he takes comfort in the fact that most of a parish priest’s duties are not defined by ideology.
“The daily practice of burying the dead, baptizing the young and preparing couples for marriage is not divided into left and right,” he says.
Today’s young priests see themselves not as a conservative insurgency but as part of a new generation that embraces the Church’s difficult teachings rather than watering them down in what they see as a misguided pursuit of big-tent evangelism.
In an attempt to make the church seem more welcoming and difficult teachings easier to accept, Father Galante said, generations of clergy softened expectations around everything from regular prayer to cohabitation before marriage to dressing up for Sunday Mass.
Many priests in the 1970s and 1980s, he said, “looked at the world and said, ‘The world is changing, we have to change, too.'”
In his view, that approach has not worked. Among Father Galante’s Catholic schoolmates, only a handful of more than 30 still practice the faith, he says. Mass attendance has been declining for decades.
Many young priests feel that morality and political sensibilities have changed dramatically, even within their memory.
Father David Sweeney, 31, who was ordained a priest with Father Galante, recalls that it was during his freshman year of college that President Obama first endorsed same-sex marriage. Today, the idea that the nation’s leading Democrat would not share that view is almost unimaginable.
“It’s a basic tenet of our faith that our culture has changed dramatically in the last 12 years,” Father Sweeney said. “If we say we hold to eternal truth, something that is unchanging, and the world changes, well, now I guess I’ve changed in my relationship to the world.”
Father Galante added: “Perhaps we are more conservative now because the culture has changed, not because we have changed.”
Father Galante and Father Sweeney were two of nine priests ordained in the Milwaukee Archdiocese, the largest group in the ecclesiastical region in more than 30 years.
“Young people today want sacrifice, they want to do something great with their lives,” said Father Luke Strand, a former vocations director for the Milwaukee archdiocese. Father Strand, 43, is rector of St. Francis de Sales Seminary, which has ordained 35 men in the past three years, 20 of them in the Milwaukee archdiocese. Two of his brothers are also priests.
St. Francis de Sales has become a place where young men experience “a deep sense of brotherhood,” Father Strand says. On Saturday nights, the men watch sports together, play basketball in the gym or bowl in the seminary’s small alley. Promotional videos for the seminary portray the students as if they were football recruits.
“It’s really appealing for a young man to say, ‘Boy, am I called to this?'” he said. “There are a lot of normal kids here.”
The idea of ”normality” is being imposed in Catholic seminaries following revelations of widespread sexual abuse of children and young people by clergy for decades. Applicants are now examined for psychosexual maturity, and the program at St. Francis de Sales includes an emphasis on “healthy and balanced celibacy.”
For priests like Father Strand, the palpable trust of the community is part of their success. He cited a quote he attributed to Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, former archbishop of Milwaukee: “No man will give his life for a question mark; he will give it for an exclamation point.”
Hours after his ordination ceremony at the cathedral in downtown Milwaukee, Father Galante was presiding over his first Mass at St. Frances Cabrini Parish in West Bend, about 40 miles northwest of the city. It was the parish where he had been baptized, confirmed and raised. More than 600 people attended the two-hour Saturday afternoon Mass — a crowd so large that ushers ran out of bulletins and had to scramble to line up extra chairs along the back wall of the sanctuary.
After Mass, worshipers walked across the parking lot to the parish school, where men and women of the church had set up long tables with ham sandwiches, pasta salads and cookies in the gymnasium, with a drink station that included coffee and Miller High Life. The atmosphere was cheerful. Some teenage altar boys, who had removed their robes and were sitting together with plates of sandwiches and brownies, said they were thinking about becoming priests someday.
Father Galante wasn’t eating. He was standing at the end of the aisle, facing a growing line of parishioners waiting to receive one of his first blessings as a priest. One by one, he greeted them, smiled, put his hands on their heads or shoulders, murmured a prayer, shook their hands. Outside, the sun was setting over his hometown. His work had just begun.
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