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fall-off in vocations is not because young men and women find it hard to accept celibacy says a 40-yearold American Paulist, it is because there is no longer any prestige in being a priest.
Fr. Arthur LeBlanc, who screens candidates for the Paulist Fathers, thinks that younger people today "come from an era when the stress is on achievement, high achievement. We're no longer drawing our vocations from the lower socio-economic classes, where it was something to have a priest or a nun in the family.
"We're drawing from the middle and the upper-middle class, but these classes are plagued by a high need for achievement.
"We have to show the Catholic high school kid that he can compete with astronauts. You're not going to get these kids with the old appeals to humility and sacrifice."