Preventing a Priestless Future

How the Church must reclaim the sacred masculinity it abandoned

St. John Capistrano urging soldiers to victory over the Turks (detail from a painting at the eponymous California mission)

The Catholic Church on earth has a priest problem. A big one. Not the kind you read about in headlines. The kind you see in empty seminaries. The kind that shows up in statistics and makes Vatican officials sweat through their vestments.

Over the last five decades, America has lost 40% of its priests. France ordains fewer men each year than most suburbs produce high school graduates. German seminaries remain largely empty. Ireland struggles to fill even a single seminary class. The same institution that survived Roman persecution, barbarian invasions, and two world wars can’t convince young men to become priests. Something fundamental has broken.

The spiritual entropy isn’t just outside the Church—it’s inside the rectory. Modern priests spend more time in committee meetings than in prayer. They spend more time worrying about parish budgets than souls. They trade the language of sin and salvation for soft talk about “journeys” and “lived experiences.” The priesthood was stripped of everything that made it attractive to brave men. Early Church priests faced lions—literally. They were stoned, beheaded, and burned alive. They knew the job might kill them. They took it anyway. Today’s priests face parish council meetings and liturgy planning committees. Far from being warriors, they are middle managers. Administrators, not heroes.

No young man dreams of presiding over bingo night. He dreams of slaying dragons. When that dream dies, so does the calling. If that sounds harsh, good. It should. Because if the Church were thriving, I wouldn’t need to write this.

One of the deepest, least acknowledged reasons young men are fleeing the priesthood is this: it’s been feminized in all the wrong ways and stayed masculine in all the wrong ways. Let me explain. We’ve turned a calling that once demanded foresight and fortitude into something soft, bureaucratic, and vaguely apologetic. Every homily must now be a gentle conversation. Every statement, a balancing act. Dialogue replaces declaration. Offense is treated as heresy. The Gospel gets strained through the filter of therapy-speak and HR lingo until it has the moral clarity of twice-brewed lukewarm tea.

But while the message gets softer, the structure stays hard. Celibacy? Still required. Marriage? Off the table. You’ve got the bones of ancient sacrifice—but none of the spirit that once made it noble. The worst of both worlds. All the cost of traditional masculinity with none of the glory.

Young men see it. They feel the contradiction deep in their gut. They’re told to renounce sex, fatherhood, and the comfort of a partner — not for the thrill of spiritual warfare, not to offer the mighty sacrifice of heaven and earth, not to baptize new nations or stare down tyrants — but to attend diocesan diversity seminars and send reminder emails about parish bake sales. They’re expected to become celibate shepherds of a flock that would rather they just smiled more and stayed quiet. It’s like training to be a Navy SEAL and getting assigned to customer service. “Congratulations, you’ve completed Hell Week. Here’s your headset — you’ll be taking complaints about the communion wafers being too bland.” Meanwhile, the Church keeps wondering where all the warriors went.

The masculine spirit hasn’t died. Not really. It’s just been insulted.

If you’re going to ask a man to sacrifice everything — his body, his future, his legacy — then you had better provide him with a mission that justifies that sacrifice. The early Church understood this, indeed the Church of every age before our own. It didn’t just tolerate masculine energy. It demanded it. The saints didn’t avoid danger. They sprinted towards it. The priesthood wasn’t a role. It was a war post.

Real men don’t mind rules and don’t fear sacrifice. What they can’t stand is hypocrisy. What repels them is a structure that demands heroic restraint while rewarding cowardly conformity. They need clarity. They need ranks to climb, missions to complete, a brotherhood to belong to. The tragedy is that the Church already has all of this. It just forgot how to present it (and some of its leaders stopped believing in it). And men—especially the kind who once would’ve walked barefoot into martyrdom—have taken the hint. They’re walking away.

Photo by Stas Ostrikov (source)

Before we go any further, I want to emphasize that celibacy alone isn’t the problem. Remove that one rule, some say, and suddenly the seminaries will overflow. As if young men are pounding on the doors, desperate to serve, but turned off by the fine print about sex. Please. That fantasy rests on a faulty premise—one that no longer holds water. It assumes that sex still carries the currency it once did. That young men are ravenous for physical pleasure, that eros is still a dominant force shaping lives.

We don’t live in that world anymore. We are living through a sex recession. And I don’t mean monks and would-be mystics. I mean everyone. According to hard data, more than one in four men under 30 hasn’t had sex in the past year. A growing number have never had it at all. Not because they’re disciplined. Not because they’re devoted to higher things. But because the modern world has made sex boring, awkward, shameful — or worse, meaningless. What was once charged with connection has been turned into a commodity. Simulated through porn and trivialized by apps.

For many young men, desire itself has withered. The fire is gone. That’s terrifying — for society, yes, as it recedes into depopulation. But for the Church, I suggest, it’s also an opportunity. You want to talk recruitment? Start there. Not by removing celibacy, but by reframing it. We’ve let the world define celibacy as deprivation. As a sterile compromise. As the sad trade-off made by the socially awkward. And we’ve gone along with it, apologizing the whole way. No wonder no one signs up.

But celibacy isn’t weakness. It’s not therapy. It’s warfare.

Or at least, it used to be. The early Church didn’t see celibacy as a tragic footnote. They saw it as fire. A priest wasn’t a man avoiding sex — he was a man consumed by something far greater: divine obsession, singular purpose, and the clarity of eternity.

Today, we pitch celibacy like a participation trophy for the emotionally damaged. As if the priesthood is the last refuge for men who couldn’t make it in the real world. We ask them to give up family and children, and offer them what? Loneliness? No. Celibacy should be framed as liberation for conquest. As a life unshackled from appetite. Not repression, but consecration. A man so bound to the eternal that earthly attachments fall away like dust.

The celibate life isn’t empty — it’s focused. It’s dangerous. It’s exhilarating. This is the paradox we must confront: the sexless generation is not a curse. It’s a doorway. If sex no longer tempts, then it no longer stands in the way. What’s left is a vacuum of longing — and the Church must fill it, not with finger-wagging, not with therapy — but with fire. Light it again, or lose them forever.

Reframing celibacy as a superpower is a start. But if that vow isn’t housed within something breathtaking, something so filled with awe it shakes you to the core, then the entire effort will prove futile. Discipline without vision is cruelty. You can command sacrifice, but if there’s no visible glory — no sense that what you’re building reaches beyond the grave — then all you’re doing is exhausting people.

Men especially don’t respond to vague ideals. They need to see something. Not just be told it’s holy. It has to look, feel, and smell holy. They need the presence of something otherworldly, something that says, “This matters.”

That’s where beauty comes in. And not the sterilized kind that gets passed around at bishops’ conferences. I’m referring to the kind of beauty that leaves you utterly speechless. That halts conversation. That reminds you you’re standing in a place meant to raise the dead. Beauty that does what catechisms alone never can: reveal God.

The Church once understood this. It was never up for debate. You didn’t need a theologian to explain the doctrine of the Real Presence when you saw it manifested in how the building itself bent around the altar. The structure said it for you. The height of the ceiling, the light hitting the chalice, the shadows dancing under stained glass, even the piercing silence — they all preached.

This was the glory of the pre-modern Church: it taught through architecture, weight, echo, and scale. It formed men not just intellectually but physically — pulling their eyes upward, their knees downward, and their souls beyond themselves. Every inch of the sanctuary was a map to eternity. And all of it said one thing: this is not of this world.

Jules Victor Genisson, interior of the Cathedral of Amiens (source)

But modern churchmen didn’t like that. They wanted comfort and approachability. They inherited buildings that could make grown men weep and replaced them with blank walls and retractable screens. Beauty resisted streamlining. It was never efficient. And so, they ripped it out. Latin was thrown out like asbestos. Chant was mocked as a relic. Icons were pulled down and replaced with clipart. Marble altars were replaced with tables you could roll out at a Knights of Columbus breakfast. Tabernacles were exiled to side chapels as if the Blessed Sacrament were a fire hazard.

And the priests, many of whom still wore Roman collars, stood over the rubble and called it progress. What filled the vacuum? Beige. Literal and spiritual. Beige vestments. Beige music. Beige theology. Beige sentiments dressed up as homilies.

Everything about the new church aesthetic contradicts beauty. Walk into most Catholic parishes today and you’ll wonder if God left and forgot to switch off the lights. Harsh fluorescents. Bad carpeting. Felt things on walls. A crucifix mounted like a forgotten safety sign. Nothing stirs. Nothing compels. Nothing arrests. And we wonder why young men don’t stay. Why would they?

Beauty isn’t a marketing strategy. It’s not decorative. It’s not optional. It’s not for the artsy types. It’s foundational. Beauty teaches. It confronts. It reveals the shape of truth before words ever reach the brain. It bypasses argument and strikes at the heart. It does what doctrine alone cannot do: it anchors belief. It baptizes the imagination. It makes the abstract unbearable to ignore. Even medieval peasants, illiterate and exhausted, understood what beauty meant. They couldn’t read the Catechism, but they saw the sacred. They saw it in the Mass, in the candles, and in the gold that lined the missal. They were poor, but their churches weren’t because they believed God deserved better than they did.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped believing that.

Photo by Saint John’s Seminary (source)

In recent years, in its desperation to look modern, the Catholic Church has thrown itself at the feet of Silicon Valley. It wants to seem current, useful, approachable — anything but ancient. And so, like every decaying institution that’s lost confidence in its own mission, it grabs for relevance like a drunk grabbing the wheel. It turns to branding, “digital outreach,” algorithms, engagement metrics, and content strategies. The same language used to sell shoes, shampoo, and streaming services is now employed to “spread the Gospel.”

What does it produce? TikTok priests lip-syncing to hymns. Bishops podcasting like life coaches. Homilies edited down to 90 seconds with quirky subtitles and acoustic guitar riffs. Lo-fi Eucharistic Adoration reels slapped with hashtags like #blessed and #spiritualvibes. Confession turned into a “drive-thru experience.” Rosary “influencers” with link trees and product codes.

This is nothing less than shameless submission. Strategic surrender, dressed up in Canva templates. And worst of all, it’s ineffective.

Because you cannot beat Silicon Valley at its own game. You cannot out-click, out-glow, or out-shock the algorithm. You will never be more stimulating than TikTok. Never more comforting than a therapist on YouTube. Never more “relevant” than whatever secular trend is going viral this week.

And you shouldn’t try. Because what the Church holds is not “content.” It is contact. Contact with something sacred and holy. Not soothing. Not safe. Something that doesn’t ask for your engagement — it demands your transformation. When you reduce that to social media strategy — when you edit it, brand it, shrink it, commodify it — you don’t make it more accessible. You make it disappear.

The Church is not supposed to compete in the marketplace of attention. It’s supposed to stand outside of it — aloof, untouchable, true. When everything else is entertainment, the Church should be confrontation. When everything else says “you are enough,” the Church should whisper, “you are dust.”

That’s what made it powerful. That’s what made it terrifying. That’s why it used to change lives. But now, it’s fighting for scraps on platforms designed to erase memory, trying to go viral for a Gospel that isn’t supposed to fit in a trend cycle, and chasing youth approval through digital stunts instead of demanding obedience through sacred mystery.

The internet already has entertainers. It already has influencers. It already has therapists, spiritual gurus, and motivational speakers. What it does not have is priests. Not real ones. Because real priests don’t dance for followers. They don’t tweet for validation. They don’t package the liturgy for reels. They don’t break the Mass into content. They disappear into it.

A real priest doesn’t look like someone you’d “follow” on your screen. He looks like someone who’s seen something you haven’t. He moves through the world marked. Set apart. Other. He’s supposed to be strange — in a good way. He’s supposed to unsettle the room just by entering it. In my opinion, this is what we’ve lost completely. The sense that priests are different. Not better than laypeople, but different. Called to something that requires a fundamental reordering of priorities, desires, and daily life.

Instead, we’ve made them accessible. Relatable. “Just like us, but with a collar.” We’ve stripped away the mystery and wonder why the mystique is gone. We’ve made them friendly and approachable and then act shocked when young men don’t see anything worth sacrificing for.

The problem runs deeper than recruitment strategies or seminary reforms. It runs to the heart of what we think the priesthood is for. If priests are just therapeutic facilitators with sacramental authority, then frankly, we don’t need that many of them. A few social workers with the power to consecrate bread will suffice. But if priests are bridges between heaven and earth, if they’re meant to be walking reminders that another world exists, if they’re supposed to smell like eternity and move like men who’ve touched the divine — then we need to start acting like it.

We need to stop apologizing for the strangeness of the calling and start celebrating it. We need to stop making excuses for celibacy and start presenting it as what it is: a radical witness to the primacy of the eternal over the temporal. Most importantly, we need to stop trying to make the priesthood appeal to everyone and start making it appeal to the right men. The men who don’t want a job — they want a mission. The men who don’t want comfort — they want conquest. The men who don’t want to fit in — they want to stand out for something that matters.

These men still exist. They’re not scrolling through seminary websites looking for career counseling. They’re not impressed by digital outreach campaigns or diversity initiatives. They’re looking for something real. Something dangerous. Something worth dying for. And when they find it — when they encounter a Church that believes in its own message enough to demand sacrifice, that values beauty enough to surround itself with it, that takes the priesthood seriously enough to make it both terrifying and irresistible — they won’t need to be recruited. They’ll come running.

So yes, let’s make priesthood great again. To achieve this, however, we must make priests radiate with something the world doesn’t fully understand. When that happens, you won’t need a digital campaign. Because men won’t be scrolling. They’ll be going unto the altar of God, the God who gives joy to their youth.