Seminary administrators weigh in on downward trends

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 3, 2025 / 13:35 pm

Seminaries and their formators are beginning to rethink what formation should look like in the U.S. following reports that enrollment at graduate-level seminaries is continuing to decline.

The fall 2025 CARA report released by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University found that graduate and college-level seminary enrollment in the U.S. has declined significantly, while high school enrollment has remained steady.

According to the report about the 2024-2025 academic year, college seminary enrollment went down 6% from 889 to 840 from the previous year. Similarly, graduate-level seminary enrollment dropped 8% from 2,920 to 2,686.

High school seminary enrollment rose by 2% from 295 to 300.

‘Right-sizing’ formation

“Many Catholics, vocations personnel, and seminary officials keep looking for the return to seminary enrollments from the 1950s instead of taking a cold hard look at the facts and how best to ‘right-size’ seminary programs based on today’s realities,” Father Phillip J. Brown, president-rector of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, told CNA.

Departing from seminary models across the country, he explained, St. Mary’s Seminary, which is the first Catholic seminary in the U.S., made the decision to cap enrollment at 100 students in order to center its efforts in “focusing on the quality of formation.”

“We believed then and do so now that such emphasis on formation quality will have a positive impact on enrollment,” said Brown, who is the longest-serving seminary rector in the U.S.

“Our research showed that 80-100 is the optimum number of seminarians in terms of personal contact with formators, faculty availability, variety of effective seminary programs, and seminary finances,” he said.

Formation at St. Mary’s is conducted in the Sulpician tradition founded by Parisian priest Father Jean-Jacques Olier in 1641, according to the seminary’s website. Sulpicians are diocesan priests dedicated to priestly formation and seminary work.

According to Brown, “wishful thinking about the return of large seminaries is out of step with demographic reality, to the detriment of seminary formation in the U.S.”

He continued: “We need to leave wishful thinking behind, rescale seminary programs, and develop programs that better serve the current reality and the need of the Church for well-formed, healthy, and effective pastors — pastors who will not just function well but who will be an animating, consoling, and spiritual presence in the parishes they serve in.”

Another CARA study in September found gaps in evaluations of candidates for the priesthood related to learning disabilities and assessing tendencies toward “activity or inclination towards sexual activity with a minor or other trait that might indicate the person could be a harm to minors.”

Hope in spite of numbers

While the numbers in CARA’s latest report appear to reflect the continuation of a trend that has seen college seminary enrollment drop from 7,917 in 1970-1971 to 1,118 in 2020-2021 to the current numbers, Jesuit Father John Horn, who is the program director for the Seminary Formation Council, said he is hopeful.

“I don’t see the decline overall as a negative sign,” Horn told CNA. Although the report showcases a downward trend in overall enrollment, he pointed out that “there are a good number of seminaries that are bursting at the seams, actually, that are not declining.”

“When I read about the decline at another seminary or overall, it’s a little difficult to wrap my mind around because I see the new springtime bursting forth,” he said, citing seminaries in Denver, St. Louis, Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland, and Milwaukee as further examples of flourishing institutions of formation.

“What I think the statistics show are in terms of seminary formation,” Horn said, is “that there are too many seminaries, and there needs to be a reduction of the number of seminaries so that it would be more of a regional service for the Church.”

‘Hunger in the culture for silence’

Horn observed a “creative tension” between thriving seminaries and those that need to close due to low numbers, which he attributed partly to a failure to “attend to an effective interiority, and help people identify the everyday experience of the Lord.”

“If they’re emphasizing more externals rather than interior catechesis and evangelization,” he said, “that type of seminary will be very unattractive to current young men.”

In the face of the decline, Horn said, “I’m very hopeful. I think we’re on the cusp of a large number of vocations coming in [due to] the great hunger in the culture for silence and contemplative life.”

“As that hunger grows, the vocations will grow.”