With Christian denominations facing clergy shortages and burnout issues, as well as challenging questions about what future pastors look like, Catholic University recently got a boost of support in the form of over $7 million to help train priests.
Catholic was one of 45 institutions recently approved for grants as part of the Lilly Endowment’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, which has given more than $700 million to boost theological education and training when technology has changed how people pray and go for spiritual guidance.
The grant supports the formation of a mentorship program at Catholic University to help further develop leadership skills among seminarians and priests. Another grantee, Howard University’s School of Divinity, received $10 million to support leadership laboratories and other efforts by an alliance of historically Black theological institutions.
“It is a joy to see that others are paying attention to the formation of future Catholic ministers and theologians,” said Mark Farah, 26, a subdeacon and representative for seminarians for Catholic University’s graduate student association. “The more we take seriously the formation of seminarians, the healthier the church will be as a whole.”
According to a fall report by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, the number of people enrolling in seminary has declined, with college seminary enrollment down 6 percent from 889 the previous year to 840 in the 2024-25 academic year, and graduate-level seminary enrollment down 8 percent from 2,920 to 2,686.
The Catholic Church has seen the number of priests in the United States plunge from 60,000 in 1965 to 35,000 a half-century later, even as the country’s population expanded by 150 million people.
Other Christian denominations have seen the number of people becoming clergy decline, and the Lilly program aims to address the complex reasons why. Part of it, experts say, is that America is becoming less religious, as well as more anti-institutional and more fragmented, thus making it harder for clergy to maintain their polarized flocks. Less clergy means more tasks for the existing pastors and priests, which is leading to burnout, experts say.
The new grant will allow Catholic University’s School of Theology and Religious Studies to create programs to help men develop leadership and other skills after they leave seminary.
Farah, who has done his study at the university since fall 2022, said that he is excited for new opportunities that the grant will provide.
“I’ve experienced the benefit of having good pastors in my life, and I hope others get to share in that experience,” Farah said.
Catholic priests complete a masters in divinity, a four-year academic program that attends to the priest’s intellectual formation. They then spend another one to two years in the field to learn pastoral skills. Most men take between four to seven years to be ordained.
Susan Timoney, an associate professor in the School of Theology and Religious Studies, said schools must find a way to integrate academic, spiritual and intellectual training with the spiritual and human development skills priests also need.
“We’ve got a limited amount of time, and so it’s asking of us to create a much more integrative program than what we have now,” Timoney said. “How do you give priests a chance to grow into who they are and identify potential leaders and the skills for that level of leadership that will be asked of them? That’s something that bishops are still grappling with.”
Ed Stetzer, dean of the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, an evangelical school in Los Angeles, said that theological education is in a time of significant change, with major seminaries declining and closing programs.
“Clergy today need a solid grounding in theology, but also an awareness of the context in which they are ministering,” Stetzer said. “So knowing what we believe is essential, but so is knowing the people that we serve — their contexts, questions, and more.”
Timoney said that mentors are needed in the first two to three years of men being appointed pastors, so the question is how to prepare more senior priests to take on that mentorship role.
“It doesn’t do us any good if we have this fabulous program for three years, and then we have to end it because don’t have the resources to continue it,” Timoney said. “This kind of money makes us better able to put resources in place that will enable us to sustain the program beyond the time of the grant.”
Joseph Yost, Catholic University’s senior vice provost for research, said that over the last 50 years, there have been fewer priests completing seminary training. Part of that is due to society being more splintered, Yost said, and people not coming together at churches in the way that they once did.
“There’s a lot of pressure on young men,” Yost said. “The priest is a leader of his group, and if his group is headed every which way, it makes it harder to be a leader.”
That includes questions such as parishioners discussing their faith.
“People are starting to ask the big questions again. ‘What is my purpose of life here? What am I supposed to be doing here?,’” Yost said. “I think society is stressed out now for a lot of reasons. But this gives people an opportunity to ask questions that give them the opportunity to become more religious.”
Timoney said one challenge is when a priest has to let go of someone at the parish who may not be a good fit.
“How do you teach them how to do that? How do you have that conversation? Because that’s one part of their responsibility in terms of good management of the parish,” Timoney said.
The hope, Timoney said, is to give seminarians good pastoral and human skills to be able to walk into crisis situations and be a spiritual presence for parishioners, including developing skills in listening and when to be present with a family during a dire situation. The need of pastors to be prepared to take leadership positions without much on-the-ground training has become more acute.
“A decade ago, priests may be priests for five to 10 years before they would be made a pastor, and now it’s two to three years,” Timoney said.
According to a studyby the Catholic Project’s 2025 National Study of Catholic Priests, more than half of the priests ordained since 2000 reported that they are expected to do too many things “that go beyond [their] calling as priests.” This generational difference “points to growing concerns about sustainability in ministry, especially as parish demands increase.”
Farah said he believes that taking steps like prioritizing prayer, recreation and spiritual direction are key to dealing with burnout. He sees the new grant from Lilly as an opportunity for Catholic to boost its clergy training while also bringing more good pastors in his life.
“Know your limitations and that not everything depends on you,” Farah said. “When I am prioritizing my prayer life and taking proper care of myself, then I can be most available for my duties.”
Michelle Boorstein contributed to this report.
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