In the sticky night air, next to a grove of mahogany trees, nearly 50 young men saunter back and forth along a basketball court, reciting the rosary. They are seminarians studying to become Roman Catholic priests. Together, they send a great murmuring into the hilly village, mingling with the Muslim call to prayer and the chanting of Vedas from a Hindu temple on a nearby ridge.Young men willing to join the priesthood are plentiful in India, unlike in the United States and Europe. Within a few miles of this seminary, called Don Bosco College, are two much larger seminaries, each with more than 400 students. As a result, bishops trek here from the US, Europe, Latin America and Australia looking for spare priests to fill their empty pulpits. Hundreds have been allowed to go, siphoning support from India’s widespread network of Catholic churches, schools, orphanages, missionary projects and social service programmes. At least 800 Indian priests are working in the US alone. India, Vietnam and the Philippines are among the leading exporters of priests, according to data compiled by researchers at the Catholic University of America in Washington. “There is a great danger just now because the spirit of materialism is on the increase,” said Bishop Mar James Pazhayattil, the founding bishop of the Diocese of Irinjalakuda, as he sat barefoot at his desk, surrounded by mementos of a lifetime of church service. “Faith and the life of sacrifice are becoming less.”Some of the forces contributing to a lack of priests in Europe and the US have begun to take shape here. Parents are having fewer children, with even observant Catholics freely admitting they use birth control. The Indian economy, which has boomed for years, offers more career options. In past generations, having a son become a priest increased the family’s stature, said the Reverend Jose Kuriedath, a sociologist in Aluva who has written a book about vocations in India. Kuriedath recounted an adage in Malayalam, the local language: “It is equal in dignity to have either an elephant or a priest in the family.” But this is changing. At St Paul’s Minor Seminary in the Diocese of Irinjalakuda, sleepy teenage boys clamber from their dormitory every morning down to chapel, past a statue of Mary and portraits of Pope Benedict XVI and Gandhi. Chacko Kuttuparambil, a stocky 17-year-old, felt called to the priesthood because, he said, as a child he was miraculously cured of a viral infection that paralysed the right side of his body. “He gave me life,” Chacko said, “so I am to give my life to Him.”
