It’s been coming for a while, and it finally happened: one of America’s largest archdioceses has closed its high school prep seminary:

For more than a century, Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary has prepared teenage boys for the priesthood, largely unchanged as the city transformed around it from gritty industrial center to modern metropolis.

But another kind of change finally caught up with Quigley.

The 102-year-old seminary — a Gothic-style building in a tony Chicago shopping district — closed this month because of a shrinking student body that has seen just one graduate ordained in the last 17 years.

It’s the latest reminder that Roman Catholic preparatory seminaries have all but vanished in the United States, and highlights the church’s struggle to find men willing to dedicate themselves to the priesthood.

“This is more or less the final nail in the coffin of the preparatory seminary,” said R. Scott Appleby, a historian at the University of Notre Dame who has written extensively about the church.

“Historians of the Catholic Church will point to the closing of Quigley … as a final landmark in a trend that has been building now for almost 50 years,” he said.

As recently as the late 1960s, there were 122 high school seminaries in the U.S. with a combined student body of nearly 16,000, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

Quigley, which counts New York Cardinal Edward Egan and Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory among its alumni, was bursting with about 1,300 students in the 1950s; it had just 183 at the beginning of this school year. When Archdiocese of Chicago officials announced in September that the school would close, they said it would be $1 million in debt by June.

Its closure will leave just seven preparatory seminaries with a combined enrollment of about 500 students in the United States. This, at a time when the number of priests in the United States has dropped from nearly 59,000 in 1975 to about 42,000 last year.

One of those seven prep seminaries still functioning is in my own diocese: Cathedral Prep, located in Elmhurst, Queens. It’s now doing double duty, as both a high school and, in the evenings, a school of formation for the diaconate program. It seems to be holding its own. And I hope it continues for a long time. I have many happy memories of the winter nights I spent in freezing classrooms (they turned off the heat in the evenings) boning up on Christology or Church History, drinking strong coffee while sitting in creaky high school desks and staring blankly at obscure physics formulas that were left on the chalkboard from earlier in the day.