Some very bright news during this dark season: vocations in Beantown are up.

Way up.

From the Boston Globe

Enrollment at St. John’s Seminary has doubled over the last two years, a stunning turnabout for an institution that seemed to be spiraling toward closure in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

The stone hall in Brighton, where two generations ago hundreds of young men prepared for the priesthood, is still strikingly quiet, but the pews of the Romanesque chapel are now about one-third full, as fresh-faced young men from around the world help to revive a 125-year-old institution that teetered on the brink of extinction just a few years ago.

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, who resisted calls from priests to close the Catholic seminary when he arrived as archbishop of Boston five years ago, has made preserving St. John’s a top priority for his administration, and has cajoled bishops from New England and beyond to send young men to Boston to prepare for the priesthood. This fall there are 87 men studying theology at St. John’s, up from 42 two years ago.

They are men like Eric Cadin, 28, of Weymouth, who thought about becoming a priest when he was a second-grader, and then pushed the idea aside until he felt a strong call as an undergraduate at Harvard.

“There was something for me lacking, and this powerful encounter with the living God, with Jesus, who transformed my life,” he said. “I am compelled.”

And then there is Tom Macdonald, 24, of Westford, who acknowledged that many of his own friends and family wondered why anyone would become a priest today.

“The men here have had to overcome a lot of cultural hostility to be here, sometimes from their own friends and family,” he said. “I understand that faith is a gift, and faith opens up new understandings, and those understandings aren’t available to those who haven’t received that gift yet.”

The seminary’s reversal of fortune is not a solution for the archdiocese’s growing shortage of priests, because many of the seminarians will return home to serve the dioceses where they grew up.

But church officials say the seminary is worth preserving as an important church institution in New England, and that the enrollment uptick sends a positive signal to prospective priests.

“Two years ago, when I went down to visit, you were in a hall all by yourself as a visitor, and now you have to call ahead to make sure there’s a guest room available,” said the Rev. Dan White, director of vocations and seminarians for the diocese of Burlington, which includes the entire state of Vermont. “And success breeds success. When those seminarians talk about the good experience they had, that’s the best advertisement for other dioceses sending men there.”

Praise the Lord. You can read more at the Globe link.