Going way back in history you can find accounts of saints being discouraged from pursuing religious vocations.Usually families had prestigious marriages or positions in mind for their children instead.
Nowadays the priesthood has lost prestige again in the eyes of some sections of society.Plus, most modern families have fewer children & don’t want to lose out on the chance of grandchildren.Add materialism to the mix & you’ve got most of the answer I think.
I think this is all very true.
I also think, unfortunately, that many people’s image of the Church is exceedingly negative these days. That is certainly the case with my family. I know that my mom would be a lot more excited if I told her I was going to become a Buddhist monk than if I told her I was going to become a Catholic priest! There’s the perception that the Catholic Church is bureaucratic, corrupt, controlling, “medieval” (whatever that means), etc.
I don’t think many parents’ issue is simply with their children joining a clergy (although yes, certainly, a desire for grandchildren and for their children’s material success will always be huge), but with the specific religion itself. Whereas fifty years ago vocations were most likely to come from devout Catholic families, my guess would be – based on personal experience, not on statistics or surveys, so I may be wrong – that today the situation is slightly (if not radically) different. They may also be coming, more and more, from families whose Catholicism is
lapsed or never existed in the first place…? This is just a hypothesis. But also, many of the discussions that dissuade potential seminarians may come from outside the family – from friends, from peers, from coworkers, etc. That is, from people whose viewpoint is more secular than a potential seminarian’s parents’ may be.
Peace,
+AMDG+
. Not so much today. Parents seem to think their son will “miss out” on something if he becomes a priest and they themselves don’t want to be seen as religious nuts.