Robert Silva, a pastor and spiritual director who has taught at the University of the Pacific and the Catholic University of America, talks about how his journey to priesthood changed his life.

"We should not deny that we are struggling with the fallout from the sex-abuse scandal," Father Robert Suva told the 2006 convention of the National Federation of Priests' Councils (NFPC). "We are convinced and convicted of our priesthood. But we are struggling."

Silva, a pastor and spiritual director who has taught at the University of the Pacific and the Catholic University of America, has been president of the NFPC through some of the most challenging years for priests in its existence. Founded in the late 1960s in the tumultuous days after the second Vatican Council, the NFPC began as a national forum for priests to answer Vatican ll's call to become a more collegial church.

In the midst of their struggles, Suva called on his fellow priests to "paste across our foreheads" the words of Pope Benedict XVI, "Christ has risen because God loves us."

"What we must be," he said, "is a ministry of love."

How has the journey to the priesthood changed since you made the decision to become a priest?

My story might be unusual in that I never even saw a priest or went into a church until I made my First Communion. We never went to church because we lived hours from town, on a ranch in the hills outside of Monterey, California. We had no running water, no electricity, but we were very Catholic. God was a part of the fabric of our lives, God was the air we breathed. During Lent, way out in the hills, our family gathered, my folks pulled out the little pamphlets, and we did the Stations of the Cross every Friday. This was what I lived as a small boy. I think families today are usually not as Catholic in that sense.

We also don't have nuns telling boys anymore, "You're going to go take the test for the high school seminary," as I was told when I went to a Catholic school later on. The nuns were very key in many priests' vocation journeys; they would always be saying, "Don't you think you want to be a priest?"

A priest's life journey began in high school, and there simply weren't as many life choices as there are today. When I was in high school, the choices for Catholics were pretty much the military, the seminary, or college. Today, with so many options before them and without a vision of life where the air you breathe is God-filled, priesthood doesn't occur to a lot of young people.

So when does it occur to them, if ever?

It's not until people are in their middle to late 20s that they begin saying, "I don't know what my life means. I'm bored being an accountant. I want to do something more."

One of my students at the University of the Pacific graduated and made big bucks. After about a year, he came back and stayed with me and said, "I can't do this anymore. I might as well die now. I'm waiting to die, and I'm making lots of money doing it."

I asked him, "What do you want to do?" He said, "You know, I think I want to do medicine." He went to med school and is now serving in the poorest parts of West Virginia, and his life has meaning.

If it's true that there are many young people in their 20s looking for meaning in their work, why are they not choosing the priesthood?

There are some difficulties with the priesthood today. One of them is that the priest represents the institution, and the institutional church today is somewhat suspect, to say the least. Its leadership is perceived as being corrupt, not only in the Catholic community but with churches in general.

Because young people also grow up today with completely different understandings of homosexuality, for example, or of the place of women, some of the teachings of the church are incomprehensible to them. Denominations across the board are asking, "Why aren't our young people coming?" They believe in God and they are longing for meaning and purpose, but they're not going to invest in the institutional church until things change.

What might bring young people in?

The church has to begin to understand itself differently. For one thing, I think we've got to be very careful that we don't let ourselves get co-opted by political agendas, regardless of what political party you may be in. I fear we saw some of that among our bishops in the last election.

second, we have to start talking and using language that young people understand. The young process reality very differently; they perceive and understand differently. The evangelization process has to be different. We can no longer say, "We're the church-come to us." We have to reach out to people where they're at.

What does it mean to be a priest today?

Let's move beyond the Christian perspective for a moment. Look at our history as a human community. We have always had priests because priests bridge the world here and the world beyond. They're symbols, signs of somebody, some reality, beyond us. The human community needs that kind of hope so it doesn't fold in upon itself.

In the Christian context Jesus the priest not only holds out hope of the beyond, but makes the beyond present, so it's not about death, it's about life. Everyone who's baptized is baptized into Christ the priest, so the purpose of their whole life is to take up that mission of being a life-giver. We are to be signs that there is a beyond and to work to bring life to others, whether it's feeding or teaching or writing or whatever. The ordained are to lead that process, which is to go through death on the cross into the life of resurrection. So we become people of hope. Our job is not to put up fences, from my perspective. Our job as priests is to be dynamic in the process of being life-giving and encouraging people to be life-giving.

Isn't there a clash of cultures in the priesthood today, especially between older and younger priests?

It reminds me of what happens when two rivers meet: There's a tremendous amount of turbulence. That's where we are. We're being tossed and thrown in the turbulence of the coming together of two different ways of understanding the priesthood. I think the next 10 years are going to be tough.

You've got newly ordained who would say that we've gone beyond the boundaries of the church and we need to get everyone back in. I agree there is some need for a correction since the second Vatican Council. But you have to notice that the average age of guys coming into the priesthood today is about 36. What are those men looking for? They may have had some pretty rocky life experiences and are looking for a solid piece of granite to stand on, the certitude of a faith that's got solid parameters.

The newly ordained tend to emphasize personal holiness, to see it as their job to be as holy as they can be and to tell people what the boundaries are so they can be personally holy as well. They may sponsor a food bank because in charity we need to feed the hungry, but the real focus will be the 24-hour eucharistie adoration chapel.

The priests who came through Vatican II do not focus on boundaries. Their image would be of the church as leaven in the world. We're in the world to engage it, and you engage it with the gospel at a level that is concrete and real. Sometimes it's not all that clear where the church leaves off and the world begins.

As you see, those are two different strategies. In one, the energy is going out, and the other the energy is going inward. I think you're not going to engage young people in the life of the church if the role of the priest is maintenance and personal sanctity. The only thing that will engage the young is a tremendous vision of what life can bring to the world and how we can transform our institutions and each other's lives. It's relational, not institutional. We need the institution, but somehow it has to house the process of building relationships.

For example, I see younger priests coming up against postmodern people who aren't, for example, motivated by talk of missing Mass on Sunday being a mortal sin. People say, "I just don't need that."

I don't believe that you have to give up personal holiness to be engaged in the mission in the world. Nor do I think that being engaged in the mission is any less an adoration of God than kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. When I kneel in adoration, what's happening is that I'm being drawn more and more into the dynamic of Jesus, the priest, giving life, bringing people out of death, and calling me more deeply into that life of mission.