A recent Catholic News Service story reports on the continued increase in seminary enrollment in the United States. Some examples:

— At the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio, 40 new seminarians arrived this year, bringing total enrollment to 186, the highest level since the 1970s.

— St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, welcomed 30 new graduate-level seminarians, making its class of 100 seminarians the largest since 1980. The influx forced 24 seminarians and two priests off campus into leased space at a former convent.

— In the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the St. Pius X diocesan seminary closed in 2004 because of declining enrollment, the number of seminarians has more than doubled–from eight to 17 in the past two years.

But the numbers alone don’t tell the full story.

“I’m tremendously impressed with the quality of the candidates, their zeal,” said Father Phillip Brown, who was appointed rector of Theological College in Washington last March. “We’re seeing a real renewal of the priesthood.”

Under Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, the Church worldwide has been blessed with a priestly vocation boom. The number of major seminarians surged from 63,882 in 1978 to 117,978 in 2009, an increase of nearly 85%, outstripping world population growth (58%) and Catholic population growth (56%) during the same time period.

The State Journal-Register reports that the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois now has 20 seminarians, the most it’s had in over 25 years. The article includes some sobering facts to counter this news, including the approximately 50% attrition rate of seminarians and how even that number doesn’t quite keep pace with the needs of a diocese that has 131 parishes as well as various college, prison, and hospital chaplaincies.

Still, the news is encouraging and is further evidence of a stabilizing of priestly vocations in the U.S. after the decline of the 1970s and 1980s. Further, the Diocese of Springfield is bouncing back from the 1990s, when it underwent some significant scandals even before clerical sex abuse became a national story.

Yet the new generation is undaunted. As one of the current seminarians noted: “[By wearing the collar], people may immediately make assumptions about you that might be very bad. I know this is not about me. I know I’m not going to fix any huge problems on my own. But I can be, for the people God sends me to, an expression of the love God has for them.”

Amen to that.