The Coolest Job In Kenya Is Being A Catholic Priest
NAIROBI, Kenya — St. Mary's Propaedeutic Seminary, located in the Kenyan Rift Valley, was built to accommodate about 75 seminarians. Today, more than 300 seminarians live there.
Church officials say the seminary has not been able to keep pace with the number of young men applying to be trained as priests.
“The graph has grown so much that we find it like a phenomenon,” said Bishop Joseph Obanyi, Chairman of the Seminaries Episcopal Commission of the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We were trying to find out whether we could find space for additional students in neighboring countries. Tanzania was asking the same. Uganda was asking the same. It is an exponential kind of growth that has touched all of East Africa.”
READ: Christian Lawyers Aid Nigeria’s Families Targeted For Their Faith
As many dioceses in Europe and North America continue to contend with declining numbers of Catholic clerics, church leaders in Kenya said they face the opposite problem of having more qualified applicants than existing seminaries can absorb. There simply is not enough room for everyone. Some dioceses have delayed admissions, while others have resorted to prefabricated dormitories and temporary transfers.
As the sole entry point for all diocesan seminary candidates in Kenya, St. Mary’s serves as the gateway through which every prospective priest must pass during his initial spiritual year of formation.
Since the number of students St. Mary’s can admit directly determines how many can proceed through the eight-year program (called “formation” in most Catholic circles) the bottleneck ripples throughout the entire national seminary network.
The strain is equally severe a four-hour drive away at St. Augustine’s Senior Seminary in Mabanga, the nation’s primary philosophical house of studies. Designed for 150 students, Mabanga now holds approximately 320 seminarians. The crisis recently reached a point where administrators had to split off 55 students and send them more than eight hours away to Nairobi to attend classes at Consolata International University. Another 50 remained in Mabanga, housed in hastily erected prefabricated dormitories.
Church officials note that applications have risen consistently each year, drawing heavily from young professionals who are leaving established careers, as well as university graduates. In a single recent entry cohort, 24 students who already had a university degree applied to enroll in the seminary, including three who had a master’s degree.
The vocational boom is no longer isolated to traditionally Catholic strongholds in central and western Kenya; it has spread into remote northern regions and mission territories historically considered difficult for church growth, such as Garissa, Lodwar and Marsabit.
This African movement reflects a broader global shift in Catholic demographics. While those choosing priesthood and religious vocations in Europe and North America have dropped steadily over the last half-century, the African continent has become the vibrant heartland of Catholic clerical formation.
Despite accounting for roughly 20 percent of the world’s overall Catholic population, Africa now represents 84% of the world's minor seminarians (high school and early college-aged students) and 68% of its major seminarians (undergraduate and graduate students), according to data published by Agenzia Fides.
No one has offered a straightforward explanation for the surge. Even though Catholic leadership in Kenya acknowledges the phenomenal nature of the growth, it has not ventured an explanation for why.
The surge has prompted questions over whether material factors are pulling young men toward the priesthood in countries where formal employment is hard to come by. That explanation has not gone unchallenged. Father Augustine Deji Dada, vice president of the Society of St. Peter the Apostle of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA, acknowledged that poverty can influence spiritual searching but cautioned against reducing vocation to economics.
“I encourage you to take a tour of a Nigerian seminary. Stay there for a week without electricity, without water, and then come and tell me whether life is better inside or outside. It takes real love for Jesus to want to live in that situation,” he told the Catholic news website ACI Africa in March.
The research available on African vocations does not establish how much of the surge is economically driven.
Addressing the strain this surge places on formation infrastructure, Fr. Guy Bognon, Secretary General of the Vatican’s Pontifical Society of St. Peter the Apostle (POSPA), emphasized that managing the growth goes far beyond numbers:
“Priestly formation does not simply mean rejoicing in having full seminaries,” Bognon said. “It is essential that Episcopal Conferences take this issue seriously. The number of vocations alone is not enough; quality is equally important. Today, in the face of the challenges confronting the world, it is essential to have well-formed priests capable of providing authentic leadership.”
According to Obanyi, training a Catholic priest in Kenya takes eight years and costs at least 250,000 Kenyan shillings ($1,900) annually per seminarian. This brings the total cost per priest to over two million shillings ($15,000) before ordination.
According to The Catholic Mirror, annual tuition fees charged to individual dioceses, which often support the seminarians, sit at 90,000 shillings ($700). This amount barely covers basic operational expenses, a figure Obanyi noted leaves church leadership with virtually no funds for capital expansion or structural improvements.
To address the immediate crisis, the Kenyan bishops have begun constructing 40 additional dormitory units at St. Mary’s Molo, with plans to expand Mabanga next. However, until infrastructure catches up with demand, many qualified applicants may have to be turned away or placed on long waiting lists.
“Last year, I applied for 18 slots (for men in my diocese) and got eight. I don’t know whether they are going to wait. It is a painful experience — it really is — for me as a bishop,” Bishop Obanyi said.
Speaking with Omnes, Father Antony Mwituria, director of Kenya’s Seminary Endowment Fund, explained that dwindling international aid forced local church leaders to rethink how they sustain priestly formation.
“We are experiencing a vocation boom … but, unfortunately, every year we have to reject many aspirants to the seminary because we do not have the capacity to accept them,” he added. “You could say it’s a ‘good problem.’”
Joseph Maina is a Kenyan journalist. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and media studies from the University of Nairobi. For the past decade, he has served as a correspondent for various print and digital publications in his native Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa.