The Lure of an Irish Catholic Diocesan Seminary

In 2010 the Council for Research and Development, the research entity of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference, commissioned a study to investigate the seminary routes, seminary experiences, and social backgrounds of seminarians for the Catholic diocesan priesthood in the pontifical university at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the only still operating Catholic seminary in the Republic of Ireland. The research, which was completed in early 2014, was based primarily on a self-administered questionnaire distributed to 65 seminarians during the 2012–2013 academic year. Thirty-six completed questionnaires were successfully returned, giving a response rate of 55%. This was supplemented by a review of the extant literature on Catholic vocations and prior research on seminarians in general and Irish seminarians in particular