The Priesthood isn’t about what you get – It’s about what you give

THE PRIESTHOOD ISN’ T ABOUT WHAT YOU GET— IT ’S ABOUT WHAT YOU GIVE

By Fr. Robert Mulderink, Dir. of Priestly Vocations

June 2025

An important part of my job as vocations director is recruitment, which includes “marketing”. I think advertising is a fascinating way to study the human person. Advertising uses images, characters, words, arguments, and music to try to influence a viewer to do something, usually to buy something (although there are also those hilarious ads that remind you to walk and eat your vegetables).

Sometimes there’s a tagline, like “come on down to Howdy’s for a great deal on a car,” and sometimes there are no words, like the glossy car commercials that show a perfect family with perfect teeth living a perfect life in their perfect car, backed by just the right soundtrack. You’ve probably already noticed, but almost all ads implicitly promise happiness, because everyone wants happiness. Advertising is a matter of persuading you that this or that will make you happy, so that you’ll buy it. Advertising uses emotion more than rational argument, and it can be almost comical when you recognize all ads have the same basic message: “See these people, how happy they are? You want to be like them. If you had [insert product here] you would be like them.”

Even when advertising is trying to motivate someone to do something generous but difficult, like serving your country in the military, it tries to show that the benefits to you outweigh the costs. Almost all ads presume the viewer believes happiness comes from getting what you want, so they pre-emptively answer the question “what’s in it for me?”

However, marketing materials for priestly vocations must take a different approach because, not only is our Christian understanding of happiness fundamentally different from the common egocentric view, but we also don’t want our priests to be men who entered seminary by asking “what’s in it for me?”

Below are a few attempts at taglines for a vocations ad. They are meant to provoke thought, to break someone out of the default of self-seeking, and not to play the usual pandering game of advertising. You might call them “anti-advertisements”:

• If you are waiting for someone to beg and plead with you to please be a priest… you’re not the man we’re looking for.
• If you are looking for an ad to tell you how much you’ll love being a priest… we actually don’t want you.
• There’s nothing in it for you. That’s the point.

How do we speak to men who are capable of self-gift, but who are used to messages that indulge their self-seeking? One very important part is to share the joy of priesthood and to address misconceptions. Another, it seems to me, is to intensely challenge their approach to life and happiness by asking the question: “Do you really think you can find happiness while your life is still centered on you?” We were made for happiness and fulfillment, but we cannot find it by grasping for material objects. Only by giving ourselves away in love for God and others will we be fulfilled. “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?” (Lk 9:23-25)