Jeff Smialek has tended to sailors returning to port, injured troops recovering from foreign wars and ordinary high school students. He has run up to docking ships with invitations to pray, soothed young combat veterans through their pain and quietly served as a tangible example of Catholicism to teenagers asking a slew of “eternal questions.”

	Father Jeffery blesses his mother Carol for the first time.

“‘Why God?’ ‘Why me?’” Smialek said. “We all struggle to answer that— but there is no clear answer. It all comes down to a matter of faith.”

Faith led this young Carmelite friar to ordination this year—the only one to do so. The 31-year-old Southeast Sider from Sacred Heart parish, a graduate of Mount Carmel High School, was ordained a Catholic priest on May 26.

As a native Chicagoan entering a holy order, Smialek is a rarity.

One week earlier, the Archdiocese of Chicago ordained 13 new priests, only one of whom is an American.

Smialek’s ceremony took place at Saint Matthew Catholic Church in Glendale Heights, Illinois, where he was given the new vestments that mark him as a full-fledged priest, currently number 178 in his order. The Carmelites currently have 21 young men in formation or training. They have ordained as many as four at a time in the past decade, but most years welcome only one or two new friars.

The number of priests in the U.S. Catholic Church has been on the decline, dropping almost 30 percent since 1965 when there were some 58,000. In 2006, there were fewer than 42,000, according to a Catholic research center at Georgetown University. For religious order priests such as the Carmelites, the numbers have declined from about 22,000 four decades ago to 13,000.

The decline in priests comes as the number of Catholics in America climbs, according to Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

Gone are the days when every Catholic family had a priest to call its own—or knew a family that did.

“I’m the only one left,” Smialek said of his beginning class. “The rest have taken other paths.”

Catholic Chicago, old style

Surrounded by Catholics, Smialek grew up a faithful member of Sacred Heart Parish on 96th Street in an old Chicago where folks identified themselves by parish instead of neighborhood. “The only thing I knew was being from a Catholic family. The whole neighborhood was Catholic,” he said of Slag Valley, near the corner of 95th Street and Marquette Avenue. His middle-class parents sent him and his older sister to the parish school under the tutelage of Franciscan sisters. Then the young man went on to Mount Carmel High School where the Carmelite friars—their learning and service—impressed him deeply.

Smialek went on to college, taking his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign in 1997, and then a master’s degree in geography at Chicago State University in 1999.

He thought he would teach. Maybe. “What do I really want to do with the rest of my life?” he wondered. “Is there something else God wants me to do?” Then he dined one evening with Father Tim Andres, O.Carm., his senior year principal at Mount Carmel who remained a close friend. “His advice was, ‘Try it. You have thought about it, so let’s give it a shot.’ He said I wouldn’t be happy without giving it a shot.”

Smialek asked the Carmelites to let him explore their community. He was one of six men who entered that year in Houston. There he ministered to sailors returning from the sea. Some nights, Smialek manned a chapel in a portside seafarer’s center. As its chaplain, he welcomed ships as they docked.

He followed the port with a year of absolutely nothing, a year called the novititiate. Free of responsibilities or assignments, Smialek could fully realize why he wanted to stay with the Carmelites— or why he might want to leave as other classmates decided to do.

“It is all you and God, a whole year talking it out with each other,” he explained. “I had more than a few fights with God that year—I guess you know who won.”

Any doubts he had about taking on a secular career melted away, and Smialek felt ready to live in a community with other Carmelites.

Smialek then taught high school history in Tucson, Arizona,—the same school that will be his first assignment —then was sent to Washington, DC, to complete a master’s degree in divinity.

Between classes, he was a military chaplain at the National Naval Hospital, dealing with troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“For a 21-year-old Marine to see where God is was a struggle,” Smialek said. “I left with more wisdom and insight from the experience than they did.”

Decline in vocations

Eight years’ total training—longer than a doctor, he jokes—to become “Father Jeff.”

Naturally, priests need more training than doctors, he said, because they take on so many jobs as counselor, coach, teacher, community builder and spiritual guide—all while donning a heavy, hooded robe.

He’s also got to be part apologist for a troubled church wracked by scandal, eroded by waning financial support and abandoned by families looking for other options in modern mega churches or secular outlets.

“If we can pick up the pieces and move on, as much as the old church is fading away, there’s a new church being born,” he said. “The best thing I can do is be myself. Hopefully, people will see a young man excited about the church and being a priest.”

His mother, who once expected her son to go into politics, thinks Smialek’s strong sense of self will help him prevail. “I’m sure he will get it done,” Carol Smialek said tearfully. “He’s in God’s hands.”

Andres also saw the signs in a teenage Smialek at Mount Carmel High. “You never know until someone matures, but you can see qualities in someone (that are) important for priesthood, compassion and generosity.” And what a blessing to have a native South Sider bring his culture to local churches, Andres said.

“There are a lot of men called to the priesthood who have been called, but Jeff has answered that call and offered his life. It’s a great example for me being a middle-aged priest that he’s willing to follow that lifestyle. It makes you feel good about the future of the church.”

Of the 13 priests ordained in the Archdiocese of Chicago, just one grew up in the United States. He grew up in a northwest suburb. The others studied and were raised in Kenya, Tanzania, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam and Poland.

Hispanics and Asians are the future of the Catholic Church, making it look different from the one in which Smialek grew up. But it’s one he’s ready to embrace.

“Traditional white European Catholics— Irish, Polish, and Italians—are rapidly disappearing and new ethnic communities are taking over. We have to look for new ways to reach out and grab (those new) Catholic communities and include them into the church. It’s scary on one hand. Pretty much everything I knew as a child is gone. My comfort zone is gone.”

Smialek, who was taught Spanish instead of the traditional Latin of his predecessors, is ready to start rebuilding communities out of Catholic churches, ready to give parishioners a home again.

“How has the parish stopped being the center of the neighborhood?” he wondered. “How do we reach out to get people of all ages? That’s the challenge asked of a young minister today.”

Reaching out to high school students—and leaving the kind of strong imprint Mount Carmel left on him—is where Smialek thinks he’ll be most useful in his first assignment. He’ll be a priest for children who’ve never met one without gray hair.

“It felt right—it still feels right,” Smialek said of his calling. “Ultimately I do feel that this is what God wants me to be. Millions have done it before me and it is possible.”