Archdiocese to Close High School Seminary : Priesthood: Rising costs, declining enrollment at Mission Hills campus are cited. Projects will be launched to aid recruitment.

In the spring of 1954, an 18-year-old seminary student graduated from a newly opened campus in the San Fernando Valley. He continued through the Los Angeles Catholic seminary system to become a priest, bishop and eventually the cardinal of the Los Angeles archdiocese.

And so it fell to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony to announce earlier this month that he must close his own alma mater, Our Lady Queen of Angels High School Seminary in Mission Hills. It was a sad task made sadder by a central fact behind the closure: Fewer teen-age boys nurtured in the seminary are following in Mahony’s footsteps all the way to the priesthood.

A church study showed that rising costs were surpassing financial resources to operate Queen of Angels, and that no more than 5% of the freshmen expected to enroll in the next decade could be counted on to complete priesthood training, which requires 12 years.

Queen of Angels was already one of the last of the nation’s so-called junior, or minor, seminaries. In 1968, there were 133 Catholic high school seminaries in the United States, but only nine will remain--none in the western states--when the campus closes in July.

“They certainly have been a dying breed,” said Father John Klein of Chicago, president of the Assn. of High School Seminaries. “The resources become scarcer, and this is one place where the cuts occur.”

There are 155 students at the Mission Hills campus, slightly more than five and 10 years ago, and well above the late 1970s, when there was a perilous drop to fewer than 100 students. The Jan. 17 earthquake forced the archdiocese to assess its financial resources for recovery. An archdiocesan committee recommended that the high school seminary be closed and that new projects be launched at parish and private Catholic high schools to encourage young men to consider the priesthood. In September, the seminary board endorsed the recommendation.

Students and faculty “were pretty much saddened,” said Father James Anguiano, the seminary’s rector. “There are a lot of memories here.”

Anguiano and Jerome Porath, superintendent of Catholic schools, have pledged to help seven lay teachers and 20 staff workers find new jobs and to relocate about 100 of the 155 students to other Catholic schools.

Graduates who intend to become priests of the Los Angeles Archdiocese go from the high school to spend eight years at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. The trouble is, not enough of them do.

If they do not make it through the system of training for priesthood, “then maybe there’s a better way,” said Sister Leo Francis O’Callaghan, who teaches chemistry and is dean of students. She leafed through several lists of past graduating seniors, counting no more than two each year who became priests.

Even the president of the school’s student body, Matthias Mendez of South-Central Los Angeles, is having second thoughts about becoming a priest.

“I found that I’m not ready yet,” Mendez said, standing in the hallway of the seminary’s Spanish mission-style building.

“Being a priest requires a lot of sacrifices and self-discipline. It’s not totally out of my mind; it’s still possible.”

Queen of Angels seminarians get only a partial taste of what it might mean to lead the priestly life. They live on campus Sunday through Thursday nights, then leave for the weekend after Friday classes.

“It has been an opportunity to appreciate our families and our homes more, and at the same time get a sense of brotherhood by living most of the time with other seminarians,” Mendez said.

Jacqueline Cranham, business manager for the seminary for most of the last 30 years, said that times have changed.

“Thirty years ago, boys came here intending to become priests,” she said. “Today, it’s a discerning process for them: ‘Do I really want to be a priest?’ ”

The number of people becoming priests and nuns reached a high-water mark in the mid-1960s; at Queen of Angels, enrollment reached 362 students in 1965. The ensuing decline coincided with church controversies over reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and the American sexual and social revolutions.

Although the high school’s enrollment has rebounded in recent years (partly because of an influx of minority students, including 55 Vietnamese now enrolled), the man in charge of recruitment for the Los Angeles archdiocese said church leaders hope to reach even greater numbers of young men while spending less money and using fewer personnel.

“It’s going to be hard to replace the kind of peer support you get at an actual school,” said Father Richard Martini, who was rector of the seminary before becoming vocations director this year.

The vocations office hopes to establish nurturing groups at high schools and periodic retreats, among other strategies.

“The new plan would call for groups of a minimum of 50 students in each of the five regions of the archdiocese, which would mean that we would be dealing with 250 students, compared to the 150 or so in the seminary now,” Martini said.

“It’s a risk--we know what we had before and we liked it.

“I guess some things you leave up to God,” he said. “But we really won’t be able to make comparisons until 18 years from now.”