Average age of priests is 63..
It used to be 35
Now with Alex Wagner panel is discussing why.. Isn't it a no-brainer?
Religious life (even with all the vows of poverty) always had an appeal to younger people (of the past ) in a way quite similar to the appeal of the military in times of hardship.
People used to live rural lives, and much of their day-to-day lives included religion. People married quite young, and were expected to go out on their own in their teens or early 20s.
For a poor person (male or female) who for whatever reason, decided that they did not want to marry and start a family, the religious life gave them an opportunity to go to school, and provided a life-long envelopment in a society that would always "take care of" them..
Priests/nuns always had a roof over their heads and food to eat.. they always had clothing and personal/medical needs met, and they never had to do manual/dirty/hard labor. They were teachers/moral leaders/ministers.
If they were a person who never intended to marry, and have a family of their own, they had a "family" they tended to spiritually, but did not have to endure the day to day grind of making a marriage work and tending to cranky/disrespectful/willful children. They were spared the necessity of doing a crappy job just to put food on the table.
Until quite recently (in evolutionary terms), most marriages were NOT "love-matches". They were often "arranged" (sometimes loosely-sometimes not so much) by families, and (for the girls) often before they even had a chance to find a "love-match".
It's not surprising to me, that in the past, many young people facing a lifetime of struggle and poverty, perhaps found a "calling" in the religious life.
In my own family there were 3 elderly nuns (Great aunts) who flat out told us kids that they all joined together because they were in their late teens when their father died in a farm accident and their Mother could not afford for them to stay on the farm. They had NO desire to follow in her footsteps, and college was out of the question, since none of them had gone beyond 6th grade, and what they saw in their future was marriage to some farmer and too many kids to care for, so they chose to become nuns.
None of them regretted their choice.
Many young people in recent years have said that they joined the military (even during wartime) because they saw no other option to get educated, get medical care, get a regular paycheck.
= new reply since forum marked as read
there probably was not a lot of hard manual labor involved.. Most cathedrals had willing supplicants who did a LOT of the maintenance, and dioceses often had budgets that allowed for work to be hired out.
I never saw a priest/nun with dirty fingernails 
