Employment Opportunity For Job Seekers

The economy is weak and you're thinking that you don't have any prospects. Who's hiring?

Want a job with a lifetime's guarantee of steady employment? Looking for a position with excellent benefits?

How about a job that comes with room and board?

You have to be male, willing to be celibate, and preferably not gay but as long as you're not a pedophile, there's a place where jobs are going begging.

The Catholic Church has job openings like no other industry.

Over the bank holiday weekend, some priests set up a booth on Kilkenny's High Street, advertising positions that the Church is having a very hard time in filling. If there's one thing that's in short supply, it's Catholic priests, and the Diocese of Ossory thinks that all the men who have lost their jobs in the building trades, manufacturing, and tourism just might be desperate enough to try the priesthood.

Once you've made it through the seminary, you get a position in a parish that includes a house. Meals and lodging are covered, plus you get a bit of walking around money. 2500 euros per month isn't to be sneezed at, even if the uniform is rather boring.

If you signed up at the Kilkenny location, you'd get a choice between study at Maynooth or education in Rome, and once you're done you'd have four weeks of paid holiday per year to look forward to.

Hard to pass up that kind of opportunity.

Except for the celibacy thing. Who'd want to go on holiday from sex for the rest of his life, in exchange for four weeks of vacation?

The head of the Church has made it clear that it's one requirement he's not willing to change.

No wonder then that so few young men went anywhere near the vocations booth in Kilkenny this past weekend.