Portland, USA - Just a few years out of college, Nathan March was earning more than $60,000 a year designing computer chips and living in a snappy apartment in Portland's West End.
Now, March has done an about-face: He is preparing to become a Roman Catholic priest.
March is one of five members of the class of 2007, the largest class of new priests in the state since 1995.
The ranks of priests here and around the country have been dwindling for years, and about 95 now serve in Maine. Their numbers are expected to drop further in the next five years, then stabilize at between 60 and 65 priests to serve the state's 234,000 Catholics.
Nationally, the number of Catholic clergy has fallen from 57,317 in 1985 to 42,528 in 2005, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. The number of U.S. parishes without a resident priest has tripled in that same period, to 3,251, according to the center.
The 11 Mainers enrolled in seminaries range in age from 26 to 52. They were engineers, lawyers, teachers, business owners, a social worker and a biologist before they decided to work toward the priesthood.
March, who is 30, used to be an electrical engineer with a company in South Portland. He has finished the third year of his five-year program at The Catholic University of America in Washington and is spending this summer at Sacred Heart Church in Waterville.
Only the most committed become priests, March said.
The pay is meager _ $25,000 a year _ and the prestige has diminished in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the church in recent years.
But the lure of service and giving his life to the church was too much for March to deny. God chose him, he said, not the other way around.
"It's profoundly mysterious why God wanted to choose me," he said.
While just one priest was ordained in Maine this year and none are up for next year, five men are expected to become priests in 2007 and three more in 2008.
"I think most guys think about it a long time because they know it's a challenging way of life," said Frank Murray, who heads the seminarian program for the Diocese of Portland. "People don't do it on a whim. They don't wake up in the middle of the night and say, 'Oops, this is what I'm going to be.'"
Before he became a priest 24 years ago, Murray was a legislator and a high school math teacher.
In March's case, he didn't consider himself religious while growing up in Cumberland. He said he was arrogant in high school, but a turning point came upon hearing a high school teacher speak about the influential role his Catholic faith played in his life. Afterward, March read the autobiography of Thomas Merton, a monk who lived from 1915 to 1968 and wrote on spiritual and secular matters.
"By the time I got to the end, I had become Catholic," March said. "My faith meant something to me."
March's faith strengthened during college and in the years after while working for a high-tech company. For nearly five years after his 1997 college graduation, he went back and forth on whether to become a priest _ he once spent three months at a monastery in Massachusetts living in poverty, celibacy and obedience _ before deciding to answer the call.
"There are very few straight lines to the seminary," said March, who called studying for the priesthood and living as a priest "a daunting task."
In 2002, he began his studies _ one year of philosophy, four years of theology _ at Catholic University. His classmates include former military officers, lawyers, teachers and businessmen, widowers and men in their 40s.
Decades ago, would-be priests typically went straight from high school to seminary to ordination. But the average age of ordination nationally is now about 37, up from 25 or so 50 years ago.
The number of men ordained in the United States has hovered around 450 in the last five years and enrollment in seminaries has stabilized, despite revelations about abusive priests.
If anything, the scandal has strengthened the resolve of the present-day seminarians, said the Rev. Edward Burns, who heads the vocations program for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Seminarians today "see themselves not as part of the problem past, but as a solution for the future."