Normally, young priests turn to their classmates for support as they navigate the transition from seminary to parish. Father D’Arcy, who lives with two more-senior priests in the rectory of Our Lady of Angels Parish in Kingsbridge, hopes that the years ahead will bring him such friends.

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“That is a very real problem, that I don’t have brother priests my age: for me, it’s a little sensitive,” he said, sitting in the rectory’s quiet living room on his first day in residence there. Parishes, he added, are busy places, and to cultivate friendships with other priests, “you need time and leisure, and priests don’t have so much time to do that.”

“That’s why you really have to get that done in the seminary,” he said.

Although at St. Joseph’s Seminary, the archdiocese’s priestly training school, he was the only student preparing to be a priest of the Archdiocese of New York this year, he did have three classmates who have become clergy members for other orders or dioceses: John Paul Ouellette, 43, a Franciscan friar who was ordained with him on May 19 and is living in a friary in Harlem; and two men from the Diocese of St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, who have returned there to become priests.

The number of seminarians has been declining, in New York and nationally, since the 1960s. St. Joseph’s, the New York Archdiocese’s stately limestone seminary in Yonkers, opened in 1896 with room for 180 students. It graduated 25 or 30 men annually through the mid-1970s, but since the mid-1990s, most graduating classes have had fewer than 10 priests. Before this year, the archdiocese’s smallest graduating class was in 1998, with two priests.

The archdiocese estimates that it would need 20 new priests a year to fill all open positions and allow priests to retire as they age. But church officials say they see some signs of hope: nationally, as well as in New York, the number of seminarians has begun to inch up in the last several years, in part because of an increase in foreign-born priests.