They’re not the Catholic priests that you’re likely to hear about these days. They’re not the newsmakers. They’re not involved in campaigns to push the Church in one direction or another, and they’re not trafficking in hot takes on social media platforms.

You won’t always know their names — unless you happen to belong to their parish or run into them at a school or charity or any of the thousands of Catholic venues where Catholic priests serve their God and their flocks.

But isn’t it time to thank these everyday priests?

The International Institute for Culture in Philadelphia thinks so and has just launched a “Thank a Priest” campaign. It’s high time. The priesthood in America is in crisis. Our aggressively secular culture and clerical sexual abuse scandals continue to take a toll on the priesthood. The Church’s reforms — addressing scandals that largely occurred decades ago but came to light only in recent years — have made Catholic institutions among the world’s safest for children. But the scandals have also intensified pop culture’s ridiculing and pillorying of priests.

One result: One national survey showed that 25% of non-Catholics associated the Catholic priesthood with predatory behavior and 28% consider our priests untrustworthy. As the main character in Georges Bernanos’ The Diary of County Priest stated, “We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.”

And Bernanos wrote this almost a century ago.

Another not-unrelated result is the dramatic decline in the number of American men entering the priesthood. The number of active priests was 60,000 in 1970; it’s just 35,000 as of 2020. This declined as the U.S. Catholic population grew by some 20 million.

“There is a crisis in the Church due to a lack of young men choosing to respond to God’s call to the priesthood,” says the “Thank a Priest” website. “We believe that the cultural negativity surrounding the priesthood is a significant factor in this crisis. We are actively countering the negative perceptions by sharing the reality — that priests are courageous, holy and selfless men devoted to serving God and their communities.”

The “Thank a Priest” program aims to shift attitudes and highlight the stories of the many unsung priests who quietly serve the Church. Their names are not in the headlines. They are the men Catholics encounter daily in the unremarkable yet essential life of their parishes, and they are a busy band.

Some have heeded Pope Francis’ call to go and minister at the “ends of the earth,” like Bishop Christian Carlassare of South Sudan — an Italian missionary who, shortly after taking his post in the violent and poverty-stricken nation, was shot in his home by terrorists.

Rather than flee, Bishop Carlassare sent a message of forgiveness from his hospital bed in Nairobi, where he pleaded for “forgiveness in all our community” and called on his flock “to seek justice with the same heart of God that is a merciful heart because these values are present in the deep of each one of us.”

You won’t find his face on the cover of a glossy magazine — but you will find his story on the website of “Thank a Priest.”

These men are the unsung priests who run the schools, open the churches each morning, and get up in the middle of the night to give Last Rites. They’re the priests who do marriage prep and counseling and go out of their way to comfort the mourning and bury the dead. They’re the priests on the other side of the confessional, offering in persona Christi (in the person of Christ) forgiveness of sin and, most importantly, saying Mass and offering you the body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ in the Eucharist. And they are the priests on the other side of the world, braving danger to bind spiritual and physical wounds.

They do all this, day in and day out, in season and out of season, year after year, decade after decade. So much service, so much sacrifice, so much grace.

The world in general, and our culture in particular, needs to know their stories, and they need our prayers. The International Institute for Culture’s “Thank a Priest” campaign provides a much-needed campaign for both.