They were young Americans, living in the shadow of the Vatican, learning to be priests. They struggled with homesickness. But Rome was magical, and the pasta irresistible. At pranzo, the midday meal, the conversation flowed with the wine.

Then, a teacher said something that silenced them:

“If you knew what the priesthood was like, you’d drop out right now.”

Nearly two decades into his vocation and in North Dakota, 5,200 miles removed from that moment, Jeffrey Zwack thinks he understands. It can be lonely, being a priest, and hard. “Most people have a job description, but for a priest, there’s unlimited expectations for a limited man,” Zwack says.

And these past few months, there has been a new burden. From his church on the edge of the North Dakota badlands, Zwack heard the crescendo of scandal in Boston and in Baltimore, in Florida and in Maine – and ultimately, close to home.

His far-flung former classmates from Rome’s Pontifical North American College – Joe Vasquez in Houston, Dan Trapp in Detroit, Joseph Hanefeldt in Omaha, Michael Heras in Corpus Christi, Texas – have heard the same clamor, as one priest after another has been disgraced.

“Sometimes, when I go to the Rite Aid, I think, ‘Are people looking at me differently?”‘ says Trapp.

There are bad priests, they admit, but their crimes are not inherent in the priesthood or some inevitable result of celibacy. Those accused of misconduct amount to less than 2 percent of the nation’s priests.

There are some 45,000 others, ordinary and extraordinary men who baptize and bury their parishioners and rarely make headlines of any sort – “the vast majority [are] dedicated and generous priests …,” Pope John Paul II says, “whose only wish is to serve and do good.”

At World Youth Day in Toronto last month, the pope asked Catholics to support those priests, and in great measure they have. Still, the priests struggle.

“It’s been very bad for priestly morale, for those of us who have tried to do our jobs as priests honestly and sincerely,” says Zwack. “For a time, I was almost ashamed to wear the priestly collar.”

This is not at all what he expected, in those golden days in Rome.

Mostly, they do not remember an instant when they were called to the priesthood. It was a slow process, born of devout families and religious leanings they had had since childhood.

Zwack remembers playing church with his siblings and friends. He generally played the role of the priest, offering Communion (“grape juice and flattened out Wonder bread”). The nuns at St. Agnes School in Minneapolis would ask who among the boys wanted to be a priest, and he would raise his hand.

Heras dated in high school, and considered becoming a psychologist.

But he always remembered a moment when God stepped into his life, in elementary school in Corpus Christi, when Heras and his classmates were running laps in the heat of the day. “I’ve always been a chunky, chubby guy,” he says, and he fell behind.

“I said to God, ‘I need some help here.’ And almost immediately, I was cooled by a breeze that just came and covered me. It was one of those little moments. It wasn’t a Cecil B. DeMille moment, but … I remember feeling so loved and protected and cared for.”

Vasquez was inspired by an energetic young priest. Hanefeldt was caught up in the opposition to the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. Trapp was a teenage atheist; he struggled with it, returned to the church, and came away with a deeper faith.

They all ended up at the North American College, since 1859 a training ground for the leaders of the American church.

Students take courses at one of two universities – the Gregorian University, where the courses are taught in Italian, or the Angelicum, where they are taught in English. The days are full of meetings and seminars and prayer.

“We became family there,” says Hanefeldt.

Their discussions at meals ranged from the secular to the sublime. Some expressed doubts – about celibacy, about whether they were meant to be priests.

In fact, Trapp says, four or five dropped out of the priesthood early on.

That’s not unusual. Dean R. Hoge, a professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., estimates that 10 percent or 15 percent of priests quit in the first five years – a troubling statistic in a church where for every 350 new priests ordained, 1,000 are dying, retiring or quitting.

Michael Heras’ father did not come to his ordination.

His father – a firefighter and Sheetrocker – did not talk to Heras for seven years after he entered seminary. He wanted grandchildren, Heras says, and “I think he was concerned with the manliness of not having conjugal rights.”

There is, he says, suspicion of men who do not marry.

He recalled a woman who once sat next to him on a plane.

“So, you’re a priest!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, Vatican Express card. Don’t leave Rome without it,” he replied.

“How do you survive without having sex?” the woman asked.

If celibacy is a major preoccupation of seminarians – and of the rest of the world – these priests in their mid-40s say it is a challenge with which they have come to terms. Vasquez says the priests he knows are happy in their celibate lives.

“Marriage is a full-time vocation,” says Heras. “It takes all of you, all the time. The priesthood is my vocation. It takes all of me, all of the time.”

But in his book “The Changing Face of the Priesthood,” the Rev. Donald B. Cozzens says there is a consequence of celibacy: Loneliness.

Cozzens, a former president of St. Mary’s Seminary in Cleveland who now teaches at John Carroll University, says priests need warm, intimate friendships to sustain them in the absence of marriage. They crave the support of other priests. Too often, it’s not there.

Zwack agrees. “I think celibacy has to be observed in a community – a community of like-minded people,” he says.

When seminaries were full, they sent large classes into the world. Most of the men were from like backgrounds, and they formed a kind of club that carried them through their careers. But now there are too few priests for too many parishes, and the old-priest network is gone. Some have family nearby (Heras’ mother is a member of his parish) but some do not.

Zwack found friendship with priests at his first posting, in Bismarck, N.D. But then he went to Bowbells, 12 miles from Canada, where he was the sole pastor.

Even in his current posting, at St. Charles Church in Bowman, a town of 1,750, he has to drive 172 miles to Bismarck for a diocesan meeting.

A shy man, he says you can form friendships with the laity, but “you have to be discreet. You don’t want to favor one or two families.”

Seminary, he says, did not prepare him for “the feeling of isolation and loneliness that has come upon me from time to time.”

Sorry, says Dan Trapp – he’d like to talk, but he can’t right now. A member of his Detroit church, St. Augustine and St. Monica, has been shot, and he needs to run to the hospital.

Trapp celebrates Mass at the church, anoints the sick, teaches Bible study, runs the annual fund-raising dinner and carnival, attends funerals of his parishioners’ families even if they’re not Catholic (and many are not – most of his congregation is black, and many are converts).

And this isn’t even his main job. He spends just a third of his time at the parish, and the rest as spiritual director and associate professor at Sacred Heart Seminary.

In Omaha, at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, Joseph Hanefeldt finds himself dealing with liability matters: Should the church youth group go rafting? If the church allowed liquor at weddings, would it be held responsible for car accidents on the way home?

“You end up as a pastor being a CEO to the place,” he says.

More priests are complaining that they are overworked, according to a study released earlier this year by Dean Hoge and a colleague, Jacqueline E. Wenger.

Partly, Cozzens says, this is because the priesthood today is markedly different from the priesthood before the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 conclave that modernized the church.

The old priests were icons, providers of the sacraments, keepers of the mystery of Christ; the new priests are servants, closer to parishioners who make more demands on them.

To understand what this means, follow Michael Heras through a day at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Corpus Christi:

He talks with a woman who says she wants to commit suicide, and sends her to counseling; officiates at a funeral of a parishioner; counsels a man whose wife had left him; goes out for a bite to eat, and is interrupted by a man who says he wants to confess, then and there (the food gets cold); meets with a couple who want to baptize their child; in his capacity as the diocese’s chief ecumenical officer, chats with an Episcopal priest; goes over results of the church’s blood drive; signs checks; surveys work on the new youth center (it took him five years to raise $1.2 million); celebrates Mass.

It is Monday, so he will not work on his homily for the weekend’s Masses. But he will spend some time on his second job – building an entirely new parish, St. Helena’s, three miles away.

And he will teach Bible study that night – he is up to “pride” in his weekly discussion of the seven deadly sins. Energetic even at the end of this long day, he prowls the front of the church like some sort of ecclesiastical stand-up comedian.

“How many of you have cats?” asks Heras, who adores his two dogs. “You can leave now. Dogs are the animals of heaven.”

At 4 a.m. Tuesday, Heras is awake, his mind still buzzing. He stumbles from his room and into the church’s adoration chapel, and drops to his knees.

“That chapel is an oasis for me,” he says.

Some priests complain that in all the daily tumult, the thing that made them priests in the first place – their spiritual lives, their personal relationship with God – can suffer.

“The extreme is, ‘I have so much work, I don’t have time to pray anymore.’ You don’t want to fall into that,” says Vasquez, who became auxiliary bishop of Galveston-Houston in January.

Hanefeldt remembered his first fall in seminary, in 1980, when Mother Teresa attended a synod in Rome. She asked to speak to the seminarians; they basked in their own importance. This living saint wanted to speak to them.

Her topic was prayer. She pointed to the tabernacle.

“My sisters pray an hour every morning,” she said.

“My sons, if you do not pray, you cannot serve.”

These days, Hanefeldt gets more calls from parishioners. They ask whether he is taking enough time for himself, getting enough rest.

Heras says his flock has dropped off little gifts – cards, plaques, a basket of fruit. The Knights of Columbus hung a sign at his church: “In Solidarity With Our Bishops & Priests.”

Parishioners are rallying ’round the priests they know and love. They are reserving judgment on the priests they read about in the newspapers.

Heras “is a very good priest,” says Dominga Campos, 58, after the Monday night Bible class. “He’s very open – he speaks out. To me, I feel he is full of the Holy Spirit.”

And the abusers? “I don’t know where they find these people.”

Still, Heras takes no chances. He decided that doors and window blinds should be left open when a priest meets privately with anyone. In June, he even ordered that a window be put in the confessional.

The scandal is “horrible, it’s humiliating, it makes some of us angry,” he says. “At times, I feel tremendous anxiety, I must admit.”

Zwack tried to address the issue in a homily, but failed: “I guess I sort of wimped out. I didn’t know quite what to say.”

His world had just been jolted. He was at a meeting in March when Bishop Paul A. Zipfel announced that two diocesan priests had been relieved of their duties because of sexual misconduct with children three decades ago.

One of them was Steve Zastoupil – Zwack’s old colleague from Bismarck.

Zwack was stunned. “I never suspected anything,” he says.

Zwack holds no brief for predator priests, but he’s not sure Zastoupil deserves his punishment. The diocese had long known about his misdeeds; he had undergone counseling, and had reconciled with his victims.

Maybe, Zwack says, he could just do things that don’t involve children. He had stumbled, but he was a good priest.

The old seminarians know that they, too, are fallible. The priesthood makes great demands on them; sometimes they do not meet them. But despite their difficulties, they love what they do.

“It’s a joy. It’s a call that God has given,” says Vasquez.

Heras’ joy is evident in his almost manic devotion to his vocation, which inspires everyone around him – including, ultimately, the father who was so angered when he chose the priesthood.

When Heras was invested as a monsignor 10 years ago, his father was there – proud, happy, fully reconciled. He died five months later.

Zwack finds joy in baptizing a baby, performing a wedding, celebrating Mass, giving a good homily. And he took particular joy in a ceremony held last month, when one of his former parishioners, James Shea, was ordained as a priest.

Shea is 27. He is very different from Zwack, as outgoing as the older man is reticent.

He wanted to be a priest like “Father Jeff” – so he, too, went off to the North American College. The seminary has changed over the years; there is, for instance, more emphasis on sexual well-being.

But some things never change, like the bonds that form between seminarians.

Shea knows that “a pallor” has settled over the priesthood as he joins it. But he also knows that he and his own classmates will be able to overcome it.

For encouragement, he will remember a call he got at the end of an especially trying day at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Bismarck, where he is associate pastor.

“How’s the priesthood?” asked Jeffrey Zwack.

And then Zwack answered his own question: “It’s great, isn’t it?”