WATERVILLE – 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.

March’s life has since done an about-face.

Now in seminary, March is preparing to become a Roman Catholic priest.

He is a member of the class of 2007, when five men will be ordained in what will be the largest class of new priests in Maine since 1995.

The number of priests in Maine and around the country has been sliding for years.

But with interest in the priesthood from men like March, the numbers in Maine are projected to stabilize at between 60 and 65 priests after bottoming out in the next five years.

There are 11 people from Maine in Catholic seminaries – they are the priests of the future who will serve the state’s 234,000 Catholics. Ranging in age from 26 to 52, they were engineers, lawyers, teachers, business owners, a social worker and a biologist before answering the call of God.

March, 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 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 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.

March didn’t consider himself religious when growing up in Cumberland. He said he was an “arrogant snot” at Greely High School, from which he graduated in 1993.

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 afterward while he was 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 once and for all to answer the call.

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. Everybody has a different story of how they came to pursue the priesthood, he said.

“There are very few straight lines to the seminary,” he said.