WATERVILLE(AP) – 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.

Currently 11 men from Maine are in 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, 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 Catholic University in Washington, D.C., 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 scandals that have 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.

Much has been made of the declining numbers of diocesan priests.

In Maine, the number is projected to fall by more than one-third in the next four or five years, from about 95 to about 60. Nationally, the number has fallen from about 35,000 in 1985 to just under 29,000 in 2004, a 17 percent drop.

But those statistics tell just part of the story. While the priest numbers are falling, the number of men entering the priesthood in the United States has been stable since the mid-1990s.

In Maine, there are enough seminarians to keep the priest numbers constant after they hit bottom in a few years.

Frank Murray, who heads the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland’s seminarian program, said the students come from all walks of life. Before he became a priest 24 years ago, Murray was a legislator and a high school math teacher.

While just one priest was ordained in Maine this year and none is up for next year, five men will 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,” Murray said. “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.”‘

In March’s case, he didn’t consider himself religious when growing up in Cumberland. He said he was an “arrogant snot” at Greely High School, where 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 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 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. They all have different stories of how they came to pursue the priesthood, he said.

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

The number of priests isn’t as low as many people might think, said Mary Gautier, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Washington, D.C.

The priest-per-capita ratio is about the same now as it was a century ago, she said. But it pales compared to the 50s and 60s, when large numbers flocked to the priesthood.

Times have changed, however, and fewer people are choosing to become priests, she said. And those who do are waiting longer – the average age of ordination is now about 37, up from 25 or so 50 years ago. Decades ago, would-be priests typically went straight from high school to seminary to ordination.

“Young men considering a vocation are now encouraged to spend time doing other things first, to test the call and make sure it’s the right thing,” Gautier said. “I think it’s a wise thing to do. This is a lifetime decision.”

The number of seminarians has remained relatively constant even through the priest abuse revelations of recent years, suggesting that the scandals haven’t put a damper on the number of people entering the priesthood.

If anything, the scandals have 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.

“The men in our seminaries are healthy, holy and wholesome men who see themselves not as part of the problem of the past, but as a solution for the future,” he said.

March sees it that way, too. Today’s incoming priests have to show extraordinary devotion in the cloud of the scandals.

“Seminarians now tend to be much more serious to their commitment, to fidelity, to this life of conversion,” he said. “It’s a daunting task.”

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On the Net:

Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland: www.portlanddiocese.net

Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate: http://cara.georgetown.edu/

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: http://www.usccb.org/