Whilst the number of men seeking to enter into the priesthood slumps across Europe, Catholic churches are turning to Poland where priests are becoming one of the country’s newest exports.

|TOP|At Krakow’s Franciscan Missionary Centre, displays of African masks and Asian costumes pay homage to the days when priests trained here were sent off to spread the Roman Catholic faiths in distant lands.

These days, however, half of the missionaries trained at the 600-year-old centre will not go much further than their European neighbours, with the exception of those who take a hop over the water to North America.

"The Church is universal, not just Polish," said Father Marek Lesniak at the Krakow seminary, whose alumni man parishes of this large archdiocese and also work in Austria, Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United States as well as Russia, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil.

"We are not a seminary for missionaries, but if someone has a calling for the missions, he can go," said the deputy director of the seminary, where many of the students remain inspired by one of its former students, the late Pope John Paul, in a Reuters report.

|AD|"We Franciscans want to join in the re-Christianisation of Europe," said Father Jan-Marie Szewek of Krakow's Franciscan province, which has missionaries in Germany, Austria, Italy and the United States.

It is not an unfamiliar sight these days to see many Polish priests approached at events with requests from their counterparts from outside of Poland to come and make up for the shortfalls in their own churches or seminaries.

Poland remains a country deeply embedded in the Roman Catholic tradition with around 95 per cent of Poles describing themselves as Catholic. More than half of these attend mass weekly, outdoing former Catholic strongholds like France, Italy and Spain, where the attendance figures at mass stand at around 10 to 20 per cent.

In Poland in 2004, student priests numbered 6,427, accounting for around one quarter of all seminarians in Europe and outnumbering the 5,038 total of all US and Canadian seminarians.

"There are not enough priests in Western Europe and that's why we are being trained to work there," said Tomasz Gora, 20, at the Salvatorian order's seminary in Bagno near Wroclaw in southwestern Poland.

The new role of Poland as the priestly breadbasket for Europe has also been noticed by Pope Benedict at the Vatican.

He told the seminaries: "Encourage your priests to do their missionary service or pastoral work in countries where clergy are scarce. It seems that today this is a special task and, in a certain sense, also a duty of the Church in Poland.”