Corpus Christi College in Melbourne has seen a large increase in young men enrolling to be a trainee priest.
This year there are 59 men at the college, which is more than double the enrolment figure of 28 students in 1999.
Rector Father Brendan Lane has told SBS the seminary will be expanding to accommodate the increased enrolments.
"We've got another eight rooms that we're going to build this year because we think we're going to grow more and we don't want to have to say no to people, ” he said.
Father Lane believes enrolments have been growing steadily because of World Youth Day, a Catholic Church event for young people held in Sydney in 2008.
"To see millions of young people, want to be part of the church because often in the parish there's very small numbers of young people, they see that great crowd and it gives them hope," he explained.
It is a lengthy, seven-year course at Corpus Christi and about half to two-thirds of the trainees survive to ordination.
One of the challenges they face is a life of celibacy.
'We're sexual beings'
Listen to Trainee priest Adi Indra discussing the challenge of celibacy with Greg Dyett.
Adi Indra, 27, from Indonesia is in his third year.
He said he can understand why some people regard celibacy as unnatural.
"It is going against the current, in a sense, but it is a new way of loving and celibacy is something that I'm still learning to sort of embrace,” he said
Whether he manages to complete the next four years has become a day-by-day proposition for Adi Indra.
"Sometimes, like last year for example, I said to myself I'll take it a year at a time and then sometimes when it comes to difficult times or challenges with studies and everything else I said I'll take it a month at a time and even a day at a time.
I think it's about renewing our commitment and remembering what we have received in our faith so if you ask me how confident I am, I'm not sure, God willing (laughs) I'll get there."
19-year-old first year seminarian Olek Stirrat, from Adelaide, attended World Youth Day as a young teenager.
"We had a Papal Mass with him and various activities but at that stage I was only 13 and probably didn't appreciate it fully. But for me it was an amazing experience just to see the Pope and participate in a papal mass.”
Fellow first-year student Anthony Beltrame, 23, told SBS he had a light-bulb moment after spending three months in Europe last year.
"I came back from holidays... I wasn't thinking about the priesthood really but I started work and pretty much straightaway all I could think of was the priesthood 24-7. And it was driving me nuts, and so I called my local priest and said I wanted to have a chat with him.”
Mr Beltrame said breaking his leg while playing football saw him stuck at home for eight weeks where he had plenty of time to reflect on whether the priesthood might be for him.
“Nothing else to do but pray, and discern and think and so my discernment process was maybe about two months. So compared with some of the other guys here in the seminary, I had a very quick period of discernment."
The young trainee priests suspect some people think the seminary is a cloistered, almost Medieval environment.
28-year-old first-year Jaycee Napoles, who was born in The Philippines, has told SBS it’s not what people might think.
"It's not medieval, it's very modern. We learn the same things that people learn in universities... the same issues that everyone faces in everyday life and we try and master ourselves so that the message of Jesus is transparent through us and it becomes clear,” he said.
Father Brendan Lane said when assessing potential students, church demographics at its various parishes are taken into consideration.
Trainee priests from the Corpus Christi College in Melbourne .
"So we have a lot of migrants in our parishes now, a lot of Filipinos, a lot of Vietnamese, a lot of Indians, a lot of Sri Lankans, Mauritians, so we try to have the same mix in the seminary."
All prospective students are now subjected to what Father Lane said was extensive testing, including psychological tests and screening for paedophilia.
"The church is a dangerous place for paedophiles today. They wouldn't survive five minutes now. We're alert," Father Lane said.
