As a general rule I dislike swallowing exceptions because it means that the system seems to work but in fact does not.  A useful trick is to do:

throw new RuntimeException(e);

However occasionally it is ok to swallow the exception for example if you have a fail over solution.  In that case I would use the log4j logging to log the error instead so all the logs go into the same place and we can then control the level of logging.

https://github.com/georchestra/georchestra/blob/master/extractorapp/src/main/java/org/georchestra/extractorapp/ws/extractor/ExtractorController.java#L47

shows how to create the logger.