On priesthood

THANKS be to God, every year there are priests being ordained in many dioceses all over the world. In our country, in spite of problems and difficulties, we have quite a number of ordinations. This is, indeed, a true blessing from God!

Every time I attend one, I can not help but reflect on priesthood, once described by Pope John Paul II as both a gift and mystery.

Either as a gift or as a mystery, priesthood immediately transmits to the mind that it is something tremendous, something overwhelming. Personally, it leaves me frozen in deep awe.

Priesthood, no matter how trivialized and devalued in a certain culture or person, makes Christ present in the flesh now. An exaggeration? I don’t know. But after doing some math and supplying the missing parts of the equation, that’s what I get.

Everyone, of course, with his baptism is conformed to Christ. He is “alter Christus,” another Christ, if not “ipse Christus,” Christ himself. But there is something more mystical in a priest’s being another Christ.

With the sacrament of Holy Orders, the priest is not just conformed to Christ in any way. He is conformed to Christ as head of the Church. He has certain powers other Christians do not have.

A priest acts in the name and person of Christ, with the authority of Christ who came on earth with the sole purpose of saving man, reconciling him with our father God. He brings about human salvation, which ultimately is a spiritual and supernatural event.

For this, Christ did many things that culminated in his passion, death and resurrection. It is for these things that the priest has to lend everything he has—his body and soul—to Christ. Christ wants it that way. A priest has to want it because of Christ.

That’s why a priest is Christ in the flesh. In his ordination, he has to realize deeply that he, like Christ, should be willing to go all the way, even offering his life on the Cross. He should be willing to be crucified, considering it as the culmination of his priesthood.

That’s why, it overpowers me to think of the kind of spiritual life a priest should cultivate to be able to come to this realization. This is the reality of priesthood. A priest has to bridge the gap between the objective and subjective aspects of his priestly identity.

A priest has to pray always. He has to have the mind of Christ, and to replicate Christ’s very sentiments and passions. Indeed, he has to echo St. Paul’s “It is no longer who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Gal 2,20)

So a priest who cares little for his spiritual life, and who understands his state simply as a matter of exercising a profession like any other, easily becoming a bureaucrat, a performer, etc., is making a big mistake. And he necessarily harms others severely.

That’s why everything has to be done to keep a priest’s spiritual life vibrant, since the spiritual life is the most delicate thing to govern. St. Gregory the Great once said that governing souls is the art of arts.

This is because every man is a universe of possibilities, both good and bad. He is capable of going up and down anytime, of going to extremes and through endless combinations of both good and bad possibilities.

A priest should be humble enough to acknowledge his nothingness and helplessness so as to seek all the assistance he needs—to go to spiritual direction, confession, recourse to sacraments, to study, to have a plan of life, etc.

He has to be sincere, completely transparent to his director and confessor. Once he has this indispensable sincerity, then he opens himself to all God’s graces and the means available in the Church.

This way, it is easy for him to reach out to other priests and to all people. He gets strengthened. A lonely priest is a dangerous anomaly, a disaster waiting to happen.

A priest should be what he preaches, celebrates and administers, and that can only be Christ, Christ crucified! Pray for priests.