Look for Christ in your study

(Excerpt of speech at the Commencement Exercises Of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary Tagbilaran City, Bohol, March 18, 2012)

THE Church and the world are in great need of priests. More than politicians, economists, accountants, call center agents, nurses, lawyers, etc., what the Church and the world need today are priests.

We have to say this because more than political, economic, social or technical solutions to our problems, what we actually most need is spiritual conversion and transformation. What we most need is to have Christ living and acting in each one of us. And priests have the distinctive duty to bring Christ to the people in their spiritual needs.

As more and more issues and controversies erupt in the Church and the world today, often leading us to complicated and confusing situations, we need priests who will give us Christ, first through the witness of their own personal lives and through their faithful preaching of the Word of God, the constant administration of the sacraments, especially the Holy Mass and confession, and through their wise personal spiritual guidance and timely and prudent interventions in public fora that are now becoming more and more urgently needed these days.

We need priests who talk only of God even as he talks also about all the worldly things that need to be evangelized—business, politics, culture, sports and entertainment, media and public opinion, environment, technology, etc.

We need priests who will give us only Christ without getting unduly entangled and mixed up with worldly and temporal things. We need priests who are genuine men of God, humble but effective ministers of Christ, who give their all to their ministry, who are full-time priests, not part-time priests who have other sideline occupations, obedient and willing to go wherever their bishops assign them.

We need priests who would always feel the need to sanctify and improve themselves more each day, who never say enough to their duty to study and to wage the ascetical struggle to develop virtues, fight temptations and deal with their own weaknesses.

We need priests who, with the grace of God, know how to link heaven and earth, blend the spiritual and material, the sacred and the mundane, the eternal and the temporal, the global and the local, the doctrine and the praxis.

We need priests who know how to pray even as they actively immerse themselves in their pastoral work. We need priests who know how to be all things to all men, as St. Paul once said, knowing how to deal with all kinds of people big and small, sophisticated and simple, and who know how to handle all kinds of issues, problems and challenges.

We need priests who know how to carry out the duties and responsibilities that directly belong to them, but who also know how to work with others, never acting like an isolationist, but knowing how to work in a team in the true spirit of solidarity and always keeping in mind the common good.

The state of the Church and the world today require that the priests be nothing less that another Christ, if not Christ himself, since Christ is the “Way, the Truth and the Life,” for all of us. It is only in Christ that priests can be all that we have just described priests should be, especially at these times.

My dear seminarians, as you finish your college philosophical studies and proceed to theology in the faithful pursuit of your vocation, I encourage you to look for Christ always. Whatever you may be doing always look for Christ.

Don’t make Christ an intellectual object of study only, or simply a historical figure, a kind of sentimental and pious curiosity, much less a prop you use to make a living.

All of us, have to be witnesses and disciples of Christ. This is a basic truth that we need to reaffirm many times, because very often we forget it, and we would just fall into a purely human approach to Christ, full of pretensions and deceptions.

Thus, we often have to ask ourselves: When I study, am I actually praying, am I actually dealing with our Lord, asking him questions, begging him to clarify certain points, asking him to give us the grace to convert the ideas and the doctrine into action and into life itself?

For example, we have to ask what relevance our study of a particular subject has with our duty towards the people. When we study, do we get the sensation that we are getting closer to God, that we are feeling an increase in our love for him, and because of that love, we also increase our love for our neighbor?

When we study, do we become more humble, more eager to serve, more eager to pray? I believe that if we ask these questions, we would be led to study properly. Not asking these questions or not getting the right answers to these questions mean we are not studying well, and/or we are studying only for wrong and often dangerous reasons.

We have to be wary of our tendency to study only as an intellectual affair. This is the way to spoil our talents and intelligence, because we would be making them occasions to be proud and vain, to be self-righteous, quick to judge others, etc.