"What a fearful thing it is to be a priest!"

(This is my translation / paraphrase of the Holy Father's General Audience of June 23, 2009.)


Last Friday, June 19, the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the day traditionally dedicated to prayers for the sanctification of priests, Pope Benedict inaugurated the Year for Priests, in association with the 150th anniversary of the death of St. John Baptist Marie Vianney. As a first symbolic act for this year dedicated to priests, the pope, entering the Vatican Basilica for Vespers, stopped in the Chapel of the Heart to venerate the relic kept there, the heart of St. John Vianney.

Divine Providence has brought together the two figures of St. Paul, whose year has just ended, and St. John Vianney. The lives of these two great saints were very different: Paul made a number of extraordinary missionary voyages to spread the Gospel, while St. John Vianney, a humble parish priest, received thousands upon thousands of the faithful without every leaving his small village. What fundamentally unites them is the total identification of each with his own ministry, with that communion with Christ that caused Paul to say: "I have been crucified with Christ. Now it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2,20). And St. John Marie Vianney loved to repeat: "If we had faith, we would see God hidden in the priest like a light behind glass, like wine mixed with water." One of Pope Benedict's aims in declaring this "Year for Priests" is "to help priests, and with them the entire people of God, to rediscover and reinvigorate an awareness of the extraordinary and indispensable gift of grace that the ordained ministry represents for the one who has received it, for the whole Church, and for the world, which without the real presence of Christ would be lost."

There is no doubt that historical and social conditions have changed since the time when St. John Vianney carried out his work. The sense of the sacred dimension of life is being lost more and more in our time, replaced by an idea of "functionality". Even in the thought of theologians, pastors, and those responsible for the formation of seminarians this occurs, as two conceptions of priesthood confront, even oppose each other. "On the one hand, there is a social-functional view that defines the essence of priesthood as "service", service to the community through the fulfillment of a specific function.... On the other hand, there is the sacramental-ontological conception, which of course does not negate the service character of the priesthood, but sees it anchored to the being of the minister and which believes that this being has been determined by a gift granted by the Lord through the mediation of the Church, a gift called sacrament" (J. Ratzinger, Ministry and Life of the Priest). This latter, sacramental-ontological conception, is linked to the primacy of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the other, social-functional conception, to the primacy of the word and of proclamation of the Gospel.

Pope Benedict stresses that the apparent tension between the two conceptions of priesthood can be resolved internally. As the Vatican II decree Presbyterorum ordinis asserts: "It is through the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel that the people of God are called together and assembled so that all ... can offer themselves as 'a sacrifice, living, holy, pleasing to God' (Romans 12,1). And it is by the ministry of the priest that the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is made perfect in union with the sacrifice of Christ, the one and only mediator."

What does this primacy of proclamation actually mean for the priest? Jesus spoke of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God as the true object of his coming into the world, and his proclamation did not just consist of words. It included at the same time his actions: the signs and miracles that he performed indicate that the Kingdom is coming into the world as a present reality, a reality which ultimately coincides with his own person. In this sense it is proper to recall that also in the primacy of the proclamation, word and sign are indivisible. Christian preaching does not proclaim 'words' but the Word, and the proclamation coincides with the very person of Christ, ontologically open to the relationship with the Father and obedient to his will. Therefore, an authentic service to the Word asks from the priest that he aspire to a profound self-abnegation, to the point where he can say with the Apostle: "it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me." The presbyter cannot consider himself proprietor ('padrone' in Italian) of the word, but its servant. He is not the word, but, as John the Baptist declared, he is the 'voice' of the Word: "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths."

Now to be the voice of the Word does not constitute for the priest a mere functional aspect. It presupposes a substantial 'losing of oneself' in Christ, participating in the mystery of his death and resurrection with the whole of his being: intelligence, freedom, will, and the offering of his own body as a living sacrifice. Only the participation in the sacrifice of Christ, his kenosis, makes the proclamation authentic. And this is the path that he must follow with Christ to arrive at the point where he can say to the Father along with Him: "may it be done, not as I will, but as You will." The proclamation, then, always implies the sacrifice of self, the condition that makes the proclamation authentic and efficacious.

An alter Christus, the priest is profoundly united to the Word of the Father, Who took the form of a slave. The priest is a slave of Christ, in the sense that his existence, ontologically configured to Christ, assumes a character that is essentially relational: he is in Christ, for Christ, and with Christ in the service of humanity. Exactly because he belongs to Christ, the priest is radically at the service of his brothers and sisters and the minister of their salvation, their happiness, their authentic liberation.

The saintly Cure of Ars often used to repeat with tears in his eyes: "What a fearful thing it is to be a priest!" And he would add: "How greatly to be pitied is a priest when he celebrates the Mass as if it were something ordinary! How unfortunate is a priest without an interior life!" Let us pray for all priests, that they totally identify themselves with Christ crucified and resurrected, and that they, like John the Baptist, may always be ready to "decrease" so that He might increase; that, following the example of the Cure of Ars, they might be constantly, profoundly conscious of the responsibility of their mission, sign and presence of the infinite mercy of God.