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Pope Urges Priests to Believe, Think and Speak With Church
VATICAN CITY, MARCH
20, 2008 (zenit):
The essence of priestly ministry is service, Pope Benedict
XVI says, encouraging priests to renew their "yes" to the
call of God.
The Pope spoke about the essence of the priesthood today
at the Holy Thursday chrism Mass held this morning at St.
Peter's Basilica. The Mass brought together some 1,600
priests, and cardinals and bishops to renew the promises
they made on the day of their ordination.
According to the Old Testament, the Holy Father explained,
there are two tasks that define the essence of the
priestly ministry: to be present before the Lord and to
serve.
"To be present before the Lord should always be, in its
depths, to take charge of mankind before the Lord who, for
his part, takes charge of all of us before the Father," he
said. In the second place, the Pontiff continued, the
priest should serve.
He said that this service is manifested in a concrete way
in the Eucharistic celebration. There, the Pope said, what
the priest does "is serve, to complete a service to God
and a service to man. […] The homage that Christ offered
to the Father consisted in giving himself unto the end for
man. The priest should unite himself with this homage,
with this service."
The word "serve," in its many dimensions, implies "the
correct celebration of the liturgy and the sacraments in
general, carried out with interior participation," the
Pontiff affirmed.
Learning
Benedict XVI continued, saying that an attitude of service
implies that the priest should always be in a state of
learning: learning to pray, "always anew and always in a
deeper way," and learning to know the Lord in his word so
that his preaching becomes effective.
"In this sense, 'to serve' means closeness, demands
familiarity," the Pope said.
But he cautioned that this familiarity also implies a
danger: that the sacred, with which priests come into
constant contact, becomes a routine.
"In this way, holy fear is snuffed out," the Holy Father
warned. "Conditioned by all the habits, we don't perceive
the fact that is most great, new, surprising -- that he
himself is present, speaks to us, gives himself to us. We
should fight unrelentingly against this habitualness in
the extraordinary reality, against the indifference of the
heart, recognizing anew our insufficiency and the grace
there is in the fact that he surrenders himself in this
way into our hands."
Obeying
To serve implies obedience, the Bishop of Rome affirmed:
"The servant is at the command of the Word. […] The
temptation of humanity is always to want to be totally
autonomous, follow one's own will alone and to think that
only in that way, will we be free -- that only thanks to a
limitless liberty will man be completely man. But in this
way we put ourselves on the side contrary to the truth."
We are only free, he cautioned, if "we share our liberty
with the rest" and "if we participate in the will of God.
This fundamental obedience that forms part of the essence
of man is much more concrete in the priest.
"We do not proclaim ourselves, but rather him and his
word, which we cannot dream up on our own. Our obedience
is to believe with the Church, think and speak with the
Church, serve with her," the Pope continued. This implies,
he acknowledged, what Christ predicted for Peter, "They
will lead you where you do not want to go."
"This allowing ourselves to be led where we do not want is
an essential dimension of our service, and it is precisely
in this way that we become free," Benedict XVI asserted.
"If we allow ourselves to be led, even though it could be
against our ideas and our projects, we experience again
the richness of the love of God."
The Pope concluded with an allusion to the washing of the
feet, with which Christ, "the true High Priest of the
world" wants "to be the servant of all. [… ] With the
gesture of love to the end, he washes our soiled feet;
with the humility of his service, he purifies us of the
illness of our pride."
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