Question 4.77

4.77 How are we to understand the future of the priesthood?

The future of the priesthood can be found in the example of the saints. Its survival and fruitfulness are guaranteed by Jesus’ promise to be with us always until the end of time. In the life of John Paul II, the Cross of Christ was absolutely central. From the first year of his pontificate, he believed it was essential to give a wooden cross to young people; he asked them to plant it throughout the world, in the hearts of men and in societies. I think that his example is all the more important given the fact that priests are bound up forever with the mystery of the crucifixion. The priest is a man who is crucified with Christ; he celebrates Mass not only to perpetuate, commemorate, and make present the crucifixion, but also in order to experience his own crucifixion; then the priest is Christ himself.

The Curé of Ars always carried out his priestly ministry deep in prayer and lost in God. He was like a bridge that leads men to the Lord. For Saint John Vianney, the priest is the witness to the vertical dimension of existence; he puts others in communication with God and tirelessly repeats his message, so that it might be heard in the noise and commotion of the world. The priest possesses the divine power to bring God and his Word down among men. He used to say: “The priest is a man who takes the place of God, a man who is vested with all the powers of God.”

The second central reality in the life of John Paul II was the Eucharist. Our configuration to Christ is accomplished through an intense life of prayer, adoration, and silent contemplation. Without prayer, a priest runs the risk of falling into activism, superficiality, or worldliness. It is by contemplating the face of Christ in prayer that a priest can acquire the generosity to give himself, body and soul, as Christ did, to his priestly ministry.

Before every apostolic appointment, every morning, the priest must enter into the mystery of the Eucharist. This little Host, which carries within it the entire universe and the history of mankind, must be the center of our life. As priests, we must become this white Host, allow ourselves to be “transubstantiated”, and resemble Christ himself in every feature. In The Spirit of the Liturgy,³ Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes that the Eucharist transforms us down to the inmost depths of our being: “Becoming contemporary with the Pasch of Christ in the liturgy of the Church is also, in fact, an anthropological reality. The celebration is not just a rite, not just a liturgical ‘game’. It is meant to be indeed a logikt latreia, the ‘logicizing’ of my existence, my interior contemporaneity with the self-giving of Christ. His self-giving is meant to become mine, so that I become contemporary with the Pasch of Christ and assimilated unto God. … The liturgy does indeed have a bearing on everyday life, on me in my personal existence. Its aim, as St. Paul says in the text already referred to, is that ‘our bodies’ (that is, our bodily existence on earth) become ‘a living sacrifice’, united to the Sacrifice of Christ (cf. Rom 12:1).”

This is why the priesthood has a future: it is the greatest gift that God gave to mankind. The Words of Jesus are eternal. In a supernatural order, the future of the priesthood is assured.

Nevertheless, doubts arise as to the receptiveness of many of our contemporaries and their willingness to respond wholeheartedly to God’s call. Of course, situations vary from one continent to another; everyone knows that vocations are very plentiful in Africa, Asia, and many countries of Latin America. But how can we not be saddened by the sight of all the young men in Europe who hesitate to respond to the Lord’s urgent appeal, “Come and follow me”?

God is still calling as many men as in the past; it is the men whose hearing is not what it used to be.

Finally, the priestly vocation is inseparable from the Virgin Mary. This is one great lesson from the life of John Paul II. The life of a priest is inconceivable without a filial bond with Mary. The Mother of Christ supports priests in their fidelity to their commitments. Thanks to the Blessed Virgin, I am convinced that the priesthood will never disappear.

At the risk of startling you, I think that the number of priests is not such a fundamental problem. Besides, Saint Gregory the Great says the same thing. … Paradoxically, the historical context of the late sixth century is rather similar to our era. In a homily given to the bishops gathered at the baptismal fonts of the Lateran Basilica on March 31, 591, Saint Gregory commented on Jesus’ saying: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” He wrote as follows: “We can speak only with a heavy heart of so few laborers for such a great harvest, for although there are many to hear the good news, there are only a few to preach it. Look about you and see how full the world is of priests, yet in God’s harvest a laborer is rarely to be found; for although we have accepted the priestly office, we do not fulfill its demands. … We accept the duties of office, but by our actions we show that we are attentive to other things. We abandon the ministry of preaching and, in my opinion, are called bishops to our detriment, for we retain the honorable office but fail to practice the virtues proper to it. Those who have been entrusted to us abandon God, and we are silent. They fall into sin, and we do not extend a hand of rebuke. But how can we who neglect ourselves be able to correct someone else? We are wrapped up in worldly concerns, and the more we devote ourselves to external things, the more insensitive we become in spirit.” We need priests who are men of the interior life, “God’s watchmen” and pastors passionately committed to the evangelization of the world, and not social workers or politicians.

What matters most is the quality of a priest’s heart, the strength of his faith, and the substance of his interior life. Intense and lasting fidelity requires a profoundly spiritual interior life and solid human maturity. Thanks to an authentic interior life and proven maturity, a priest can detach himself from what is merely superficial and transitory so as to be more fully present to what is essential. Fidelity often demands a long struggle.

When Christ inaugurated the priesthood, he had twelve apostles around him; they turned the whole world upside down. Today, there are more than four hundred thousand of us priests. Well, then, everything is possible. … We will never be more overwhelmed with work than the apostles were! The most important thing is the interior transformation of the men who have chosen to follow Christ.

We must not fear the shortage of priests but, rather, hope that there will be good, holy priests, men of God and men of prayer; on the other hand, the worst thing is the behavior of unfaithful priests, who are always agitated because they never take the time to be with God in prayer. Saint John of the Cross exhorts us to be constantly in prayer and adoration in the presence of God, so as to arm ourselves against activism, especially of the ideological sort, which produces nothing lasting that can raise us up to God. He wrote in his Spiritual Canticle: “Let those, then, who are singularly active, who think they can win the world with their preaching and exterior works, observe here that they would profit the Church and please God much more, not to mention the good example they would give, were they to spend at least half of this time with God in prayer, even though they may not have reached a prayer as sublime as this. They would then certainly accomplish more, with less labor, by one work than they otherwise would by a thousand. For their prayer they would merit this result, and themselves be spiritually strengthened. Without prayer, they would do a great deal of hammering but accomplish little, and sometimes nothing, and even at times cause harm.”⁴