524. March 28, Priestly Ordination of Our Father (II)

Meditations no. 456 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The priesthood of Jesus Christ is perpetuated in priests.

O God, for your glory and our salvation you appointed Jesus Christ eternal High Priest. Grant to those whom he chose as ministers and dispensers of his mysteries the grace to be faithful in the fulfilment of the ministry they have received. These words from the Liturgy, which show us the greatness of the priesthood of Christ, can serve as an introduction to the theme of our prayer today, as we commemorate the anniversary of the priestly ordination of our Father.

All human beings have been redeemed by Christ the Priest. It is not possible to separate in Christ his being God-Man from his function as Redeemer. The Word was made flesh in order to save men, in order to make them one with Him: this is the reason why He came into the world. What is more, God has wanted to make some men sharers in his ministerial priesthood, consecrating them himself and dedicating them to that service through the Sacrament of Orders. Eo quod maneat in aeternum, sempiternum habet sacerdotium (Heb 7: 24), St Paul says: because Jesus Christ lives for ever and his Priesthood remains for all eternity. It is eternal and it is made eternal in us, his priests. For this reason, when the priest consecrates, when he renews the Holy Sacrifice, he consecrates the Body and the Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and he can say: This is my Body: the Body of Christ. This is my Blood. - the Blood of Christ. The priest is another Christ.

If all Christians are alter Christus, other Christs, due to the marvellous and unique fact of having been baptised, the priest is another Christ also in a sacramental way, by virtue of the priestly ordination which configures him with Christ the Head of the Mystical Body. It enables him to act in Christ’s name, with the power to renew the eucharistic Sacrifice, to forgive sins and to preach the Word of God with authority. For this reason, the ministerial priesthood requires sanctity of life, a love able to stand up to all sacrifices, an unconditional dedication to his mission.

The life of our Father, those years of priesthood that we commemorate today, were years of the fulness of love, of service to the Church and to souls. In a few minutes, he said on one occasion, I will come, along with this son of mine who accompanies me, to celebrate Holy Mass: to have a most personal encounter with the Love of my life. And this son of mine will remind me, on answering me in the words of the liturgy, that I will be going up to the altar of God who gives joy to my youth. Because I am young and I will always be young, since my youth is that of God, who is eternal. With this love I will never be able to feel old.

Then I will kiss the altar, with kisses of love. And I will take the Body of my God in my right hand, and the chalice of his Blood in my left, and I will raise him up above all the things of the earth, saying: per Ipsum, et cum Ipso, et in Ipso: through my Love, with my love, in my Love!

The fruitfulness of the priesthood of our Father.

For many years God prepared our Father for the mission he was to confer on him on the 2nd of October 1928. And part of the preparation was his call to the priesthood. Many times he told us that, before he came to have the first premonitions of the will of God, he had not thought of becoming a priest. He took up that way, against his natural inclination, in order to be more available to fulfil the divine will.

It was the 2nd of October 1928 when our founder understood fully the meaning Jesus Christ wanted to give to his priesthood. God was destining him to be the Father of a great multitude of children, of all races and of all tongues. Truly applicable to our founder are those words which Abraham heard from the mouth of God: Look up at the sky, and. count, if you can, the stars in it; your race, like these, shall be numberless.

Our Father often told us that we were children of his prayer and mortification, children of that spirit he had received from God and for the transmission of which he had spent his whole life. I cannot fail to raise my soul in thanksgiving to God, from whom proceeds all fatherhood in heaven and on earth (Eph 3: 15-16), for having given me this spiritual paternity which, with his grace, I have taken on with the full conviction of being on earth only for this purpose.

I love you with the heart of a father and a mother: you are my crown and my consolation, he told us on other occasions. He continues to love us like that. And each one of us, until the end of time, truly is and will be a child of the fidelity of our Father, of his prayer and of his penance, of his work of government and of his teachings.

What was God asking of me?, he wrote in one of his letters. He was asking for fidelity to his plans, for generous correspondence to his desire to open up the divine pathways of the earth. He was asking for a loving and firm fortitude, so that his will would find an opening among men. For this reason, my daughters and sons, I feel the grave responsibility to correspond to the mercies of God with an attitude of vigilant and loving firmness, so that nothing and no one will be able to force, to disfigure, the specific features which God has wanted to impress on this way of ours, which is a new way in the life of the Church.

It fell to our Father to suffer the sleeplessness and the fatigue, the periods of loneliness - a loneliness which was always very much accompanied, because he was always united with God -the pains and the sorrows necessary to open up the way for us. To us his children, on the contrary, falls the enjoyment of the benefits he achieved, the affection of a large family, the joy of making our way along a beautiful and safe path which leads to heaven. Are these not more than sufficient reason to give thanks, especially today?

Offering prayers and sacrifices for priests.

The Church asks her children to pray for the sanctity of priests and for an increase in priestly vocations. It is a duty of all the Christian faithful. Our Father reminded us of it in his catechesis to thousands of people: You have an obligation to pray very much, so that we priests will be extremely faithful all over the world because every day, when we go up to the altar, we lend our Lord our body and our voice. It would be very sad if we betrayed the fidelity we owe him, because we are Christ himself.

Priests are instruments of grace, in spite of their personal limitations. The spiritual power of the sacrament, St Augustine explains, is like light: it arrives pure to the objects it illuminates, and it is not stained even though it passes through a dirty medium. Nonetheless, ministers should be holy, and they should not seek their own glory, but rather that of the One they serve. For this reason we should pray and mortify ourselves for them, so that they will be as God wants: faithful servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.

Our founder disposed in the Work that today, as on the feast of the Holy Cure of Ars and on the anniversary of the first ordination of members of the Work, all of his children should pray and offer mortification for priests, especially for those of Opus Dei.

All of us in the Work, lay people and priests, have the same vocation. The priests are ordained to help the lay members of both sections in their apostolic works; to attend dutifully to the non-Catholics and non-Christians who seek friendship and understanding; to exercise their ministry with the many souls who, moved by divine grace, approach Opus Dei, ita ut possint sub umbra eius… habitare (Mark 4: 32), to rest in its shade; finally, to serve the Holy Church of God and all souls in a variety of ways.

Today we ask our Lord, through the mediation of the Blessed Virgin, and going also to the intercession of our Father, for the sanctity of these brothers of ours. As our founder wrote in 1955, such is the amplitude and extension that God has wanted to give his Work that every day we will need more priests.

Pray with me to the Lord of the harvest - petite, et dabitur vobis; quaerite, et invenietis; pulsate, et aperietur vobis (Matt7: 7); ask, and the gift will come; seek and you shall find; knock and the door shall be opened to you - so that we will always have the priests we need to carry out our apostolate well: priests who will be faithful to this supernatural spirit, who will do their work with self-denial, putting their heart on the ground so that the others may tread softly; who will give themselves with joy, without calling or considering themselves victims; who will truly love their brothers and sisters and who will know how to make themselves loved by them.