During the Ordination of New Priests (2 July 1980)

On Wednesday, 2 July 1980, at the ordination of new priests in Rio de Janeiro, the Holy Father spoke on the mission of he priesthood.

Venerable brothers and dearest sons.

1. It is solemn this hour. The Lord is here among us. To give us certainty of this, his promise would suffice: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am in their midst" ( Mt 18:20). It is in his name that we are gathered for the priestly ordination of these young men who are here before this altar. Upon them, chosen from the wonderful land of Brazil with affection of predilection, Jesus will soon send down the Spirit of the Father and of him. And the Holy Spirit, marking them with his seal by means of the imposition of the Bishop's hands, enriching them with special graces and powers, will bring about in them a mysterious and real configuration to Christ, head and shepherd of the Church, and will make them his ministers forever.

It is good, at this point of the rite, to stop and meditate. The Gospel we have heard and the liturgical ceremony that preceded its reading are topics capable of fixing our minds in endless contemplation. It is natural that, in this moment of intense joy, I address you in a special way, dear ordinands, who are the reason for this celebration. And I do so with the words of the Apostle Paul: "Our mouth has spoken to you frankly..., and our heart has been completely opened for you" ( 2Cor6,11). My ardent desire is to help you understand the magnitude and significance of the step you are about to take. This solemn hour will undoubtedly have a reflection on all the other hours that will come later in your life. You will have to return many times to the memory of this hour to gain the impetus to continue, with renewed ardor and generosity, the service that you have been called to exercise in the Church today.

2. “Who am I? What is required of me? What is my identity?”. This is the anxious question that priests are most frequently asked today, certainly not immune from the repercussions of the transformation crisis that is shaking the world today. You, dearest children, certainly do not feel the need to ask yourself these questions. The light that invades you today gives you an almost tangible certainty of what you are, of what you have been called to do. But tomorrow it may happen that you meet brothers in the priesthood who, caught up in uncertainty, wonder about their own identity. It may be that, once your first fervor has died down a little, you too will one day come to ask yourself these questions. For this reason I would like to offer you some reflections on the true physiognomy of the priest, which may serve as a strong help for your priestly fidelity.

It is certainly not in the sciences of human behavior, nor in socio-religious statistics that we will seek our answer, but only in Christ, in faith. We will humbly interrogate the divine master and ask him who we are, how he wants us to be, what our true identity is before him.

3. An initial response is given to us immediately: we are called. The history of our priesthood begins with a divine call, as happened for the apostles. In their choice, Jesus' intention is clear. It is he who takes the initiative. He himself will point it out: "You did not choose me, but I chose you" ( Jn 15:16). The simple and moving scenes which each disciple's call presents us reveal the precise implementation of specific choices (cf. Lk 6:13) on which it is useful to meditate.

Who does Jesus choose? It does not seem that he considers the social class of his chosen ones (cf. 1Cor 1,27), nor that he counts on superficial enthusiasms (cf. Mt 8,19-22). One thing is certain: we are called by Christ, by God. This means: we are loved by Christ, loved by God. Have we reflected enough on this? In reality, the vocation to the priesthood is a sign of predilection on the part of the one who, choosing you among many brothers, called you to participate, in a very special way, in his friendship: "I no longer call you servants, because the servant does not know what what does his master do; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you" ( Jn 15.15). Our call to the priesthood, marking the highest moment in the use of our freedom, provoked the great and irrevocable choice of our life and, therefore, the most beautiful page in the history of our human experience. Our happiness consists in never underestimating it!

4. With the rite of sacred ordination you will be introduced, dear children, into a new kind of life which separates you from everything and unites you to Christ with an original, ineffable, irreversible bond. Thus your identity is enriched by another note: you are consecrated.

This mission of the priesthood is not a mere legal title. It does not consist only in an ecclesial service rendered to the community, delegated by it, and for this reason revocable by the community itself or renounceable by free choice of the "official". On the contrary, it is a real and intimate transformation through which your supernatural organism has passed through the work of a divine "seal", the "character" which enables you to act "in persona Christi" (in Christ's place). and for this he qualifies you in relation to him as living instruments of his action.

Do you now understand how the priest becomes a "segregatus in Evangelium Dei" (chosen to proclaim the Gospel of God), (cf. Rom 1:1), no longer belongs to the world, but is from now on in a state of exclusive property of the Lord. His sacred character touches him in such depth as to integrally direct all his being and his actions towards a priestly destination. Thus there is nothing left in him that he can dispose of as if he were not a priest, or, even less, as if it were in contrast with this dignity. Even when he carries out actions which, by their nature, are of a temporal order, the priest is always the minister of God. Everything in him, even what is profane, must be priestly as in Jesus, who was always a priest, always acted as priest, in all the manifestations of his life.

Jesus thus identifies us with him in the exercise of the powers he has conferred on us, and our personality in a certain sense disappears in front of his since it is he who acts through us. “With the sacrament of Holy Orders - someone aptly said - the priest becomes definitively suitable to lend his voice, his hands and his whole being to Jesus our Lord. It is Jesus who, in Holy Mass, with the words of the consecration, changes the substance of the bread and wine into that of his body and blood" (cf. I. Escrivà de Balaguer, Priest for eternity, Milan 1975 , p. 30). And we can continue. It is Jesus himself who, in the sacrament of penance, pronounces the authoritative and paternal word: "Your sins are forgiven" ( Mt 9:2; Lk5.20; 7.48; see. Jn 20:23). It is he who speaks when the priest, exercising his ministry in the name and in the spirit of the Church, announces the word of God. It is again the same Jesus Christ who takes care of the sick, children and sinners, when love involves them and the pastoral solicitude of sacred ministers.

As you can see, here we find ourselves before the summits of Christ's priesthood, in which we share and which caused the author of the letter to the Hebrews to exclaim: "On this subject we have many things to say, which are difficult to explain" (Heb 5 , 11).

The expression "the priest is another Christ", created by the intuition of the Christian people, is not a simple way of saying, a metaphor, but a wonderful, surprising and comforting reality. 

5. This gift of the priesthood, always remember it, is a marvel that was accomplished in you but not for you. It was for the Church, which is to say, for the world that needs to be saved. The sacred dimension of the priesthood is totally ordered to the apostolic dimension, that is, to the mission, to the pastoral ministry. "As the Father has sent me, so I send you" (Jn 20:21).

The priest is, therefore, an "envoy". Here is another essential connotation of priestly identity.

The priest is the man of the community, bound in a total and irrevocable way to its service, as the Council clearly illustrated (cf. Presbyterorum Ordinis , 12). In this respect you are destined to fulfill a double function, which alone would suffice for an immeasurable meditation on the priesthood. By putting on the person of Christ you will to a certain extent exercise the function of his mediator. You will be interpreters of the word of God, dispensers of divine mysteries (cf. 1Cor 4:1; 2Cor6,4) among the people. And you will be, before God, the representatives of the people in all its components: the children, the little ones, the sick, and even those who are distant and adversaries. You will be the bearers of his offerings. You will be his voice praying and pleading, exulting and moaning. You will be his atonement (cf. 2 Cor 5:21). 

For this we must try to keep the words of the apostle impressed in our memory and heart: "We act as ambassadors for Christ, as if God were exhorting through us" (2 Cor 5:20 ) , to make our life an intimate, progressive and firm imitation of Christ the Redeemer.

6. Dear children, with this quick exposition I wanted to illustrate to you the fundamental features of the figure of the priest. 

I now wish to draw some practical conclusions which will help you in carrying out your priestly activity inside and outside the ecclesial community.

First of all the ecclesial one. You know that the doctrine of the common priesthood of the faithful, so widely developed by the Council, offered the laity the providential opportunity to discover more and more the vocation of every baptized person to the apostolate and their necessary active and conscious commitment to the task of the Church. From this came a vast and consoling flowering of initiatives and activities which constitute an invaluable contribution to the proclamation of the Christian message both in mission lands and in countries like yours, where the need to make up for, with the help of the laity, the presence of the priest.

This is certainly comforting and we must be the first to rejoice in this collaboration of the laity and to encourage it.

None of this however, it should be said right away, in any way diminishes the importance and necessity of the priestly ministry nor can it justify a lesser commitment to ecclesiastical vocations. Even less can it justify the attempt to transfer to the assembly and the community the power that Christ has conferred exclusively on sacred ministers. Yes, we must solicit the collaboration of the laity in every possible way. But in the economy of redemption there are functions and tasks - such as the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the forgiveness of sins, the office of the magisterium - which Christ essentially linked to the priesthood and in which no one, without having received sacred orders can replace us. Without the priestly ministry, religious vitality runs the risk of being cut off from its sources,

It is true that the grace of God can act in the same way. especially where there is the impossibility of having a minister of God and where there is no fault in not having one. However, it is necessary not to forget that the normal and sure path of the goods of redemption passes through the means instituted by Christ and in the forms established by him.

From here we also understand how much the problem of vocations must be at heart for each of us. We urge you to devote the first and most intense concerns of your ministry to this area. It is a problem of the Church (cf. Optatam Totius , 2). It is a major issue among everyone. The certainty of the religious future of your homeland depends on this. Perhaps the real difficulties in getting the Church's invitation to reach the world of youth may discourage you. But have faith! Even the youth of our time strongly feel the attraction for heights, for arduous things, for great ideals. Do not delude yourselves that the prospect of a less austere priesthood in its demands for sacrifice and renunciation - as, for example, in the discipline of ecclesiastical celibacy - could increase the number of those who intend to commit themselves to following Christ. In reverse. Rather, it is a mentality of vigorous and conscious faith that is missing and needs to be created in our communities. Where daily sacrifice keeps the evangelical ideal alive and raises the love of God to a high level, vocations continue to be numerous. The religious situation in the world confirms this. The countries where the Church is persecuted are, paradoxically, those where vocations flourish the most, sometimes even abound.

7. You must also become aware, dear priests, that your ministry today takes place in the context of a secularized society, whose characteristic is the progressive decline of the sacred and the systematic elimination of religious values. You are called to realize salvation in it as signs and instruments of the invisible world.

Prudent but trusting, you will live among men to share their anxieties and hopes, to comfort their efforts for freedom and justice. However, do not let yourself be possessed by the world, nor by its prince, the evil one (cf. Jn 17:14-15). Do not adapt yourselves to the opinions and tastes of this world, as Saint Paul exhorts: "Do not conform yourselves to the mentality of this age" ( Rom 12:1-2). Instead, place your personality, with his aspirations, in line with God's will.

The strength of the sign does not lie in conformity, but in distinction. Light is different from darkness in order to light the way for those in darkness. Salt is different from food in order to give it flavour. Fire differs from ice in warming limbs stiffened by the cold. Christ calls us light and salt of the earth. In a dissipated and confused world like ours, the strength of the sign lies exactly in being different. It must stand out all the more the more apostolic action demands greater insertion into the human mass.

In this regard, who does not realize that having absorbed a certain worldly mentality, having frequented dissipated environments, as well as abandoning an external way of presenting oneself, distinctive of priests, can diminish the sensitivity of one's own sign value?

When these luminous horizons are lost sight of, the figure of the priest darkens, his identity enters a crisis, his particular duties are no longer justified and contradict each other, his very raison d'etre weakens.

Nor can this fundamental raison d'être be recovered by becoming a priest "a-man-for-others". Must not those who wish to follow the divine master already be so?

The priest certainly is a "man-for-others", but by virtue of his particular way of being a "man-for-God". The service of God is the foundation on which to build the genuine service of men, which consists in freeing souls from the slavery of sin and in leading man back to the necessary service of God. Indeed, God wants to make humanity a people that you worship him "in spirit and in truth" ( Jn 4:23).

Let it therefore remain very clear that priestly service, if it truly wants to remain faithful to itself, is an excellent and essentially spiritual service. May this be accentuated today! Against the multifaceted tendencies to secularize the priest's service, reducing it to a merely philanthropic function. His service is not that of a doctor, a social worker, a politician or a trade unionist. In certain cases, perhaps, the priest will be able to provide these services, albeit in a supplementary manner, and, in the past, he provided them in an excellent way. But today they are adequately carried out by other members of society, while our service is increasingly specified as a spiritual service. It's in the area of ​​souls, of their relationships with God and their inner relationship with their fellow men that the priest has an essential function to disengage. It is here that his assistance to the men of our time must be realized. Of course, whenever circumstances require it, he cannot avoid also providing material assistance, through works of charity and the defense of justice. But as I said, that is, in the final analysis, it will be a matter of a secondary service which must never make us lose sight of the main service, which is that of helping souls to discover the Father, to open themselves to him and to love him above all others. the things. through works of charity and the defense of justice. But as I said, that is, in the final analysis, it will be a matter of a secondary service which must never make us lose sight of the main service, which is that of helping souls to discover the Father, to open themselves to him and to love him above all others. the things. through works of charity and the defense of justice. But as I said, that is, in the final analysis, it will be a matter of a secondary service which must never make us lose sight of the main service, which is that of helping souls to discover the Father, to open themselves to him and to love him above all others. the things.

Only in this way can the priest never feel useless, a failure, even when forced to give up some external activity. The holy sacrifice of the mass, prayer, penance, the best, indeed, of his priesthood would always remain intact as it was for Jesus in the thirty years of his hidden life. In this way, God too would be given immense glory. The Church and the world would not be deprived of authentic spiritual service.

8. Dear ordinands, dear priests, at this point my discourse turns into a prayer, a prayer that I wish to entrust to the intercession of Mary Most Holy, Mother of the Church and Queen of Apostles. In anxious expectation of the priesthood you have certainly placed yourselves close to her, like the apostles in her upper room. May he obtain for you the graces you most need for your sanctification and for the religious prosperity of your country. May she grant you above all love, her love for her, the one that gave her the grace to generate Christ, to be able to fulfill your mission of generating Christ in her souls too. May she teach you to be pure, as she was, make you faithful to the divine call, make you understand all the beauty, the joy and strength of a ministry lived unreservedly in dedication and immolation for the service of God and souls. Finally, let us ask Mary for you and for all of us present here, to help us to say, following her example, the great word: Yes to God's will, even when it is demanding, even when it is perhaps incomprehensible, even when it is painful for us .

So be it.

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