I would like to break a spear for the clergy. We condemn the clericalism, but we respect and honor the clergy. Too many times we confuse each other, reducing the priesthood to a profession, connected to the power and privileges of a few, and of a distant time.
Too much propaganda, too much ideology, even among Catholics, And we have disimpated to distinguish the wheat from the Loglio, now pointed out on the vanity, now the arrogance, now the fragility, or the real faults of many priests. All true, for heaven’s sake: let’s talk about men. The twelve apostles – and who knows the 72 disciples sent two by two – were not perfect, nor the best. We forgot, however, that you have to be grateful to priests and love.
A religious dress means a life donated, with courage, countercurrent, with sacrifices and thanks that we struggle to understand. Because, we must ask ourselves, in front of a boy who studies for years and years in the seminary, he chooses not to have a family of his own, to be a father in a different, not biological way, to live humbly, actually uncomfortable or in distant countries. Why? They are neither strange nor out of the world. And then they were chosen, and they said yes. How much do priests need to build the community.
All as baptized we are sent to work in the vineyard of the Lord: at school, or at work, because Faith is not doctrine or ethics, but an event that changes and involves the whole of life And the judgment on reality, for everyone. But Someone is asked more: Of Being heart and hands of Christ To consecrate and bless, of being total gift, servants of a real world, not ideal, inhabited by brothers thirsty for truth.
What a thrill to see the Pope to order his priests, In his Rome, last month: with authority and tenderness, with gratitude and trust. “In a time when belonging are weaker and the rarer sense of God, God has not tired of gathering his children”.
If it seems to us that God’s thought on his Church has changed, rather ask ourselves how much we missed us in the announcement of his design of salvation.
In prayer for priests, in supporting priests, in the invitation to our boys not to be afraid, as the Pope said by recalling the well -known cry of St. John Paul II: “Accept the invitation of the Church and Christ the Lord.” Why?
Because the Lord chooses and sends. Because the kingdom of heaven is already here, and its centuplo. To his priests then Leone XIV asked to be the custodians of the mission of Jesus, “owned by the love of Christ … who frees and enable not to possess anyone”. Thus the profound meaning of celibacy is better understood. So priests are the post-it of the presence of God in our world, signs of his grace, gift for our lives. There are, just go looking for them. It is enough to show them affection and awareness of how much they spend their lives to comfort, accompany, teach, explain the Word of God, forgive, administer what saves, the sacraments. They donate the sacred, for this they are priests. Clero, that is, heirs of Christ.
(IMMMATCHE above: Pope Leo XIV, in the homily of the Mass for the ordination of new eleven priests of the diocese of Rome. Photos Ansa)
