Posted on 01/11/2008 9:42:31 AM PST by NYer
It’s Vocations Awareness Week Jan 13-19, and there is a lot of news on the vocations front. But the best news is old news: The seven sacraments are the original, and best, seven reasons to be a priest. But here are seven that incorporate recent news headlines about the priesthood.
First: The World Needs Heroes
That’s the title of NYPriest.com’s new movie ad, and it makes the essential point. God has shown his love and respect for human beings by taking an incredible risk, putting the very future of his project of redemption into our hands. He has arranged things such that the graces he intends for mankind reach us primarily through the seven sacraments. If men will step up and accept the responsibility to be the channel of these graces, then the risk will pay off, with eternal rewards. If they don’t, it simply won’t.
Second: To Make Christ Present to More People.
Before he ascended into heaven, Christ said, “Behold, I am with you until the end of time.” He didn’t mean he would be with us “in spirit” or in our “thoughts and prayers.” He meant he would be with us for real, in his body, blood soul and divinity.
Christ fulfilled his promise in an astonishing way: by being present in the Eucharist. He will always be present in the sacrament somewhere in the world.
The Vatican’s clergy point-man, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, asked in January for “dioceses, parishes, rectories, chapels, monasteries, convents and seminaries” to institute perpetual adoration. The more priests we have, the more people Christ can be present to. Christ’s presence increases exponentially with new priests.
Third: To Forgive Sins.
Confession has been in the news a lot recently, with mainstream news articles explaining it, wondering at its disappearance and pointing out where it is being renewed. It’s no wonder. Christ taught about the true value of human beings when he said, “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” In confession, a priest gives the greatest gift possible, worth more than all the riches in the world: He restores penitents’ souls.
Christ instituted many sacraments throughout his life, but only one after his resurrection. That was the sacrament of confession, when he breathed on the Apostles and told them, “Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven.”
Fourth: To Be a Living Icon of Christ.
The Vatican call for perpetual adoration is a call “to make amends before God for the evil that has been done and hail once more the dignity of the victims” who suffered from the “moral and sexual conduct of a very small part of the clergy.”
Perpetual adoration won’t just atone for the small percentage of guilty clergy — it will help the innocent majority become more holy.
That’s a necessity. Human beings respond to other human beings. Jesus Christ was not just a teacher, and he wasn’t just an instrument of salvation. He was a man with a face. People can experience Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and his forgiveness in confession, but the human heart still needs to see a man behaving in a Christlike way to fully understand Christ’s message. We need more priests to do this for the Church.
Fifth: To Be Like Mary.
There were 48 new Legionary priests ordained in Rome at Christmastime. Pope Benedict XVI said, “I wish to direct a special greeting to the community of the Legionaries of Christ who come from various countries, especially the new priests and the representatives of Regnum Christi. … Like Mary, may you know how to keep, ponder and follow the Word that became flesh in Bethlehem, and enthusiastically spread his message of salvation.”
It may seem odd, calling on an all-male priesthood to be like Mary, but Mary is the perfect model for any Christian — and especially a priest. She brought Christ into the world and, from the wedding feast at Cana to Pentecost, was at the center of efforts to introduce him to the world. Priests uniquely imitate her in the Mass.
Sixth: To Preach and Teach.
Priests have at the same time the easiest and most challenging teaching job in the world. What they have to teach is Christ — God himself who united himself with humanity in order to show us how to live. The Gospel contains unique, powerful answers to all our yearnings, problems and desires.
A preacher who immerses himself in Christ’s life will be a profound and wise teacher just by saying the simple and true things the Church teaches. But it’s a challenging task, also, precisely because of its simplicity.
Seventh: To Expand Your Family.
The Hartford Courant newspaper recently interviewed Father Joseph Looney about the Fraternity of Priests, an organization to address loneliness.
In Mark 10:29-30, Jesus gives the apostles a novel reason to follow him, leaving everything, and everyone: “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.”
Christ doesn’t promise riches, and he doesn’t promise a “happily ever after” ending. But what he does promise, he delivers — priests have many homes, and many more family members than a layperson could hope to have. They also have a fraternal relationship with other priests, if they seek it out.
True
21 of the 22 Churches sui juris which comprise the Catholic Church ordain, as a norm, married men. Your specious reasoning is taking on water. You’d best don a flotation device and abandon your doomed ship.
You’re mistakenly mixing God’s undoubted omniscience into our free will. God knows all things, and knows each and every action we will ever make, and knows all of them from all eternity. BUT WE DON’T! Therefore, we have true free will to accept or reject His grace, to eat or not eat that steak, to accept or reject blue as our favorite color. We are not robots; we can make real choices. God, in turn, offers His grace to all of us, but does not force us to accept it. This allows us to exercise our free will, even in our responses to God. Therefore, all of our choices with respect to God are free, and all of the consequences of those choices, good or bad, are based on our own wills, and thus deserved.
This is the only way to view creation with any type of sanity. Total predestination makes no sense of creation, as nothing has a purpose. We are merely programmed robots, and nothing can really be done to God’s glory. Why, then, does ANYTHING exist? If nothing in creation has any choice but to play out its fate, how does grace really come into the equation? It can’t. You might say that the person was predestined to accept the grace, but that merely masks the problem. Why would not God simply save the person as foreordained straightaway, without the flummery and facade of “offering” grace to a being that has no foreordained choice but to accept it? Life itself is meaningless in such a scenario.
We are here to tend God’s vineyard. The events playing out in that vineyard DO redound to God’s glory, because true faith and subsequent free acts of goodwill show the result of His grace being efficacious. He respects our free will to reject that grace, too, because even that redounds to His glory. While God is sufficient unto Himself, and doesn’t strictly NEED anyone or anything to manifest His glory, nevertheless, He has chosen, in His infinite wisdom, to establish His creation anyway, and that creation does, in fact, serve to manifest His glory. This can only be so if that part of creation created in His image and likeness (intellect and free will), namely, angels and mankind, CAN ACT ON GRACE in a way that has a true purpose. In other ords, they cannot be mere machines or automatons. Grace itself is meaningless in such a universe. God’s “glory” is a mere shadow in such a creation. No. We have true freedom, and only within that reality does God’s grace have any true meaning.
In the end, yes, God already knows the outcome of all events, good or evil. To that extent, it is true that evrything is “predestined” in a way. But, by way of analogy, God has not set up a chess game in order to move all of the pieces around Himself. It’s more along the lines of His setting up the game, and then allowing the pieces themselves to move around on the strength or weakness of their own free and true choices. His only “intervention” is to offer all of the pieces His “advice” (grace) as to what constitutes the best move. Having given them the tools to respond to His “advice” (intellect and free will), He lets the pieces make real, actual moves. This latter type of creation can manifest God’s glory, the former type, where all of the pieces have no free will, really cannot. We are truly here for a reason, we are not the product of a sick joke!
Therefore, in the context of this thread, men may make real, honest CHOICES with respect to God’s call. Their vocations are heartfelt, and not merely imposed. Their free offering of themselves has far greater merit for themselves, and manifests God’s glory in a far superior way, than if they had no real choice in the matter, and they were merely inserted in their roles through God’s will ordained from all eternity. Again, there is a real PURPOSE to our being here!
Of course we don’t know what our future choices will be, but I believe that man only believes he has free-will. If God truly knows what each of us will do, then our choices can only be what He knows we will choose. I believe He created each of us, knowing exactly what our ‘freewill’ choices are going to be.
Just because we must view creation as humans, doesn’t mean that is the way it is, it just means that is what we are limited to seeing. It may make no sense to us, why should it? We are just men. What is wrong with following God’s program? It’s not as if we couldn’t anyway. How could we do anything other than what God knows we will do?
Why do you feel that we humans should or even could know why anything exists? To me that sounds a little arrogant.
I too believe our pupose here is to fulfill God’s will.
Somehow, I don’t think this is going to do much to attract men into the priesthood.
That depends on the bishop and diocese. In St. Louis, there are now 111 seminarians studying for the priesthood and the bishop is in the process of doubling the size of the seminary. Here in Albany (and most of the other ultra-liberal run dioceses), the ordination rate is very low. Young men are attracted to serving our Lord as pastors (as is the case in STL), not as Sacramental Ministers which follows the liberal design.
If I stand above the fray, I can certainly understand the attractiveness and coherence of that notion. How can God "back off"?
They make me feel better also, plus, there’s something inside me, that believes I should pray.
Being all formal and everything, I'd say prayer is a duty. And Hey, is that great or what? A duty that makes you feel good. What are the chances of that?
Sounds good to me.
One might drop to their knees before Mary, but she would tell them to get up and go bow before Jesus instead.
Perhaps, but the fact remains that Mary could not be a priest.
I think you’re right twice. But I also think Mary doesn’t “need” to be a “presbyter” type hierarchical priest because, by God’s grace, she has achieved (this is just my thought, I didnt’ get it vetted) as perfect priesthood of life as a human can have unless that humanis Jesus. She offered him forthe world, and while the usual Mass lasts maybe an hour, just the ramp-up for the offering she made was 9 months.
I think we’re all called to be what you might name “priests of the heart”, but only some of us need to be that guy wearing a dress in the front of the room. I’m not minimizing or dissing what “presbyters” do, I’m just saying that all of us are called to share in the prophetic, priestly, and royal call of Jesus, after our fashion.
And yeah, I think She’d say, “Here is My Son and Lord! Let us side by side kneel to Him!”
And I would just melt into a puddle, a very happy puddle.
I would agree. In fact, scripture calls us (all believers) a nation of kings and priests.
AND prophets, I think. You got to run it thorugh the 1 COR 12 sieve and work out which of the gifts line up with how to exercise the call, but in principle, we’re all particpants in all of it, and actually have opportunities to exercise all the roles, one way or another.
Reason #9: All the wine you can bless.
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