“I don’t know of any Catholic that claims a priest is equal to Christ. “
I’ve met numerous and if you’ve read this thread there are some very prominent ones as well. From post 144
THE AMAZING GIFT OF THE PRIESTHOOD.
by Father Kenneth Baker
“...Simply stated, the Catholic priest is another Christ. Through his ordination he has been granted the amazing gift of being a channel of divine grace for the eternal salvation of those he come into contact with — both in his official ministry and in his personal life...”
“I think you are terribly mistaken if you believe that or, also, some Catholic who believes that is obviously clueless,”
I dunno, what does the title Father mean to Catholics?
As I’ve said, I’ve met several catholics who believed this because that is what they were taught.
driftdive; iscool
Iscool:
The word mystery has different meanings in the Pauline epistles. For example, In St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the apostle wrote that he wanted people to consider him and his fellow missionaries as “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor 4:1).On the other had, the “mysteries” also includes those things which had remained hidden since the foundation of the world, but were now revealed by Christ (Eph 1:4; 3:9; Col 1:26; 1 Cor 2:7). It is the context of 1 Cor 4:1 that mysteries are understood to referring to sacraments, which is who St. Jerome, the great biblical scholar of the 4th century translated the Greek word “musterion” or “mystery” into the Latin word “Sacramentum”, which where our English word “Sacrament” comes from.
Driftdiver:
The priest, i.e. the presbyterate, receives a gift, through God’s Grace, and as Pope Benedict writes (Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 204) “he is not the source of his priesthood. He is a priest, not through his own skills and abilities, but by the gifts of the Lord, a gift that always remains a gift and never becomes simply his possession, a power of his own. The new priest receives the gift and task of priesthood as a gift from another, from Christ, and recognizes that all he is ever able and allowed to be is a “steward of the mysteries of God” (c.f. 1 Cor 4:1), a “good steward of God’s varied Grace” (c.f. 1 Pet 4:10).
So altar Christus or acting in persona Christi, is what the article by Fr. Baker is referring to. By virture of the priest’s ordination, the one priesthood of Christ is made present through the ministerial priesthood without diminishing the uniqueness of Christ’s priesthood. Only Christ is the true priest, the others being only his ministers (CCC paragraph 1545). So, again, the article you cited is to understood in this context.
So by virtue of being ordained, the Priest for example, when celebrating the Eucharist is not speaking on his own, he is as Pope Benedict writes (Spirit of the Liturgy pp. 172-173), is stepping back and making way for the actio divina, the action of the Lord. So when the priest in the Eucharistic prayer states “This is my Body”, repeating Christ words from the Last Supper, the priest knows “That he is not speaking from his own resources but in virtue of the Sacrament that he received, he has become the voice of someone else, who is now speaking and acting. This action of God, which takes place through human speech, is the “real action” for which all of creation is in expectation. The elements of the earth are transubstantiated, pulled, so to speak, from their creaturely anchorage, grasped in the deepest ground of their being, and changed into the Body and Blood of the Lord. The New Heaven and New Earth are anticipated. The real action in Liturgy in which we are all supposed to participate is the action of God Himself. This is what is new and distinctive about Christian Liturgy: God himself acts and does what is essential. He inaugurates the new creation, makes himself accessible, so that, through the things of the earth, through our gifts, we can communicate with him in a personal way. But how can we participate, have a part, in this action? Are not God and man completely incommensurable? Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God himself became man, become body, and here, again, and again, he comes to his body to us who live in the body. The whole event of Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, and Second Coming is present as the way by which God draws man into cooperation with himself….True, the Sacrafice of the Logos is accepted already and forever. But we must still pray for it to become our sacrifice, that we ourselves, as we said, may be transformed into the Logos, conformed to the Logos, and so be made the true Body of Christ.
In closing, it seems to me that at the root of Protestantism’s anti-Sacramentalism, is a problem with the implications of the Incarnation, that God became man, and because Incarnation is always a reality, it is never pulled away, in Catholic theology, from the theology of the Cross and Resurrection. They are always linked.
Pax et bonum