His Excellency The Most Reverend Mauro Piacenza

Secretary of the Congregation for the Clergy.

During the audience that he granted to the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for the Clergy on the 16^th March last, the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, announced a special Year for Priests, to last from the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the 19^th June next until the same feast day in 2010. The Plenary Assembly took for its theme, “The missionary identity of the priest in the Church as an intrinsic dimension of the exercise of the tria munera”. It was in this context that the Pope called to mind the “indispensable aspiration to moral perfection that must dwell in every authentically priestly heart”.

The special Year dedicated to priests has been announced, “precisely to encourage priests in this striving for spiritual perfection on which, above all, the effectiveness of their ministry depends”. Appropriately, the Pauline Year, which will conclude on the 29^th June, will thus pass on the baton to the Year for Priests in a providential journey of teaching the continuity and the ever deeper appreciation of one of the most urgent tasks of our time: the mission.

On the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of the death of St. John Mary Vianney, the Curé of Ars, the Church gathers around her priests to rediscover their fruitful presence and to re-emphasise with Christian joy their essential and ontologically distinct role within the universal mission, which, quite rightly, also involves all the baptised.

As the Holy Father has wished it, the Year for Priests will be a year “reserved” not solely to priests, but will be shared by the whole Church; in every aspect of her life, she will be called to rediscover, in the light of the missionary impulse which is her own, the greatness of the gift that the Lord has deigned to bestow upon her in the ministerial priesthood. The Pope reminded us that, “if the whole Church is missionary and if every Christian, by virtue of Baptism and Confirmation quasi ex officio (cf. CCC 1305), receives the mandate to profess the faith publicly, the ministerial priesthood, also from this viewpoint, is ontologically distinct, and not only by degree, from the baptismal priesthood, also known as the "common priesthood" (Benedict XVI, Allocution to Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for the Clergy, 16^th March 2009).

The strength of the mission emerges uniquely from the heart made new by the encounter with the Risen Christ, as happened to St. Paul. This is an encounter in which the Lord Jesus is not only known enthusiastically or received intellectually, but is truly experienced as the unsurpassable and extraordinarily captivating “response” of the Father to every longing of the wounded heart of man, which draws out, by the extraordinary human-divine presence of the Redeemer, the only adequate answer to one’s own self, to one’s human and mysteriously infinite need of salvation.

The heart of St. Paul, pierced by the beauty of Christ, like the heart also of St. John Mary Vianney, which on the 19^th June next will be brought to the Papal Basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican and exposed to the public veneration of priests and the lay Faithful, bear testimony with overwhelming force to that which is the source of the ecclesial mission.

The Year for Priests, to be celebrated in all the Dioceses of the world, must be an occasion to rediscover the identity of the sacred ministers whose roots are sunk deep in the apostolic mandate, and “that has always been at the heart of the Church's mission, which impels priests to be present, identifiable and recognizable both for their judgement of faith, for their personal virtues as well as for the habit, in the contexts of culture and of charity” (ibid.).

In fidelity to the unbroken ecclesial tradition and in listening attentively to the profound needs within the heart of man, one must respond concretely to the biblical invitation, “Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees” (Is. 35:3), and, with truth and a conviction replete with trust, continuously “say to those who are of fearful heart, “Be strong, fear not! Behold your God”” (Is. 35:4). To reveal God to the world: this was the task of the Apostle Paul; it is the task and the profound meaning of the priestly ministry within the Church for the world.

The mission, as St. Paul knew well, and as St. John Mary Vianney lived it in his own ministry of “participation” in the vicarious substitution, has Christ himself and his salvific incarnation for its “content” and “method”. The Holy Father affirmed this fact when he said, “in the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, that is, in the fact that God became man like us, lies both the content and the method of the Christian proclamation” (ibid.). It is in this sense urgent, with the valuable inheritance of the Pauline Year and of the forthcoming Year for Priests, and with the constant deepening of the initial and ongoing formation of priests, to extract ourselves from every temptation of “discontinuity”, rediscovering the unity and harmony of the one sacred and salvific history of God with mankind, through his body which is the Church, and within her the unity of the priestly and apostolic task which yesterday, today and always is to celebrate the Eucharist daily and devoutly, in obedience to the Lord’s command (Lk. 22:19), and to dispense the inestimable treasury of the grace of the Divine Mercy.

The happy and providential initiative of the Holy Father to announce the Year for Priests finds the fullest, most convinced and most generous response from the Congregation of the Clergy, and from the entire Episcopacy of the world, which sees also in this initiative a propitious occasion to inject a really fresh vigour into that most urgent of all the missions: solicitude for priestly vocations.

It will therefore be a Year for teaching continuity and deepening perception: continuity in looking with ever grateful wonder at the apostolic call and mission, and a deepening perception in making the mission specific, with the priestly ministry being at the heart of this intention.