PRIESTS FOR A NEW EVANGELIZATION
(*)
Bishop Alvaro
del Portillo
The present considerations,
under the title “Priests for a New Evangelization,” make direct reference to
the new evangelizing endeavor—new and at the same time old, because it began in
Christ twenty centuries ago—which the times demand and to which the Holy Father
John Paul II is calling us.[1]
We all are well aware that the Second Vatican Council directed all its teaching
to the cause of renewing the Church, particularly its Decrees on the ministry
and life of priests, and on priestly formation.[2]
1. Need for a new evangelization
This new evangelization, especially in the
West, is not directed to a world which has never heard the preaching of Christ,
but, on the contrary, to a world in which the message of Jesus Christ has been
proclaimed, believed and loved, although now it seems to be cutting itself off
from its own roots.[3]
Western society is evolving, to a great extent, in a direction paradoxically
opposed to its own spiritual and cultural roots, and together with material
progress we clearly see a grave moral regression.[4]
People often speak of our
society today as “post-Christian.” Perhaps in some cases this description is
opportune, when used to reflect a de
facto situation and the intellectual and practical deformation seen in many
Christians.[5]
However, the term “post-Christian” is entirely inadequate if it is meant to
imply that Christ’s doctrine has lost its capacity to shape the contemporary
world. Nothing is further from the truth, which by God’s grace we can see in so
many surroundings and, above all, in the souls of countless people.
Therefore, the present
urgency for a new evangelization should place before our eyes the Church’s “ongoing mission of bringing the gospel to
the multitudes—the millions and millions of men and women—who as yet do not know Christ the Redeemer
of humanity. In a specific way this is the missionary work that Jesus
entrusted and again entrusts each day to his Church.”[6]
It is precisely this universal evangelizing mission that needs a renewed
Church, revitalized with the perennial message of Christ, so imbued with an
imperishable timeliness; in other words, it requires a new awakening of Christian consciences that
will attract the world to the light of our Christ. As Msgr. Escrivá stressed so
strongly, “Christ is not a figure that has passed. He is not a memory that is
lost in history. He lives! Jesus Christus
heri et hodie, ipse et in saecula, says Saint Paul. —‘Jesus Christ is the
same to-day as he was yesterday and as he will be for ever.’” [7]
The decision to take up the apostolic
responsibilities that are ours today as Christians is not compatible with a
pessimistic or negative vision of the present-day world. Proclaiming Christ’s
kingdom effectively and working for its spread requires loving the world in
which we live, and loving it “passionately,” as the Founder of Opus Dei liked
to say:[8] Therefore we are asked to contemplate this
historical situation and the persons that make it up “with the eyes of Christ
himself,” as Pope John Paul II wrote in his first encyclical.[9]
Amid the lights and shadows of passing events, one also sees today the
restlessness of the human soul yearning for God, expressed in St. Augustine’s
famous words: “You have made us for
yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” [10]
The accelerated pace that marks our own era is deeply marked by the
restlessness of so many hearts that lack a clear guide for their own life and
for the meaning of human history. It is right there, in the midst of all that restless
unease, where we have to proclaim loudly that the one they are seeking is
Christ, and that what they don’t know and yearn for is God’s fatherly love,
which is offered to everyone in Christ and in the Church.[11]
We have been witnessing in
recent months great transformations in many parts of the world, above all in
the Old Continent, which seem to announce a new era of freedom, of
responsibility, of solidarity, of spirituality, for millions of people. We
cannot forget, however, and we say this with sorrow, that many sectors in our
Western society are closed and hostile to the saving Cross,[12]
with eyes that refuse to contemplate God’s beauty reflected in the face of
Christ.[13]
2. The Mission of Everyone in
the Church
Confronting this world of
ours, I stress once again that the evangelization will be new not because of
the essential content of the teaching that is proclaimed, nor for the way of
life that is held up to our contemporaries. The novelty has to reside in the
new spiritual and apostolic energies put into play by all the faithful, for we
all share in responsibility for the Church’s mission.[14] Particularly important is the consistent
witness of the lay faithful, who are called, in the words of John Paul II, “to testify how the Christian faith
constitutes the only fully valid response . . . to the problems and hopes that
life poses to every person and society. This will be possible” the Pope
continues, “if the lay faithful will know how to overcome in themselves the separation of the Gospel from
life, to again take up in their daily activities in family, work and society,
an integrated approach to life that is fully brought about by the inspiration
and strength of the Gospel.” [15]
Msgr. Escrivá
insistently proclaimed this teaching right from the 1930’s, always with renewed
vigor and appeal: “Through
baptism all of us,” these are words of his from the year 1960, “have been made
priests of our lives, ‘to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through
Jesus Christ’ (1
Pet 2:5). Everything we do can be
an expression of our obedience to God’s will and so perpetuate the mission of
the God‑man.”[16]
The richer understanding of the Church’s doctrine, through which the baptismal
vocation has been understood and presented with the ecclesiological importance
it deserves, is undoubtedly one of the pillars on which the Church can rely to
confront its evangelizing future.
The necessary insistence
that the lay faithful take up their responsibilities to make the Christian
light shine more fully in society, should go hand in hand with the insistence
on the need for an abundant, generous, humble, and daring exercise of the
public ministry of priests: “Alongside Christian families and lay Christians
who assume to a greater degree...their multiple apostolic commitments, there is
a greater need for priests who are fully priests, precisely by the vitality of
their Christian life. And the more de-Christianized the world is and lacking in
maturity of faith, the greater need there is for priests who are totally
dedicated to giving testimony to the fullness of Christ’s mystery.”[17]
The Church that we want to
see flourishing anew and giving new fruit, “the Church of the new Advent,” as
we read in the Encyclical Redemptor
Hominis, “the Church that is continually preparing for the new coming of
the Lord, must be the Church of the Eucharist and of Penance. Only when viewed
in this spiritual aspect of her life and activity is she seen to be the Church
of the divine mission, the Church in
statu missionis, as the Second Vatican Council has shown her to be.”[18]
The “Church of the Eucharist and of Penance” is necessarily the Church of the
vigorous priestly ministry. It is the Church of the holy priest, of the priest
who deeply loves, with all his being, the call he has received from the Master,
to conduct himself at every hour as alter
Christus, ipse Christus.[19]
There is no need to stress
here the need for the ministerial priesthood in the new evangelization, or the
mutual harmony between the ministerial priesthood and the common priesthood of
all the faithful. It is very clear to all of us that without an abundant
dispensation of those great mysteries of God,[20]
the Eucharist and Penance, and with them the nourishment of the divine word,
the supernatural life of the faithful will languish. The new evangelization
depends essentially on there being ministers who generously dispense, with a
hunger for their own holiness and that of the faithful, the word of God and the
sacraments. They must be men formed by the Church, who always “think and feel
with the mind of the Church,” in order to be one hundred percent priests to the
measure of the self-giving of Christ, always closely united to their respective
Ordinary, with veneration for the entire hierarchy of the Church and especially
for the Roman Pontiff.
3. The need for holy priests
The new evangelization
confronts numerous difficulties which, added together, can seem quite daunting.
In the face of this wave that tries to sweep all before it, Christians, and
perhaps in a special way priests, can experience quite acutely the radical
insufficiency of their own human strength.
This reality calls vividly to
mind the marvelous priestly example of the Founder of Opus Dei. I raise my
heart in an act of thanksgiving, closely united to millions of souls who do the
same throughout the world, for the Holy Father’s decision to issue the Decree
of heroic virtue on the ninth of this month. At the age of twenty-six he
received from God an immense evangelizing mission: that of spreading throughout
the world, among people of all walks of life, a lively realization, both
theoretical and practical, of the universal call to holiness. As he wrote back
in 1930: “We have come to
say, with the humility of one who knows himself to be a sinner and of little
worth—homo peccator sum (Lk 5:8), we say with Peter—but with the
faith of someone who allows himself to be led by God’s hand, that sanctity is
not just for the privileged few. God calls us all of us, he expects Love from
us all; from everyone, wherever he may be; from everyone, in whatever situation,
profession or job. For one’s normal, ordinary life, apparently unimportant, can
be a path to sanctity … All the paths of the earth can be an occasion for an
encounter with Christ.” [21]
The difficulties our Founder faced throughout his whole life were also
gigantic. Nevertheless, the efficacy of God’s grace in his life, a life spent
willingly—at times with great suffering—in heroic correspondence to God’s gift,
was astonishing.
I recall an episode that took
place in August 1958. The Founder of Opus Dei was walking one day through the
City of London and, when passing by the famous banks and great commercial and
industrial enterprises, before the panorama of a world that was humanly powerful
but indifferent and even hostile towards God’s concerns, he felt with special
force all of his own weakness, his incapacity to carry out the mission he had
received thirty years earlier to imbue all human realities with the spirit of
the Gospel, to place Christ at the summit of all human activities. But
immediately he felt a clear divine locution within him: “You can’t do it, but I
can.”
It was a new confirmation of
what had always been embedded in his soul and in his conduct: a sure faith, a
supernatural certainty, that it was Jesus Christ himself—the true and eternal
Priest of the New Covenant, established definitively in his Blood—who brings
about the loving communion of God with men, from which is born the communion of
men with one another. It was the faith, then, that his priestly work, like
every priestly action in the Church, is efficacious precisely because it is
carried out per Christum et cum Christo
et in Christo.[22]
If the new evangelization,
like the first one, like every truly supernatural work, is impossible for our
human strength, both our own and that of everyone in the Church, it is possible
for God, for Christ. Therefore, by that very fact, it is possible for us, to
the extent that each one of us is—I think it is necessary to insist on this
point, since it is always timely—“not simply alter Christus:
another Christ, but ipse Christus:
Christ himself!”[23]
Here is the deep theological reason for the need for personal holiness, both
for every specific apostolic work and for the re-Christianization of the world
as a whole. Identification with Christ is a gift,
but it is also a task. Every
Christian, and in a proper and special way, each priest is ipse Christus “in a direct way, by virtue of the sacrament.” [24]
But we must never forget that this identification also constitutes the
definitive goal, the object of a task, a personal responsibility to make a
reality in each of us St. Paul’s words: For
me to live is Christ;[25]it is no longer I who live, but Christ who
lives in me.[26] We are called to set an example for the
men and women of today and of all times, so that they too can fully take up
this responsibility.
Therefore, today as always, when faced
with the needs of every epoch, the question “What kind of priests does the
Church and the world need today?” always has this answer: the Church and the
world need holy priests, that is priests who, knowing their own limitations and
weaknesses, make a decided effort to follow the path of holiness, of the
perfection of charity, of identification with Jesus Christ, in faithful
correspondence to divine grace. The Second Vatican Council said clearly: “Priests are bound, however, to acquire that perfection in a
special fashion. They have been consecrated by God in a new manner at their
ordination and made living instruments of Christ the Eternal Priest that they
may be able to carry on in time his marvelous work.”[27]
Identification with Jesus requires a life
of prayer and penance—not as a “private concern” of the priest, but as a
condition for his pastoral effectiveness, precisely because the priest, by
himself, cannot do it, but to the
extent that he is Christ, he can do it.
In this context, there also
comes to mind a note written by Msgr. Escrivá in 1932. I think it a matter of
justice to make these references if we consider that the Venerable Servant of
God, impelled by God’s action, has brought thousands of priests to the Church,
incardinated in so many dioceses and in the Prelature of Opus Dei. Upon
contemplating once again in his prayer the magnitude of the mission God had
entrusted upon him, he wrote: “I feel that even if, by God’s permission, I
should remain alone in this enterprise, and even if I should find myself
dishonored and poor—more so than I already am—and sick ... I will not have any
doubt about either the divine origin of the Work or its realization! And I
stand by my conviction that the sure means of carrying out the will of God,
prior to moving and acting, are to pray, pray, pray, and expiate, expiate,
expiate.”[28]
4. Priestly holiness and a life of prayer
Holiness and prayer are so
closely linked that it is impossible to have one without the other. “That
phrase of St. John Chrysostom is true: ‘I think it is obvious to everyone that
it is impossible to live virtuously without the help of prayer’ (De praecatione, orat. I).” [29]
“Perhaps in these recent
years” wrote John Paul II to all priests, on the occasion of Holy Thursday in
1979, “there has been too much discussion about the priesthood, the priest's
‘identity,’ the value of his presence in the modern world, etc., and on the
other hand there has been too little praying. There has not been enough
enthusiasm for exercising the priesthood itself through prayer, to make its
authentic evangelical dynamism effective, in order to confirm the priestly
identity. It is prayer that shows the essential style of the priest.”[30]
The need to be men of prayer brings once again to my
mind our Founder and his extraordinary apostolic fruitfulness. It is impossible
to adequately describe here, even briefly, his life of continual prayer, of
which I was a direct witness (to the extent that one can “witness” a spiritual
reality) for forty years. I feel confident in saying that God granted him abundantly
the gift of infused contemplation. I recall, among so many other details, how
during breakfast, while both of us were reading the newspaper, our Father would
scarcely have begun reading when he would become absorbed, caught up in God. He
would rest his forehead on the palm of one hand and stop reading the paper,
praying instead. I was deeply moved when, after his death, I read in his Personal Notes this entry from 1934:
“Prayer: although I don’t give it to you
... you make me feel it at odd hours; sometimes, when reading the
newspaper, I’ve had to tell you: let me read! How good my Jesus is! While I, on
the other hand....”[31]
It would take a long time to
adequately depict the rich life of prayer of this priest, always a priest! The
Holy Spirit undoubtedly brought him to the highest peaks of mystical union in
the midst of ordinary life, while undergoing very severe passive purifications
in his senses and spirit. Permit me, nevertheless, to stress that if these and
other very numerous facts that we know testify to a specific action of the Holy
Spirit in his soul, the depth with which the habit of continual prayer took
root in his daily life, both day and night, also reveals the faithfulness and
generosity of his dedication to those daily times of meditation and mental
prayer and the reading of the Breviary and other vocal prayers. What is more,
the extraordinary irruption of God in his soul was frequently like a divine
response to his fidelity to mental prayer in moments when it was particularly
costly or difficult for him.
For example, in one of his notes, among many others written in
1931, we read: “Yesterday,
at three in the afternoon, I went to the sanctuary of the church of the
Foundation, to spend some time praying before the Blessed Sacrament. I didn’t
feel like it. But I stayed there, feeling like a fool. From time to time the
thought came to me: You see, good Jesus, that if I am here, it is for you, to
please you. Nothing else. My imagination ran wild, far from my body and my
will, just as a faithful dog, lying at the feet of its master, dozes off
dreaming of running and hunting with his friends (dogs like himself), and he
stirs and barks softly. . .but without leaving his master. That’s how I was,
just like that dog, when I noticed that, without meaning to, I was repeating
some Latin words that I had never paid any attention to and had no reason to
recall. Even now, to remember them, I have to read them off the small sheet of
paper I always carry in my pocket to write down whatever God wants....
The words of Scripture that I ‘found’ on my lips were: et fui tecum
in omnibus ubicumque ambulasti, firmans regnum tuum in aeternum. Repeating
them slowly, I applied my mind to their meaning. And later, yesterday evening
and again today, when I read them again (for, I repeat, as though God wanted to
assure me that these words are his, I can’t recall them from one moment to the
next), I well understood that Christ Jesus was telling me, for our consolation:
The Work of God will be with Him everywhere,
affirming the kingdom of Jesus Christ forever.”[32]
It is in the persevering
prayer of each day, whether done with ease or with dryness, where the priest,
like any Christian, receives from God—even in an extraordinary way if
necessary—new lights, a firm faith, a sure hope in the supernatural efficacy of
his pastoral work, a renewed love: in a word, the strength to persevere in his
work and the root of effectiveness of the work itself. Without prayer, and
without prayer that one strives to make continuous, in the midst of one’s daily
occupations, there is no identification with Christ, in so far as this is a
“task,” grounded on the “gift” received. Moreover, I dare to affirm that a
priest without prayer, if he doesn’t falsify the image he gives of Christ (who
is the Model for everyone), will present it in a nebulous way that neither
attracts nor gives orientation, that fails to serve as a compass for the people
who see or hear us.
I often heard Msgr. Escrivá
say that “the Work of God has been built with prayer.” By these words he was
not expressing a theoretical principle of the spiritual life, but rather a
reality deeply assimilated and felt in his own life, fully equivalent to the
affirmation, also frequently on his lips, that it was God who had done and was
doing the Work. Thus he prayed out loud on March 27, 1975: “How has Opus Dei
come about? You, Lord, have
done it all, with a handful of good-for-nothings... Stulta mundi, infirma mundi, et ea quae non sunt (1 Cor 1:26-27). St Paul’s teaching has
been fulfilled to the letter. You have laid hold of instruments that were
utterly illogical and in no way suitable, and you have spread the work all over
the world.”[33]
5. Priestly holiness and A life of penance
Following and identifying oneself with
Christ requires, together with prayer, taking up the Cross each day,[34]
freely sharing in the mystery of the redeeming Cross. Specifically, “the
priest,” in the words of Pope Pius XII,
“should, therefore, study to reproduce in his own soul the things that are effected upon the Altar. As Jesus Christ
immolates himself, so his minister should be immolated with him; as Jesus
expiates the sins of men, so he, by following the hard road of Christian asceticism, should labor at the
purification of himself and of others.” [35]
A priest has to be a man of penance, and
perseveringly penitent, not just mortified. He has to make expiation, in union
with Christ’s Cross, for his own sins and those of the whole world. He has to
be able to say with St. Paul “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and
in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of
his body, that is, the Church.”[36]
The Founder of Opus Dei not only accepted
the Cross with joy in sickness, in persecution, in all sorts of external
difficulties and interior purifications that God allowed him to traverse, but
he also sought it with the deep conviction that to find the Cross is to find
Christ. This is how he expressed it, with words of great theological and
mystical depth, in a meditation given on April 28, 1963, recalling especially
difficult moments more than thirty years earlier: “When our Lord gave me those
blows, back around the year 31, I didn’t understand it. And suddenly in the
midst of that great bitterness came those words: ‘You are my son’ (Ps 2:7), you are Christ. And I could
only repeat: Abba, Pater! Abba, Pater!
Abba! Abba! Abba! And now I see it with new light, like a new discovery: as
one sees, as the years goes by, the hand of God, of divine Wisdom, of the All
Powerful. You have made me understand, Lord, that to have the Cross is to find
happiness, joy. And the reason—I see it now more clearly than ever—is this: to
have the Cross is to be identified with Christ, it is to be Christ, and
therefore, to be a son of God.” [37]
Msgr. Escrivá’s life of penance consisted,
above all, in constant self-denial in the thousand incidents of ordinary life;
but also a strong corporal penance. Among other manifestations of his union
with the Cross of Jesus, I could highlight, for example, the years when,
because of the Spanish Civil War, discomforts and shortages of every type were
so prevalent that any one, including the most mortified person, would have
considered it enough just to endure them, offering them to God. Msgr. Escrivá
in contrast, responding to God’s loving requirements, saw all this as
insufficient in order to follow the call he had received and felt that he
should do more.
I personally witnessed this reality,
especially during the months I spent with him in the Honduran Legation in
Madrid. All of us who had taken refuge there suffered real hunger, but he
abstained, in a natural way, even from the little that we had, practicing a
very rigorous fasting as he did during many other periods of his life. For
example, after his death, I was able to read a note that he made on June 22,
1933, addressed to his confessor, in which he spoke about the resolutions he
had formulated regarding penance during a recent retreat. These are his exact
words: “The Lord is undoubtedly asking
me, Father, that I intensify my penance. When I am faithful in this point, the
Work seems to receive new impetus.” And he went on to list his specific
resolutions: “Disciplines: Monday, Wednesday and Friday; plus an extra one on
the vespers of feasts of our Lord or our Lady; another extra one each week in
petition or thanksgiving.
“Cilices: two each day, until the midday
meal, then one up until supper. On Monday, one around the waist, and on Friday
around the shoulder, as up to now.
“Sleeping: on the floor, if it’s wood [not stone], or without a mattress
on the bed on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Fasting: on Saturdays having only what they give me for
breakfast.”[38]
It is not a question of
necessarily following a particular path of penance, but it is necessary to make
clear that identification with Christ, and therefore effectiveness in one’s
priestly ministry, requires a strong imprint of the Cross in one’s own flesh
and spirit. And this is even more true in our day and age, to carry out the new
evangelization in a world that in great part is submerged in hedonism. All of
this makes sense only in the light of faith: faith in the mystery of
Redemption, in the mystery of the Son of God, made obedient unto death and
death on the Cross.[39]
6. Priestly holiness and pastoral charity
There is no need to stress the
fact that the priestly ministry requires a priest to also be a man of action, since this is evident to
everyone. From the point of view of the faith, we can consider it equally
evident that the driving force of a priest’s pastoral activity is rooted
exclusively in Christ’s charity: caritas
Christi urget nos, [40]
says St. Paul. Christ love is urging us on—a supernatural love that blossoms
forth as a fruit of the Cross. For as St. Thomas Aquinas says: “it is a certain
participation in the infinite Love that is the Holy Spirit.”[41]
Indeed, only charity, which is patient and kind, which excuses everything,
which believes and puts up with everything,[42]
can provide the strength needed not just to fulfill certain specific pastoral
duties, but to undertake a complete dedication shown in incessant activity for
the good of souls, going beyond what strict justice might demand in regard to
the faithful entrusted to the priest’s care.
Here too, I feel the need to
evoke the memory of our beloved Founder. Fatigue, sickness or adverse
circumstances were never an excuse for him to lessen his untiring dedication to
his ministry. This pastoral concern, which leads to an unconditional dedication
to the service of souls,[43]
necessarily includes a deep love for a priestly fraternity that is expressed in
deeds. A priestly fraternity that does not confuse unity with uniformity, that
respects everyone’s legitimate freedom, also in the broad ambit of priestly
spirituality.
Much could be said of the
Founder of Opus Dei’s truly heroic love and service for his brother priests. I
recall, for example, the many retreats he preached to priests throughout Spain
at the request of the bishops before he moved to Rome. Among these was a
retreat he gave in October 1944 to the Augustinian community in El Escorial.
The day before the retreat was to begin he fell sick, with a temperature of
102º. But he went anyway, and I accompanied him. Despite the fever, which the
next day had risen to 104º, he finished preaching the retreat, and even managed
to hide the fact he was sick from those attending.
7. A life rooted and centered
in the Eucharist
Let us now turn our attention
to another important aspect, the most radical and central aspect of a priest’s
life, and the guarantee of his evangelizing effectiveness.
Prayer, penance, and action
guided by an untiring pastoral charity. These are the “coordinates,” as it
were, in which we have considered the priest’s identification with Jesus
Christ, to the extent that this is a task requiring correspondence to God’s
gift. But it would be a grave omission to overlook the fact that the Christian
life, and especially these aspects of priestly life, has to be rooted, centered, and therefore unified
in the Sacrifice of Christ, in the Holy Mass, in the Eucharist.
The Holy Mass is “the center
and the root of the whole life of the Priest,”[44]
as the Second Vatican Council reminded us, with words that Msgr. Escrivá had
already frequently stressed.[45]
There is no doubt that this
centrality of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is a reality in the life of every
Catholic, but in the priest it takes on special meaning. As John Paul II said,
“Through our ordination—the celebration of which is linked to the holy Mass
from the very first liturgical evidence—we are united in a singular and
exceptional way to the Eucharist. In a certain way we derive from it and exist
for it. We are also, and in a special way, responsible for it.”[46]
I once again turn to the
illustrious priestly example of the Founder of this university. For forty
years, day after day, I was a witness to his effort to turn each day into a
holocaust, into a prolongation of the Sacrifice of the Altar. The Holy Mass was
the center of his heroic dedication to work and the root that vivified his
interior struggle, his life of prayer and penance. Thanks to his union with
Christ’s Sacrifice, his pastoral activity acquired immense sanctifying value.
Truly, in each of his days, everything was operatio
Dei, Opus Dei, an authentic path of prayer, of intimacy with God, of
identification with Christ in his total self-surrender for the salvation of the
world.
Externally there was never
anything extraordinary or remarkable in Msgr. Escrivá’s Mass, although it was
impossible not to appreciate his deep devotion. >From the beginning of his
priestly ministry he strove never to allow any routine or haste to enter into
his celebration of the Holy Sacrifice, despite his habitual lack of time to
carry out his many pastoral activities. On the contrary, he tended
spontaneously to say Mass with a lot of peace, entering into each text and the
meaning of each liturgical gesture, to such an extent that for many years, he
had to make a real effort—following what he was told in spiritual direction—to
go faster in order to avoid attracting attention and to be at the service of
the faithful who expected to spend less time at Mass. In this context, one can
understand what he wrote in 1932, like a sigh escaping from his soul: “When
saying Holy Mass, the clocks should stop.”[47]
The intensity with which he
united himself to our Lord’s Sacrifice in the Eucharist, culminated in an
experience that I don’t hesitate to call a special mystical gift. On October
24, 1966, he told us, with great simplicity: “At my age of sixty-five, I have
made a marvelous discovery. I love to say Holy Mass, but yesterday it cost me a
tremendous amount of work. What an effort!
I saw that the Mass is truly Opus Dei, work, as the first Mass was truly
an effort for Jesus Christ: the Cross. I saw that the action of the priest, the
celebration of Holy Mass, is work to confect the Eucharist; that there one experiences
suffering, and joy, and tiredness. I felt in my flesh the exhaustion of a
divine work.” I have no doubt that this discovery corresponded to a request
that he constantly directed to those of us at his side: “Ask our Lord to make
me more pious in the Holy Mass, so that each day I have greater hunger to renew
the Holy Sacrifice.”
8. The Marian dimension of a
priest’s life
At the foot of Christ’s Cross,
on Calvary, stood Mary, his Mother, and together with her the disciple whom he
loved.[48]
The Church’s Tradition has always seen St. John the Apostle as representing all
Christians, all the men and women who have received in the Sacrament of
Baptism, as an indelible character, a participation in Christ’s priesthood. The
words of our Lord on the Cross reveal to us an essential dimension of the
Christian life: Behold your mother.[49]
In the words of John Paul II, we find here “the Marian dimension of the life of
Christ's disciples. This is true not only of John, who at that hour stood at
the foot of the Cross together with his Master's Mother, but it is also true of
every disciple of Christ, of every Christian.”[50]
Being alter Christus, ipse Christus—another Christ, Christ himself—necessarily
entails being children of Holy Mary. And just as identification with our Lord
is both a gift and a task, so filiation to our Lady is a gift: “a gift that
Christ himself makes personally to each person”;[51]
and also a task, which the Evangelist describes succinctly: And
from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.[52]
By entrusting himself to Mary in a filial manner,”
the Holy Father says, “the Christian, like the Apostle John, ‘welcomes’ the
Mother of Christ ‘into his own home’ and brings her into everything that makes
up his inner life.”[53]
If this is true for every
Christian, it is so by a new title for the priest, who has been called to
participate in a new way in Christ’s priesthood and to live centered in a
special way on the sacrifice of the Cross. As a disciple of our Lord he should
entrust himself filially to Mary, going to her as his Mother and learning from
her what it means to have a “priestly soul”: the eagerness to co-redeem with
Christ, a thirst for souls, a spirit of reparation; in short, a desire to
acquire the same sentiments as Christ Jesus.[54]
As the minister of our Lord, a priest should never forget, when renewing the
Sacrifice of Calvary and dispensing the treasures of Christ’s grace, that, at
the foot of the Cross, the Virgin Mary “dedicated herself totally to the
mystery of the Redemption of mankind,”[55]
and that the Body and Blood of Christ that are made present on the altar have
been received from his Most Holy Mother.
The last Council exhorted
priests to “love and venerate with filial devotion and veneration this mother
of the Eternal High Priest, Queen of Apostles and Protector of their own
ministry.”[56]
How deeply the Founder of Opus Dei experienced this marvelous reality of the
Blessed Virgin’s maternal assistance in his priestly ministry! As he recalled
on the feast of St. Joseph in 1975, a few months before his death, glancing
back at his pastoral work in the 1930s: “How many hours walking through that
Madrid of mine, every week, from one side to the other, wrapped up in my cape!
… Those entire Rosaries, prayed in the street, anyway I could, but without
omitting them, every day ... I never thought that to carry the Work forward
would bring with it so much suffering, so much pain, physical and moral:
especially moral ... Iter
para tutum! My Mother! Mother! I had no one except you! Mother, thank you
... Mother, Cor Mariae Dulcissimum! O
how much I have gone to you!
“And at other times, speaking
and preaching, realizing that I was not worth anything, that I was nothing, but
with one certainty. Mother! My mother!
Don’t abandon me! Mother, My Mother!”
These were deeply sincere exclamations of a son, which burst forth
from his priestly soul, precisely on the last feast of St. Joseph that he
celebrated here on earth, because in his heart, and also in his name, Mary and
Joseph were indissolubly united. They were the pathway to an intimate
conversation with Jesus, and through Him, with Him, and in Him, with the Father
and the Holy Spirit.
Attaining a deep devotion and
a tender love for our Lady has to be one of the primary objectives of priestly
formation. There are deep theological reasons for saying that this devotion can
never be seen as a pious addition to the priest’s formation. Rather it is
rooted in the “gift” received by the priest at his ordination, which is
destined to grow and to develop in his life. Our Lord wanted to associate his
Mother in a special way with his work of Redemption. And thus the priest too,
who has received the power of acting in
persona Christi Capitis, needs
the motherly help of our Lady in his ministry. Without Mary he would not be
able to attain a truly priestly life.
9. Conclusion: Formation for
holiness
Present-day circumstances in
society and the new evangelization in which we are all involved demand that we
strive to take a qualitative leap forward in our priesthood, and therefore also
in our priestly formation. In his recent Letter to priests on Holy Thursday,
Pope John Paul II wrote: “Today, as the third millennium of the coming of
Christ draws near, we perhaps experience more deeply the immensity and the
difficulties of the harvest: The harvest is great; but we also see the scarcity
of workers: The laborers are few (Mt 9:37). Few: and this not only in
respect to the quantity but also to the quality. Hence the need for formation.”[57]
The priests need to acquire in
their years of preparation, and later in their ongoing permanent formation, a
clear awareness of the identity between
the realization of their personal vocation—being a priest in the Church—and the
exercise of their ministry in persona
Christi Capitis. Their service to the Church consists essentially (other
ways of priestly service can be legitimate, but are secondary) in making
present actively and humbly among their brethren Christ the Priest, who gives
life to and purifies the Church, Christ the Good Shepherd, who leads it in
unity towards the Father, and Christ the Teacher, who gives comfort and
encouragement with his word, and with the example of his life.
A priest’s formation is
something that lasts his entire life because, in its various aspects, it should
lead to forming Christ in him,[58]
making that identification a reality as a task, in response to the sacramental
gift received. A task that requires above and beyond an incessant pastoral
activity, and as a condition for its effectiveness, an intense life of prayer
and penance, a sincere spiritual direction of one’s own soul, frequent recourse
to the Sacrament of Penance lived with extreme refinement, with one’s whole
existence rooted, centered and unified in the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
A new evangelization, yes, but
with the clear awareness that, in the words of Msgr. Escrivá, “in the spiritual
life nothing needs to be invented; one only needs to struggle to identify
oneself with Christ, to be other Christs, ipse
Christus, to fall in love with him and live Christ’s life, who is the same
yesterday and today and forever: Iesus
Christus heri et hodie, ipse et in saecula (Heb 13:8).”[59]
The Church sings of Christ the
Eternal High Priest: Ave verum corpus
natum de Maria Virgine. I beseech
God that the Marian path by which the Son of God came to mankind always be
present in priestly formation.
(*) This text is taken from Msgr. Álvaro del Portillo’s contribution to the
1990 Symposium of Theology at the University of
Navarre. The theme of the Symposium was
“The Formation of Priests in Contemporary Circumstances.” The full text of the discourse has been
published in Italian in Consecrazione & Missione del sacerdote (Ares,
Milan 1990, 2nd expanded edition, pp. 101-126).
In the version presented here only a few
brief initial paragraphs as well as some similar passages have been removed. In
these passages, Msgr. del Portillo discussed the consonance between the theme
of the Symposium and the recent Declaration of the heroic virtues of Msgr.
Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, which was published on April 9, 1990,
just a few days before the discourse was given. These small changes have been made in order to emphasize the
contemporary relevance of the text, which can always also be consulted in its
original form.
Bishop Álvaro del Portillo, Prelate of Opus
Dei, lived for almost forty years at the side of St.
Josemaría and was his closest collaborator. Having died on March 23, 1994, his
Cause for Beatification and Canonization is underway.
[1] Cf., for example, John Paul II, Addresses: at the European ceremony of Santiago de Compostela, November 9, 1982: Insegnamenti V,3 (1982) 1257-1263; to the Council of the European Bishops Conferences, January 2, 1986: Insegnamenti IX,1 (1986) 12-17; in the Cathedral of Augsburg, May 3, 1987: Insegnamenti X,2 (1987) 1565-1574; in Speyer, May 4, 1987: Insegnamenti, ibid., pp. 1593-1602; to the Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture, January 12, 1990: L'Osservatore Romano, January 13, 1990; to the members of the Diplomatic Corps, January 13, 1990: L'Osservatore Romano, January 14, 1990.
[2] Cf. Vatican II, Decree Presbyterorum Ordinis, no. 1; Decree Optatam Totius, preemie.
[3] Cf. John Paul II, Apost. Ex. Christifideles Laici, no. 34.
[4] Cf., for example, the descriptions in the encyclicals Redemptor Hominis, nos. 48-53; Dives in Misericordia, nos. 63-77; Dominum et Vivificantem, nos. 56-57.
[5] On the “crisis of conscience and of the sense of God,” which is closely united to the obscuring of the sense of sin, as reflected in certain elements of today’s culture, cf. John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Poenitentia, no. 18.
[6] John Paul II, Apost.Ex. Christifideles Laici, no. 35.
[7] Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, New York 1985, no. 584.
[8] Josemaría Escrivá, Conversations with Josemaría Escrivá, New York, 2002, no. 113.
[10] Saint Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 1, ch. 1, n. 1: PL 32, 661. Cf. also, Vatican II, Past. Const. Gaudium et Spes, no. 41.
[11] Dives in Misericordia, nos. 13-17, contains profound reflections God’s fatherly love revealed in Christ.
[12] Cf. Phil 3:18.
[13] Cf. 2 Cor 4:6.
[14] Cf., for example, Álvaro del Portillo, Escritos sobre el sacerdocio, Palabra, Madrid 1970, pp. 41-44; Fieles y laicos en la Iglesia, Eunsa, Pamplona, 2ª ed., 1981, pp. 33-45.
[15] John Paul II, Apost. Expos. Christifideles Laici, no. 34. On the common priesthood of the laity, cf., for example, 1 Pet 2:9; Rev 1:6; 5:9-10; 20:6; Constitutiones Apostolicas III, 16,3: SC 329, p.157; St. Ambrosio, De Mysteriis 6, 29-30: SC 25 bis, p. 173; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 63, a. 3; Vatican II, Dogm. Const Lumen Gentium, nos.. 10-11; Decree Presbyterorum Ordinis, n. 2.
[16] Christ Is Passing By, Scepter, New York, 1985, no. 96.
[17] John Paul II, Address, May 30, 1980: Insegnamenti III,1 (1980) p. 1532. Cf. Letter to priests on the occasion of Holy Thursday, 1990, April 12, 1990, no. 3.
[18] John Paul II, Enc. Redemptor hominis, no. 20.
[19] Cf. Josemaría Escrivá, Homily “A Priest Forever,” in In Love with the Church, Scepter, New York, 2002, no. 38.
[20] 1 Cor 4:1.
[21] Josemaría Escrivá, Letter, March 24, 1930, no. 2.
[22] Cf.., for example, Heb 7-9; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 22, a. 1; Council of Trent, Decree, On the Sacrifice of the Mass: Denz. 1739-1740; Vatican II, Const. Sacrosanctum Concilium, nos. 5-8.
[23] Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, no. 104.
[24] Josemaría Escrivá, Homily “A Priest Forever,” in In Love with the Church, Scepter, New York, 2002, no. 38.
[25] Phil 1:21.
[26] Gal 2:20.
[27] Vatican II, Decr. Presbyterorum Ordinis, no. 12. Among the many patristic testimonies about the demand for personal sanctity that the priesthood requires, cf., for example, St. Gregory Nazianzus, Oratio 2, n. 91: PG 35, 493; St. John Chrysostom, De sacerdotio, lib. 6, n. 5: PG 48, 682; St. Peter Chrysologos, Sermo 108: PL 52, 500-501; St. Isidoro Pelusiota, Epistula 284: PG 78, 713; St. Gregory the Great, Dialogi, lib. 4, c. 59: PL 77, 428.
[28] Josemaría Escrivá, Intimate notes, no. 1699. Cf. Vázquez de Prada, The Founder of Opus Dei, vol. I, Princeton, 2001, p. 365.
[29] St. Pius X. Ex. Haerent Animo, August 4, 1908: ASS 41 (1908) p. 564.
[30] John Paul II, Letter Novo Incipiente, April 8, 1979, no. 10.
[31] Josemaría Escrivá, Intimate notes, no. 1130.
[32] Josemaría Escrivá, Intimate notes, no. 273.
[33] Josemaría Escrivá, Meditation, March 27, 1975.
[34] Cf. Lk 9:23; 14:27; Mt 10:38; Mk 8:34; Gal 2:9; etc.
[35] Pius XII, Apost. Expos. Menti Nostrae, September 23, 1950: AAS 42 (1950) pp. 667-668.
[36] Col 1:24.
[37] Josemaría Escrivá, Meditation, April 28, 1963.
[38] Josemaría Escrivá, Intimate notes, no. 1724.
[39] Cf. Phil 2:8.
[40] 2 Cor 5:14.
[41] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 24, a. 7 c.
[42] Cf. 1 Cor 13:4-7.
[43] Cf. 2 Cor 12:15.
[44] Vatican II, Decree Presbyterorum Ordinis, no. 14.
[45] Cf., for example, Josemaría Escrivá, Letter, February 2, 1945, no. 11; Christ Is Passing By, no. 87; The Forge, no. 69.
[46] John Paul II, Letter Dominicae Cenae, February 24, 1980, no. 2.
[47] Josemaría Escrivá, Intimate notes, no. 728; cf. The Forge, no. 436.
[48] Jn 19:26.
[49] Jn 19:27.
[50] John Paul II, Enc. Redemptoris Mater, March 25, 1987, no. 45.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Jn 19:27.
[53] John Paul II, Enc. Redemptoris Mater, op. cit., no. 45.
[54] Cf. Phil 2:5.
[55] Vatican II, Decree Prebyterorum Ordinis, no. 18.
[56] Decree Prebyterorum Ordinis, no. 18.
[57] John Paul II, Letter to priests on the occasion of Holy Thursday, 1990, no. 4.
[58] Cf. Gal 4:19.
[59] Josemaría Escrivá, Letter, January 9, 1959, no. 6.