FAMIGLIA CRISTIANA

22^nd May 2009, 11 am

Interview with

H.E. Mons. Mauro Piacenza

Titular Archbishop of Vittoriana

Secretary of the Congregation for the Clergy

1. Why has the Holy Father proclaimed a Year for Priests?

A. The Holy Father takes especially to heart, as is only natural, the life, spirituality, sanctification and mission of Priests. The Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for Clergy, during which the Year for Priests was announced in audience, had in fact as its title, “The missionary identity of the Priest in the Church as an intrinsic dimension of the exercise of the tria munera”. In our time, it is urgent and necessary to faithfully recall both to priests and to the holy People of God the beauty, the importance and the indispensability of the priesthood for the Church and for the Salvation of the world.

A Year devoted to deepening and rediscovering what makes the Catholic priesthood, expanding the opportunities for prayer with and for Priests, cannot fail to be for the benefit of the overall mission of the Church, which, as we proclaim in the Creed each Sunday, sees one of its essential “notes” expressed precisely in the ordained ministry: Apostolicity.

2. Our Magazine mainly deals with and is addressed to Christian families. What relationships should they establish with Priests? How should they love and support them?

A. The Priest “is taken from among men and is appointed to act on their behalf in their relations with God” (cf. Hb. 5:1), and so he himself comes from a family and enjoys the experience of sonship and the communion typical of family life.

Every Priest holds the family in great esteem, since it is there that man responds to the calling, which is both universal and natural, to live in communion and to contribute to the gift of life. At the same time, however, he is called to a vocation which is higher, because supernatural, to perfect chastity for the Kingdom of Heaven, that is to say he is called to witness in the most effective way to faith in Christ the Lord and His victory.

Families are called to acknowledge and respect the role of fatherhood that the Lord has entrusted to Priests through the Church, since they are the ‘fathers’ of that “family of families” that is the Parish. By showing respect, discretion, attentive availability, docility, by carrying out their different duties, and by appropriate, albeit not excessive, familiarity, families can accompany the Priest and support him with their prayers, and make him feel that which he truly is: a father in faith!

3. What should families do to foster Priestly vocations? And what about schools?

A. It is God who fosters vocations! Families, being the first formative environment, can favour a welcoming disposition for the divine call or – God forbid – can foster an outlook which leads to its possible rejection. Certainly, the role of the family in terms of education in the faith is essential and irreplaceable: It is in the family that one learns the ‘familiarity’ with God and the ‘things of God’ that is so typical of Catholics, who believe in the Incarnation of the Word; It is in the family that one learns the first prayers, to do good and to obey the commandments, respecting and accepting everybody; one learns the meaning of the sacred and of sacred affections, the meaning of Sunday and the day of rest. A Christian family is a true cenacle of prayer and this atmosphere allows candidates for the priesthood to listen more attentively to the Lord’s voice.

The school should at least educate people about the meaning of God, with an approach that has the capacity to create a genuinely “lay” perception, in a manner without prejudice that is open and intelligent, welcoming of a universal anthropological fact, namely that the religious sense is universal, that it concerns everybody, and therefore the entire society. Catholic schools, moreover, to which Christian parents should freely have access, without having to endure a double burden to be able to do so, should be the cradle of true Christian life and of joyful and faithful testimony to the Lord, in happiness and charity, with a sense of purpose and reasonableness about the proposed programme of education and faith, which is for the benefit of tender minds opening themselves to the consciousness of reality, having the right to encounter witnesses who believe and who are therefore believable.

4. What ‘image’ of the priest is the Pope proposing to the people of our age with the celebration of this Year for Priests?

A. It is the perennial image! The one that the Church and true doctrine have always presented and which is wonderfully epitomised by the evangelical character of the “Good Shepherd”. Certainly it is true that our time is marked, with notable differences between the secularised and relativist West and other countries in the world where the meaning of the Sacred is still very strong, by certain tendencies which inevitably also found to adhere to the priest in the exercise of his ministry and which we need to begin to correct, and for which this Year will also serve as a help. I’m thinking, for example, about the temptation to activism, which has found a place in not a few priests who while they seem heroic in their total dedication, nevertheless jeopardise their own vocation and the effectiveness of their Apostolate if they do not persevere in that life-giving relationship with Christ, which is nourished by silence, prayer, Lectio Divina and, above all, Eucharistic Adoration. The Holy Father Himself reminded priests that “no one proclaims or brings himself, but within and through his own humanity every priest must be well aware that he is bringing to the world Another, God himself. God is the only treasure which ultimately people desire to find in a priest” (Benedict XVI, Address, 16^th March 2009).

5. What is the meaning of priestly fatherhood?

A. It is the fatherhood of God, present and effective in the world through the glorious face of Christ and his Mystic Body, which is the Church. This is a fellowship of men and women changed by the encounter with the Lord, called to moral and baptismal sanctification and to whom the Lord gives different tasks in the one ecclesial body. Priests are entrusted with the role of fatherhood both sacramentally and institutionally, exercised by means of the Tria Munera, that is to say the task of teaching Catholic faith, of sanctifying through the celebration of the Sacraments, in particular the Holy Mass and Penitential Reconciliation, and governing, that is to say leading the Lord’s flock to the ‘pastures of eternal life’ as fathers and shepherds.

In a time when the ‘need for fathers’, educators, guides who are able to light the path with reasonableness and love, and consequently with authority, is being rediscovered, a wonderful new opportunity for priests has opened up. Priestly fatherhood also comes down to the spiritual fatherhood of many confessors who, without any fuss and in great fidelity, guide consciences in an authentic discernment of the will of God for each individual

6. Is there a connection between the crisis of vocations and the crisis of fatherhood suffered by our Western society?

A. The Priest, today as ever, is called to be a witness of the Absolute! Today’s true contradiction cannot be found by looking for superficial originality as happened in recent decades, producing only a weak and short-lived fascination. Priests may become true ‘signs of contradiction’ only in so far as they become saints! We need only think of Saint John Mary Vianney, Saint John Bosco, Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, Saint Pio of Pietrelcina… All of them priests, all of them different in terms of personality and personal history, but they were all extraordinarily united in their love for and their testimony to Christ the Lord, and for being for this very reason “signs of contradiction” in a truly prophetic manner! It is not possible to be like this by falling silent about Christ, by making the ministry horizontal, by thinking the only Salvation is the one that is immanent.

A society that, especially through the ‘revolution of 1968’ wanted to get rid of ‘fathers’, has not become more free or more adult, but has simply become “orphaned”. It will be a long journey, but the recovery of the irreplaceable value – it being natural – of fatherhood has already begun, and with it the awareness of the need for the religious and the sacramental fatherhood of the priest.

7. Does the spiritual motherhood ‘launched’ last year by your Congregation concern also Christian mothers or only consecrated women?

A. The issue of spiritual motherhood is very important since it refers to the absolute primacy of prayer and the communion of the Saints in the life of the Church. The Church is not principally an ‘organisation’! It lives in the hearts of the faithful, in the silent prayer of many suffering people, in the fruitful work of many Christians who contribute to the growth of the Kingdom of God in the world at every level of society.

Therefore, spiritual motherhood is meant for all women who are willing to offer their prayers and their sacrifices for the sanctification of priests, while being aware of their different vocations: It is well that a mother, who is already a mother by nature, should be a mother through and through, that she educate her children, care for her husband find her spiritual and affectionate centre of gravity in God and in her own family.

A consecrated woman would obviously have more time to dedicate to prayer and contemplation and will be able to express her ‘spiritual motherhood’ towards priests by offering herself so that the priest will be sanctified through the exercise of the sacred ministry.

8. What fruit Year for Priests bear for the Church?

A. Whatever God wills! Certainly, the Year for Priests represents an important occasion to look once again and with ever grateful wonder at the work of the Lord who, “on the night he was betrayed” (1Cor 11: 23), deigned to institute the ministerial Priesthood, binding it inextricably to the Eucharist, the source and summit of life for the entire Church.

It will be a Year, therefore, in which to rediscover the beauty and the importance of the Priesthood and of individual priests, and to strengthen the sensitivity to this of the entire Holy People of God: consecrated men and women, Christian families, those who suffer, and especially the young who are so receptive to great ideals that are lived from an authentic impulse and with constant fidelity. The Holy Father, in his Address on the 16th March last to the members of the Congregation for the Clergy gathered in Plenary Assembly, reminded them that: “It seems urgent to recover that awareness 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 their attire, in the contexts of culture and of charity”. The Year for Priests wishes to sustain and to implore from the Spirit these fruits of visible Presence.