Franciscan Penance Library

Thoughts to a Newly Ordained Priest

You will have received many good wishes on the day of your ordination--and counsels, admonishments, and the rest. I have nothing to add to this, except for some words borrowed from others.

At the end of his 1980 presidential campaign Edward Kennedy seemed to have alluded to the almost Camusian moment of clarity, of lucidity, that follows a time of preparation, a time of anticipation, when he spoke of "someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down, and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing".

On that day after your ordination, you will awake in the silence of your heart to that silent voice that still asks, still offers the invitation and the promise. And in that still moment of infinite lucidity you will realise that the "yes" to Divine Love you uttered the day before was not a conclusion, not even an introduction. Rather, it was a definitive assent. A "yes" ratified in eternity, but one which requires constant renewal--each day, and at every moment. Your yes must be a dynamic reality, a living thing. This yes must take on life, and you for you part must make that life your own.

For in entering this state of life, you will be offering yourself as a sacrificial victim in union with the sacrifice of the Divine Victim in the very essence of His action: Sacrificial Love. And so now more than ever, your only purpose must be to love. And all the grand institutional machinery of the Church and the religious state has been erected for this sole purpose, to enable you to seize the opportunity and the unmerited privilege of loving: spending yourself in love, suffering with joy for love's sake. To serve, to give, to suffer, ultimately to die, and all this in order to love and be loved.

And this is easily transposed into the context of the Confraternity. Just as the "machinery of the Church and the religious state has been erected for this sole purpose" of enabling the newly ordained priest to love, so has the Confraternity's own machinery been created in order to enable each one of us to love: to love each one within, to love each one outside, and to love God.

The Confraternity is dispensible. No one needs it, no one is required to be a member of it. It exists in order to enable our love. For the one called to this life, the Confraternity is the path along which he or she will
enter into the life of Divine love. This is its purpose.

Such a principle of fraternal charity, of practical love, is seen throughout our Rule. It is the very basis of our life. In the reciprocity of Divine Love which is incarnated in our lives, and which must be especially, intensely incarnated in the life of a penitent, our practical love for each and EVERY one must be the impetus of all that we do, and concurrently the result of what we do. This is the circular reciprocity, the mystery, of Love: love begets love, love is simultaneously the result of that begetting. To put it in terms of causality (Aristotelian
metaphysics), Love must be both our efficient cause and our final cause.

If any part of this mechanism prevents us from loving, we are guilty of disintegration and disorder. And if we fail to use this mechanism to express this love, we have failed altogether.

One of the quotes I sent to the new priest were these words of Christ to St. Catherine of Sienna:

"You cannot render Me any service, but you can help your neighbour. The soul in love with My truth gives herself no rest but searches ceaselessly to help others. You cannot give back to me Myself the love I demand, but I have put you beside your neighbour so that you may do for him what you cannot do for Me. What you do for your neighbour, then I consider as being done for Me."

Love is heroic, but we must be witnesses that the heroic is ordinary, that it is the rule rather than the exception. We must be witnesses in deed that each moment can be saturated with the dynamic life of Divine Love. As St Josemaria said (one of the quotes I sent to the priest): "Let me stress this point: it is in the simplicity of your ordinary work, in the monotonous details of each day, that you have to find the secret, which is hidden from so many, of something great and new: Love."

The saints' lives were saturated with love, and we too easily assume that this is extraordinary. We take it for granted that a Mother Therese lives in destitution serving the untouchables of society. We take it for granted
that a Jesus sits at table with prostitutes and crooks, that he touches a leper. We take it, literally, for granted, because we are used to these tales in their lives. The anecdote takes on a facility which corrodes the exceptional love of the act. Love is not easy, it takes effort to say yes.

Mother Therese was quite comfortable as a Sister of Loreto, Francis was quite comfortable as the playboy son of a merchant, John Paul II wanted to be a contemplative Carmelite, Dominic was a revered Spanish Canon, and on, and on. The saints' lives each present such an example. But I have always been adament that the saints and their lives are only examples. Examples held out not as models to be slavishly impersonated; conversely, not as exceptional abberations. Rather, I see them as examples that it IS possible. That Divine Love is real, that it is truly possible to say yes. After all, why is the sinful woman so famous, or the woman at the well, or Saint Peter, or St Thomas, or St. John Paul II? Why? Because their very lives tell me that if a whore, a woman with a half dozen husbands, a block-head, and a cynic can all make it, then maybe I can too. And the last example in the list refutes the objection that those were ancient days and extraordinary cases, that such fairy tales can't happen now. The life of John Paul II (and he, again, is only one example) shows that even today a nobody, the son of an unknown, from a long line of unknowns, can look into the very face of our own present world, a world which during his own life and before his very eyes industrialised evil for the first time--the holocaust of Hitler, the progrom of Stalin, the subsidization of abortion by the state--that such a no-one can still, and in our own day, come out from behind an iron curtain and set the byways of the world on fire with love.

These are only examples, they are not exceptions. To make a saint an exception is to isolate them, to isolate the forces of Love in their lives, and to resign one's own responsibility--it is to deny that the same, the exact same force is present and available in our own lives. To say that the saint is somehow special or different from oneself, that they lived a hundred years ago and a thousand miles away, is to shirk and deny the reality that the same One is still here, and that He asks me the same question.

No, the saints are only different from you or I in that they are famous, because they are widely known. And I am not, of course, denying them veneration and love, etc. We love them, we venerate them, we respect them, we emulate them. And for good reason, because they help us, they encourage us, they intercede for us: they show us that it is really possible to love.

In the secular context, why do we love the rags to riches story, why do we fantasize about a Cinderella? Because such a legend helps us to believe, if only for a time, that maybe one day it could happen to us too.

Yes, we take for granted that Mother Therese rescues the babies of India, that Francis talks to birds in Italy, that Symeon prays for 37 years at the top of a pillar in Syria, and on and on.

They did not have to do this, there was nothing wrong with their original state, they could have stayed there. Nothing REQUIRED them to move; there was no fear of loss for staying, there was no hope for gain in leaving.

But in the same way, Love asks something more, without REQUIRING it. Like the examples above, it doesn't threaten damnation for saying no, it doesn't promise glory for saying yes. Instead we see only the natural result of our answer: that to say no to the invitation will bring as a result an isolation, a stagnation of life and ultimate death; that to say yes will bring as a result an opening up to infinity.

Robert Kennedy often quoted the words of Camus, asking "if you will not do this, then who will do this?" And I think Divine Love asks us the same thing.

I always remember the short exchange between Jesus and the Leper

And a leper came to Him and bowed down before Him, and said, "Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean." Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, saying, "I am willing; be cleansed."(Matthew 8:2-3)

This is a most beautiful example of the 'yes' to Divine Love. He said, "I am willing".

When we idealise the experiences of the saints, we also diminish their value as examples. If Time magazine had never written of Mother Therese, would she have been less a saint? Would the love she showed be any less love? I say emphatically no. She would have been less famous to us, yes. But that was not her project. Her project was to love; and if we had never heard her name it would make no difference at all, because the love she showed would still live in the untouchable's heart, even if she had only ever helped one of them. But then yes we would be the poorer had we never heard her name, not because the language would have one less cliche, but because we would not have the example of her life to show us that love is real, that it is possible, and that it is possible for each of us. And if her body was not encased in gold and silver, would it be any less worthy of our respect? If you and I never kissed her picture or lit candles in front of it, her face would still shine with the radiancy of God's own face, in the light of the eternal day.

You see, love is charismatic, it is attractive. People are drawn to love, because it is open. Closed in upon oneself in the "brittle shell of one's own self-hood" the door is closed and locked, and the life of such a
person repels others from approaching. But love draws to itself, even if it is incarnated in a ragged old woman smoking a cigarette and drinking instant coffee in some out of the way town.

I remember another example like this. I remember a Sunday morning in July 2002. The charismatic love which illuminated a single man's life had attracted 800,000 people to an abandoned field in pouring rain. Many had slept all night in puddles. Many had walked miles and miles, some had flown from all over the world. And they all came--myself included--to see a single man. An old man, one who could no longer walk, one who drooled, one who could barely be understood while speaking, one who (after about an hour) could not even hold his own head up. Why would little less than a million people go through so much to see such a person. Why would a million young, attractive, energetic people want to see and hear such a person. Why would anyone want to be bothered with someone in a condition which, in the eyes of the world and the culture of death, classifies him as a piece of garbage, refuse to be discarded and removed from sight.

The answer, of course, is love. As with Christ, we loved John Paul II, and we love him still, because he first loved us.

--A CFP Life Pledged Member Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous