Priesthood Ordination Mass 2017
Cathedral of the Risen Christ
May 27, 2017
Bishop James D. Conley
Bishop Bruskewitz, Bishop Senior, Bishop-elect Shlesinger, my brother priests, deacons and seminarians, dear religious sisters, beloved ordination candidates and your families, dear friends in Christ.
Today is a great day of joy for the Diocese of Lincoln and for the universal Church. For today, in God’s wonderful and mysterious providence, these five young men before you will be ordained into the priesthood of the One High Priest, Jesus Christ, our Redeemer and “the source of eternal salvation.”
The word Eucharist means “thanksgiving,” and in the Holy Eucharist we give thanks to the Lord for his goodness, his grace, and his sacrificial love—the wellspring of our eternal salvation. And in a special way, we give thanks to God for the priesthood, and for these five men, who will be consecrated in “the image of Christ the eternal high priest,” and who will share, in the sacrifice of the Mass, in Christ’s holy and redemptive sacrifice at Calvary.
The priest shares uniquely in the mission and identity of Jesus Christ. The Scriptures we read today reveal to us what that means.
From the prophet Jeremiah, we hear that the priest is called to share in Christ’s prophetic mission, in preaching and teaching the Gospel—and is given, in a special way, the words of the Lord. “See,” says the Lord to his priests, “behold, I have put my words in your mouth.”
In the Letter to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Luke, we hear that the priest shares in the sacrificial and sanctifying mission of Jesus Christ. The priest offers the sacrifice of atonement, making us mystically present to the atoning sacrifice of Christ at Calvary. The priest stands in the person of Christ, in persona Christi, offering the “prayers and supplications” of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and makes manifest, in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, the “source of eternal salvation,” and “fount and apex” of the Christian life.
In the Gospel of Luke, we hear also that the priest shares in the reign of Christ the King. Christ confers the Kingdom upon his apostles, and the priest shares in that kingly authority given by Christ—what he forgives on earth is forgiven in heaven. St. Luke tells us that Christ’s kingship is the leadership of a servant, and reminds us today that the priest must be like Christ, “among you as the one who serves.”
Dear sons, the ministry of the priest is essential to the life and mission of the Church—to the salvation of the world. Today, as you are ordained to the priesthood, you are made anew, so that in your ministry, as St. Paul understood so well, it is not you who lives, but Christ who lives in you.
Sacred ordination is an awesome grace, and a humbling gift. Today, you may feel unworthy of such a gift. In truth, none of us is worthy of being Christ’s priest. But the Lord has chosen us—unworthy though we are—to become his sacred ministers, to share in his high priesthood.
And the Lord calls us to become the priests the Church needs today, here and now. Last year, in an address to vocation directors, Archbishop Charles Chaput spoke about the kinds of priests we need in today’s world. We are living in a culture that is at odds with Christianity. Modern democracy is a culture of personal autonomy and is suspicious of authority. Our technocratic consumer culture makes slaves to the passions and to the expectation of instantaneous gratification. The decline of the family makes for lonely people, who don’t understand what it is to love, and to be loved.
This is the context in which we are called to share in Christ’s life as priests, prophets, and kings. And fundamentally, that means we are called to be missionaries. To realize that our institutions, our schools and parishes, however strong they are, will not withstand secularizing culture if we are not making disciples of Jesus Christ as missionaries.
The Church in the Diocese of Lincoln is fundamentally healthy. But the secular culture of our world is making it ever more difficult for Catholics in our diocese to remain practicing Catholics. Our Mass attendance has continued to decline 1% each year over the past ten years. To be sure, there are many and complicated factors that attribute to this decline. But there is a deep vein of practical atheism coursing through American consumer life, that deadens the soul to a desire for holiness and discourages the hope of anything beyond the horizons of this world.
That means that you men must be dissatisfied with the status quo. To reverse the trend, you must be eager to live for more than yourselves. You must be hungry to work and preach and sanctify, to lead in new ways. You must want to do more than maintain the flock, maintain our institutions, maintain our parishes: you must want to live on fire, in mission for Jesus Christ. You must be willing to be unpopular, uncomfortable, and uncertain of the future—if you are going to bring the Gospel to the world in a transformative way.
Your priesthood can set the world aflame. But your heart must burn within you first. To be the kind of priests the world needs today, you need first to be an intimate disciple of Jesus Christ. To recognize him in the “breaking of the bread.” To adore him. To wonder at his love. To sit in the silent and transforming company of his heart, in adoration of the Holy Eucharist, “love made visible” and the sacrament of divine friendship.
The world needs you, dear sons, to be holy priests—sharing in the sacrifice, the prophecy, and the reign of Jesus Christ. The world needs more than “business as usual” from you. The world needs an extraordinary life of holiness. And all of that means that you must, every day of your priesthood, be on your knees, in silence, before the Lord—growing in love, in wisdom, and in holiness. God’s first language is silence. To be the priest that we need you to be—to live in persona Christi for this moment in time—you must be willing to enter the extraordinary dialogue of silence with the Lord.
In his message for his year’s World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Pope Francis reminded us that there can be no “Christian mission apart from constant contemplative prayer. The Christian life needs to be nourished by attentive listening to God’s word and, above all, by the cultivation of a personal relationship with the Lord in Eucharistic adoration, the privileged ‘place’ for our encounter with God.”
Jesus didn’t need many men in the beginning. He needed the right men. The priesthood today doesn’t need many men. It needs the right men.
Be assured of our prayers for you. And be assured of the Lord’s love for you. May you transform the world, in the love of Jesus Christ.
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