Recognition, celebration and appreciation of the gift of the priesthood of Jesus Christ is the heart of the liturgy of the Chrism Mass.
Cherishing the priesthood is the mission that is given to us all –
- pupils of our schools represented by so many of young pupils, whom I welcome
- members of the diocesan Lourdes Youth Team,
- students of St Mary’s University College,
- members of the caring professions
- parishioners and representatives of parishes and Catholic organisations from the parishes of our diocese
The world over at this Chrism Mass the people of God gather in freedom – though we remember and hold in our prayers those who are still constrained to do so in clandestine circumstances – with their bishops
- to celebrate the gift the priesthood,
- to bless the Holy Oils
- to consecrate the Holy Chrism for use in the celebration of sacraments in the pastoral ministry and in the service of the faithful in the parishes of the local Churches.
The yearly liturgical cycle presents this moment for thanksgiving. The prayers and liturgical texts call us to renewal and to a re-invigorated mission in the priestly service of the Word of God, in the sanctification of life through the sacraments, and in self-sacrificing dedication to priestly ministry.
The biblical passages (Is 61.13a, 6a, 8b-9; Apoc 1.5-8; Lk 4.16-21), so well known to us and to which we have listened, anchor our thoughts and this celebration in Christ as prophet and priest.
They also provide the well-spring for the priestly and prophetic character, through baptism, of each Christian believer.
This Liturgy re-invigorates us for mission as a priestly people.
It engages all of us here-present in prayer with and for those of us called to the exercise of ministerial priesthood.
My dear brothers in the priestly ministry, the Preface of this Mass evokes the core of our vocation and ministry. In prayerful phrases it puts it thus :
They are to renew in his name the sacrifice of human redemption to set before your children the paschal banquet to lead your holy people in charity to nourish them with the word and strengthen them with the Sacraments.
That’s the heart of ministry that we share, my dear brothers in the ministerial priesthood of Jesus Christ.
As priests of Jesus Christ we work to proclaim the Word of God, to celebrate the sacred liturgy and the sacraments, and to evangelise by proclaiming Christian meaning, hope and purpose to human existence.
Priesthood is the exercise of a vocation and a way of life that is as edifying and fulfilling as it is challenging and demanding.
Our experience of life and its struggles, our personal struggle with faith, equip us, whether ordained or not, to measure the demanding nature of priestly ministry. As priestly ministry edifies and fulfils, so too it demands and calls to permanent personal and spiritual renewal.
We recognise that priestly ministry, ever appreciated in our Church and by many Christians and non-Christians, has also become in twenty-first century Ireland an onerous, counter-cultural and, in the eyes of some, a seemingly subordinate way of life.
Both Christian insight and our own experience confirm that healthy and vibrant priestly ministry grows out of a lifestyle that cherishes prayer and reflection, and from the support of active ecclesial communities and parishes. Dynamic priestly service and leadership are fostered by in-service training for clergy and by formation and assistance to enhance, review and sustain professional standards in priestly service. In the course of the forthcoming decades we – parishes, diocese, the Church – shall have to invest resources, time, and indeed we shall have to forego self-interest for a time, in order to refresh and renew our clergy in the course of their ministry. Like everything in life this need to support the updating, human well-being and renewal of clergy will carry a cost. It will also yield a spiritual dividend for our parishes and communities!
This continuous in-service formation, now recognised as a necessary part of all our lives, is vital to enabling priests and religious to re-fuel their understanding of the Christian faith, to update and deepen their sense of Holy Scripture and theology and to explore classical as well as contemporary religious literature and thought. As a local Church we shall have to devise ways of providing for programmes of such ongoing formation, recognising its importance for the vitality of the life of our diocese.
We all know the context in which the vision of priestly ministry, as set out in the preface this Chrism Mass, is lived out. The priest and religious is a herald of God in an epoch which at one and the same time refuses to recognise God, ignores the divine and yet paradoxically manifests numerous signals of quest for God. God, religious faith, are not so much rejected; they are more often the object of caricature and reduced to superficial misrepresentations.
Opening lives to the experience of Christ, ministering through personal presence, Word and Sacrament the saving grace of the paschal mystery to raw human experience, proclaiming the grammar of Christian faith – this is our work in life as priests. It requires skills to know God, to know the ways of the human heart and mind in their many seasons.
This prevailing ethos, in which we live and minister, and which makes the work of evangelisation difficult, is rendered more challenging by an atrophying secularism, which would undo the healthy balance between the secular and the sacred that reason and faith must seek to establish and fine-tune in the service of faith itself and in the service of integral human development.
Added to this, the collapse of the ideology of limitless human progress, the increased sense of the precarious character of existence, disorientation in regard to fundamental human values, disillusionment with corruption, erode the human capacity to hope and to aspire. Uncertainty, the precarious quality of existence, disquiet and disenchantment threaten to atrophy the human soul.
This describes something of the setting for priestly ministry today. Sowing and nurturing the seeds of faith in this context requires human and spiritual qualities. These qualities are grown and nurtured on life’s long and tortuous journey, in the practice of priestly ministry and especially by assisted reflection on the trials of that practice. These skills require constant cultivation in moments, contexts, initiatives designed for that purpose.
Likewise the priest and religious are regularly faced with the impact on individual and family lives of evil and sin. In our weekly ministry we also encounter and seek to carry the burden of the human pain and sufferings of the sick, of the depressed, of the disillusioned spouse, of the poor, of the newly poverty-stricken, of the anxious parent, of the hurting, disaffected young adult, of the victims of child sexual abuse, of the hurt and wounded colleague in ministry, of parent, spouse or friend of somebody whose reserves gave up and committed suicide, of the victims of violence or murder. The list is endless, as we know.
Last week at the Clergy Conference, prepared by the Living Church Office, we heard something of results from research on the significant impact of working with the traumatic experiences of others. As ministers of the Word and Sacrament who mediate the Paschal mystery of Christ’s redemptive life, death and resurrection, when we encounter these destructive and intractable realities of life, it is our vocation to lead the suffering and afflicted to the heart of the mystery of Christian faith, where the power and workings of evil are broken by the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Col 3.14-15 ; Eph 2.16). This is our vocation and our mission.
Fulfilling this vocation takes a toll. It also ennobles. It matures and indeed it sanctifies. Yet at the same time we have to realise that the Church community, be it parish or diocese, needs to make provision for appropriate assistance and support for the impact of stress, of secondary traumatisation of clergy, of deflected anger, in priestly ministry. We need to know this, to take it on board and to follow through with appropriate support and understanding.
And let’s face it : as a Church, as people, as a society we have much to learn and discover in this arena of care for the carers of our society and of our Church. The Living Church process in our diocese provides a framework for us to explore these issues and to devise feasible responses to care for clergy.
As we move through the months ahead we shall have many opportunities to consolidate our sense of the priesthood and of priestly ministry and our commitment to cherishing the gift of priesthood.
The International Eucharistic Congress will provide us priests with a time to renew our sense as priests and pastors of being tasked with gathering in and building the community of faith.
The Congress will enhance our sense of vocation, like the prophets, to nourish, challenge, heal and transform the faith community with the Word of God. It will also revitalise our sense of sacramental ministry and the significance of that ministry in the process of evangelisation.
A few months later, on 12 October, we shall begin the Year of Faith, proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and to explore the pertinence of Christian faith for the human condition .. “so that the members of the Church will be credible and joy-filled witnesses to the Risen Lord in the world of today – capable of leading those many people who are seeking it to the “door of faith.”[1]
The Living Church project, moving towards the diocesan Congress in 2013, will gain further impetus from initiatives to be generated by this Year of Faith in the life of the universal Church. Indeed we should plan and imagine in our diocese and in our parishes ways to seize the grace of that Year of Faith for our parishes and for our faith communities.
My brothers in priestly service, my dear sisters and brothers in Christ, we, your priests, are about to renew the promises of our Ordination in your presence, mindful of these occasions of consolidation and renewal of faith and Christian life that mark the year ahead.
We look forward to these expressions and events of faith with Christian hope in our hearts and minds.
We know the joys, the struggles, the pain, the self-denials entailed in gospel-inspired renewal.
We priests and bishops accept that high personal, professional, religious and moral standards are legitimately expected of us. We shall continue to do our best to inspire by example, whilst ever aware that we are sinners in need of God’s mercy.
We ask for understanding and your collaborative support in ministering to the increasing demands, spiritual, religious, and human in our parishes and ministries. Together with parishioners we need to intensify and increase volunteer support in the pastoral outreach of our parishes.
In these times which have tested the morale of dedicated clergy, the Christian community needs to find its voice to re-articulate the noble, self-sacrificing and essential service to Church and society of the priest.
That voice, alas all too silent, stifled admittedly by the scandals of criminal sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults, must find words again from within the horror chamber of these scandals in our Church and their destruction of lives, to call forth in God’s name new vocations, new aspirants to the priesthood and religious life, to proclaim the saving mystery of Christ, to gather believing communities to listen to the Word of God, to celebrate the sacraments and to offer the meaning and healing of God’s loving mercy, made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, to men and women, to society and to systems of human governance.
May this sacred liturgy renew us in faith, in cherishing the divine gift of priesthood, in the exercise of our priestly ministry in the service of God’s Word, the Sacred liturgy and the sacraments.