The world still needs
priests, men able to bring God to humanity.
For this reason, the years
spent in the seminary teach would-be priests to be “men of God”, train
them to develop a deeper personal relationship to Jesus.
It is however
also a time of study, because “The Christian faith has an essentially
rational and intellectual dimension. Were it to lack that dimension, it
would not be itself.”
Finally, the seminary is a “time of growth of
human maturity” because priests must have “have the right balance of
heart and mind, reason and feeling, body and soul” as well as cardinal
and theological virtues.
Thus wrote Benedict XVI on the Feast Day of
Saint Luke the Evangelist in his letter to seminarians marking the end
of the Year for Priests.
Here it is the full text of the letter.
Dear Seminarians,
When in December 1944 I was drafted for military
service, the company commander asked each of us what we planned to do in
the future. I answered that I wanted to become a Catholic priest.
The
lieutenant replied: "Then you ought to look for something else. In the
new Germany priests are no longer needed". I knew that this "new
Germany" was already coming to an end, and that, after the enormous
devastation, which that madness had brought upon the country, priests
would be needed more than ever. Today the situation is completely
changed. In different ways, though, many people nowadays also think that
the Catholic priesthood is not a "job" for the future, but one that
belongs more to the past.
You, dear friends, have decided to enter the
seminary and to prepare for priestly ministry in the Catholic Church in
spite of such opinions and objections. You have done a good thing.
Because people will always have need of God, even in an age marked by
technical mastery of the world and globalization: they will always need
the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, the God who gathers us
together in the universal Church in order to learn with him and through
him life’s true meaning and in order to uphold and apply the standards
of true humanity. Where people no longer perceive God, life grows empty;
nothing is ever enough.
People then seek escape in euphoria and
violence; these are the very things that increasingly threaten young
people. God is alive. He has created every one of us and he knows us
all. He is so great that he has time for the little things in our lives:
"Every hair of your head is numbered".
God is alive, and he needs
people to serve him and bring him to others. It does make sense to
become a priest: the world needs priests, pastors, today, tomorrow and
always, until the end of time.
The seminary is a community journeying towards
priestly ministry. I have said something very important here: one does
not become a priest on one’s own.
The "community of disciples" is
essential, the fellowship of those who desire to serve the greater
Church. In this letter, I would like to point out – thinking back to my
own time in the seminary – several elements which I consider important
for these years of your journeying.
1. Anyone who wishes to become a priest must be first and foremost a "man of God", to use the expression of Saint Paul (1 Tim
6:11). For us God is not some abstract hypothesis; he is not some
stranger who left the scene after the "big bang". God has revealed
himself in Jesus Christ. In the face of Jesus Christ, we see the face of
God. In his words, we hear God himself speaking to us. It follows that
the most important thing in our path towards priesthood and during the
whole of our priestly lives is our personal relationship with God in
Jesus Christ. The priest is not the leader of a sort of association
whose membership he tries to maintain and expand. He is God’s messenger
to his people. He wants to lead them to God and in this way to foster
authentic communion between all men and women. That is why it is so
important, dear friends, that you learn to live in constant intimacy
with God. When the Lord tells us to "pray constantly", he is obviously
not asking us to recite endless prayers, but urging us never to lose our
inner closeness to God. Praying means growing in this intimacy. So it
is important that our day should begin and end with prayer; that we
listen to God as the Scriptures are read; that we share with him our
desires and our hopes, our joys and our troubles, our failures and our
thanks for all his blessings, and thus keep him ever before us as the
point of reference for our lives. In this way, we grow aware of our
failings and learn to improve, but we also come to appreciate all the
beauty and goodness, which we daily take for, granted and so we grow in
gratitude. With gratitude comes joy for the fact that God is close to us
and that we can serve him.
2. For us God is not simply Word. In the sacraments,
he gives himself to us in person, through physical realities. At the
heart of our relationship with God and our way of life is the Eucharist.
Celebrating it devoutly, and thus encountering Christ personally,
should be the centre of all our days. In Saint Cyprian’s interpretation
of the Gospel prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread", he says among
other things that "our" bread – the bread which we receive as Christians
in the Church – is the Eucharistic Lord himself. In this petition of
the Our Father, then, we pray that he may daily give us "our" bread; and
that it may always nourish our lives; that the Risen Christ, who gives
himself to us in the Eucharist, may truly shape the whole of our lives
by the radiance of his divine love. The proper celebration of the
Eucharist involves knowing, understanding and loving the Church’s
liturgy in its concrete form. In the liturgy we pray with the faithful
of every age – the past, the present and the future are joined in one
great chorus of prayer. As I can state from personal experience, it is
inspiring to learn how it all developed, what a great experience of
faith is reflected in the structure of the Mass, and how it has been
shaped by the prayer of many generations.
3. The sacrament of Penance is also important. It
teaches me to see myself as God sees me, and it forces me to be honest
with myself. It leads me to humility. The Curé of Ars once said: "You
think it makes no sense to be absolved today, because you know that
tomorrow you will commit the same sins over again. Yet," he continues,
"God instantly forgets tomorrow’s sins in order to give you his grace
today." Even when we have to struggle continually with the same
failings, it is important to resist the coarsening of our souls and the
indifference which would simply accept that this is the way we are. It
is important to keep pressing forward, without scrupulosity, in the
grateful awareness that God forgives us ever anew – yet also without the
indifference that might lead us to abandon altogether the struggle for
holiness and self-improvement. Moreover, by letting myself be forgiven, I
learn to forgive others. In recognizing my own weakness, I grow more
tolerant and understanding of the failings of my neighbour.
4. I urge you to retain an appreciation for popular
piety, which is different in every culture yet always remains very
similar, for the human heart is ultimately one and the same. Certainly,
popular piety tends towards the irrational, and can at times be somewhat
superficial. Yet it would be quite wrong to dismiss it. Through that
piety, the faith has entered human hearts and become part of the common
patrimony of sentiments and customs, shaping the life and emotions of
the community. Popular piety is thus one of the Church’s great
treasures. The faith has taken on flesh and blood. Certainly popular
piety always needs to be purified and refocused, yet it is worthy of our
love and it truly makes us into the "People of God".
5. Above all, your time in the seminary is also a time
of study. The Christian faith has an essentially rational and
intellectual dimension. Were it to lack that dimension, it would not be
itself. Paul speaks of a "standard of teaching" to which we were
entrusted in Baptism (Rom 6:17). All of you know the words of
Saint Peter, which the medieval theologians saw as the justification for
a rational and scientific theology: "Always be ready to make your
defence to anyone who demands from you an ‘accounting’ (logos) for the
hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15). Learning how to make
such a defence is one of the primary responsibilities of your years in
the seminary. I can only plead with you: Be committed to your studies!
Take advantage of your years of study! You will not regret it.
Certainly, the subjects which you are studying can often seem far
removed from the practice of the Christian life and the pastoral
ministry. Yet it is completely mistaken to start questioning their
practical value by asking: Will this be helpful to me in the future?
Will it be practically or pastorally useful? The point is not simply to
learn evidently useful things, but to understand and appreciate the
internal structure of the faith as a whole, so that it can become a
response to people’s questions, which on the surface change from one
generation to another yet ultimately remain the same. For this reason,
it is important to move beyond the changing questions of the moment in
order to grasp the real questions, and so to understand how the answers
are real answers. It is important to have a thorough knowledge of sacred
Scripture as a whole, in its unity as the Old and the New Testaments:
the shaping of texts, their literary characteristics, the process by
which they came to form the canon of sacred books, their dynamic inner
unity, a unity which may not be immediately apparent but which in fact
gives the individual texts their full meaning. It is important to be
familiar with the Fathers and the great Councils in which the Church
appropriated, through faith-filled reflection, the essential statements
of Scripture. I could easily go on. What we call dogmatic theology is
the understanding of the individual contents of the faith in their
unity, indeed, in their ultimate simplicity: each single element is, in
the end, only an unfolding of our faith in the one God who has revealed
himself to us and continues to do so. I do not need to point out the
importance of knowing the essential issues of moral theology and
Catholic social teaching. The importance nowadays of ecumenical
theology, and of a knowledge of the different Christian communities, is
obvious; as is the need for a basic introduction to the great religions,
to say nothing of philosophy: the understanding of that human process
of questioning and searching to which faith seeks to respond. But you
should also learn to understand and – dare I say it – to love canon law,
appreciating how necessary it is and valuing its practical
applications: a society without law would be a society without rights.
Law is the condition of love. I will not go on with this list, but I
simply say once more: love the study of theology and carry it out in the
clear realization that theology is anchored in the living community of
the Church, which, with her authority, is not the antithesis of
theological science but its presupposition. Cut off from the believing
Church, theology would cease to be itself and instead it would become a
medley of different disciplines lacking inner unity.
6. Your years in the seminary should also be a time of
growth towards human maturity. It is important for the priest, who is
called to accompany others through the journey of life up to the
threshold of death, to have the right balance of heart and mind, reason
and feeling, body and soul, and to be humanly integrated. To the
theological virtues the Christian tradition has always joined the
cardinal virtues derived from human experience and philosophy, and, more
generally, from the sound ethical tradition of humanity. Paul makes
this point this very clearly to the Philippians: "Finally, brothers,
whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is
pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any
excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these
things" (4:8). This also involves the integration of sexuality into the
whole personality. Sexuality is a gift of the Creator yet it is also a
task which relates to a person’s growth towards human maturity. When it
is not integrated within the person, sexuality becomes banal and
destructive. Today we can see many examples of this in our society.
Recently we have seen with great dismay that some priests disfigured
their ministry by sexually abusing children and young people. Instead of
guiding people to greater human maturity and setting them an example,
their abusive behaviour caused great damage for which we feel profound
shame and regret. As a result of all this, many people, perhaps even
some of you, might ask whether it is good to become a priest, whether
the choice of celibacy makes any sense as a truly human way of life. Yet
even the most reprehensible abuse cannot discredit the priestly
mission, which remains great and pure. Thank God, all of us know
exemplary priests, men shaped by their faith, who bear witness that one
can attain to an authentic, pure and mature humanity in this state and
specifically in the life of celibacy. Admittedly, what has happened
should make us all the more watchful and attentive, precisely in order
to examine ourselves earnestly, before God, as we make our way towards
priesthood, so as to understand whether this is his will for me. It is
the responsibility of your confessor and your superiors to accompany you
and help you along this path of discernment. It is an essential part of
your journey to practise the fundamental human virtues, with your gaze
fixed on the God who has revealed himself in Christ, and to let
yourselves be purified by him ever anew.
7. The origins of a priestly vocation are nowadays
more varied and disparate than in the past. Today the decision to become
a priest often takes shape after one has already entered upon a secular
profession. Often it grows within the Communities, particularly within
the Movements, which favour a communal encounter with Christ and his
Church, spiritual experiences and joy in the service of the faith. It
also matures in very personal encounters with the nobility and the
wretchedness of human existence. As a result, candidates for the
priesthood often live on very different spiritual continents. It can be
difficult to recognize the common elements of one’s future mandate and
its spiritual path. For this very reason, the seminary is important as a
community, which advances above and beyond differences of spirituality.
The Movements are a magnificent thing. You know how much I esteem them
and love them as a gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Yet they must
be evaluated by their openness to what is truly Catholic, to the life of
the whole Church of Christ, which for all her variety still remains
one. The seminary is a time when you learn with one another and from one
another. In community life, which can at times be difficult, you should
learn generosity and tolerance, not only bearing with, but also
enriching one another, so that each of you will be able to contribute
his own gifts to the whole, even as all serve the same Church, the same
Lord. This school of tolerance, indeed, of mutual acceptance and mutual
understanding in the unity of Christ’s Body, is an important part of
your years in the seminary.
Dear seminarians, with these few lines I have wanted
to let you know how often I think of you, especially in these difficult
times, and how close I am to you in prayer. Please pray for me, that I
may exercise my ministry well, as long as the Lord may wish.
I entrust
your journey of preparation for priesthood to the maternal protection of
Mary Most Holy, whose home was a school of goodness and of grace. May
Almighty God bless you all, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
From the Vatican, 18 October 2010, the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist.
SIC: AN/INT'L