Our Priests

Our Priests
www.cinopsbegone.com – Sun., June 14, 2009 - Corpus Christi

There is excitement in the air when you begin to reread Pope Benedict’s meditations from June 8th to June 14th. A lot of times you are not even aware of it. Guess who is on the pedestal, Our Parish Priest.

Here is the meditation of Saturday, June 13, 2009:

Recently, I had occasion to speak with a person who holds an important public office and who said to me:

The impression that people have today is that being a Christian is something irksome, a multiplicity of commands and prohibitions to which new prohibitions are added with every increase in knowledge and every new possibility that is opened to us.

Little by little, it begins to seem impossible to live all that, to bear all that. But when a person has once met CHRIST, when a person has once seen JESUS and really learned to know HIM, then everything is changed.

Then everything is comprehensible and life is renewed. And you priests have really one task: to present JESUS to all people in such a way that they see HIM and learn to love HIM. Then everything that faith teaches will be self-evident.

I remember then that Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians, described his activity as apostle and priest in the following words:
“I depict CHRIST clearly before your eyes.” cf. Gal 3:1

Ultimately that is what the priesthood is all about: to have seen JESUS oneself, to have received with love HIM whom we have seen, to live in that seeing, and then to show HIM to others.

From Roman homilies, March l7, 1985
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Co-Workers of the Truth,” Meditations for Every Day of the Year, 1992, Ignatius Press, San Francisco (ghk,opl)

Today’s Liturgy of the Hours: St. Thomas Aquinas, priest

Since it was the will of God’s only-begotten Son, that men should share in his divinity, he assumed our nature in order that by becoming man he might make men gods. Moreover, when he took our flesh he dedicated the whole of its substance to our salvation. He offered his body to God the Father on the altar of the cross as a sacrifice for our reconciliation. He shed his blood for our ransom and purification, so that we might be redeemed from our wretched state of bondage and cleansed from all sin. But to ensure that the memory of so great a gift would abide with us forever; he left his body as food and his blood as drink for the faithful to consume in the form of bread and wine.