A Blessing for All

This is a beautiful Irish Blessing I like to share with everyone.

The Year for Priests

This year we are marking the 150th anniversary of the St. John Mary Vianney (the Cure of Ars) who is the universal patron of parish priests. Because of this, Pope Benedict XVI has declared this year to be the Year for Priests. He opened it last June 16, 2009, the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This year for Priests will end will last until the Feast of the Sacred Heart next year (2010).

In his Letter proclaiming this Year for Priests, Pope Benedict said that this year is meant "to deepen the commitment of all priests to interior renewal for the sake of a more forceful witness to the Gospel in today's world." During this year, the whole Church, clergy and laity alike, is asked to reflect on the gift of priesthood that Christ our Lord gave to the Church.

Once, St. John Mary Vianney said: "A good shepherd, a pastor after God's heart, is the greatest treasure which the good Lord can grant to a parish, and one of the most precious gifts of divine mercy... O how great is the priest!.. If he realized what he is, he would die... God obeys him: he utters a few words and the Lord descends from heaven at his voice, to be contained within a small host... Without the Sacrament of Holy Orders, we would not have the Lord. Who put him there in that tabernacle? The priest. Who welcomed your soul at the beginning of your life? The priest. Who feeds your soul and gives it strength for its journey? The priest... Leave a parish for twenty years without a priest, and they end by worshiping the beast there... The priest is not a priest for himself, he is a priest for you."

We priests tremble at these words of the Cure of Arse as he reminds us of the great responsibility that has been laid on our shoulders. These words humble us for truly we cannot but feel so unworthy of this great privilege and task the Lord has entrusted to us. Yet it is good to be reminded of the great gift of the priesthood and of what the priesthood is really all about, for nowadays both lay and clergy have the tendency to conceive of priests and the priesthood in secular, corporate terms. Nowadays, how often do we hear of priests likened to a CEO? Or how often is he expected to act like a showbiz personality in his homilies or in the way he runs the parish? I submit to you that the idea that people usually have of priests and their expectations of them do not quite match what the Lord really intends them to be. This is one of the causes of deep misunderstandings in the parish sometimes. Hopefully this Year for Priests will also be an occasion for the lay people to purify their notions and expectations of the priesthood and priests.

For me, this Year for Priests is not about putting them on a pedestal. Above all, it is about praying for them. They too, like anybody else, struggle hard on the road to holiness. Certainly, they are not as perfect as the angels. This Year for Priests is also about "re-configuring" our expectations of them. One of the greatest source of inspiration for us priests is when we see lay people try to take their faith seriously and make efforts to really live that faith. When we see lay people who are like that we also grow.

Finally, may this Year for Priests inspire parishes to really pray for vocations. We lack priests in our diocese. Pray, therefore, the Lord of the harvest to send laborers in his vineyard.

Receiving Holy Communion by the Hand

Pope Benedict XVI, in his book "God is Near Us," gives us some instructions on how to receive Holy Communion by the hand in a proper, reverential way. He quotes St. Cyril of Jerusalem (4th century A.D.) who tells candidates for baptism what they should do at communion. He says: "They should make a throne of their hands, laying the right upon the left to form a throne for the King, forming at the same a cross. This symbolic gesture, so fine and so profound, is what concerns him: the hands of man form a cross, which becomes a throne, down into which the King inclines himself. The open, outstretched hand can thus become a sign of the way that a man offers himself to the Lord, opens his hands for him, that they may become an instrument of his presence and a throne of his mercies in this world."

The Holy Father continues to say that when we receive communion, we should cultivate "an inner submission before the mystery of God that puts himself into our hands. Thus we should not forget that not only our hands are impure but also our tongue and also our heart and that we often sin more with the tongue than with the hands. God takes an enourmous risk - and at the same time an expression of his merciful goodness - in allowing not only our hand and our tongue but even our heart to come into contact with him. We see this in the Lord's willingness to enter into us and live with us, within us, and to become from within the heart of our life and the agent of transformation." (God is Near Us, p. 71)

The Biblical Basis of His Reflections

As usual, Pope John Paul II begins a new cycle of reflections on the Theology of the Body by taking a key Biblical passage as a kinf of a jumping board. This time, the passage is a passage from Chapter 12 of the Gospel of St. Mark.

On one occasion, a group of Sadducees approached Jesus to ask him a question about the so-called law of levirate marriage. This law is contained in Deuteronomy 25:7-10 and concerns brothers who lived under the same roof: “If one of them died without leaving children, the brother of the deceased had to take the widow of his dead brother as his wife. The child born from this marriage was recognized as the son of the deceased, so that his bloodline would not become extinct and that his heredity would be preserved in the family” (see Gen 38:8).

The Sadducees presented Jesus with the following case: “There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; and the second married her and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. In the resurrection, when they will rise, whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her” (Mk 12:20-23). This argument was intended to prove that there is no resurrection.

In reply, Jesus said: “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they take neither wife nor husband, but are like angels in heaven” (Mk 12:24-25). These words, says John Paul II, complete “the revelation of the body.”

According to the Holy Father, Jesus, in his reply, affirmed that God who is the Giver of Life is not bound by the law of death brought about by sin. God rules over man’s earthly history of which death is a part because of man’s Fall. God triumphs over death. God, who revealed Himself to Moses as “He who is,” constitutes the inexhaustible fountain of existence and life. Moreover, in his reply to the Sadducees who denied the resurrection, Jesus enunciated two important teachings: 1) He affirmed the future resurrection of the body, and 2) He made a statement about the state of the bodies of risen human beings.

The Resurrection of the Body

Pope John Paul II began the Third Cycle of his reflections, this time on the Resurrection of the Body and how this fundamental article of our faith sheds light on marriage and celibacy (or continence for the “sake of the Kingdom”), by meditating on Christ’s conversation with the Sadducees, who denied the reality of the resurrection. This dia-logue is found in a passage in Matthew 22:24-30 (with parallels in Mk 12:18-27 and Lk 20: 27-40).

Christ’s conversation with the Sadducees regarding the future resurrection of the body is crucially important for two reasons: first, it forms the third component of what the Holy Father calls “the triptych of words that are essential and constitutive for the the-ology of the body.” The other two passages are: the one in which Christ refers to the “beginning” and the one in which He appeals to “purity of heart.” Second, its contents “have an essential meaning for the theology of the body.” Moreover, Christ’s words re-garding the resurrection in his conversation with the Sadducees “have a fundamental im-portance for understanding marriage in the Christian sense and also ‘the renunciation of conjugal life’ for the kingdom of heaven.”

TOB - The Resurrection of the Body

After a long pause, we shall now continue our presentation of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body.

In Cycle One, The Body in Creation, John Paul II brings us back to God’s original purpose and plan for man created in his image and likeness in the mystery of creation. In Cycle Two, The Body Fallen yet Redeemed, the Holy Father reflects on the fallen nature of the human person, male and female, now saddled by the adverse heritage of sin and concupiscence. However, though man has fallen, he has been redeemed by Christ. We cannot hope to fully understand who man is if we do not understand him in the dimensions of sin and redemption. But there is more to an understanding of man’s true nature: man, fallen but redeemed, is also a being called, in Christ and through Christ, to share in the mystery of the resurrection. In other words, for John Paul II, we can only have a total vision of man if we understand him in the dimensions of creation, sin, redemption and the future resurrection to which he is called by the living God. Cycle Three (nine addresses from November 11 to February 10, 1982) of his reflections deals precisely on the mystery of the resurrection.

It is on this Cycle Three of his reflections that we now turn.

HAPPY EASTER!

THE LORD IS RISEN, ALLELUIA, ALLELUIA!