Two Important Occasions in the Year for Priests
by Fr. Roger Landry - January 15, 2010
When civil governments declare a special year — like last year's celebrations of the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln — it generally remains on the periphery of most people's lives. When the Church, however, declares an ecclesiastical holy year — like the Years of the Rosary, the Eucharist, St. Paul and the present Year for Priests — it is meant to have a central influence on how individual Catholics and the Church as a whole live and worship throughout the year.
The Catholic Church in the United States is now in the midst of the 25th annual National Vocation Awareness Week, which concludes tomorrow. On Monday the Church throughout the world will begin the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity. This year both of these periods of prayer can and should be enhanced by the larger ecclesiastical Year for Priests we're celebrating.
2010 marks the 35th National Vocation Awareness Week, which begins on the feast of the baptism of the Lord and continues throughout the first week of Ordinary Time. The timing is to meant to indicate that by our baptism every Catholic has been called to holiness, and that for most of us that holiness is to be sought and lived in our ordinary day-to-day lives. The U.S. Bishops ask us during these days to reflect upon the vocational meaning of our existence and to pray for others that they may awaken to the revelation of the Lord's plans for them. In particular, they ask us to make an extra effort to pray for vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life; for those God is calling to the single life as celibates in the world; and for those with the vocation to marriage, that they might seek the sanctification of their spouses and children.
During this Year for Priests, this week of prayer and education is a time to recognize just how crucial the vocation to the priesthood is to the life of the Church: without the priesthood and the sacraments the priest makes possible, it would be much more difficult — almost impossible — for any of the baptized to live out their vocation to sanctity. It is, therefore, also an occasion to pray to the Harvest Master with gratitude and supplication for those who are already priests, those in formation for the priesthood, those discerning a priestly vocation and those yet totally unaware that God is calling them to this path of holiness and the sanctification of others.
In late 2007, the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy — in recognition of the truths that the priesthood is essential to the universal call to holiness and that in some places priestly vocations are in short supply — began a worldwide effort asking the people of God to pray for priestly vocations. In a beautiful and highly-recommended booklet entitled "Adoration, Reparation and Spiritual Motherhood for Priests," it lifted up as a model of the type of prayer it was proposing the tiny village of Lu Monferrato in northern Italy. In 1881, a time of increasing secularism and virulent anti-clericalism, the mothers of this tiny village of a few thousand inhabitants, conscious of the need for priestly vocations, began to gather each Tuesday afternoon for Eucharistic adoration to ask the Harvest Master to send priestly laborers. They would make together the following prayer: "O God, grant that one of my sons may become a priest! I myself want to live as a good Christian and want to guide my children always to do what is right, so that I may receive the grace, O God, to be allowed to give you a holy priest! Amen!" That prayer, and their fervent desire for vocations, bore more fruit than any of them could have ever imagined. In the span of a few decades, this one village parish — much smaller than many of the parishes in the Diocese of Fall River — produced 152 priestly vocations and 171 religious women to 41 different congregations.
The same Lord who abundantly answered their prayers still listens attentively and lovingly to ours. This National Vocation Awareness Week, within the Year for Priests, is a propitious time for all of us in the Church to pray for priestly vocations with even greater trust and perseverance that the people of Lu Monferrato, because the need for priests today is even greater.
The Year for Priests is also supposed to have an influence on how we experience the Octave for Christian Unity, which begins on Monday and culminates, as it always does, on the January 25th feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, the priest-apostle who worked so hard not only to build the Church but to keep it united as "one body and one spirit" with "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all" (Eph 4:4-6).
During this Year for Priests, the principle focus, as in everything the Church does, is meant to be on Jesus Christ, the eternal high priest. When we examine his "great priestly prayer," made to the Father on the night before he was executed, we see that he prayed principally for two things: for the holiness of the apostles and all those to whom they would hear the Gospel through them; and for unity among all believers, "that they may be all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I am in you" (Jn 17:20-21). As priest, during the first Mass, Jesus prayed that our unity with each other be as complete as the perfect unity that exists between the persons of the Blessed Trinity.
We might be tempted to dismiss Jesus' prayer as something that, however beautiful, is clearly unachievable. Jesus, however, would never have prayed for something intrinsically impossible because prayer for him was not an exercise in "wishful thinking." Moreover, it is inconceivable that God the Father would refuse the prayer of his Son. Before he raised Lazarus from the dead, Jesus gave witness to this truth, saying, "I thank you, Father, for having heard me. I know that you always hear me" (Jn 11:42). Therefore, if Jesus were praying that we be one, that we be as united among ourselves as the Persons in the Blessed Trinity are united, then that must mean it is not impossible and that the Father heard that prayer.
While it is true that full communion will be finalized in heaven in the communion of saints, it is also clear that Jesus was praying for it in this world. During the same discourse he said, "I am not asking you to take them [us] out of the world." He wanted us to be "in" the world without being "of" it, and gave us the reason why: our unity in this world was to be the greatest sign of all of who God is and how God loves us. "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you," he implored, "may they also be in us, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (Jn 17:15-23). Christian unity, in other words, will be the greatest testimony of God's love and of the truth of Christ's words and deeds. Division among Christians, on the contrary, will obscure that truth and love — and obviously has over the course of history.
If this communion with God and with each other meant so much to the Lord that he poured out his heart praying for it in his great priestly prayer to the Father, then each of us who loves the Lord Jesus must make it our life's mission to pray and work to bring about that communion of love. Priests and faithful alike, especially during this Year for Priests, need to support our High Priest in this, his ardent priestly desire.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
