“The Father anointed our Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy
Spirit. May Jesus preserve you to sanctify the Christian people and to offer
sacrifice to God”; “Accept from the holy people of God the gifts to be offered
to him. Know what you are doing, and imitate the mystery you celebrate: model
your life on the mystery of the Lord’s cross”.
Pontificale Romanum: De Ordinatione Episcopi,
presbyterorum et diaconorum,
Edition typical, Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis 1990)
From the Vatican, 27th
March 2010
Dear Brothers in the Priesthood,
In these paschal days we
will live the Mystery of our Redemption, and we will carry out actions and
speak words that are truly found at the heart of our priestly existence. On
Good Friday we will live that humble and prophetic action of prostration, just
as we did on the day of our Ordination; in this way during the Sacred Triduum
we will have the opportunity to welcome the gifts renewed by grace, begging the
Divine Providence to be able to offer plentiful fruit for ourselves and for the
Salvation of the world.
As
the formula for the anointing with Chrism reminds us, we are clothed with the
very power of Christ, with that potestas
with which the Father consecrated His only Son in the Holy Spirit, and which
has been given to us precisely to sanctify His People and to offer the
Eucharistic Sacrifice. Any contrary use of the sacramental power received in
Sacred Order is illegitimate and dangerous, both for our salvation and for the
good of the Church herself. As if calling to mind the absolute disproportion
between the greatness of the Mystery and the smallness of the man, it is not by
chance that the rite recalls: “Know
what you are doing”. Although we will never be able to fully appreciate the
great Mystery which has been placed in our hands, we are nevertheless called to
a continuous striving after moral perfection, so as to live “the Mystery which
is placed in our hands” to be “imitators of Christ”.
This is the extraordinary and
undimmed daily newness of the Priesthood: the Mystery is placed in our hands!
The Lord of time and history, he who made all that exists, from whom we come
and to whom we return, the Author of life, makes some of his poor creatures
participants in his own saving power, entrusting himself, like a defenceless
sacrificial lamb, completely into their hands. May this entrustment never
become a betrayal! May he keep awake the consciousness of the embrace of the
predilection, of which we are the objects, and may he also lead us, especially
in the time of testing, to repeat our total “yes”: a “yes” conscious of its own
limits, but not held back by them; a “yes” free from all inferiority complexes;
a “yes” conscious of history, but never intimidated in the face of it; “yes”
which, beginning from that spoken by the Blessed Virgin Mary in the house of
Nazareth has travelled down the centuries to become actual in the Saints and in
the Today of our Christian existence.
A Priest aware of what he does,
conforming his life to Christ, overcomes the world! This is the victory which
is the real “proof” of the Resurrection of Christ.
Titular Archbishop of Vittoriana
Secretary