The priest stands in the breach...

The priest stands in the no-man's-land between...

  heaven and earth,

  war and peace,

  life and death,

  the eternal and the passing

  belief and unbelief,

  light and dark,

  humanity and divinity,

  gift and mystery,

  sin and forgiveness,

  guilt and redemption,

  what is and what is possible

  what is and what ought to be,

  what is and what shall become.

Priestly ministry while standing in the midst of these dueling realities can be a dangerous place to be, for it is the place first and best occupied by the Lord himself.  He binds up all creation in himself; he gathers those who have been lost and scattered across the great expanse of space and time to bring their voices into one song of praise before the Father.  He is the Eternal Word who became flesh to dwell among us and to show us the Glory of the Father.

The image of these priests standing together and clinging to the cross in the midst of chaos is an inspiration and reminder to me of what it's all about.  I stand from afar in solidarity with my sacerdotal brothers (no doubt of the orthodox persuasion) to pray for the deliverance of Kiev.  I pray that our own nation not be put to the same test in the crucible of revolution and violence among our own people, but that God may show his mercy and provide deliverance.  May many holy priests and people of good faith have the courage to cling to that cross for the salvation of our nation and world.

May 28, 2005 - Eight years...



May God sustain in all priests a grateful awareness of the gift they have received; may he also awaken in many young men a ready and generous response to his call to give themselves completely to the cause of the Gospel. The men and women of our time, who have such need of meaning and hope, will greatly benefit from their witness. And the Christian community will rejoice, knowing that it can look forward with confidence to the challenges of the approaching Third Millennium.  -Blessed John Paul II ("Gift and Mystery" 1996)

 

Von Speyr on priests and the sacrament of confession...

   "The confessions the priest hears are much more numerous than his own.  While listening to confessions he hears the most varied, and at times most serious sins, ones that startle him and perhaps have an enduring influence on him.  There is, of course, the grace of office that protects him in this respect, but he must deal properly with it.  On the one hand he should not employ its objectifying power as a kind of trick by when he pushes away everything he has heard so that he need know nothing more of it, simply locking the office door in order to be left alone.  On the other hand he should not immerse himself dangerously in what he has heard.  In order to strike the proper balance here he must look at the Son and his relationship to the Father.  The unique Son has become the Son of Man and has been depersonalized in the generality of human existence; but this individual man, looking up to the Father, is at the same time personalized as the unique Son of God.  He has become flesh and has to defend this flesh against the world, but does so as one who perpetually offers this same flesh to the Father in his service of redemption.  He is continually gathering himself together in order to give perpetually of himself, of his flesh and blood.  He defends himself against the world so that he may be collected for the Father and let himself be scattered into all the world by the Father and in the Father's will.  The Father desires that the Son be this individual flesh that remains intact in the face of the world no matter how intensely it gives itself to the world.  In giving his own flesh he must have the experience of incarnate existence, not in such a way that he succumbs within it and becomes tainted, nor in such a way that he feels elevated above it and closes himself off.  The real priestly situation of the Son is found where the Son is both a body surrendered in suffering and in the sacrament and the unique Son of the Father in human form.  An that is also the position of the priest who must administer confession of those entrusted to him, yet must himself confess and embody before the Father in a single totality both the complete authority and the complete submission to confession.  He gathers confessions, but he scatters them as well by confessing along with the penitents, by intervening in their confessions as penitent and by rounding out the confessional sacrifice of his penitents through his own sacrifice.  Wherever it may appear that he stands above confession, there he as a genuine priest must stand under it; he washes the feet of the Lord's disciples.

   The penitent comes as a person and experiences the official authority within the confessional; the priest comes as the representative of the office and must enter into the personal realm.  As a priest he can do this only if he is intact in his own existence as a person; only thus can he infuse the official aspect with a personal element.  At Cana the Lord offered the best wine; it would have sufficed for the miracle if it had been any wine at all or if the water had taken on the taste of wine.  What the Lord offers beyond that is an expression of his own personal standard; he knows what good wine is, and this is the wine he wants to give.  The priest should administer confession similarly so that the very best emerges from within it, and thus he must become ever more personal according to God's intentions so that he may fructify the office in a more enduring fashion."

... from Adrienne von Spyer, Confession, tr. Douglas W. Scott, Ignatius Press (1985), pp. 134-35.