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Your generation grasped the intuition that God\u2019s vision of human love is magnificent, that Christian perfection is not the exclusive preserve of monks, and that marriage, too, is a path to holiness. You asked your priests to examine the Christian mystery of marriage, to deepen its theology, and to work with you to develop a spirituality for the married Christian. You were quite right to be demanding. Good work has been done. The path is now marked out for the Christian who wishes to strive for Christian perfection within and through marriage. L\u2019Anneau d\u2019Or, <\/i>the magazine, has contributed to this as best it could. We must persevere, for the task is far from complete.<\/p>\n
But today\u2014in this final issue of the tenth year of L\u2019Anneau d\u2019Or<\/i>\u2014allow me, in turn, to make a demand of you. I ask you\u2014who once asked us to understand the greatness of your marriage\u2014to reflect on the greatness of our priestly vocation. Make no mistake: I am not seeking sympathy, but rather a profound understanding of the mysterious powers of our sacrament.<\/p>\n
For the priest of our time certainly does not lack sympathy. Never before have literature, theatre, and cinema shown such interest in him. Undoubtedly, the credit for the priest\u2019s grand entry into contemporary literature belongs to (Georges) Bernanos and his unforgettable Diary of a Country Priest<\/i>. Yet, we must admit that only the secondary aspects of the priesthood\u2014sometimes merely anecdotal or even lacking authenticity\u2014have been captured. The essential element has been missed: the mystery of the priest. And I am not certain that Christians\u2014even the active members of our own Movements\u2014always have a more accurate view.<\/p>\n
To understand the priest, one must place oneself, from the very outset, at the heart of the mystery of Christ. Any other viewpoint distorts the perspective.<\/p>\n
Governor Festus summarised the conflict between Paul and the Jews in these terms,\u00a0It concerns “a certain Jesus who had died, but whom Paul asserted to be alive<\/i>” (Acts 25:19). Festus had grasped the point. This is precisely what lies at the heart of the Christian faith: Christ, having reconciled humanity to His Father through His death, has risen again. He is alive. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?<\/i>” the angel of the Resurrection asked the holy women.<\/p>\n
Let the Ascension, then, not mislead us: it is a mistake to think that Christ\u2014having bequeathed to us His teachings, His Eucharistic Body, and the priests who are His ministers\u2014has departed from our world. The Ascension is a transition from one mode of presence to another: from a visible presence to an invisible one. Christ has not escaped our universe; He remains inextricably bound to it by all the ties of His humanity. With His glorious and invisible body, He is present among us. He will always be so, just as He promised, “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age<\/i>.”<\/p>\n
In His presence, He acts. He is like a pole, a centre from which emanate all the supernatural energies of the Redemption\u2014energies that ceaselessly work upon humanity to uplift and transform it. Thus, He continues the mission for which the Father sent Him, a mission that will not conclude until the Last Day. Until then, He unceasingly builds His Mystical Body\u2014His Church\u2014day by day, person by person. Make no mistake: this is something entirely different from mere recruitment, or from asking for a person’s adherence as one might for any ordinary group. For Christ, the aim is to have everyone share in His death and resurrection, and to bring about in each person the redemption that is a passage from sin to grace, from death to life\u2014to that new life which is divine charity. It is a true re-creation. And it takes place gradually, as mankind opens themselves to this action of Christ\u2014who ceaselessly calls upon them\u2014and to that fire destined to consume everything.<\/p>\n
The law of the Incarnation remains valid\u2014that law which led the Son of God to reach mankind through human means, to assume a body so that He might be seen, heard, and touched. To achieve the goal we have just mentioned\u2014the building up of the Mystical Body\u2014Christ\u2019s action employs a means He chose above all others: the priest\u2014or more precisely, the priestly body, ranging from the Pope to the humblest suburban curate. It is to this priestly body that Christ communicates His sanctifying power, through a vital transmission that is ever-present and active. \u2014 It should be noted that this participation in Christ\u2019s sanctifying power is the very foundation of the distinction between clergy and laity.<\/p>\n
Do not interpret this to mean that Christ grants power of attorney to His priests to sanctify us\u2014like a man setting off on a journey who delegates authority (that is, the power to act in his stead) to a subordinate. Once again, Christ is not absent; He is the Great Present One. It is He who acts, but through the priestly body. It is He who teaches His Church, but through the magisterium<\/i>; it is He who leads, but through the hierarchy; it is He Himself who communicates His life to His members, but through His priests and the sacraments. Note the little preposition “through.” It is through the artist\u2019s hand that an inner vision becomes a statue or a painting. It is through the priesthood that the life of Christ passes into the members of his Mystical Body. The priesthood is thus like the instrument\u2014the free and living organ\u2014that Christ uses to accomplish his redemptive work.<\/div>\n When I ask you to understand the greatness of our sacrament, it is all this that I invite you to grasp and to believe. That priest who absolves you in the sacrament of penance, who proclaims the Word of God, who bestows blessings\u2014do you believe, yes or no, that through him, an actual action of the ever-living Christ <\/i>reaches you? “It shall be done according to your faith<\/i>.” And I know well that appearances are deceptive: our flaws\u2014physical and moral\u2014veil the mystery perhaps even more than the appearances of bread and wine, of water or oil. But do not forget that the power of Christ once passed through the fringe of his cloak to heal the woman with the hemorrhage, and through a bit of mud to open the eyes of the man born blind to the light. Do you not think that we ourselves must turn to these events to dare to believe in our own mysterious powers? Better yet, to cling to our Master\u2019s explicit promise: “Whoever listens to you listens to me<\/i>.”<\/p>\n For my part, I believe that many of the ills afflicting today\u2019s Christendom\u2014so many anemic Christian lives, so many households lacking vitality or radiance\u2014can be explained by a misunderstanding of the priestly mission and the detachment that ensues. The earth bears no more fruit when it is no longer irrigated.<\/p>\n Will you object that Christ has at His disposal not only the priestly body but also the Holy Spirit to sanctify souls? That is true! And fortunately so; otherwise, we would have to despair of the salvation of hundreds of millions of people whom priestly action cannot reach directly. Yet even they receive Life only thanks to the priesthood\u2014to the universal and perpetual celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice.<\/p>\n But for those who know Christ and His teaching, recourse to the priestly ministry is not optional: it is through priestly action and the sacraments that Christ reaches the believer and communicates the Holy Spirit, who “teaches him all things<\/i>,” “pours charity into his heart<\/i>,” and “prays within him: Abba, Father<\/i>.”<\/p>\n What might not be hoped for from your generation if, having discovered the riches of the Sacrament of Matrimony, it were also to discover the riches of the Sacrament of Holy Orders\u2014the very two sacraments upon which the growth of the Body of Christ rests.<\/p>\n Henri Caffarel, L\u2019Anneau d\u2019Or,<\/i> No. 60<\/cite> Your generation grasped the intuition that God\u2019s vision of human love is magnificent, that Christian perfection is not the exclusive preserve of monks, and that marriage, too, is a path to holiness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":231764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-priest-and-couple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234973"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234978,"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234973\/revisions\/234978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.henri-caffarel.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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