PRIEST AS SACRIFICIAL VICTIM

Each Lent in the monastery we take a theme for the focus of our prayer and this year it  is for our 2 Holy Fathers and the priesthood -  for priests in dire need and those who are following in the footsteps of holiness.  I also especially pray for those who have given their lives in prayer for the needs of priests, be they other religious or  laypeople.

In spite of the great scandal in our present Church regarding priests, there are many more who daily struggle to be  faithful witnesses proclaiming the Presence of Jesus through preaching the Gospel, praying the Mass, administering the sacraments and  being true shepherds to their flock.

Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard, who served as Archbishop of Paris
in the post-war years, expressed this mystery of the priesthood in a pastoral letter that he wrote on Holy Thursday 1949:

At the altar, the priest, like Christ, is the [sacrificial] victim. But he is also the sacrificer; he is then the dreadful man, the one who works death, the one who slays sin and burns it, the one who is crucified and who crucifies, the one who cannot save the world, nor will consent to its salvation, save through nailing it to the Cross.

“Without the shedding of blood there is no redemption” (Heb. 9.22)… That is why the priest in relation to society must always be somehow or other its adversary. He will never be forgiven for recalling and perpetuating, from  generation to generation, Christ, whom they thought they had suppressed forever… Far from being a fatherly adviser or a good-natured citizen, a priest is, like God, a terrible being. He is a fighting man… Like Saint Michael, he challenges the Dragon, dragging him out of ambush by healing men’s hearts,  so as to crush one by one his ever resurgent heads. Although it is too frequently overlooked, a priest is an exorcist…; he has the power and the duty of expelling the Devil (Cardinal Suhard, Priests Among Men).