The Year of the Priest is with us, and priests can look forward to numerous books, exhortations, conferences, seminars, retreats, gatherings and other opportunities to grow in their priesthood, which is to grow in persona Christi, in the person of Christ.
It is also an opportunity for lay people to grow in our understanding of and respect for priests. A good starting point is never to think, say, or accept from others the comment “they (priests) are only human”. They are not. They are human, of course, with all the human potential to be bad-tempered, poor communicators, self-centred, lazy, domineering, kind, gentle, wise and helpful – all those human characteristics that we all have to work so hard to avoid or to develop as the case may be. But they are not ‘only human’. They are more than that.
They are humans who have been given extraordinary gifts by the Lord our God, gifts that exceed the human capacity to develop, gifts that belong to God Himself and can only be exercised by a man who stands in persona Christi, in the person of Christ.
Our faith is built on a mountain of paradoxes – three persons in one God; saved by one who is both God and man; Mary, Virgin and Mother; creatures with free will; a Church which is the fullness of Christ – and priests are one of these paradoxes, men who can exercise the power of God. As lay people, we honour this paradox first by praying for priests that the frailty of their humanity will not weaken the power of their priesthood, and second by receiving and honouring the gifts they give us by the power God has given them.
The first of these great powers is the power to consecrate the Eucharist, the power to bring the body and blood of Jesus onto the altar and to present Him to us in Holy Communion. This is a power that even the Archangels have not been given, and which Mary herself does not exercise. Mary, of course, produced Jesus and gave him to the world, body, blood, soul and divinity, and then stood by him and shared the great sacrifice offered on the Cross, but she, like Jesus, has no need to repeat that sacrifice.
The second great gift Jesus has given to priests to exercise is the power to forgive sins. It was the first gift he gave to the Apostles after the Resurrection when he said to them, ‘receive ye the Holy Spirit, whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain they are retained’.
It is one of the mysteries of human life that even Catholics who have experienced the peace of forgiveness and the joy of communion have abandoned belief in these gifts, or have drifted away from them, or have decided they don’t have time for them. Many also have experienced the persistence of God’s love and have returned to the gifts they receive from priests. It often seems that the expression ‘they (priests) are only human’ is a mechanism for maintaining the absence when faith and reason would have it otherwise. Perhaps it might help if we examined the sort of thing Jesus has done to show his love for priests, especially those who are struggling.
There have been more than 100 miracles in which the appearance of bread and wine in the Eucharist have given way to visual or physical evidence of the presence of Jesus. Many of these miracles have been performed to reinforce the faith of priests who were struggling with the belief that the consecration really does bring us the body and blood of Christ.
One of the most famous of these occurred in the town of Lanciano in Italy in 750. A monastic priest was suffering from doubt about the real presence and was startled to find one day that as he said the words of consecration, the bread turned to flesh and the wine to blood. Everything was visible to those in attendance. The flesh is still intact and the wine is divided into five unequal parts which together have the exact same weight as each one does separately.
The miracle of Lanciano gained new prominence in the 1970s when two sets of tests were performed on the relics. The first set were conducted by Dr Edward Linoli, a professor of anatomy, histology, chemistry and clinical microscopy. His results were published in a scientific journal, The Sclavo Notebooks in Diagnostics, Collection#3, 1971, and revealed that the flesh was human heart muscle; the miraculous blood was human blood only; both were of human blood type AB (the same as the man in the Shroud, and the most common type in Middle Eastern populations); the proteins in the blood occurred in the same proportions as in normal blood; and there was no trace of embalming or other salt infiltrations. Publication aroused intense scientific interest around the world.
In 1973, the Advisory Body of the World Health Organisation appointed a medical commission to check Professor Linoli’s findings. Their work lasted 15 months and included 500 tests. Their results were published by WHO and the UN in December 1976 in New York and Geneva. They confirmed all of Dr Linoli’s findings and reported that the tissue was living tissue because it responded rapidly to the tests in the way living tissue would. True to its scientific limitations, the commission reported it was impossible to give an explanation.
The best reason for receiving the Eucharist, forgiveness of sins or any other gifts from our priests is faith in the word of Jesus and His Church. However, it is useful to be able to give to those who need it this evidence of a miracle that has now been alive for 1259 years. It may give them a rational foundation for approaching the sacraments in faith.
Throughout this Year of the Priest, let us live the paradox to the full so that we may gain maximum benefit from the divine gifts they give us and so that they may gain whatever strength they need in their humanity from our prayers, our respect and our support.