By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY – Priests are called to be prophets, especially today in a world that acts as if God doesn’t matter and as if fidelity were either impossible or an attack on personal freedom, Pope Benedict XVI told more than 550 priests, Bishops and Cardinals.
“In his way of thinking, speaking, judging what happens in the world, serving and loving, relating to others, even in his dress, the priest must draw prophetic strength from his sacramental belonging” to Christ, the Pope said.
Pope Benedict met at the Vatican on 12 March with participants in a two-day theological conference on the priesthood which was sponsored by the Congregation for Clergy as part of the Year for Priests.
The Pope said that too many people, including priests themselves, equate a priest’s identity with the functions he carries out in the Church and the world, “almost like a social worker”.
But when he receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders, a man’s very being changes and he becomes part of the one priesthood of Jesus Christ, the Pope said. “The men and women of our time ask us only to be priests to the depths. The lay faithful can have their human needs met by many others,” he said, but it is only from the priest that they can receive the word of God, the sacramental forgiveness of sins and the Eucharist.
It is the priest’s identity, not his function that has led the Latin-rite Church to require and the Eastern Catholic Churches to recommend that priests be celibate, he said.
“Sacred celibacy,” he said, is “an authentic prophecy of the kingdom, sign of consecration with an undivided heart to the Lord and to the things of the Lord, (and) an expression of the gift of oneself to God and to others.”
The modern world, which “progressively is excluding God from the public sphere,” has a hard time accepting someone dedicated to the sacred, someone “taken from the world in order to intercede on behalf of the world,” the Pope said.
Priests today must “speak of God to the world and present the world to God,” he said. “Today, the most necessary prophecy is that of fidelity which, starting from Christ’s fidelity to humanity, passing through the Church and the ministerial priesthood, leads him to living his priesthood in total adhesion to Christ and the Church,” the Pope said.
Pope Benedict said that in many ways priesthood “remains a great mystery, even for those of us who have received the gift. Our limits and our weaknesses must lead us, with profound faith, to live and protect this precious gift with which Christ has configured us to Himself, making us participants in His saving mission”.