May 30: World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests

VATICAN –

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) – This year, the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is celebrated on May 30, which has been declared the World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests. In the Letter sent on this occasion to all priests, from the Prefect and Secretary of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Claudio Hummes and Archbishop Mauro Piacenza respectively, the priority of prayer over action is made explicit, "since it is on prayer that the effectiveness of action depends. The Church's mission largely depends on each person's personal relationship with the Lord Jesus and must therefore be nourished by prayer." Below we offer several excerpts from the Letter.

"In the second place, with an unquenchable thirst and longing for Christ, the most authentic dimension of our Priesthood is mendicancy, simple and continuous prayer that is learned in silent orison. It has always characterized the life of Saints and should be asked for insistently. This awareness of our relationship with him is subjected to the purification of daily testing. Every day we realize again and again that not even we Ministers who act "in Persona Christi Capitis" are spared this drama."

"The one adequate measure, with regard to our Holy Vocation, is radicalism. This total dedication with awareness of our infidelity can only be brought into being as a renewed and prayerful decision which Christ subsequently implements, day after day. The actual gift of priestly celibacy must be accepted and lived in this dimension of radicalism and full configuration to Christ. Any other approach to the reality of the relationship with him risks becoming ideological. Even the great mass of work that the contemporary conditions of the ministry sometimes impose on us, far from discouraging us must spur us to care with even greater attention for our priestly identity which has an incontrovertibly divine root."

"Let us be faithful, dear confrères, to the daily Celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist, not solely in order to fulfill a pastoral commitment or a requirement of the community entrusted to us but because of the absolute personal need we have of it, as of breathing, as of light for our life, as the one satisfactory reason for a complete priestly existence."

"Since the missionary spirit is intrinsic in the very nature of the Church, our mission is likewise innate in the priestly identity, which is why missionary urgency is a matter of self-awareness. Our priestly identity is edified and renewed day after day in "conversation" with Our Lord. An immediate consequence of our relationship with him, ever nourished in constant prayer, is the need to share it with all those around us. The holiness we ask for daily, in fact, cannot be conceived according to a sterile and abstract individual acceptance but is necessarily Christ's holiness, which is contagious for everyone: 'Being in communion with Jesus Christ draws us into his 'being for all'; it makes it our own way of being' (Benedict XVI, "Spe Salvi," No. 28). Christ's 'being for all' is realized for us in the Tria Munera by which we are clothed in the very nature of the Priesthood. These Munera which constitute the entirety of our Ministry, are not the place for alienation or, even worse, a mere functionalist reductionism of ourselves but rather are the truest expression of our belonging to Christ."

"Lastly, the Holy Mother of God remains an indispensable foundation of the whole of priestly life. The relationship with her cannot be resolved in pious devotional practice but is nourished by ceaseless entrustment to the arms of the ever Virgin of the whole of our life, of our ministry in its entirety."

"Dear confreres, the urgent need for a movement of prayer, placing 24-hour continuous Eucharistic adoration at the center so that a prayer of adoration, thanksgiving, praise, petition and reparation will be raised to God, incessantly and from every corner of the earth, with the primary intention of awakening a sufficient number of holy vocations to the priestly state and, at the same time, spiritually uniting with a certain spiritual maternity -- at the level of the Mystical Body -- all those who have already been called to the ministerial priesthood and are ontologically conformed to the one High and Eternal Priest."

(S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 29/5/2008)

Links:
Complete text of the Letter and Prayer for the Day, in various languages
http://www.fides.org/ita/vita_chiesa/2008/cclero_290508.html