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SEVEN PRIESTLY VIRTUES
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The Church is not meant to organize religion but to
personalize it: to keep the personal passionate presence of God alive
forever at the creative centre of all human affairs.
The
modern world will not transcend itself. It has lost touch with the
sacred, with its center and its source of life. Everything is profaned.
The world of man and nature is emptied of transcendent significance.
Solidarity
The discreet solitude of the priest is a creative protest against the euphoric or chaotic togetherness that stamps our way of life in the modern world. But it is also the highest and most apt expression of his solidarity with the whole human race, in fact, with the whole of creation. The more solitary he is, the more divinely endowed and psychologically equipped he will be to enter into a significantly profound relationship with all levels of life – animal, vegetable and mineral as well as human – affirming and consecrating the totality of being.
Suffering Servant
That is why neither joy nor sorrow escapes the priest. He is a man for all seasons. He is in touch with all creatures – being which both reveal and veil God. But the priest cannot shun anything. The pastoral care of a parish priest, for instance, does not only extend to the people in his domain or parochial boundaries, but to the animals, trees, flowers, parks, ponds, air, water, buildings, roads, ect. The priest is a marked man, an alter – Christus . If he is to identify with Christ, the High priest of creation, and the willful leonine victim of love, then he must freely decide to suffer all of life. Such a decision, such a radical choice designates with unmistakable clarity and poignancy his inevitable end: he will be crucified. But he will also rise jubilantly from the dead: his horizons will be infinitely broadened, the quality of his life hilariously enhanced.
Sweetheart
Ordinarily I am repelled by the word “sweetheart”. But deep below its quotidian and pedestrian use there is a proper meaning – a meaning so rollicking and robust that I must resort to it now to counteract what might seem to grim and solemn a description of priesthood. The priest should be a sweetheart in the deepest sense of that word. Without forfeiting one whit of his prophetic fury and moral outrage, he should be, like his Master, gentle, tender, compassionate, and moral outrage, he should be, like his Master, gentle, tender, compassionate, and intuitive. Like his Lord, yes but also like a good woman. What he needs is a strong anima, the anima, the feminine principle. In him the womanly principle must be keenly developed and highly refined. This will not emasculate him but make him more manly (“virtuous” and “ virile”) than ever. Until he discovers the internal woman and integrates this dark, soft, receptive, mysterious part of himself into his total personality, he can be neither a man of prayer nor an apostle. How can he bear Christ into the world without becoming Marian to the core?
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