By JAMES MONTI
Recently, during a visit to the Blessed Sacrament at a church about half an hour from my home, I went to pray before the side altar of St. Joseph and was captivated by the extraordinary realism of the new statue of Joseph enshrined there, in particular the face, which gives the supplicant the sense that Joseph is giving his full attention to the worshipper at his feet. Likewise exceptional is the church’s new statue of the Blessed Virgin with the Christ Child, due to an equally engaging depiction of the Infant Jesus, who seems to fix His gaze directly upon those in the pews, even from a distance.
The pastor at that church told me how he had given very detailed and particular instructions to an artist he had commissioned on how he wanted him to carve the two statues. The pastor also explained all the major changes he had made in the sanctuary, moving the Tabernacle to the center and beautifying the high altar, acquiring for the sanctuary magnificent Baroque-style candlesticks and a matching sanctuary lampstand.
Why would a priest go to these lengths to refurbish his church? It is a matter of love: “For zeal for thy house has consumed me” (Psalm 69:9). From a priest’s love for God arises a burning zeal for the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls. That zeal born of love will make him eager and even clever in seeking out every opportunity and means to lead souls to God.
It is this same love and zeal that makes a faithful priest eager to carry the monstrance in the annual Corpus Christi procession, despite the sometimes-intense heat of the day in late spring that the feast falls upon. The manifest joy of such a priest in carrying His Divine Master out into the byways where his flock lives serves as a special reminder of the priceless worth of a truly devoted priest. While the Solemnity of Corpus Christi is first and foremost a day to attest our faith in and love for Christ in the Holy Eucharist, it is also an apt occasion to thank God for the faithful priests He has placed in our lives.
In speaking about the essence and meaning of the priesthood, we often enough use the expression “alter Christus,” “another Christ,” to denote the deep and profound identification with Christ that the Sacrament of Holy Orders confers upon the man being raised to the priesthood. Thereafter, as an ordained priest, in celebrating and conferring the sacraments he acts “in persona Christi,” “in the person of Christ,” a reality that particularly comes to the fore when in the Mass he consecrates the Host with the words, “This is my body . . . ”, and in Confession absolves the penitent with the words, “And I absolve you from your sins. . . .”
Implicit in this identification with Christ in the overall sense is the priest’s identification with Christ Crucified, with the Lord in His Sacred Passion. This particular dimension of the transformation into an “alter Christus” wrought by Ordination is in the course of the Ordination Rite most dramatically expressed in the ordinands’ total prostration of themselves during the recitation of the Litany of Saints, the act that immediately precedes the bishop’s laying on of hands upon the heads of the ordinands. By prostrating before the altar in this manner, the ordinand symbolically offers himself entirely to God, offering the totality of his life and being for the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls.
In doing so he is “dying to self”; his old self dies, as it, were, that he may put on Christ. This self-sacrifice of the ordinand is clearly in imitation of and in likeness to the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. His prostration physically expresses his conformity to the Lamb who was slain, laid to rest for three days in the Holy Sepulcher.
This extraordinary liturgical gesture of the man to be ordained to the priesthood will be repeated by him in the years to follow on just one day of the year, Good Friday, when at the very beginning of the day’s Liturgy of the Passion he again totally prostrates himself before the altar, this time symbolizing not his own sacrifice but rather that of Christ at the moment of His death on the Cross. One can’t help but think that for many priests this occasion on Good Friday must bring back memories of their Ordination day.
The sacrifices that a man makes to become a priest, and most especially the sacrifice of renouncing marriage and family life, likewise manifest his identification with Christ Crucified, who surrendered Himself entirely in His Passion. Yet for many priests, their loving sacrifice is rewarded with the most amazing expressions of gratitude and support from their own families. Having gotten to know priests from quite a few different countries and cultures, I have heard from them beautiful stories of the incredible outpouring of love, reverence, and gratitude that is bestowed upon a newly ordained priest by his extended family and circle of friends in his native land. At ordinations that I have attended, I have seen this firsthand. These families of faith hail their priest-son as a hero who has chosen “the better part.”
Of course, there are priests who have been compelled to walk the difficult and painful path of pursuing their priestly vocation without the support of their loved ones, sometimes having to brave even bitter opposition from their parents or siblings. Yet their journey to the priesthood, put to the test by these sorrows, affords them the opportunity to be even more intimately united with Christ in the pains of His Passion.
We take for granted that priests wear black cassocks and clerical attire, yet don’t pause to reflect upon what this black vesture means. The explanation most commonly given is that the color black, associated with the mystery of death, attests that the priest in embracing his vocation has “died to self” that he might live for Christ. On a deeper level, the black attire serves as yet another manifestation of a priest’s intimate identification with Christ in His Passion, for black is the hue of the sky that turned dark as Our Lord was dying upon the Cross.
The small but very conspicuous bit of white that a priest wears upon his neck, the Roman collar, can be seen as representing what St. John the Evangelist in the Prologue to his Gospel has to say about the coming of Christ into the world, a world turned black by the darkness of original and actual sin: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). It is the priest’s vocation to be that light shining in the darkness.
Among the different vestments that a priest puts on to celebrate the sacraments and exercise other sacred functions, the stole holds a unique place. When hearing Confessions, a priest may be without his other vestments, but he will always make a point of putting on his stole. There are even small portable stoles that some priests carry with them, so that in the event that they suddenly happen upon a person seeking the Sacrament of Penance or encounter a dying person at the scene of an accident they can quickly put it on. Described as “the yoke of Christ,” the stole serves as a further reminder of a priest’s conformity to Christ Crucified, for it rests upon his neck just as the crossbeam of the Holy Cross rested upon the neck of Our Lord as He carried it to Golgotha.
Working at a seminary, I have the privilege of witnessing firsthand the growing excitement of seminarians as the day of their priestly Ordination draws near. It is during this final leg of their journey to the altar of God that they make the definitive decision about the personal object that will more than anything else represent their priestly vocation — their chalice.
The Gates Of The Heavenly Jerusalem
It is for them an intensely personal and deeply important decision, because the form and details of the chalice give them the opportunity to express in a very particular and intimate manner their own love for Christ, the Christ who following their Ordination will make His abode in their chalice when each day at the moment of consecration the new priest takes that chalice into his hands and pronounces the words of consecration.
The priest’s personal chalice can be likened in a sense to the wedding rings that a bride and groom take upon their fingers at their marriage as a permanent symbol and seal of the undying love that they have vowed to each other. And just as a wedding ring should be made of precious materials to express the sanctity of this vowed love between husband and wife, so too a priest’s chalice is rightly made from precious gold and silver. And there is even more reason to make a chalice of the most precious materials, for not only does it represent the priest’s spiritual marriage of himself to the Church, but it is first and foremost a vessel destined to hold the infinitely sacred Body and Blood of God Incarnate.
The chalice that a future priest chooses for himself will also be his daily companion throughout the years of his priesthood, “the Chalice of everlasting salvation” (The Roman Missal, ©2010, ICEL) that he will take into his hands daily, both on days of joy and on days of sorrow. In this too, the priest’s identification with Christ in His Passion is brought to the fore, for it is the sacred instrument that he will employ each day to re-present the Passion and death of the Lord by celebrating Mass with it.
Moreover, Our Lord spoke of His Passion as a chalice when in the Garden of Gethsemane, He prayed to His Heavenly Father, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39). Our Lord also spoke of a priest’s share in His Passion as a chalice when He told to the Apostles Saints John and James, “You will drink my cup….” (Matt. 20:23).
In the procession of Corpus Christi, that quintessential moment in a priest’s daily life when he raises aloft the Holy Eucharist following the consecration is wonderfully prolonged, as he keeps raised before his own eyes and the eyes of his people the Sacred Host on a journey that will ultimately lead him and his flock to the gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem. As we join in the sacred festivities of Corpus Christi, let us be sure to thank God for those consecrated hands in which the King of the Universe is carried and given to us.
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