The four pillars of the 65th Anniversary of our Diocese – devotion to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, Mary as Mother of the Church and our mother, vocations to the Holy Priesthood, and prayerful outreach to Catholics gone astray – find tongue in the declaration, “This is My Body, which will be given up for you.”
Jesus offered His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, first to His Apostles under the appearances of bread and wine, then to the Father in the Holy Spirit upon the Cross. In a sense, the Blessed Mother spoke her Son’s words to God through Gabriel, furnishing for that Body and Blood, soul and divinity a dwelling in her chaste womb and in our world.
All the baptized are ordered to sacrifice to God and intercede for others. But ordained priests astoundingly unite earth with heaven when they utter those words on the Cross of the Altar, and every extension of it.
All priestly intercession applies especially toward fellow members of Christ’s Body who “absent themselves from the assembly” (Heb 10:25). Our Heavenly Father loves His prodigal children, and with His own love we can accompany them to the source of eternal life.
As patroness of our Diocese, St. Catharine of Siena, supports the pillars of our jubilee in her “Dialogue,” which talks about the sacramental heart, or what she called the “Mystic Body of Holy Church.”
The excellence and dignity of priests derive from “the treasure I have put into their hands,” namely, the Holy Eucharist. It is “the sun … the light of learning, the heat of divine charity, and the color that is fused with the heat and the light, the Blood and Body of My Son.”
As a lay affiliate of the Order of Preachers, Catharine echoed St. Thomas Aquinas’ Eucharistic attitude: we see God truly present with the eyes of faith, we touch Him with the hand of love, and we taste Him with holy desire – and all by His initiative.
Jesus spoke to Catharine about the holiness that His ministers ought to have, and the respect they ought to receive, in view of the profound mysteries they daily serve. Jesus becomes present in the Holy Eucharist apart from the holiness or virtue of the priest. But that failsafe is no excuse for clerics’ persistence in pride, lust, or greed, which were common in Catharine’s day, and not altogether absent from ours.
The good apples “saved nothing, and after their death there remained no money at all, and there were some even who, for the sake of the poor, left the Church in debt. This was because through the largeness of their charity, and of the hope that they had placed in My providence, they were without servile fear that aught should diminish to them, either spiritual or temporal.” My running coach calls it “leaving it all on the course.” I’m nowhere near that.
In another chapter in the “Dialogue,” on Divine Providence, the Lord noted a particular person’s rescue from eternal damnation on the basis of his Marian devotion: “For My goodness, in deference to the Word, has decreed that anyone at all, just or sinner, who holds her in due reverence will never be snatched or devoured by the infernal demon. She is like a bait set out by My goodness to catch My creatures.”
The Holy Eucharist makes the Priesthood, and makes it tremble in gratitude and awe. As the Blessed Mother never forgets the child within her womb (Isa 49:15), we treasure her Son’s prodigal brothers and sisters as our own.
How? By praying for “all rational creatures, for the mystical body of the Holy Church, and for those friends whom I have given thee, whom thou lovest with particular love,” and this without sparing “the example of thy life, and the teaching of thy words, reproving vice and encouraging virtue according to thy power.”
By Father Christopher Zelonis, Pastor of SS. Peter and Paul, Lehighton. Read more articles by Father Zelonis at www.shipwrackharvest.blogspot.com.
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