I was honored this past week to join the Saint John’s Seminary community in saying farewell at the end of my six year term as Rector. Cardinal O’Malley presented me with the Archbishop Williams award on behalf of the Faculty, Seminarians and Trustees gathered for the Mass and dinner, and afterwards I delivered the following remarks.
I am grateful to Your Eminence for arranging this evening and for the singular honor of having, for a season, been Shepherd of this holy house. Thank you, Father Salocks and Fr O’Connor and each of the priests on the faculty, whom I have been privileged to call “brother.” But most of all, thank you, my dear sons, for letting me be your Father.
But now has come the time when I must try to say to you what I have tried to say in Webster and Leominster, in Washington, in Blackstone and Spencer and Worcester: Thank you.
Thank you for your patience with my weakness and for your love of Christ’s strength. Thank you for your kindnesses to me and for your love of him. Thank you for your example of sacrifice and good hard work. Thank you for making me a better Priest by your so tangible love of Christ and his Church.
For I have been changed by this house, by the seminarian who sat before me with tears running down his face from the bottom of his heart, as his voice cracked, “all I want to do is to give my life to Christ and to his Church.”
For in the end, this Holy House is never about any one man, for each of us come and go performing our assigned function and then answering Christ’s call to follow him to other pastures and to other sheep.
And that function, for your Rector, from Peterson to Murray to Hughes to Salocks has ever been the same: to lead you to Christ, the one true Priest, to teach you to love His Church even more than you love yourself and to urge you to seek, despite all your weaknesses to lead others along the way which leads only to him.
This is our privilege and our one true reward, to be entirely his and never only our own. It is our noble calling, and one of which we are never truly worthy. But how blessed we are in every season of our lives to be called to be his Priests, obedient to his voice and conformed only to his will.
It is that common work which unites us, dear brothers, and which will make us one for the rest of our lives, as it unites us to the countless thousands who have walked these halls before us, and the countless thousands, please God, who will walk them in the years yet to come.
So farewell, for now, my brothers and sons, until we meet in other pastures, as we inevitably will, until that day arrives for which our hearts ache, when he will gather us into that Holy House which is our hope and our joy.
What a journey it is to which he has called us, we little brothers of Christ the High Priest, and how blessed we are to be called to the Altar of the Lamb.
