I’ve been a priest for 42 years and I can tell you, if you’re meant for it and God has called you to it, being a parish priest is the best job in the world.
That’s why, through the years, I’ve spoken to thousands of priests about finding the power and inspiration for their good work in the Mass. We call it ars celebrandi, or the art of celebrating the Holy and Living Sacrifice with joy and grace.
Let’s begin by going back to a little over 700 years ago to the Lateran Basilica in Rome, where a prominent notary by the name of Riccardo Annibaldi has died. The folks at the Lateran have chosen Arnolfo di Cambio, a talented disciple of the sculptor Nicola Pisano to carve his tomb.
Now the tomb has been moved and restored several times with varying degrees of success. Today you can find it in the Lateran cloister and it tells a marvellous story. The story is not so much about the poor notary who is buried inside, but about the clerics at his Funeral Mass, who are depicted in a series of stone reliefs on a ccsmatesque mosaic background.
Six clerics, just like you and me. The first appears to be an acolyte (although his candle went missing a few hundred years ago).
Then is a delightful thurifer, who holds his thurible aloft and is blowing on the charcoals. How many times have you seen that!?
Next in in line is a Deacon, as you can see from his crossed stole. He holds an aspirgilleum in his right hand and is repeatedly dunking it into the bucket to get it wet enough to sprinkle the coffin.
The last figure to the right appears to be the Bishop, who is paging through a Missal held aloft by a tiny acolyte, as he tries to make sure the ribbons are in the right places.
But the figure I most enjoy is the priest Miter and Crosier bearer who stands directly behind the Bishop, staring with lust at the miter he holds in his left hand.
As it was in the beginning, so now and forever. Amen.
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It is a tremendously honest depiction of this gaggle of clerics, preparing to celebrate the Sacred Mysteries.
Which is what we need, an honest depiction of what wonderful human beings priests are. And an honest depiction of how these men suffer from the same pains and stresses as any other group, and how they are constantly fed by a burning desire to do the right thing, to give their life to Christ and to his Church.
Such men are in love with their people and with the faith which Christ sends them to bring to the young and the old, the cheerful and the depressed, the rich and the poor, and all the people in between.
Sure, Priests are also sometimes depressed, and in sad spiritual straights. The older ones grew up in a time when the priest was the most admired man in the community, but today, some of their brothers are accused of molesting children.
Meanwhile, the younger ones labor under the burden of skepticism and a search for authentic authority.
And there’s no doubt that Priests are weighed down by bureaucracies and rapidly shifting demographic realities as they struggle to establish priorities, while their people struggle with what to believe about a world that seems to change ever fifteen minutes.
And we haven’t even mentioned a media voracious for the next fresh scandal!
It’s not all bad, certainly. There’s the great majority of parishioners who love their priest more than he deserves. I will never forget the outpouring of affection upon the death of my first pastor. As their only remaining priest, the parishioners practically anointed me with the tears they shed for this good man. The love which people hold for their parish priest is extraordinarily durable, as recent studies on the impact of the sexual abuse scandal have shown.
But still, especially for the Diocesan Priest, things can get confusing and hard.
While much of what I will say today may apply equally as well to diocesan and religious Priests, allow me to begin with a disclaimer. Religious priests are a wonderful leaven in the diocesan dough.
They bring us Saint Francis to call us back to simplicity, and Saint Dominic to make us think, and Saint Ignatius to give us a conscience. Each of the founders of religious communities still minister to us through their dedicated sons.
But these Priest sons have their Father to look to for inspiration and support. In comparison, the diocesan priest can often feel like an orphan.
The Diocesan Priest
So where does the diocesan priest go to drink deeply of the particular charism of his calling? It is, I suggest, to the Sacred Liturgy.
Here is the center of his day, the source and the summit of all his activity, and the principle time when the Church is made manifest to him and to the world. To quote Pope Saint John Paul II:
The celebration of the Eucharist is the most important moment of the priest's day, the center of his life. Offering the sacrifice of the Mass, in which the unique sacrifice of Christ is made present and applied until he comes again, the priest ensures that the work of redemption continues to be carried out.1 From this unique sacrifice, the priest's entire ministry draws its strength2 and the people of God receive the grace to live truly Christian lives in the family and in society. It is important for bishops and priests not to lose sight of the intrinsic value of the Eucharist, a value which is independent of the circumstances surrounding its celebration. For this reason, priests should be encouraged to celebrate Mass every day, even in the absence of a congregation, since it is an act of Christ and the Church.3
For the Sacred Liturgy is the bridge between the daily life of the people of God and Christ, who invites them to partake of his heavenly banquet. It is the pontifex between this world and the next, and the Priest is the gatekeeper. In the Sacred Liturgy two great loves of the priest’s life are brought into a holy communion: the People of God and the Lord who formed them into a royal priesthood.
Here too we can find the root and the sustenance of the diocesan priest’s spiritual life. Here he makes sense of it all, and here the priest finds the “food for the journey” on which he guides the flock entrusted to his care.
San Pietro Soccer
I can remember years ago when I was on sabbatical in Assisi, sitting across from the Church of San Pietro and watching a bunch of kids playing soccer in the piazza in front of the Church. The twelfth century lions serves as goal posts and the door of the Church the goal.
As they were playing, the priest walked by the kids on his way to Mass and stopped. He puzzled over whether he should yell at them about possibly doing damage with their games. And then he smiled and went into Church.
They looked on with amazement at Father, this little incarnation of grace. They wondered about him and about who he was. As they played their soccer, they trusted that he was praying for them; that when they get lost in the coming years, he will help them find their way home; and that when the pain would feel as heavy as a cross, he would help them to understand.
They needed him to be holy. To be a man who says his prayers. They needed him to be the image of Christ for them.
Who They Want Him to Be
Which is important because I cannot know what I am supposed to do until I know who I am supposed to be. And so it is with the Diocesan Priest. So who is he supposed to be?
The Diocesan Finance office wants him to be an accomplished accountant; the Capitol campaign folks want him to be an effective fundraiser; the religious ed people want him to be master teacher and headmaster of parish CCD; the local hospital needs him to be a master in bioethics and pastoral practice.
Others want you to be the conductor of the orchestra, whose success is measured by the harmony of his parish. Still others want you to be the politician, whose job it is to convince, cajole, and energise the base.
Lots of people want you to have the qualities of a late night talk show host, engaging them and making the audience think and respond. Not far away are those expecting you to be an entertainer, whose jokes and easy manner keep them coming back week after week. There are even those who want you to be the magician, whose mysteries never cease to amaze. Hocus pocus….just like hoc est corpus…. Hmmmm.
But who does Christ want the parish Priest to be? The Liturgy helps us to figure that out in two articles from the General Instruction of the Roman Missal. The first describes who the Priest is at Mass:
At Mass or the Lord's Supper, the people of God are called together into unity, with a priest presiding and acting in the person of Christ, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord or Eucharistic sacrifice…4
Seems like a fairly standard definition…but let’s take a closer look. First, the people do not gather of their own volition, this assembly does not belong to them They are “called together into unity” by Christ. Like the priest, they are chosen and assembled into a holy people, a royal priesthood, Christ’s own mystical body. This is an important starting point because none of us, priest or people, are ultimately in control. It was not us who chose him, but he who chose each one of us.5
The priest is described as having two jobs: to preside over the assembly Christ has gathered and to act in the person of Christ. In persona Christi had a hard time of it in the sixties and seventies. Perhaps it was because the culture was increasingly egalitarian, perhaps it was because the pastor Father remembered translated in persona Christi as ‘I’m God Almighty.’ In any case, priests ordained right after the Council usually cringe when you start to talk about in persona Christi, until they understand what it really means.
And that’s where our next paragraph from the General Instruction comes in:
A priest also, who possesses within the Church the power of Holy Orders to offer sacrifice in the person of Christ, stands for this reason at the head of the faithful people gathered together here and now, presides over their prayer, proclaims the message of salvation to them, associates the people with himself in the offering of sacrifice through Christ in the Holy Spirit to God the Father, gives his brothers and sisters the Bread of eternal life, and partakes of it with them.
Notice the words used to describe who the Priest is at Mass. They are the same words used to describe the paschal sacrifice of Christ upon the cross;
- The priest stands at the head of the people (praeest) just as Christ our High Priest reigns from the wood of the cross (regnavit a ligno Deus)6 and as “the head of the human race”7 offers the paschal sacrifice, drawing all things to himself.8
- The priest presides over their prayer (praesidet) just as at Christ, who presided over the offering of his own Body and Blood upon the cross, now ‘presides invisibly over this Eucharistic celebration.’9
- The priest proclaims the message of salvation (proclamat) just as he who is the truth and who “enlightens every man”10 proclaims the Mystery of Faith from the altar of the cross.
- The priest joins the people to himself (sociat) in offering ‘his sacrifice and theirs’ just as “Christ always truly associates the Church with himself in this great work wherein God is perfectly glorified and the recipients made holy.”11
- The priest gives them Christ’s body (dat) just as Christ first said to his apostles, “take this, all of you and eat it…” and from his pierced heart poured forth “the sacraments destined to impart the treasures of redemption on the souls of men.”12
- The priest partakes of it Christ’s Body and Blood (participat) which Christ offered from the wood of the cross for the salvation of the world.13
This is the essence of priestly identity. So, now that we know who the priest is, let’s find out what the priest does.
And that’s where ars celebrandi comes in. It’s a great phrase to use at a cocktail party. What video have you been watching? “Well, this morning I was listening to a talk on on how the ars celebrandi, properly understood, can promote effective celebration of the Sacred Mysteries.” They will all be impressed. So what the heck is an ars celebrandi?
In the spring of 2001, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments met in plenary session to consider the major questions before the church in this period of the post-conciliar liturgical renewal. It is significant that among the major issues up for discussion by the Bishop members was the idea of ars celebrandi, a subject addressed at some length by Cardinal George Pell. His Eminence stressed that for the Priest in particular:
Ars celebrandi is not only a matter of preparation of mind, body, and heart, but also an appreciation of the gestures, the attitude of the body, and the dignity of a humble leadership that is evident to the people in a man who is loving and able to pray the liturgy, able not only to cover himself in sacred vestments, but above all, to be clothed with the Lord Jesus Christ.
This ars celebrandi, then, comes from somewhere. It comes from an understanding of who the priest is.
And at the foundation of it all, the priest has one role: to act in the person of Christ.
This is why Pope Pius XII, and the Council fathers after him, reminded us that the actions of the priest are the actions of Christ, the same Lord who now “offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of offering is different.”14
What the priest is called to do, therefore, is to conform his actions to Christ’s paschal sacrifice. Who the priest is called to be at Mass is the mirror into which people might look to see, not him, but the Christ who lives in him.15
In his great encyclical Mediator Dei, Pope Pius XII offered a profound reflection on this fundamental truth:
The priest is the same, Jesus Christ, whose sacred Person His minister represents. Now the minister, by reason of the sacerdotal consecration which he has received, is made like to the High Priest and possesses the power of performing actions in virtue of Christ's very person. Wherefore in his priestly activity he in a certain manner lends his tongue, and gives his hand" to Christ.”16
Dignity and Humility
The work of the priest, then, is to become like Christ. But GIRM paragraph 93 goes on:
When he celebrates the Eucharist, therefore, he must serve God and the people with dignity and humility…
The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council described the priesthood in these words:
Dignity
What is this “dignity of the priesthood”? It is a rank with certain attendant responsibilities. However, as the English work suggests, this dignity demands something more than just doing a job. The dignity of the work makes demands upon the worker. Living out this dignity requires a constant pursuit of the holiness of Christ in the life of the priest. Thus is the granting of the dignity of the priesthood inextricably linked with a renewal of the Spirit of holiness deep within the heart of every priest. This is why the Bishops first asks that God grant the ordinandi “the dignity of the priesthood” and then immediately prays, “Renew deep within them the spirit of holiness.”17
The “dignity of the priesthood” is not, therefore, a call to triumphalism, but a title of service, in the model of Christ, the High priest who came to serve and not to be served and who offered his own body upon the altar of the cross.
Humility
This is why the words dignity and humility go so well together. The dignity of the priesthood is a kenotic dignity, authentic to the extent that it pours itself out and dies for the other. True presbyteral dignity requires the radical humility of him who died for the very ones who nailed him to the cross. Unless the priest becomes the least for the sake of the littlest, he is not living out the priestly dignity he received on the day of his ordination.
We have all known priests who have understood how priestly dignity is born of humility. Some of them are listening to these poor words right now. They are the ones who day by day let go of ambition and pride and seem to thrive on sacrificing, consoling, forgiving, and loving like Christ the High priest.
I remember and old priest when I was a young boy, who I later found out never balanced a check book in his life. He was an administrative disaster who could drive any parish into chaos in a matter of weeks. But the people venerated him, not for what he did, but for who he was. He was, as Saint Clare used to say of Saint Francis The man of God.
You knew by the way he moved that you were loved and cared for. When he walked into a room, everyone felt better just for his being there. And when you spotted him at the end of the procession at Mass, you knew there was a God.
So, too, in the way he spoke. There was an inner peace and a calmness that told you everything was now going to be alright. And when he prayed, even in a language I did not yet understand, there was such an easy familiarity between him and his God that you felt you were listening in on two old friends, like the easy conversation of a couple who has been married for fifty years.
A Friend of Jesus
About fifteen years ago, in a Chrism Mass homily, Pope Benedict XVI said it best when he said that the deepest meaning of being a priest is found in your “becoming the friend of Jesus Christ.”
Friendship means sharing in thought and will. We must put into practice this communion of thought with Jesus, as St Paul tells us in his Letter to the Philippians (cf. 2: 2-5). And this communion of thought is not a purely intellectual thing, but a sharing of sentiments and will, hence, also of actions. This means that we should know Jesus in an increasingly personal way, listening to him, living together with him, staying with him.19
A friend of Jesus, offering the holy and living sacrifice, and looking just like him.
And therein lies the spirituality of the parish priest.
You’ve heard the oft quoted maxim that the job of the priest at Mass is to “say the black and do the red”? It’s not a bad idea, for the words and rubrics of the Roman Missal have been handed down to us over the centuries.
But the Church is asking something more of the priest who when celebrates the Mass. That’s what I’d like to talk about today.
It is not just the words the Priest says, but the way in which he says them, from the heart. It is not just how high he raises the chalice, but how he raises it, with his whole being.
As Paul Claudel once wrote:
Your prayers, and your faith, and your blood, with his in the chalice; These, like the water and wine, form the matter of his sacrifice.
This is what is truly meant by fostering an ars celebrandi, an art of celebrating the Mass and it is, I suggest, the key to an authentic spirituality of the Diocesan priest. For this ars celebrandi is not so much a matter of mastering skills, as conforming my heart to the Lord into whose Priesthood I have been ordained, and with whom I seek to join his holy people.
Sacrosanctum Concilium on Ars Celebrandi
The Council Fathers first articulated this truth in the oft-quoted fourteenth paragraph of the Conciliar Constitution Sacrosanctum concilium. Have you ever listened to a talk on the Sacred Liturgy which has not recalled that the “full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else…"?
However, seldom is the paragraph quoted in context. For this seminal challenge is immediately followed by the strikingly blunt assertion that it "there is no apparent hope of this happening unless pastors of souls themselves have first become thoroughly imbued with the spirit and power of the Liturgy and become masters and teachers in it. Therefore, it is essential that attention be directed, first of all, to the liturgical formation of the clergy.”19
For priest are the primary agents of the liturgical reform. The success or failure of the conciliar vision is largely in their hands. But success must begin and end with the renewal of their priestly hearts.
Internalisation
One of the greatest things you can say about a priest is that he has a pastor’s heart. What that means, then, is it’s not so much who the priest is on the outside, but who he really is, way down deep inside.
Our beloved Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, was talking to the priests from the Diocese of Albano about sixteen years ago. And he said something fascinating about Ars celebrandi.
Ars celebrandi, he insisted, demands that “the priest enter truly into [the dialog between God and man, which is at the heart of the sacred liturgy]. Announcing the Word, he must feel himself in colloquy with God.”
“Of course,” we might be tempted to reply. “Doesn’t every priest know that when he stands at the altar he is in dialog with God?” Does he?
What the Pope is asking here is whether our focus at Mass is always on Christ or is it sometimes on the performative and relational dimensions of the ritual we have been taught to enact? Are the individual relational aspects of this work sometimes prior to and obstructive of the divine dialogue into which he is called to lead us?
"He is in a dialog with God," the Holy Father reminds us, precisely "because the texts of the Holy Mass are not theatrical lines or some such - they are prayers, thanks to which, together with the congregation, I as priest talk to God."
Here we find the true context of a liturgically rooted spirituality of the Diocesan priest, for it is rooted in the we of the liturgical assembly,…”praying with the Church, with the words of the Church, and being truly in colloquy with God.” Thus does the Holy Father insist on internalisation as the first prerequisite for an authentic Priestly ars celebrandi.
A number of years ago, I was invited by the Cathedral Rectors' Association to address them on how to improve cathedral Liturgy. While they were probably expecting a dissertation on the fine points of the latest rubrical disputes, that's not what they got. For to make better Priest celebrants, I suggested to them, you need to encourage Priests to be holier: to seek after sanctity, to long for prayer, to rejoice in virtue, to be conformed more and more to Christ. That is the secret of the ars celebrandi: obedience, authenticity, humility, and love for the sacred rites and texts are by-products of a life lived in close communion with Christ. It's the same secret known by Chaucer in the Parson's tale: “Christe's lore and his apostle twelve he taught...but first he followed it himself.”
Internalisation and John Paul II
Our consciousness of the heart of the priest as the proper forum for the renewal of the Sacred Liturgy was really born in the time of Pope Saint John Paul II, who encouraged us never to forget the "intimate bond between the Priest's spiritual life and the exercise of his ministry.”20 And the same Pontiff who issued perhaps the most challenging words of the first forty years of the liturgical reform, when her reminded the Bishops of the United States in the course of their ad limina visit that
“prayer for the needs of the Church and the individual faithful is so important that serious thought should be given to reorganising priestly and parish life to ensure that priests have time to devote to this essential task, individually and in common. Liturgical and personal prayer, not the tasks of management, must define the rhythms of a Priest's life, even in the busiest of parishes.”21
And that is precisely what we need. More than administrative reorganisations, pastoral planning or restructuring of strategic plans. We need a renewal of the spirituality of the diocesan priest, born of a renewal of his celebration of the sacred liturgy and inspired by the words the Bishop spoke to you when first he place the gifts of the holy people of God: “Know what you are doing, and imitate the mystery you celebrate: model your life on the mystery of the Lord's cross.
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1 - cf. Presbyterorum Ordinis, 13.
2 - Cf. Ibid.
3 - Pope Saint John Paul II, May 27, 1998; cf. ibid., 13; Code of Canon Law, c. 904.
4 - General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 27.
5 - John 15: 16.
6- Vexilla Regis
7 - Mediator Dei, no. 75.
8 - Cf. John 12:32.
9 - Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1348.
10 - John 1:9.
11 - Sacrosanctum concilium, no. 7.
12 - Mediator Dei, no. 17.
13 - Cf. Council of Trent, Sess. 22, c.1, as cited in Mediator Dei, no. 76.
14 - Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1367.
15 - Cf. Galatians 2: 11-21.
16 - Mediator Dei, no. 69.
17 - Ord Pt, no. 112.
18 - Pope Benedict XVI, 13 April 2006.
19 - Sacrosanctum concilium, no. 14
20 - Pastores Dabo Vobis, no. 24.
21 - Pope Saint John Paul II, ad limina apostolorum visit with the Bishops of Michigan and Ohio (May 21, 1998).
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