A Reflection on the Priesthood

By Father Greg Markey
From the Bulletin of St. Mary Church, Norwalk, CT, January 27, 2013

When a young man receives the mysterious call to become a priest, there is a sense of being complete, of having found what he is looking for, and the conviction, like the early apostles, that it is worth leaving all to follow Christ. The priesthood is the greatest of all vocations. He is the most intimate friend of God. Having power to consecrate the Body and Blood of Christ, the Lord has raised him higher than all the kings of the earth, and above the angels of heaven. Similar to the beginning of marriage, he is excited for the future that the Lord has planned for his life, but never really knows what kind of challenges he will have to overcome. Now he must spend the rest of his life being faithful to his vocation.

Catholics have a right to expect holiness from their priests, that their priest would live a life of integrity, offer the Sacraments with reverence, and preach the Gospel with fidelity. However, it is healthy to remember the human potential for sin: no priest has ever been immaculately conceived. When some friars once publicly praised St. Francis of Assisi, he told them, “I may yet have sons and daughters; you cannot safely praise me. No man is to be praised whose end is uncertain.” Although he remained a deacon his whole life, St. Francis was a man who understood the uncertain outcome of this spiritual warfare.

The Lord knew that one of His own priests, Judas Iscariot, would betray his vocation, and Jesus warned the people about the danger of becoming overly attached to individual priests, “Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Matthew 23:9).

The priest is involved in the most intense form of spiritual combat simply because he has made the decision to put on the collar and work for the salvation of souls. “Be attentive, dearly beloved priests, for the devils tempt one priest more than a hundred laymen; because a priest that is lost brings with him many people to hell,” says the Doctor of the Church, St. Alphonsus Ligouri. It is only common sense that the enemy will work most diligently to kill the commander because of the damage it causes to the whole company of soldiers. The priest is a shepherd leading the flock to heaven, and is engaged in spiritual battle of the most serious kind because the stakes are nothing less than eternal life and eternal damnation. The devils hate the priest for the number of souls he has freed from their grasp and they pursue him with a vigor that can only be born in hell.

There is nothing more painful and dramatic than a priest who falls from grace, causing all of the Church to suffer. Yet for the intensity of the battle, the priest’s culpability in mortal sin is similar to that of the angels who rebelled. St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes, “The priest having become an angel of the Lord, must expect either the reward or the reprobation of the angels.” Because of his formation, the books he has read, the many instructions he has received and sermons he has heard, he has become like the angels themselves in their great capacity to understand right and wrong. St. Alphonsus says that if the priest commits mortal sin, “he cannot allege ignorance, for he knows the great evil of mortal sin; he cannot plead weakness, because he knows the means by which, if he wishes, he can acquire strength; if he is unwilling to adopt the means, the fault is entirely his own.”

The saints warn that a priest who sins gravely is particularly susceptible to growing indifferent to the gravity of his crime. Because the priest enters the Holy of Holies each day and handles the Sacred Mysteries, he has the temptation of losing the sense of awe before God. The exhortations about hell and all that is terrible in God’s just judgment have lost their power and no longer fill him with terror. He has heard it all before and now they are just words. St. Jerome writes, “There is not in the whole world a monster to be compared with a priest in the state of sin, for the unfortunate man will not bear with correction.” The guilty often responds to accusations by belittling their accusers or intimidating them, but this only postpones the inevitable shame.

Finally, the obstinate sinful priest is the most delicious of all souls in hell. “Oh! How great the rejoicing of the devils when a priest enters hell,” writes St. Alphonsus Ligouri, “All of hell is in confusion to meet the priest who comes.”

Some of the well-meaning faithful will reply to the news of a priest scandal by saying, “There but for the grace of God go I”. While it is a compassionate statement, it is also an inadequate understanding of the human person. Both free will and grace are at work in the human act, and the soul has many chances to turn back before the full horror of mortal sin comes to fruition.

St. Alphonsus tells us, “When you hear of the fall of a spiritual soul, do not imagine that the devil has suddenly precipitated her into sin; for he first brought her into tepidity, and then has cast her into the precipice of enmity with God.” In the spiritual life, mortal sin is never a single moment of weakness when the soul made a bad decision. Rather, mortal sin is a gradual process by which the soul grows tepid, repeatedly consents to small temptations, step by step, through door after door, until the grave monster of darkness has enveloped her. There are many “yes’s” to small temptations before the final consent to the mortal sin. “Deliberate and unrepented venial sin disposes us little by little to commit mortal sin” (Catechism, 1863). This not only shows how merciful the Lord is in giving the soul numerous opportunities to recognize that there is still time to turn back, but also how the soul is then fully culpable if the act comes to fruition.

To become a good priest is no easy matter. It is not simply avoiding mortal sin to save his soul. It is to walk the narrow path of perfection, to deal with the spiritual warfare day in and day out with often no one but the Lord and his guardian angel keeping tabs on his progress. This is why regular Confession and a spiritual director are especially necessary for priests.

In the old form of the Rite of Ordination, the bishop gave an exhortation to the deacons about to be elevated as priests and finished with these words: “May you thus build up, by preaching and example, the house, that is, the family of God, so that your promotion may not be a cause of damnation for me, nor by the reception of so great an office, for you.” This kind of exhortation is no longer used in the ordination rite today but one can see the wisdom of reminding the newly ordained priests of the serious nature of what he about to undertake.

The lay people should love their priests, pray for their priests, and thank God for their priests, recognizing the hidden spiritual warfare he undergoes all for their salvation. The priest has “put on the breastplate of righteousness”, “the shield of faith”, “the helmet of salvation”, and the “sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:14-17). The battle is raging and no one’s salvation is assured until the last breath.