Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Mass for the Saint John Paul II Shepherd’s Guild

July 31, 2021
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

1^st Corinthians 10:31-11:1
Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-11
Luke 14:25-33

To mark the pages in my breviary I use memorial prayer cards from the lives of family and friends that serve as a reminder to pray for the dead and that I hope to one day go where my Christian faith offers me the confidence that they have arrived. Among those cards is one that recalls the life of Father William Eddy, a priest who taught me in high school and fostered my vocation as a diocesan priest through his own life, vocation, and priestly ministry. It reads:

Priesthood. “For without the priesthood, we would forget God. Without the priesthood the sacraments would dissipate into sentiment. A priest, another Christ, an instrument of mercy whose whole life is holy and ordered to grace… fully devoted — not to self — but to the Body of Christ, the Church…For the priest is commanded to offer the Eucharist in memory of Jesus. It is the priesthood that enables us to remember Jesus as He insists on being remembered. It is the priesthood that keeps us from denying the truth of God and remaking Him according to our own image, whim, and inclination.”

Redefinition and remaking. We live at a time when so many voices in leadership, academia, and even religion are aggressively set on redefinition and remaking everything from the nature of marriage and biological sexuality to social order and law and justice. These attempts at redefinition do not involve God but rather involve psychological and physical violence and have brought about hostile camps with lines drawn stark with ideology. So much so that leadership is presented regularly in areas of politics, social media, and even family life as requiring giving offense to members of the opposing ideological camp. We are to follow the loudest, most offensive, and most obnoxious voice in the mob according to this current ethic. The temptation is to apply this unhappy way of life to the nature of the Church and to the leadership required of the priesthood. Yet, Saint Paul reminds us in our first reading what exactly is the Apostolic character of priestly life and vocation: “Avoid giving offense, whether to Jews or Greeks or the Church of God, just as I try to please everyone in every way, not seeking my own benefit but that of the many, that they may be saved.” The priesthood is directed in the order of nature and grace for the salvation of souls and always requires the eternal horizon of God that points to the passing away of this world without abandoning those for whom God became man to save through the gift of His life on the Cross.

Redefinition and remaking. The redefinition and remaking of marriage and family life has led our culture to embrace marriage as a temporary and private arrangement and children not as a gift from God, but as a product and extension of the interests of two or more distinct individuals — male or female or both or either. This redefinition has reduced the natural growth and development of a child from dependence to interdependence through stages of maturity arriving at a healthy sense of freedom to an ongoing state of adolescence of shared interests among children and parents. The priesthood requires the growth and development of a young man into mature freedom as an adult and not as identified — by self or others — as an extension of the desires of his parents. As Jesus says in the Gospel of today: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

How does the priesthood, even the Church, and our world avoid redefinition and remaking in our own times and even throughout history? It is the Cross of Christ. The eternal sign of God’s love and the reciprocal response of human love made only possible by the grace of spiritual and moral conversion. We pray for that grace today to priestly vocations in our diocese that we might be transformed and not redefined as Christ’s Church for whom He gave His life.

“For without the priesthood, we would forget God. Without the priesthood the sacraments would dissipate into sentiment. A priest, another Christ, an instrument of mercy whose whole life is holy and ordered to grace… fully devoted — not to self — but to the Body of Christ, the Church…For the priest is commanded to offer the Eucharist in memory of Jesus. It is the priesthood that enables us to remember Jesus as He insists on being remembered. It is the priesthood that keeps us from denying the truth of God and remaking him according to our own image, whim, and inclination.”

Priesthood.