A Priest Is a Priest
At 25, I resigned engineering work in 1995 to enter the seminary. A boss asked, “What makes you tick?” I replied, “People have souls, and I want to help them get to heaven.” A priest’s day-to-day life hinges upon Holy Mass, Liturgy of the Hours, Eucharistic Holy Hour, Rosary, study, priestly fraternity, hearing confessions, baptizing, preaching/teaching the whole Gospel truth “in season and out”, anointing the sick, comforting the dying, burying the dead, preparing the engaged, etc. All this develops me as a man, a Catholic and a priest. And like Jesus, the priest – and each one of us – must “live lean”, travel light and be missionary.
Administration is part of a priest’s duties; it cannot become primary. However, even within “churchworld”, there are people (of little or no Eucharistic faith) who treat the Church, the priest and the parish as merely functional things that “meet my needs”. Such a bourgeois and me-focused mindset shrinks the Church. The danger to the priest in these days is that he degenerates into a “sacrament machine” and a buildings manager, and that he forgets why he was consecrated to God: to save souls. “The Church must not let herself be tempted by the organizational and bureaucratic systems that the modern mindset tends to impose on it,” wrote Fr. Massimo Camisasca. Instead, the priest must be the man of prayer first. As Pope Saint John Paul II once told the bishops of Michigan and Ohio:
At a time when many demands are made on the priest’s time and energies, it is important to emphasize that one of his first duties is to pray on behalf of the people entrusted to him. This is his privilege and his responsibility, for he has been ordained to represent his people before the Lord and to intercede on their behalf before the throne of grace. Indeed, prayer for the needs of the Church and the individual faithful is so important that serious thought should be given to reorganizing 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.
~Fr Loftus