{"id":3924,"date":"2011-02-15T19:53:20","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T19:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/2011\/02\/the-terrible-and-inescapable-g\/"},"modified":"2015-11-16T11:35:29","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T10:35:29","slug":"the-terrible-and-inescapable-g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/2011\/02\/the-terrible-and-inescapable-g\/","title":{"rendered":"The terrible glory of the priesthood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"5eccehom.jpg\"<\/a>Reading Canon Eug\u00e8ne Masure’s book, “Parish Priest” (Fides, 1955) I fell upon this remarkable passage:<\/small><\/p>\n

It is not only at the Last Supper and on Calvary that Jesus was a priest. He is a priest forever, inasmuch as His priesthood is coextensive with the Incarnation itself. He continues to exercise His mediatory functions without interruption. Since He is a living and substantial sacrament, He is a priest in all of His relations with God and men. As Father Salet says, “The instant the Word becomes incarnate — the Word who is at once the perfect Image of the Father and the exemplar of creation — He must of necessity be the Mediator, the religious bond between God and man, and consequently the Priest”<\/em>. His ordination is the Incarnation itself. He is consecrated not by a transitory and accidental act, not by an unction received on a certain day, but by God Himself uniting Himself to His humanity and thereby conferring upon Him the incommunicable name of Christ<\/em>. That is to say, He is a priest in His substance, by all that He is, by His entire being. It also means that all His actions are necessarily priestly acts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Ontological Nature of the Priesthood<\/strong>
\nI find this text extraordinarily helpful in coming to a better understanding of the ontological nature of my own priesthood. What is, in effect, the real meaning of the indelible character of Holy Orders if not this: that my priesthood is coextensive with my humanity and that, by virtue of my ordination, I have become a living and substantial sacrament? Once ordained, a man is a priest in all his relations with God and men. The priesthood cannot be put on like a garment and then put off at will.
\nEvery Action Is Priestly<\/strong>
\nThe instant I became a priest, a kind of incarnation<\/em> took place — to use the phrase of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity — I began to participate in the Mediatorship of Christ, becoming a priest in my very substance, by all that I am, and by my entire being. It follows from this that all my actions are priestly actions. This is the terrible and inescapable glory of the priesthood: that it cannot be laid aside, even for a moment. The terrible glory of the priesthood can be disfigured, defiled, and dragged into the depths of the most sinful degeneracy. It remains a terrible glory: a mysterious reality that marks the priest in this life and in the next, either for his eternal beatitude or his eternal torment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Canon Eug\u00e8ne Masure’s book, “Parish Priest” (Fides, 1955) I fell upon this remarkable passage: It is not only at the Last Supper and on Calvary that Jesus was a priest. He is a priest forever, inasmuch as His priesthood is coextensive with the Incarnation itself. He continues to exercise His mediatory functions without interruption. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-priesthood"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paVypq-11i","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3924"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3924"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11854,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3924\/revisions\/11854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}