Thursday 11 June 2009

A time of grace approaches


The Year for Priests promises to be an intense moment of faith for the priests of the world, together with Benedict XVI. We are called every day - and much more so during this year - "to be ever more authentically that which we already are, [to] conversion to our ecclesial identity of which our ministry is a necessary consequence, so that a renewed and joyous awareness of our 'being' will determine our 'acting,' or rather will create the space allowing Christ the Good Shepherd to live in us and to act through us." (Archbishop Piacenza)

"Our spirituality must be nothing other than the spirituality of Christ himself, the one and only supreme High Priest of the New Testament and his mission to reveal the Father and his wondrous plan of salvation. This mission of Christ carries with it the building up of the Church: Behold the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the Church."

"We must be laborers for the building up of the one Church of Christ, for which we must live purposefully and faithfully the communion of love with the Pope, with the bishops, with our brother priests and with the faithful. We must live this communion with the unbroken pilgrimage of the Church within the very sinews of the Mystical Body."

"Run spiritually in this year with a 'wide open heart,'" the archbishop urged, "so as to inwardly conform to our vocation the better to say, in truth 'it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.'”
(The Photo above was taken in Ars with priests of the Society of St John Vianney.)

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