My dearest, let’s meditate today on the Christian Priesthood. In the Letter to the Hebrews: “Every High Priest taken from men is ordained for men in things pertaining to God, that he may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hb 5,1).

How great is the responsibility of being administrators of God’s goods! It is right this the characteristic of a Priest. Indeed, he doesn’t manage material goods but divine ones; he’s he who brings God to the souls and the souls to God. For this reason he has to be rich of God and must love Him in all, more than everything.

The Priest has many tasks: first of all that of sanctifying himself, then sanctifying the others, helping sinners to convert themselves, sustaining and encouraging the distressed, forgiving sins, bringing peace where’s hate and revenge, and above all remembering everybody that God gave us this life to prepare our eternity.

The Priest must also give good example in the exercises of the virtues: bounty, brotherly charity, forgiveness, humility, joy, enthusiasm in religious life, and particularly has to live always in God’s grace. Unfortunately yet, though the Priest is Jesus himself, remains a man among other men, with his limits, his defects, his failings, and sometimes, alas, also with scandals.

Dear friends, we Priests so greatly need your help. First of all that you pray the Lord that there could be new vocations for the priesthood, because if we go on like this your children, or nephews or new comings, will remain with no priest.

Jesus in His Gospel warns us to pray: “The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest” (Mt 9, 37).

Let’s compare with the past: in 1850 in Italy there were more than sixty thousands of Priests, when people were more or less twenty or twenty five thousand; now instead, people is about sixty thousand and the priests are only twenty thousand, and most of them are also aged. Hence we have only to think over and ask to ourselves: how will be the Church’s future in Italy?

To obtain vocations to the priesthood from God, besides prayer, we can offer also our sufferings, make sacrifices, and ask God that our own children may become Priests. On this subject it is said that a mother, as soon as she bore a baby, she asked the Lord to make him a Priest or a Nun. That mother had thirteen children and they all consecrated themselves to God.

Dearest mothers do not fear that your son may become priest, since if this could be achievable it would be for you the greatest grace and blessing. 

So therefore, if you want that your children grew well and felt the desire of becoming priest, bring them to the religious ceremonies since they are still little, and above all make them frequent the Confession and the Holy Communion. If you take them far from God, how can develop in them the desire of loving Him and above all of consecrating to Him?  

Forgive me if I hint at my personal experience. In my family, made up of ten sons, there have been two brothers Priests and two sisters Nuns.  Obviously we have grown up in a very Christian family. Every Saturday our parents sent us to confess and they gave us the example: in the evening we always said the Rosary and our father read for us religious books: for example the Imitation of Christ, the Practice of loving Jesus, and above all a book that talked about: Dead, Judgment, Hell and Paradise. The Saints used to say that the vocation takes birth on parents’ knees.

Dearest Parents, put one hand on your heart and the other on your conscience, and ask yourself: “I am a Christian, but what do I do to obtain from God   vocations to the priesthood?” a Christian who never say a prayer for this intention, how can assert to love his religion? If Jesus recommends praying the Owner of the harvest, His word must not remain dead letter, but must bring fruit in our life. Let’s pray, pray a lot for the vocations, and graces will fall copiously over our family and us.

Besides praying for the vocations, let’s help those who are already Priests. Let’s sustain and defend them in their work. Let’s take part at their program planned by them. Particularly, let’s not disapprove, or thwart, or slander them, since God’s Judgment would be terrible for those who put themselves in contrast to Priests.  Jesus indeed said: “ He who hears you hears me; and he who despises you despises me; and he who despises me despises Him who sent me”(Lk 10,16). Those who make Priests suffer, make God Himself suffer.

     I greet and bless you from the bottom of my heart, assuring you prayers and greet you every good in the Lord, and that you may become saint through Christ’s Priesthood.  

 

 

Your aff.

P. Luigi Duilio Graziotti

Founder with Mother Providence