Worth Revisiting - I Know This Is Late, But...

Thank you once again, Allison Gingras at Reconciled To You  and Elizabeth Riordan at Theology Is A Verb  for hosting Worth Revisiting each week. It is a privilege to share our work with you and your followers.

Here is another post from 2011:

 

I Know This Is Late, But...

(Originally posted August 8, 2011)

We hit the trifecta of Eucharistic saints last week: St. Alphonus Liguori, St. Peter Eymard, and St. John Marie Vianney, the model for all priests. I wrote about the first two Saints, but my computer got zapped at the Catholic Writers' Guild Conference. My son-in-law just removed the bugs. What follows is what I had intended to share last week.

(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Like Saints Alphonsus and Peter, St. John Vianney gets to the heart of what it should mean to be a Catholic. Here is a sample of his wisdom on the Eucharist.

"There is nothing, so great as the Eucharist. If God had something more precious, He would have given it to us."

"We ought to visit him [Jesus in the Holy Eucharist] often.  How dear to Him is a quarter of an hour spared from our occupations or from some useless employment, to come and pray to Him, visit Him, and console Him for all the ingratitude He receives!  When He sees poor souls hurrying to Him, He smiles at them.  They come with that simplicity which pleases Him so much, to ask pardon for all sinners, and for the insults of so many who are ungrateful."

Do we have sufficient faith, "to see God hidden in the priest like a light behind the glass, like wine mixed with water"? Have we taken our precious priests for granted? The Cure of Ars suggests we have.

"Were we to fully realize what a priest is on earth, we would die: not of fright but of love…Without the priest, the passion and death of our Lord would be of no avail. It is the priest who continues the work of redemption on earth…What use would be a house filled with gold, were there no one to open its door? The priest holds the key to the treasures of heaven: it is he who opens the door; he is the steward of the good Lord; the administrator of His goods."

Our Holy Father held St. John Vianney up to all our priests during the Year for the Priest, affirming what this humble man had said: "A good shepherd, a priest after God’s Heart, is the greatest treasure which the good Lord can grant to a parish, and one of the most precious gifts of divine mercy."

How well our priests and our Church would be served if all of our priests strove to follow this saint's priestly example, treasured the priesthood as he did, and heeded his advice: "O, how great is the priest!...If he realized what he is, he would die…God obeys him: he utters a few words and the Lord descends from heaven at his voice, to be contained within a small host." It is for these reasons he suggested that "we ought to pity a priest who celebrates Mass as if he were engaged in something routine."

God doesn't make mistakes. He chose each and everyone of our priests. He has called each of them to be "another Christ". He calls each of them, as well as each of us, to holiness. None of us can ever achieve that goal on our own. We can and will if we make the Eucharist, the source, center and summit of our daily lives.

Our priests are under an unrelenting attack. We must appreciate, love and support each of them. We must pray for them. We must fast on their behalf. We must thank them for standing up for the Truth and for making the Eucharist the center of their priestly lives. We must stand by them when they are attacked for defending the Faith.

We must let them know that we want to accompany them on the journey to holiness and eternal life.

We must!

Worth Revisiting - We Need More Holy Priests

Be sure to visit Allison Gingras  (Reconciled To You) and Elizabeth Riordan (Theology Is A Verb) each week for Revisiting Wednesday, a place for Catholic writers to share their wares and stir your souls. Stop for a visit now (and every Wednesday).

I would like to share the following:

There has been a shortage of priestly vocations in this nation for some time. There are a number of reasons for this crisis (well beyond the scope of this simple article) but one screams to be addressed: the failure of some priests to make the Eucharist the source and center of their daily lives – an issue addressed many times by Blessed John Paul II.

We do not need priests who believe their success rests in political activism and community organizing and who tickle our ears with platitudes and half-truths while withholding the spiritual Truth we need to live eternally. We need courageous priests, real men, other Christs, holy priests, who teach, live, defend, explain and love all the Truths of our Faith – men who would rather die than see a single person under their pastoral care lose their soul.

Worth Revisiting - Of Mute and Silent Tabernacles and Lifeless Hosts

Thank you Allison Gingras  (Reconciled To You) and Elizabeth Riordan (Theology Is A Verb) for another opportunity to re-publish our favorite posts on Worth Revisiting.

Stop for a visit now (and every Wednesday). The gifted hostesses and other writers who post each week will no doubt have much of value to offer you..

[I share the following thoughts with a renewed sense of urgency. We are spinning our wheels and jeopardizing souls if we do not become lovers of the Eucharist.]

Eucharistic Reflection - Of Mute and Silent Tabernacles and Lifeless Hosts 

(Originally posted September 22, 2015)

“We ministers of the Lord, for whom the Tabernacle has become mute and silent, the stone of consecration cold, the Host a venerable, but lifeless, memento: have been unable to turn souls from their evil. How could we ever draw them out of the mire or forbidden pleasures?

And yet we have talked to them about the joys of religion and of good conscience. But because we have not known how to slake our own thirst at the living waters of the Lamb, we have mumbled and stuttered in our attempts to portray those ineffable joys, the very desire of which would have shattered the chains of the triple concupiscence much more effectively than all our thundering tirades about hell…Our lips have been unable to speak the language of the Heart of Him Who loves men, because our converse with Him has been as infrequent as it has been cold.

Let us not try to shift all the blame onto the profoundly demoralized state of society. After all, we have only to look, for example, at the effect on completely de-Christianized parishes of the presence of sensible, active, devoted, capable priests, but priests who were, above all, lovers of the Eucharist.”

(From  The Soul of The Apostolate by Jean Baptiste Chautard, OCSO)

Pray for Saintly Priests!

Monday Musings – Every Knee Shall Bend!

(Image source:Biblebios.com)

If God used Balaam’s donkey to get that prophet’s attention, I guess he can use me to get yours. May these periodic postings on the second and fourth Mondays of each month (God willing) generate fruitful discussion and faithful change.

A few days ago, I was prompted to read through some older journal entries and discovered one from more than 13 years ago. How timeless are the insights God gives us, especially those we may have forgotten but are blessed to rediscover!

Let me share with you what I wrote (with some editing) more than a decade ago:.

“I attended Mass at a Dominican Monastery today. There are no resident Dominican friars there. As I exited my car, I saw an elderly Franciscan priest getting out of his vehicle. He had come to say Mass. He was unable to stand upright. His elderly and frail body was hunched over (literally in half) as he walked carefully on the snow with the aid of a cane, his priestly vestments folded over his other arm.