To my brothers soon to be ordained priests of Jesus Christ,

For a seminarian or religious in formation, priestly ordinations are the climax of each year. They are the climax of formation itself. Several years of prayer, corrections, meetings, ministries, lectures, essays, soccer games, liturgies, house chores, common meals, and a bounty of grace lead to this one moment. You have reached it.

This year presents extraordinary circumstances. This year presents a cross. The chapel will not be packed. The organ will swell only to fill much empty space. Families will be absent. There will be no mothers to receive the manutergia and your first blessing. Many of you will be unable to say a first Mass at your home parishes. Our Lord knows the trials many in the world have gone through and continue to go through during this pandemic. Your ordination is no exception.

When I think of priestly ordinations, the scene is always magnificent. I see young men, like Simeon the high priest from the Book of Sirach, appear with “the people gathered round” them (Sir 50:5). Each of them, like Simeon, is vested with a “glorious robe and clothed . . . with superb perfection” (50:11). Each ascends “to the holy altar” and makes “the court of the sanctuary glorious” (50:11). They also conclude their service in the manner of Simeon, who, after offering “a libation of the blood of the grape,” came down from the sanctuary “to pronounce the blessing of the Lord” over the people (50:20). Trumpets sound (50:16) and those gathered sing “with their voices in sweet and full-toned melody” (50:18). 

To put it simply, priestly ordinations are awesome.

Thinking ahead to your priestly ordination, brothers, my thoughts have increasingly turned to Our Lord. Simeon’s priesthood was indeed magnificent, but it was merely a figure of Christ’s definitive priesthood. When Jesus appeared for his priestly service, people also gathered round: “A company of evildoers encircle me” (Ps 22:16). Mocking soldiers vested him not with a glorious robe, but “a purple cloak” (Mark 15:17).  When he went to the altar of the Cross, like Simeon he made the sanctuary glorious, but he did so because he and the Father were glorified in his sacrifice of love: “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him” (John 3:31). Jesus offered not a libation, but a holocaust. He offered not the blood of the grape, but his Most Precious Blood. He did not bless the people. He wrought salvation.

When and where was Jesus ordained to such a glorious priesthood? Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI points to the Garden of Gethsemani. We learn this, he says, from the Letter to the Hebrews, which speaks of how Jesus was “made perfect” in suffering (5:7-10). Citing another scholar, the pope emeritus explains “that in the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, the expression ‘make perfect’ . . . is used exclusively to mean ‘consecrate as priest’” (Jesus of Nazareth, Vol. 2, 164). In the Garden, Jesus offered himself. He made intercession on behalf of suffering humanity. He bore our infirmities there. Our sins caused him to sweat blood, the first fruits of his Passion. The Letter to the Hebrews “tells us that precisely in this act of self-giving, in this bearing-aloft of human existence to God, Christ truly became a priest ‘according to the order of Melchizedek’” (Ibid., 164).

Brothers, you are being ordained into this priesthood. On your ordination day, you will be given the unique opportunity to enter into the mystery of Christ’s own consecration on Mount Olivet. There, Jesus “fell to the ground” (Mark 14:25). You will imitate this gesture (cf. Jesus of Nazarth, 153-154). There, Jesus’s mother was not present, although, wherever she was, she was surely praying intensely at that very hour. He had with him only his weak, bleary-eyed brothers. Similarly, your mothers will be away. You will have only your feeble brothers with you, watching and praying as you learn to take on the sufferings of the world as mediators in the Mediator, priests in the Priest, victims in the Victim.

May God bless each of you as the day of your ordination approaches. May he bless your families and friends. I pray that you approach the Garden with the knowledge and consolation that Christ leads you there. That Garden will define your priesthood, as it did for the Eternal High Priest. And may your priesthood—your participation in Christ’s priesthood—bear everlasting fruit unto the salvation of souls and the glory of God Almighty.

Sincerely,

A Brother in Christ and in St. Dominic

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Photo by Br. Zachary Sexton, O.P.