'As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you.'[1] For they are partakers of the priesthood of Christ, and share in the twofold jurisdiction over His natural and over His mystical Body. By sacred Orders they are deputed 'to the highest ministries, by which service is rendered to Christ Himself in the Sacrament of the Altar: for which service greater interior sanctity is required than is required even by the state of religion.'[2] Moreover, they are friends, to whom He said, with familiar love, ' I will not now call you servants, but My friends, because you have known all things which I have done in the midst of you.'[3] And forasmuch as in the dispensation of redeeming grace it is so ordered that the servants of God receive the help of the Holy Ghost, according to the height of their dignity or the arduous greatness of their office, to none assuredly are given more abundant graces than to the friends and partakers of the priesthood and mission of Jesus our Saviour."
We have seen what sanctity is required by the manifold relations in which a priest stands to the Person of his Divine Master. Here S. Thomas tells
- ↑ S. John xx. 21.
- ↑ S. Thom. Summa Theol. 2da 2dæ, q. 184, a. 8.
- ↑ Pontif. Rom. § 1.
