The Eternal Priesthood/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PRIEST'S HELPS.
Sometimes we say, or at least we feel, "If I had known what it is to be a priest I should never have ventured. I have all the dangers of other men, and many that are the perils only of a priest. They are set up on high, and they are set over souls to give account. The world and Satan have special enmity and malice against a priest. What good does my life do me? I am not better than my fathers; and if I fall, my fall will be great, and perhaps irremediable. Grandis sacerdotis dignitas sed grandis ruina." Such thoughts often come by the suggestion of the tempter and the fault of our own hearts. But, unless we play false to ourselves, a truer mind soon asserts itself; and we say, "I have the dangers of other men, but I have graces beyond them all. They have the sacramental grace of sons and of soldiers, but I have also the sacramental grace of a priest." If the dangers of a priest are great, his sacramental grace is greater than his dangers. He has helps both general and special in the exercise of his priesthood, which are more than adequate for every duty, danger, and temptation.
We have already spoken of the general helps of the priesthood, and of the pastoral care: we will now count up the special helps which surround a priest in all his life.
1. First, and above all, is his daily Mass. "When the morning was come, Jesus stood on the shore." The day begins with the presence of Jesus; the altar is the shore of the Eternal World, and Jesus comes at our word. In the Holy Mass we know Him, and yet our eyes are holden. He is in another form. We cannot see Him; but we know that it is the Lord. He makes ready for us, and gives to us the Bread of Life. If we were to spend a whole life in preparation, one such divine contact with His Presence would be an overpayment of all our prayer and penance and purification of heart.[1] But He comes to us, not once in our life only, but morning by morning. Every day begins with Him. If the first hour of every day were spent in the presence—certain though unseen—of our guardian-angel or of our patron Saint, our whole day would be restrained and elevated by it. Familiarity might deaden at last our vivid sense of so near an approach of the supernatural world and we might cease to realise it. But the Holy Mass is more than all this. It is the personal Presence of the Lord of angels and of Saints; and yet, through familiarity with the exceeding condescension of His great humility, we may gradually lose the vividness of our perception. The Council of Trent teaches us that the Presence of Jesus is above the laws and order of nature.[2] He is there, God and Man in personal reality and substance; and we, when we hold the Blessed Sacrament in our hands, are in contact with the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the world. The Council says again that He is present, not as in a place, but as He is—a substance.[3] In the divine order there is no time, and place is not. We are in contact with the eternal world; and that contact is real and substantial and personal, both on His side and on ours. We behold Him face to face by the vision of faith. Beyond this there is nothing but the vision of the blessed. After the consecration we are already admitted to it under a veil. Nobis quoque peccatoribus, to us sinners also is granted in the Holy Mass a share and a friendship with the Saints and Martyrs in the heavenly court. From the consecration to the Communion we are as truly and more consciously with Him than Cleophas and his companion in the way to Emmaus. And though our eyes are holden our understanding is not. We see Him in another shape; but we know Him while we see Him. And we speak to Him as our Lord, our Master, our Friend; and by an inward speech He answers us in words which it is not in man to utter. His abiding is for a short interval of time, but that brief time encloses an abyss of light and peace. We say Mass morning by morning all our life, but we never reach the end of this mystery of His personal nearness. There is no fixed horizon to the multitude of His sweetness,[4] which expands on every side like the illimitable sea. And yet all its sweetness is hid in the Blessed Sacrament for those who seek Him in holy fear. And before He departs from us for a season, to come again to-morrow, He takes and gives to us His precious Body and Blood as in the guest-chamber, on that last night of farewell, and as at Emmaus, when He vanished out of their sight. He is gone, but in a little while He is to be found again in the midst of His disciples; as the Council says again that "Jesus, having loved His own while He was in the world, loved them to the end:" "that He might never be absent from His own, gave us, by an inexplicable counsel of His wisdom, a pledge of His love above the order and conditions of nature"[5]—that is, His own perpetual Presence veiled from sight. When the Archangel Raphael departed from Tobias and his son so that they could see him no more, they lay "for three hours prostrate on their faces."[6] What ought to be our thanksgiving after Mass?
If I do not speak of Communion it is because I need not. Every priest knows what no words could tell. We cannot make colour or sweetness visible or sensible to the intelligence alone. Sight and taste only can know. Therefore the Holy Ghost says, "Taste and see that the Lord is sweet."[7] We must taste first and see afterwards; but it is by an internal sight which needs no light, and has no limits of sense. In every Communion we are made flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone; and if our hearts are pure we are made also heart of His Heart, mind of His mind, will of His will, spirit of His spirit. We are not straitened in Him, but in ourselves. If our hearts were prepared as they might and ought to be by contrition and piety, the sacramental grace of even one Communion would suffice to sanctify us in body, soul, and spirit. The virtues which go out from the presence of our Lord into our hearts are measured by our capacity to receive them; and that capacity is measured by our preparation, both remote and proximate: that is, by our preparation before we go to the altar, and by our habitual union with God. Our Lord said: "In that day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in Me, and I in you."[8] "In that day," that is, "when I am in the glory of the Father, and the Holy Ghost is come. Then you shall know that you are by substantial Communion of My Body and Blood in Me, and I in you." This consciousness of the Divine Presence dwelling within and encompassing us without is a mutual indwelling promised in these words. It was this that S. Paul meant when he said, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." He becomes the Guide of all our living powers. They are elevated by union with Him. As every beat of the heart and every breath we draw is prevented and sustained by His creative power, so He prevents all our thoughts, words, and works. Our freedom and our agency are made perfect by union with Him. He is the presiding and Divine Agent who helps us in all things to do His will, but demands of us our whole personal obedience. We live, and act, and speak of our own freedom; but our freedom is guided and guarded by His grace and power. He lives in us, and we live by Him. What help can be wanting to a priest who loves his daily Mass? It contains all things—Nutrit, præservat, reparat, delectat et auget. He is our food, our shelter, our refreshment, our delight, and our evergrowing strength.
2. The second help of a priest's life is the Divine Office. Seven times a day the acts of divine worship ascend from the Church throughout the world to the throne of God. The Church in warfare, in suffering, and in heaven, adores the ever-blessed Trinity with an incessant voice of prayer and praise. The whole Church is the sanctuary, and the Divine Office is the ritual of the choir on earth uniting with the praises, thanksgivings, and doxologies which are the ritual of the choir in heaven. Every priest has his place in this choir, and he makes seven visits to the heavenly court day by day.
The Divine Office is a part of the divine tradition. It is a perpetual witness for God and for the faith. It has been wrought together by the hands of men; but those men were Saints, and their work was wrought under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. The framing of the Ritual may have been the work of human hands; but the materials of which it is composed are the words of the Spirit. of God. The Psalms and the Scriptures of inspired men under the Old Law and the New, with the writings of the Saints, are all interwoven into a wonderful texture of prayer and praise, of worship and witness of the kingdom of God, and of the Communion of Saints. The perpetual revolution of yearly solemnities and festivals—winter and spring, summer and autumn—brings round continually the whole revelation of faith. Prophets and Apostles, Evangelists and Saints, speak to us with voices that never die. The whole history of the kingdom of God is always returning upon our sight.
A devout soul asked of S. Peter Damian "why it is that we say Dominus vobiscum, as if many were present, when in truth none are there, and we are all alone?" He answered: "Because we are never alone. We are always worshipping with the whole Church throughout the world, and we pray that the presence of the Lord may be with all the faithful upon earth." We say "The Lord be with you," for we are adoring God on behalf of the whole visible Church, and in fellowship with those whose union with our Lord is already made perfect. We make these seven visits to the world of light and we recite the Holy Office because the Church lays it upon us under pain of mortal sin. We are bound to recite it for two reasons: the one, for the glory of God, the other, for our own sanctification. It is the wisdom and love of the Church for its priests that impose this grave obligation. The Church takes out of a priest's day so much of his time as his office requires, an hour and a half or two hours. That time no longer belongs to the priest, but to God and to the Church. The priest cannot alienate it, for it is not his own; but, under obedience and grave obligation, he is bound to use it for his own sanctification. The face of Moses shone after he had spoken with God; and our faces ought to shine, or our hearts at least ought to burn and to shine inwardly with the light of the heavenly court. When we say the hours, we "come to Mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the Church of the first-born, who are written in the heavens, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect."[9] What ought to be the habitual piety, recollection, humility in word and spirit, of one who, seven times a day, is in choir with the Saints, and before the face of God? Next to the Holy Mass, what greater help to sacerdotal perfection can there be than this?
8. A third help of the priest is mental prayer. The Divine Office is vocal prayer, but the mere recital of it fills the mind with the matter of mental prayer. A priest's life is the vita mixta of our Lord, and for our instruction Jesus spent days in toil and nights in prayer. A priest's life is both contemplative and active, and these two elements cannot be separated without loss and danger. Hæc meditare, in his esto, ut profectus tuus manifestus sit omnibus. The things Timothy was to meditate and to live in were all the truths and precepts of the faith, but most especially "reading, exhortation, and doctrine"—that is, the deposit of the revelation in all its fulness and detail. In reading, our minds terminate upon a book; in meditation, our intelligence and our heart terminate upon God. Prayer is a vital act of faith and desire, to attain a fuller knowledge of God and a closer union with Him in affection and in resolution—that is, in heart and will.
The first effect of mental prayer is the realisation of the objects of faith—that is, of the world unseen as if it were visible, and of the future as if it were present. To realise is to have a vivid and abiding perception of things unseen as if they were palpable, and things future as if they were already come. We read of Moses that he endured the wrath of Pharao as seeing Him that was invisible. All the terror of the earthly king was lost in the sense of the Divine Presence behind the throne which overpowered all human majesty. S. Paul says we walk by faith, not by sight; but the objects of faith are eternal, the objects of sight are passing away. The invisible world is the substance, the visible world but the shadow. To minds that are not supernatural this world, loud and glaring, is palpable, and therefore thought to be real. The unseen is impalpable, and though not to be denied, yet upon such minds it has no action or constraining power. The great multitude of men live all day long as if there were no unseen world and no world to come. They do not meditate. They say prayers, but their prayers are not mental, The mind does not realise or aspire or stay itself upon God, upon the glory of the ever-blessed Trinity, upon the beauty of the sacred Manhood, upon the bliss of the Mother of God, upon the rest and joy of the Saints, upon the fellowship we have with them now, upon the share which is promised to us in their rest and joy hereafter, upon the presence of Jesus with us always, and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in every pure and humble soul, above all in the soul of a pure and humble priest, of a faithful and fervent pastor. If we realise these things as the merchant realises the market-place and his bales of merchandise, or the money-lender his securities and his coins of gold, then we shall live in this world, but not of it, as those who have risen with Christ[10] and are already "blessed with Him in heavenly places."[11] This realisation of unseen and heavenly things is better than all external rules to guard and strengthen a priest. It is an internal light and strength, which he carries with him at all times and in every place, sustaining the sacramental grace of his priesthood: and this is a divine and unfailing help in every peril or need.
4. Another potent help in a priest's life is preaching the Word of God to others. S. Paul said: "God sent me out not to baptise, but to preach the Gospel." The Council of Trent says that preaching is the chief office of Bishops;[12] and if it be the chief work of the Bishop, how much more of the priest. If Isaias was afraid to speak in the name of God because he was "a man of unclean lips,"[13] what shall we judge of the sanctity and dignity of the preacher? If a prophet could hardly dare to preach in God's name, where shall the pulpit orators appear? That which was ordained for their help becomes unto them the occasion of falling. To be chosen out and to be sent by God to speak to men in His name, to come as a messenger a latere Jesu to preach penance and the remission of sins, to show the way of sanctity and of perfection in His name, in His words, and by His authority—who would dare these things if necessity were not laid upon him? To speak in God's name coldly, carelessly, and without due knowledge, without exact preparation, what rashness, what peril. To preach ostentatiously, with self-manifestation, vanity, and unreality[14]—how provoking to our Divine Master, how scandalous to souls. The simple, the humble, and the faithful instinctively detect the preacher who preaches himself; even men of the world, accustomed to the brief and peremptory language of earnest life, at once find out the unreal and the professional. They will listen to an honest preacher, though he be rude and rough.[15] The fewer of his own words and the more of God's words the surer he is to command the hearing and the respect of men. They feel that he has a right to speak, and that he is speaking in the name and in the words of his Master. They feel too that he has forgotten himself, and is thinking only of the message from God, and of the souls before him. He is teaching them what God has first taught him. He has prayed for it, and pondered on it; the truth has gone down through his intellect and his conscience into his own heart, and out of the fulness of it he speaks. The Wise Man says, "The mouth of the wise is in his heart; but the heart of the fool is in his mouth:" and a very shallow heart it is. If for "every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account in the day of judgment,"[16] what shall be the account of the words which we have spoken in long years and in a long life, as if in God's name? If the words of God by the prophet ought to be true of us as of himself, "Is not my word fire, and as the hammer that breaketh the rocks in pieces?" what shall be judged of our cold, light, interminable flow of words with few thoughts and empty rhetoric; idle because inefficacious, and inefficacious because our own? Whose heart have we set on fire? what hard heart have we broken? And if not, is it not because we have not first learned of God what we teach to others? If we sought it of Him He would give us a mouth and wisdom which even our adversaries would not be able to resist or to gainsay. The best meditation before preaching is prayer. We must, indeed, meditate what we preach, and make meditations in our sermons, but not sermons in our meditations; for our meditations are for our own sanctification, and we cannot more surely reach the hearts of other men than by teaching what has first been realised in our own. For this reason the work of preaching the Word of God keeps us always as learners at the feet of our Divine Master. And in speaking His truth it reacts with a powerful effect upon ourselves. It deepens its outlines on our own intellect, conscience, and heart. It powerfully sustains our will; it replenishes our mind, keeping alive in our memory the meditations of long years that are past with continual fresh accessions of light. And it brings down a special blessing into the heart of the preacher. Qui inebriat inebriabitur et ipse. He that abundantly refreshes the souls of men with the water of life shall be abundantly refreshed himself. He that watereth shall be watered himself in the very time and act of speaking for God. A humble priest preaching as he prays is united with the fountain of the water of life; he has his lips to the spring: and he will often wonder at the thoughts which he never thought, and at the words which were put in his mouth. It is the promise, "He shall receive of Mine and show it unto you." Ille plus dicit qui plus facit—the few words of a holy priest do more than the many voices of human eloquence.
Preaching, then, is a constant and supernatural help to sacerdotal and pastoral perfection.
5. One more, and the last, we may enumerate is the confessional. S. Gregory the Great says that priests are like the laver of brass in the entrance of the Temple, in which the people took the water of purification before they entered. They receive the sins of all the people, but are kept always pure themselves.[17] Jesus stretched out His hand and touched the leper, saying, "Be thou clean." The priest touches the sinner and is kept pure. But he needs to watch and pray, ne lepra possit transire in medicum.
We study moral theology in books, but there is no book so full of teaching as the confessional. The first time a priest sits in the tribunal of Penance can hardly be forgotten. On either side come alternate voices, as it were from heaven and from hell. First comes the confession of a sinner black as night; next the confession of a child in baptismal innocence; after that a penitent truly contrite, followed by a soul ignorant of itself and of its sinfulness; then come the poor, simple and single of heart; after them worldlings, intriguers, and evident liars. All the treatises of the Salmanticenses cannot teach a priest what his confessional is always teaching. If he has the humility to learn, it will teach him five great truths:
First, self-knowledge, by bringing things to his own remembrance, and by showing him his own face in a glass by the lives of sinners.
Secondly, contrition, in the sorrow of penitents who will not be consoled.
Thirdly, delicacy of conscience, in the innocent whose eye being single, and their whole body full of light, accuse themselves of omissions and deviations from the will of God, which we, perhaps, daily commit without discernment.
Fourthly, aspiration, by the fervent, whose one desire and effort, in the midst of burdened and restless homes, is to rise higher and higher in union with God.
Fifthly, self-accusation at our own unprofitableness, from the generosity and fidelity of those who are hindered on every side, and yet, in humility, self-denial, charity, and union with God, surpass us, who have every gift of time and grace needed for perfection.
But if we would learn these things, we must treat the Sacrament of Penance as we would treat the Sacrament of Baptism, realising its divine character and power. The first part of his duty that a lukewarm priest forsakes is the confessional. Sometimes he resents the rebukes which penitents unconsciously give. Sometimes he is weary of sitting long hours, and bearing with the rude and the repulsive. Sometimes he hears and absolves without a word because he has nothing to say, partly from a want of interior piety, and partly from not attending to the confession itself.
If, however, a priest rightly fulfils his office as father, judge, and physician, it becomes one of the most direct and powerful helps to his own sanctification.
What, then, can be wanting to sustain the priest in the perfection with which he was invested when he came for ordination? These five great sacerdotal graces, the Holy Mass, the Divine Office, the practice of mental prayer—that is, a life of contemplation—the preaching of the Word of God, the absolution of sinners, and the guidance of souls in the confessional, all react directly, powerfully, and profusely upon the life and mind of the priest. He can never plead for any fault of commission or of omission, or for yielding in any temptation, or for failure in any duty, that he had not the knowledge or the power to act up to his priesthood. Such a plea would be an accusation against our Divine Lord for commanding impossibilities, or exacting a hard service like an austere man, without providing adequate and abundant helps. It is a temptation, and a very common fault, to throw blame upon our state and circumstances, and to imagine that we should do better in some other state or way. If we fail under a full and fair trial with all helps around us, we should fail anywhere and in any condition and in any surroundings. If a priest's dangers are great, a priest's helps are greater.
- ↑ S. Gregory of Nazianzum says: "Extreme old age would not be a long preparation for the priesthood."—Orat. ii. § lxxii.
- ↑ Catech. Trid. ad Par. P. iv. c. 2.
- ↑ Ibid. P. ii. c. iv. 36.
- ↑ Ps. xxx. 20.
- ↑ Catech. Trid. P. ii. c. iv. 2.
- ↑ Tobias xii. 21, 22.
- ↑ Ps. xxxiii. 9.
- ↑ S. John xiv. 20.
- ↑ Heb. xii. 22, 23.
- ↑ Col. iii. 1.
- ↑ Ephes. i. 3.
- ↑ Sess. xxiv. De Ref. c. iv.
- ↑ Isaias vi. 5.
- ↑ S. Augustine says of such: "Foris tumescit intus tabescit."
- ↑ S. Jerome says: "Multoque melius est a duobus imperfectis rusticitatem habere sanctam quam eloquentiam peccatricem."—Ep. ad Nepot. tom. iv. p. 263.
- ↑ S. Matt. xii. 36.
- ↑ Reg. Pastoralis, lib. ii. c. ii.