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Five and a half years ago (July 2004) we welcomed you, dear Brother Bishops and Priests to the First National Congress of the Priests right here 7at the World Trade Center (WTC) in what we thought was the unprecedented, historic and grace-filled gathering of some four thousand priests in the Philippines. It was reported then that there were talks, reflections and moments in adoration prayers that caught the priests in rapt attention and fervor where one “could hear a pin drop.” The proceedings of that congress were caught in a book entitled HISTORY AND GRACE, a copy of which was sent to all participants.

Five and a half years ago (July 2004) we welcomed you, dear Brother Bishops and Priests to the First National Congress of the Priests right here 7at the World Trade Center (WTC) in what we thought was the unprecedented, historic and grace-filled gathering of some four thousand priests in the Philippines. It was reported then that there were talks, reflections and moments in adoration prayers that caught the priests in rapt attention and fervor where one “could hear a pin drop.” The proceedings of that congress were caught in a book entitled HISTORY AND GRACE, a copy of which was sent to all participants.

We thought we already established history then, and we remembered that historic event with a unique plaque in the walls of WTC. Today we inform you, dear Brother Bishops and Priests, that right in this one-hectare hall of the World Trade Center we have broken our own record by filling this hall with more than 5,000 priests.

Why do we convene the Second National Congress for Priests today? Truth to say there had already been two attempts to assemble the priests again since the 2004 Congress. The first try was at the prodding of the priests-participants themselves of the First Congress, soon after its conclusion. It was something like the continuing fervor of a lasting grace that, like the dying embers from the furnace, must be fanned once again into a flame and must not be allowed to die. There is spiritual hunger in the priests, and that passion among them to meet brothers again and that desire must be encouraged and sustained.

The second attempt was two years ago when the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI presided at the Sydney World Youth Day (2008); that occasion we wrongly speculated as the timely invitation to the Holy Father to pass by the Philippines to visit and address the Bishops and Priests assembled in the Second National Congress of the Clergy.

Grace has indeed its own time. But when the Holy Father announced last April (2009) that June 2009—June 2010 was going to be the YEAR FOR PRIESTS, the CBCP Commission on Clergy immediately resumed its original plan to convoke the Second National Congress for Priests. The same Congress plan, already in preparation, was ratified by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ General Assembly last July 2009.

Following the theme for the Year for Priests, this Second National Congress will dwell on the FAITHFULNESS OF CHRIST, THE FAITHFULNESS OF THE PRIEST. For tis event it is our privilege and joy that the Reverend Father Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap., Preacher to the Pontifical Household since 1980, accepted our invitation for him to lead us in the reflections on the same theme chosen by the Holy Father.

The purpose of the Year for Priests is to encourage every priest in striving for spiritual perfection, the Holy Father said in his General Audience address (June 25,2009). It is a renewal for every priest in his spiritual life and direction on which depends the effectiveness of his ministry. The Holy Father further indicated that the exercises of the whole year are to help the priests, and through the entire People of God to rediscover and reinforce their knowledge of the indispensable gift of Grace which the Priesthood represents for the priests themselves, the whole Church and for the world. To the priest is addressed the imperative of renewing and strengthening his spiritual life where Christ is better known through prayer, discipline, study and contemplation of the Word and Eucharistic Adoration, enabling him go out and recognize the people particularly the poor among his flock. As Christ Jesus was constantly among the poor, the poor will surely usher the prayerful and impressionable priest to Jesus and the portals of the Kingdome. (Matthew 25:31-46).

Like the Eucharist, or perhaps as the extension or the continuation of the Eucharist, the poor open our eyes to MEET Christ. “For I was hungry and you gave me to eat… “ Enter the Kingdom –receive the Love of My Father.

Aware of the singular gift of the Priesthood for the Church and the priest himself, the Holy Father, in effect, is telling us that to encourage the priest’s renewal in that gift, called the priesthood, is to renew the Church. Renew the priest; help the renewal of the priests, and you help the renewal of the Church.

Historically, any reform in the institutional Church and the People of God demanded at the onset the renewal of the Clergy. In the same homily, the Holy Father said that “there are also sad situations which can never be sufficiently deplored, where the Church herself suffers as a consequence of infidelity on the part of some of her ministers. Then it is the world which finds grounds for scandal and rejection.” True there were weak pastors in the Church, but there are also many heroic and saintly priests in its rich history. It has always been taught by the Church that ‘the presence of Christ in the minister does not mean that the priests were preserved from all human weaknesses, the spirit of domination, error, and even sin’ (CCC1550). The priest’s need to be holy is even greater than that of the faithful wanting to be holy.

It must not be forgotten that the Golden years of the Church were always rooted in the times when there were many zealous and saintly priests. The unique spiritual symbiosis between the holy priests and the holiness of the Church had never been as convincingly articulated as in the glorious and sometimes painful history of the Church in the last 2,000 years of its existence. The correlation between the two (the Church and the Priest) cannot at any time be ignored. Holy priest can only mean a holy people of God. The opposite is even more sadly true, that any degeneracy in the institutional church can also be  connected to the decay in clerical life and behavior. “Talis sacerdos, qualies ecclesia”. The Cluniac Monastery Reform, the Mendicant Orders Reform and the Counter Reformation’s Council of Trent that institutionalized Priestly formation in Seminaries, as we know them today, made us recall that any reform in the Church must radically touch the renewal of the Clergy. The pivotal statement of the Vatican Council II Decree on Priestly Training, said it all for the renewal of the priests and the renewal of the Church when it declared, “ The Council is fully aware that the desired renewal of the whole Church depends in great part upon a priestly ministry animated by the spirit of Christ and it solemnly affirms the critical importance of Priestly training”. (Optatam Totius. Introd.).

Thus, the 150^th anniversary of the death of the Cure d’Ars, Saint John Mary Vianney, became the occasion for the Holy Father to call the Priests all over the world to focus their prayer and reflection on the great gift of their priesthood, and what the Church could be when priests reverence and live the great gift and mystery of their Priesthood.

Faithfulness of Christ is actually the holiness of Christ, for He has been faithful to the Father, and completely faithful to what He is: to the Father as a loving Son, and to the Good and the Love that He shares with the Father and the Spirit. For Christ, to be faithful is to be holy.

Priests also are called to be faithful. At Ordination the priest enters a new relationship with Christ Jesus. He is anointed by the Holy Spirit whereby he is signed with a special character in which he is claimed by God as His (as God’s own), configuring him to Jesus Christ, enabling the priest to act in the person of Jesus,  the head. Singled out! Anointed! Claimed! Configured! How closer still can any person be to Jesus, dear Brothers in Priesthood. A new Creature in the Holy Spirit.

In that relationship Jesus called his disciples friends “I call you friends and not servants.” There enters a relationship of trust, an openness of mind and heart. “Friends; because I have made known to you everything I learned from my Father” (John 15:15). Here the priest is called to the faithfulness of a friend.

“I commission you to go out and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” Here the priest is called to a mission and he becomes a disciple with a mission. He is then called to the faithfulness of a disciple.

After the resurrection at the first appearance of Mary of Magdala, the Risen Lord told her, “Go to the brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father.” Jesus addressed the apostles as brothers; beyond mission Jesus entered a more profound relation with the apostles. He called them to the fidelity of a brother.

Friend, disciple and now brother! Each of these brings the priest to a new world of relationship, each calling for a profound commitment to faithfulness: as a friend: in order to share; as a disciple: to a mission and as a brother: to love.

In the hierarchy of graces that leads to the Priesthood, the primacy is given to the gift of our vocation. The call of God comes in many, varied and mysterious forms. And as we reflect on our vocation again and again, we realize that the call involves not only following Jesus, but necessarily the call to change, to conversion, to a renewal. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Gospel” (Mark 1:15). Our vocation is basically to conversion—to constantly change, to turn again and again to God—that we may become generous and faithful companions of Jesus in the ministry of evangelization. St. Paul writing to the Ephesians underlined the need to change this way, “You were to put aside your old self, which belongs to your old way of life and is corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind was to be renewed in spirit so that you could put on the New Man that has been created on God’s principles, in the uprightness and holiness of the truth” (Ephesians 4:22-24). Part of the spirituality of the priest is to continually change that he may constantly put on the mind and the ways of Jesus Christ with whom he is a brother, friend and disciple, but nonetheless still a faithful servant of the Word.

There can be no vocation unless there is conversion. In the priestly life and ministry we priests cannot proceed, unless to Jesus Christ, we concede! But again the manner of response differs from person to person. Simon Peter’s ultimate “Yes, you know that I love you” was different from Paul’s “ who are you, Lord.”  Francis of Assisi’s rejection of wealth and luxury to embrace Poverty was different from John Mary Vianney’s march to leave the army and tilling the farm to join the seminary. Dramatic changes in people’s lives show us how different were the calls, for example, in Augustine, Ignatius and Blessed Charles de Foucauld.

But these examples are saints, one may question. So what? There is always an opening in the Kingdom of the Father if only we are impressionable enough to grace, Jesus assures us. There is always a door for the answers that are generous, the hesitant, for the maybes and even for the downright No’s. But in all of these and other possible responses, any response to a call demands a conversion.

Have we forgotten the story of Jesus when he narrated that two sons were asked by their father to go out to their farm and help the farm work, and the boy who said that he did not like and he would not go was the one who changed his mind (heart) and went out to help. Put all your imagination into the answer “NO” of boy. Stretch the imagination of a little farther when the boy, saying nothing, went out and worked in the farm? No! then he went. What happened?

Put yourselves into the boy’s life (these five days) …and you will be ready to listen to Father Raniero Cantalamessa.

It is our prayer that our retreat director, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, will lead us in prayer and reflection towards a renewed priestly ministry and life.

I end by repeating the words of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI when he concluded his homily on the day he opened the Year for Priests at the Basilica of St. Peter.

“Dear Priests, the call to conversion and recourse to the Divine Mercy also applies to us, and we must likewise humbly address a heartfelt and ceaseless invocation to the Heart of Jesus to keep us from the terrible risk of harming those whom we are bound to save…”

Dear Brothers, let us cultivate this same emotion in order to carry out our ministry with generosity and dedication, or to preserve in our souls a true ‘fear of God’ : the fear of being able to deprive of so much good, through our negligence or fault, those souls entrusted to us, or God forbid, of harming them. The Church needs holy priests; ministers who can help the faithful to experience the merciful love of the Lord and who are his convinced witnesses. In the Eucharistic Adoration, let us ask the Lord to set the heart of every priest on fire with that ‘pastoral charity’ which can enable him to assimilate his persona “I” into that Jesus the High Priest, so that he may be able to imitate Jesus in the most complete self-giving. May Mary the Virgin Mother obtain this grace for us. May She accompany us during the Year for Priests so that we are able to be sound and enlightened guides for the faithful whom the Lord entrusts to our personal care. Amen!

Thank you and God bless everyone!

GAUDENCIO B. CARDINAL ROSALES,
Member, Commission on Clergy CBCP
Second National Congress of the Clergy

World Trade Center
Pasay City
25-29 January 2010