Second National Congress of the Clergy

2nd National Congress of the Clergy
January 28, 2010
World Trade Center, Pasay City

Your Eminence Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales
Your Excellencies, my brother archbishops and bishops of the Philippines

His Eminence Ricardo J. Cardinal Vidal

It is not easy to address a gathering of priests. They are the toughest audience to please. Not only are they critical with your diction and grammar, they also look for new things and new insights. What more can you actually say to a group of people who have heard it all, and have said it all?

If you come to think of it, priests are probably over-educated. They spend four years studying philosophy, four years studying theology, and then one year in Spiritual-Pastoral formation gives them a crash course on psychology. So newly-ordained priests are philosophers, theologians and psychologists, all rolled into one. No wonder that when a seminarian does not proceed to the priesthood, the most logical career he takes is to become another “over-educated professional: he becomes a lawyer.

This sense of knowing too much can be a bane to the life and ministry of priests. When sent to a far-flung parish, the young priest can easily be the most educated person in the community. This status may help him in his ministry, but it can also be a hindrance. The local mayor consults him on every project, and the priest begins to think he knows everything about politics. He knows a thing or two about food supplements, and he thinks he knows better than the local doctor. The women-folk confess the sins of their husbands to him, and this gives him the presumption that he knows everything about everybody in the community.

This is how a priest can think he is powerful. He knows too many things, sometimes too much for his own good. Because everybody listens to him, he forgets to listen to everybody else. He is the teacher, and he presumes everybody to be his student. When a priest makes this presumption, he loses his vocation to serve. When he thinks he knows everything, he learns nothing from anybody. And it is not possible to serve someone from whom one has nothing to learn.

Our Lord reminds us today: “Avoid being called teachers. Only one is your teacher, the Messiah.”

The priest is first of all, a disciple, and he must learn from the Master. There are three ways for priests to learn from Jesus. First, he must learn from Jesus crucified. Much of what we learn about the Lord in Theology does not come close to the knowledge we gain from Jesus teaching from the cross. There is no other way to learn from the cross except by carrying it ourselves.

We have been told that priestly life is all about carrying one’s cross, yet, in our initial experience of priestly life, there is actually very little cross to bear. At the initial years, there is only wild adulation, abundant gifts, unmitigated affirmation. But the cross that we have to bear is not the opposite of these, but the exercise of restraint in the face of adulation, gifts and affirmation. The first lesson of Jesus crucified is thus to “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.”

The intellect is not the quickest to learn among the faculties of man. It is rather the heart. But unlike the intellect which compounds its knowledge by adding more while keeping what has been learned earlier, the heart forgets its previous knowledge when it adopts a new object of affection. The mind learns by compounding. The heart learns by substituting.

The mind may be able to hold together contrary ideas, but the heart cannot love two contrary things at the same time. When you teach the heart to love the things of the heart to love the things of the world, it will jettison its desire for Jesus. You cannot love God and mammon at the same time. When a heart desires all things at the same time, it is bound to be broken.

Learning from Jesus is knowing how to seek him with single-minded devotion. A priest begins his life and ministry with the love of Jesus in his heart. After some time, he begins to wonder whether he has made the RIGHT choice. Actually he did; the reason why he has begun to doubt now is because he did not make Jesus the ONLY choice.

Second, the priest learns from Jesus by learning from “other Christs,” his brother priests. The trouble with our priestly culture is that we do not usually learn from our fellow priests. Among the overly-educated, nobody wants to be a student. Yet, there is so much to learn from each other’s experiences, struggles, pains and joys. Among priests, there can be so much heated and excited discussions about politics, sports, and business, but when the matter turns to personal and spiritual life, everybody becomes deaf and dumb.

There is so much to learn from elderly priests. The trouble with young priests is that when elderly priests begin to talk about how life was like before Vatican II, they begin to walk away. Yet, it is not so much the stories that matter when it comes to elderly priests, but their testimony of life lived in fidelity and constancy.

Parish priests can be good mentors to parochial vicars, even if, or especially if, they –the parish priests—are such heavy crosses to bear. This also applies to Bishops. When your parish priest or bishop is such a heavy cross to bear, embrace him. Anyway, it can also be the other way around. Do you wonder why during the rite of ordination, the bishop embraces the newly ordained priest? He is embracing a new addition to his many crosses!

But even in spiritual and moral matters, the lay faithful too have something to say. We should not presume to know their needs by merely conducting surveys and workshops. The best way a priest can know the condition of God’s people is through the confessional. Like St. John Mary Vianney, a priest should spend much time in the confessional to know the real needs of the people he serves. We do not know the needs of people by virtues they exercise; we know their problems by the sins they commit.

In listening to God’s people, the priest must give preference to the poor. For a priest, it is not always a choice between the rich and the poor. Sometimes, it is a choice between the self and everybody else. Self-interest can determine a priest’s attitude towards the rich and the poor. Because the poor could be a burden to him and the rich could pander to his every need, the choice is not at all difficult to make. When a priest opts for himself, the poor always takes the last place.

The quality of our service is determined by the direction of our desires. If our hearts are directed towards the self, we become masters to be served. When our hearts are directed to God and his people, we become the servants of all.

May Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, teach us to serve without thought of personal gain. May she teach us to always do what her Son tells us to do. Amen.