Prayer for a Priest

Preparatory Prayer:

"My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my Savior." St. Luke, chapter 1.

Setting:

Let me summon up before the eyes of my imagination the impressive scene presented by an ordination ceremony. If I am myself a priest, it will be very easy to go back in memory to that morning when, with my fellow ordinands, I prostrated myself on my face before the altar, and the bishop and choir implored on me the fullest of God's blessings. The priest is God's "elect" and the prelate, at a solemn moment, rises up, holds his crosier in his left hand, and, signing the prostrate aspirants with his right, begs God to bless them, to sanctify them, and, finally, to consecrate them forever to His service. Henceforth the priest belongs no longer to himself; he is the "homo Dei," "God's man." There is abundance of evidence to prove the almost acute anxiety of Holy Church that her priests should always keep striving towards this ideal. If I am a lay person, this meditation is for me too, for there is urgent need of prayer for priests. Hence, as I approach my priedieu this morning I can kneel in spirit at the ordination ceremony and learn much to help my own spiritual life.

Fruit:

Zeal in praying for priests consequent on a realization of their dignity and responsibility.

1. Number twenty of the "Occasional Prayers" in the Missal is "for the priest himself." It can serve as an excellent model of the form our prayer should take when we kneel to pray for our priests. It is put, in the first place, on the lips of priests but, as Our Lord wills to show me today, this by no means restricts its suitability; from it lay people can learn the needs of the priests, in order to beg God for them, and the dangers, in order to implore God to shield His priests from them.

The prayer is intended to be incorporated into certain Masses, and therefore consists of a Collect, a Secret, and a PostCommunion. No one can read these thoughtfully without observing at once how the priest keeps returning to the thought of his own utter unworthiness. Thomas a Kempis, addressing priests, says that if they had the purity of an angel and the holiness of John the Baptist they would not be worthy of the immense dignity conferred with the priesthood.

How faithfully he interprets the mind of the Church as she sends her priests to the altar! In the Collect, the priest invokes the almighty and merciful God Who has called him, but through no merits of his own and only because God's clemency is without any bounds. In the Secret he implores Our Lord to wash away all the stains of sin from his soul. In the PostCommunion he reminds God once more that he is a sinner who begs pardon for his crimes; God must not refuse him forgiveness so that he may thus, and only thus, be rendered fit to serve His divine Majesty.

Jesus, give us priests who, like Yourself, the great High Priest, will be truly meek and humble of heart. What priest can be anything else if he realizes, even dimly, the overwhelming dignity to which he has been raised by You, "lifting the poor man from the mire and placing him with the princes of His people"? Jesus, give us priests who will shun all ostentation, all foolish boasting, all that pride in manner and behavior so foreign to Your spirit as expressed in this prayer.