Why Do We Need Priests?

Last Sunday, May 27, was Pentecost and Seminary Day in Venezuela. For that reason, today I want to share with you a beautiful text by the Argentine novelist Hugo Wast (1883-1962), entitled “The Wonder of the Priesthood.” Here is its substance.

Wast invites us to consider that not even the Blessed Virgin can do what a priest does, nor the angels and archangels, Michael, Gabriel or Raphael, nor any of the princes who defeated Lucifer. At the Last Supper, he writes, Our Lord performed a miracle greater than the creation of the universe with all its splendors, turning bread and wine into his Body and Blood to feed the world, and this wonder, before which angels and men kneel, a priest can repeat every day. Only a priest can work that other miracle of forgiving sins: what he binds in his humble confessional God, bound by his own word, binds in Heaven, and what he looses, God looses at that very instant.

Humanity has been redeemed, Wast continues, and the world goes on because there are men and women who are fed each day by that redeeming Body and Blood that only a priest can make present. And he imagines what would happen if that stopped because there were no more priestly vocations: the heavens would be shaken and the earth would burst apart, as if God’s hand had stopped holding it up; people would cry out in hunger and anguish for that bread, and there would be no one to give it; they would ask for absolution, and there would be no one to absolve them.

A priest, he says, is needed more than a king, a soldier, a banker, a doctor or a teacher, because he can stand in for all of them and none of them can stand in for him. At the altar a priest has a dignity infinitely greater than a king’s: he is not a symbol, not even an ambassador of Christ, but Christ himself, repeating God’s greatest miracle.

When you consider all this, Wast concludes, you understand the immense need to foster priestly vocations; why in former times every family longed for a priestly vocation to spring up in its midst like a stem of spikenard; the immense respect peoples once had for priests; that one of the worst things anyone can do is to block or discourage a vocation; that parents who stand in the way of a son’s priestly vocation are renouncing an incomparable title of nobility; that a seminary is worth more than a church, a school or a hospital; and that helping to build or maintain a seminary, or to pay for a young seminarian’s studies, is to prepare the way to the altar for a man who, for half an hour each day, will be more than all the dignities of the earth, because he will be Christ himself offering his Body and Blood to feed the world.

And now it is my turn to thank all the faithful priests throughout the world (and especially our admirable priests in Venezuela, whether born here or adopted by us), who have given an admirable example of love for God and of total dedication and service to their faithful. And thank you for the encouragement you pass on with your joy and your hope, to keep fighting in this “valley of tears” following the example of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you All! And count on our prayers! for many holy priestly and religious vocations in our beloved Venezuela. We need them very much, to keep planting the strong roots of faith that alone will lead us to live in a country with true Justice and Peace!