The Priest Is Not His Own

The title is taken from the title of a Fulton Sheen book about the priesthood.

So let me tell you about the priesthood.

This morning I witnessed one of my dearest friends, a priest, bury his mother.

We’ve known each other since we were classmates in seminary. I remember one of our professors telling us a story in class one day. It was the story of priest who was preparing to celebrate the funeral Mass of his mother. I think this was a liturgy class. A priest-friend of that priest said to him, “Today, let the church bury your mother.”

The implication was that the priest in question should let the rituals of Holy Mother Church play out in all their beauty, that he should offer the sacrifice in persona Christi and let Our Lord work through him.

This morning, my friend let the Church bury his mom because he was not his own. He is a man configured to Christ. I watched as he choked up at the final prayers of the Mass. I choked up too because I feel for him. When we got to the cemetery he was composed as he prayed the last prayers he would pray in the presence of the body of the woman who taught him to pray and who offered him to God to be His priest.

In the ancient rites, there is a beautiful moment during a priest’s ordination where his hands, until then bound, having just been anointed with oil, are wiped clean of that chrism with a cloth called a maniturgium. The new priest then offers as his first gift that same cloth to his mother. At her death, she is buried with the cloth so that symbolically she may offer it to Christ at her judgment.

“Look what I did for you; my Lord! I made a priest for you!”

I have been so blessed to see so many intimate moments in the lives of Our Lord’s holy priests. I have seen these ordinations and witnessed priests give their mothers and fathers and siblings and friends Holy Communion. And today I stood by my friend as his mother’s body was lowered into the earth, just down the hill from my own twin sister’s grave.

Thanks be to God for holy priests!

Thanks be to God, too, for holy mothers!

Pray for priests. Pray God send us more and pray for those He has claimed that the evil one not snatch them away.

Mary, Mother of Priests, pray for us!