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The Northern Cross - Fiat Voluntas Tua

Priesthood is a miracle of the love of Jesus

When our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, established the “Year for Priests” last June 19, I don’t know if he realized the great blessing it would be for the church, especially in the midst of the recent challenges regarding clergy abuse that have called for repentance and renewal within our beloved universal church and purification of the priesthood of Jesus Christ.

Bishop Paul D. Sirba
Fiat Voluntas Tua

Our Holy Father prayed that this year would “help all priests grow towards the spiritual perfection essential to the effectiveness of their ministry, and enable the faithful to appreciate more fully the great gift of grace which the priesthood is: for priests themselves, for the church, and for our world.”

He desired the year be for priests a favorable opportunity to grow in “intimacy with Jesus” and asked “the Lord to set the hearts of every priest on fire with that ‘pastoral charity’ which can enable him to assimilate his personal ‘I’ into that of Jesus the High Priest, so that he may be able to imitate Jesus in the most complete self-giving.”

The year has taken place within the crucible of suffering and joy — the Paschal Mystery.

In my brief five months as your new shepherd, I have been able to witness firsthand the love and care of our priests, whether they serve as your pastors, parochial vicars or in specialized ministries. I have had the privilege of meeting with our retired priests and listening to their remarkable stories of how God’s grace worked through them. I have also met all of our seminarians and encouraged them to persevere in their preparation for the work in the Lord’s vineyard and service to you. The priesthood is a miracle of the love of Jesus.

The faithful have shown great support for their priests this year through prayer and a true sense of solidarity and appreciation for their ministry in the church. We need each other. I am grateful for your love, and I ask you to continue that care and support of our priests as I make the new assignments known in this issue of The Northern Cross and we begin a process of strategic planning.

We face some changes this summer, but I am confident that our Lord will guide us through the process as we discern his will.

As part of our preparation for the planning process, given the number of parishes and active priests we have, I am going to ask our pastors to review the number of Masses offered in their parishes each weekend and to count the number of parishioners attending each Mass so we can begin reflecting on our needs versus the convenience of our Mass times. I count on your prayers and support as together we move forward with this process.

The Year for Priests concludes in one sense on June 11, but as one woman at the Council of Catholic Women spring meeting suggested, “We should make it the ‘Decade for Priests!’” I think our Holy Father would concur. I know I do.

Our Holy Father has a spectacularly beautiful way of saying things about the priesthood: “Within and through his own humanity every priest must be well aware that he is bringing to the world Another, God himself. God is the only treasure which ultimately people desire to find in a priest. . . . The priest is called to be expert (in divine intimacy) so that he may be able to lead souls entrusted to him humbly and trustingly to the same encounter with the Lord. . . . As church and as priests, we proclaim Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ, crucified and risen, Sovereign of time and of history, in the glad certainty that his truth coincides with the deepest expectations of the human heart.”

Diocese of Duluth • 2830 E Fourth St • Duluth Minnesota 55812 • (218) 724- 9111