Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests (Ascension)

GOFP 38

Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests

embraces the beauty and value of the co-responsibility of all baptized in building the Kingdom. Even as he helps his people grow through his ministry, his people will help him become a better minister of God’s grace and mercy. The priest will benefit from his people’s wisdom and insights to grow in understanding. The goodness and holiness of his people can inspire him to seek a deeper union with his Savior. Their struggles and heartaches will move him to have recourse to intercession and teach him to preach a word that will comfort and renew hope. The various difficulties of his people will lead him to seek practical means to assist. For example, the pastor of an immigrant community may need to help his people with medical and legal aid or adult education. These are not things most priests are trained to do, but with generous hearts they will grow in order to serve their people. In these ways, the community will draw him into greater pastoral charity and help form in the priest a deeper identity as spouse and father that will inspire and enliven “his daily existence, enriching it with gifts and demands, virtues and incentives.” 30 38 To flourish, a priest will take great care to fulfill the promises that he made on the day of his ordination. He will see his celibate commitment as a path to undivided love for God and for his people, a living witness to supernatural realities, a fitting complement to his spousal love for the Church, and a privileged way of living spiritual fatherhood. His obedience to the Church, and specifically to his diocesan bishop and the Holy Father, will be mature, free, and ungrudging. 31 Praying for the Church and especially for those entrusted to his ministry, through the Liturgy of the Hours and his

30

PDV, no. 27.

31 “By its very nature, the ordained ministry can be carried out only to the extent that the priest is united to Christ through sacramental participation in the priestly order, and thus to the extent that he is in hierarchical communion with his own bishop. The ordained ministry has a radical ‘communitarian form’ and can only be carried out as ‘a collective work’ (Angelus, Feb. 25, 1990).” PDV, no. 17. See also CIC, c. 273.

18