Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests

6 | GUIDE TO ONGOING FORMATION FOR PRIESTS

out markers for growth in their respective dimensions as well as personal, fraternal, and episcopal means to grow in those dimensions. 8

10. This document can be used in a variety of ways. Priests will find it helpful to review the document regularly, so that new avenues of growth are never lacking. Specific resolutions to improve are essential to any plan of ongoing formation. Priests are urged to discuss these resolutions in spir itual direction and with priest friends and mentors The document can also be profitably used in fraternal discussions. The insights of fellow priests, each striving to grow, can be mutually illumi nating and encouraging. Such discussions are best held in the context of prayerful fraternity. Finally, although the main body of this document can be useful to those formally entrusted with the care of priests, the appendices are specif ically aimed at those involved in ongoing clergy formation at the diocesan level. 9 Each of the four appendices focuses on a topic deemed to merit a more detailed treatment: respectively, programs for recently ordained priests, tools for evaluating when clergy require assistance, cultural consid erations in ongoing formation, and boundary education. As priests of the United States, you give of yourselves generously and faithfully in serving the people in your care. Often enough, you do so at the expense of your own needs and personal growth. Our heartfelt prayer as your bishops is that these pages will help right that imbalance and provide tangible help in the lives of you, our priests, who wish to “stir into flame the gift of God” that you received at ordination. May that rekindled flame burn brightly and warm innumerable souls on their journey to their heavenly home. 11. 12. 13.

8 Personal, fraternal, and episcopal means are envisioned by the Ratio Fundamentalis and the PPF. “After all, it is the priest himself who is principally and primarily responsible for his own ongoing formation. . . . Priestly fraternity is the first setting in which ongoing formation takes place.” Ratio Fundamentalis , no. 82. “This journey of discipleship and growth in Christian faith and service continues after ordination with ongoing formation, in which the ordained priest seeks an ever-deepening conformity to Christ under the guidance of the diocesan bishop or competent authority of the institute of consecrated life or society of apostolic life.” PPF, no. 33. 9 Although this Guide is directed specifically to priests of the Latin Church, it may assist all Churches sui iuris in the United States when adapted to reflect the traditions, pastoral life, and requirements of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches.