Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests

44 | GUIDE TO ONGOING FORMATION FOR PRIESTS

a man of encouragement who knows how to lift up and sympathetically exhort his people to a higher way of life? 90

f. A father needs courage to protect his family. The priest must be a good shepherd, not a mercenary who runs at the first sign of a wolf. Can a priest take a stand? Will he be loyal to Christ and to the Gospel? Is he able to teach the truth even when it is hard for his people to hear? Is he willing to be rejected or sidelined for it? g. Finally, a good father is committed . Is a priest able to persevere in his vocation? Can he weather difficult times? Is he committed to becoming a better priest?

HEALTHY CHASTITY

115. A crucial marker in the human formation of a priest is his capacity to live healthy chastity. Chastity is fundamentally a positive trait, because through it a man gains the self-mastery to love in a sexually mature way. Chastity is “the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being.” 91 Though the priest is celibate, he is still a sexual being; chastity ensures that his mascu line love is well directed. 92 Such a view of chastity presumes that the body is good. The human body enables us to interact, communicate, and love. If God did not want us to love him and others as sexual beings, he would have made us angels. Nevertheless, in Original Sin our passions, and especially our sexual urges, became unmoored from the dominion of reason. It is the virtue of chastity 90 “Revealing himself at all times as priest, he will therefore exercise his spiritual mission with kindness and firmness, humility and a spirit of service, opening himself to compassion, participating in the sufferings inflicted upon men by the various forms of poverty, spiritual and material, old and new. He will also know how to bend over with mercy upon the difficult and uncertain journey of the conversion of sinners, to whom he will reserve the gift of truth and the patient, encouraging benevolence of the Good Shepherd, who does not reprove the lost sheep, but loads it onto his shoulders and celebrates its return to the fold (cf. Lk 15:4-7).” DMLP, no. 41. 91 CCC, no. 2337. 92 “It cannot be forgotten that celibacy is vivified by the practice of the virtue of chastity, which can be lived only through the cultivation of purity with supernatural and human maturity insofar as essential for the development of the talent of the vocation. It is not possible to love Christ and others with an impure heart. The virtue of purity makes it possible to live what the Apostle said: ‘Therefore, glorify God in your body!’ (1 Cor 6:20). Then again, when this virtue is lacking, all the other dimensions are damaged.” DMLP, no. 82. 116.