Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests

180. It is remarkable how much of Jesus’ ministry was taken up in teaching. One might even say that the purpose of the Incarnation, after redemption itself, was to teach humanity how to embrace the Gospel. Jesus taught in sermons, in parables, and in actions. Mary and Joseph found him as a boy in the Temple, “sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers” (Lk 2:46-47). Throughout his public ministry, Jesus was teaching. After his Resurrection, Jesus taught the disciples on the road to Emmaus. “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures” (Lk 24:27). That same Easter Sunday evening, he appeared to the disciples in the upper room and “opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (Lk 24:45). St. Luke began his Acts of the Apostles by commenting on “all that Jesus did and taught until the day he was taken up” (Acts 1:1-2). Jesus was constantly engaged in the intellectual formation of his disciples. Forming the intellect is important for every Christian because the mind is like the tiller of a boat. With a small shift it can change the entire direction of a life. The last century of history, with its hundreds of millions of dead at the feet of pernicious ideologies, stands as a bleak testament to the power and importance of the mind. It has never been more urgent to pass on the life-giving message of the Gospel. A sound intellectual formation also preserves the mind from the tyranny of impulse and an unmoored imagination. As has been said many times before, without doctrine the Christian becomes a mere sentimen talist. “From the age of fifteen,” St. John Henry Newman wrote, “dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I Intellectual Formation 5 181. 182. 183.