Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ s5

1 Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

With joy and affection I welcome you all here this evening and especially the priests of our diocese, as we gather in St. Mary’s Cathedral for the annual change and renewal of the Holy Oils. The oils are the tools we use in the ministry we share, but just as important is our own renewal, as we gather as priests, in communion with the people we are called to serve, to recommit ourselves to follow Christ and to shepherd His people.

These Holy Oils will be used for approximately 1400 Baptisms, 1500 Confirmations and many of the faithful will receive these oils in the Anointing of the Sick during this year in the Diocese of Ossory. We as priests will administer these Sacraments. Your service, your generosity and your holiness, as priests, is what brings the Sacraments to our people and what makes the Sacraments available to the people we are called to serve.

2015 is a significant year for our diocese in that these new Holy Oils will be used for the Ordination of Deacon Brian Griffin on 28th June, the first Ordination in our diocese for fourteen years. As we gather this evening to renew our priestly promises, we ask the Lord to bless Deacon Brian as he prepares for his Ordination. We priests in our diocese join in solidarity with him in his preparation for Ordination and we will support him in his service as a priest of the Diocese of Ossory.

Our preaching and our witness of a priestly life is what makes the Sacraments credible and meaningful to the people we serve. The role of the priest is crucial even for the priesthood itself. It is most likely that 2 everyone here this evening was helped in discovering his priestly vocation because of the witness, the friendship and possibly the advice, each of us experienced in a priest whom we knew and whose ministry touched our lives. Now it is our turn, our duty, to cultivate vocations for the future. If we truly love our people, the people we are called to serve, we will want them to have the blessings of the Catholic priesthood.

In the first reading the Prophet Isaiah says: “You yourselves shall be named priests of the Lord. Your descendants shall be renowned among the nations.”Your priestly ministry will produce other priests, priests who will serve the next generation of Catholics and then, their vocations will inspire the next generation. The way we express our thanks for our faith and our priestly vocation is to pass these gifts on. We felt a love for the priesthood because we saw the vocation embodied in a priest, a curate, a brother, a teacher, a missionary. We were drawn by the idealism and generosity of men and women who were good shepherds, who loved Christ and loved the people they served.

A couple of years ago the Jesuit magazine published an interview with the Holy Father. In that interview Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, asked Pope Francis why he became a Jesuit. The Holy Father shared with him of how he was attracted to the Jesuits by three things: their missionary spirit, community and discipline. I thought it might be interesting to reflect on these three characteristics in our lives as priests in the Diocese of Ossory.

Pope Francis was drawn by the missionary spirit and joined the Jusuits with the dream of being a missionary in Japan like St. Francis Xavier. However, because of his poor health, he remained in Argentina where he 3 discovered the need for mission. We are all called to be missionaries, we are called to serve.

In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis writes: “I dream of a missionary option”, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.”

The Holy Father states that “the Parish is not an outdated institution, precisely because it possesses great flexibility; it can assume quite different contours depending on the openness and missionary creativity of the pastor and the community.” Each of us as priests has a clear responsibility and a duty to make sure that every parish is vibrant and missionary. The Holy Father warns against allowing the parish to become “a useless structure out of touch with people or a self-absorbed group made up of a chosen few.” He calls on us to review and renew our parishes to bring them near to people, to make them environments of living communion and participation, and to make them completely mission oriented. I believe if we embrace this missionary option, our parishes will see more people responding to a priestly vocation or a life of Christian marriage.

The second quality that the Pope mentions is community. The Holy Father is not referring to a group of similar individuals who come together for comradery and convenience. The community we need is one of brothers and sisters who come together around Christ and who share His vision, a community that is for the mission of Christ. 4

The Holy Father in Evangelii Gaudium reminds us that: “The Christian ideal will always be a summons to overcome suspicion, habitual mistrust, fear of losing our privacy, all the defensive attitudes the world imposes on us…..

The Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence that challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service and from reconciliation with others. The Pope warns us about isolation which can find expression in a false autonomy which had no place for God. We must not live an individualistic life. We are called to bear witness to a constantly new way of living together in fidelity to the Gospel. Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of communion. The Lord is calling us to be a family gathering, not a house divided. We are diverse in our outlooks, experience, spirituality, but we are all priests of the same presbyterate, sharing in the responsibility not only of our individual parish but also sharing the responsibility of our diocese.

Our challenge as priests is to bear witness to a constantly new way of living together in fidelity to the Gospel. It is a fraternal love capable of seeing the goodness of our neighbor, of finding God in every human being, of tolerating the nuisances of life in common by clinging to the love of God, of opening the heart to divine love and seeking the happiness of others. 5 The third quality that attracted the Holy Father to his vocation was the discipline he saw in the lives of the Jesuit priests. Discipline is not easy. In some ways it gets harder as you grow older, but it is no less important. Certainly one of the greatest disciplines, as Pope Francis wisely perceived, is our use of time. The Holy Father often repeats that time is greater than space. He says, “This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results.”

It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations, or inevitable changes in our plans. Sometimes we deceive ourselves into believing that financial resources, pastoral techniques, professional trainings and great organisation is the key to success. True success really depends on our own faith life and vocation as priest and friend of Jesus Christ. As the Holy Father says: “The best incentive for sharing the Gospel comes from contemplating it with love, lingering over its pages and reading it with the heart.” If we approach it in this way, its beauty will amaze and constantly excite us. But if this is to come about, we need to recover a contemplative spirit which can help us to realise that we have been entrusted with a treasure which makes us more human and helps us to lead a new life. There is nothing more precious which we can give others.

Prayer, spiritual reading, and reflection, must be part of our daily routine. Managing our time is a great challenge, but also in prayer, we will find the peace and the strength to live our ministry with joy.

There are moments in our ministry that are difficult. There are difficult matters that we would rather not do, but we have no escape, they must be done and we must do them. All of us have things we have to do, things 6 we dread. Quite often, those dreaded things we have to do and those difficult days we experience, make us stronger and are probably some of the most important experiences for us as priests. I have certainly found this to be the case in my own ministry. That is the discipline that the Holy Father, as a young man saw in the priests and religious he admired and who inspired him in his vocation. This is the kind of discipline that makes time and space for God and for others in our daily routine.

This is the discipline we need in our ministry, in serving the faithful in our parish and in our diocese, serving the people entrusted to our spiritual care. We as priests must be mindful that we are called to serve the people.

As the Holy Father states so clearly: “None of us can think we are exempt from concern for the poor and for social justice.” It requires great discipline to be able to respond to the demands on our time and the many challenges of ministry. Our task is to allow the world to glimpse the love and mercy of the Good Shepherd who is always seeking the lost sheep, not to condemn but to console. Only a person with discipline in their life will have the freedom to respond. It is the discipline that we will attain only by having that personal Rule of Life that provides for prayer, spiritual reading, confession and priestly fraternity. Of course we as priests do not have to do all these things alone. We should welcome and indeed encourage members of the lay faithful to join with us, to be real Apostles.

The joy of the Gospel that can make our ministry an expression of joy requires: apostolic enthusiasm, priestly fraternity and discipline.

Today we have another chance to be renewed together with our brother priests. With gladness we will pronounce our Ordination promises. They are 7 the vows of love and fidelity that we made to Christ and to the people we are called to serve. Together let us embrace this renewal. And often stirring the gifts into flame, like the Apostles, let us go back to our people to announce Christ’s victory and the Joy of the Gospel.

And we ask this through Christ our Lord.

+ Séamus Freeman, SAC. 1st April 2015