I want to speak about one aspect of the mystery of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but applying it in a particular way to the priest. When Our Lady sings the Magnificat, she says: From now on will all ages call me blessed (Lk 1:48), and, before this, Elizabeth had told her, Blessed are you who believed (Lk 1:45) because Mary had faith. Today we celebrate a very beautiful feast of Our Lady: Her Assumption, body and soul, into heaven. She merited being taken up body and soul into heaven because of the merits Her Son won by dying on the Cross, and, because she was faithful to all those graces that she received, Mary lived the Beatitudes to the fullest extent. I want to speak about what we could call the priestly beatitudes, which, of course, can also be applied, in a certain way, to every baptized person.
There are eight Beatitudes, although, properly speaking, there are seven, as the eighth is a confirmation of the earlier ones. While there are thousands of beatitudes, Our Lord points out seven (for example, He doesn’t say “Blessed are those who believe”), because all of the beatitudes that exist can be reduced to one of the seven that our Lord points out in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (cf. Mt 5:1-12).
What are the Beatitudes? They are those acts that make man happy. The Beatitudes are the heroic acts of the saints; they are those acts that have a special importance, a special quality, be it because of what they cost to carry out, be it because of the perseverance that they imply, be it because of the merit that they bring with them. We can attribute them principally to the gifts of the Holy Spirit present in our souls, although, of course, they also imply the exercise of virtue.
I
In the first Beatitude, our Lord teaches us: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Mt 5:3).
How beautiful it is when we find ourselves with a priest who is truly poor! We quickly turn our attention to him. He isn’t one who is behind money, one who serves two masters, but rather only Jesus Christ. In this sense, we priests must live poverty to the point of feeling, as the Pope has recently said, “the sting of poverty,” particularly those of us who profess a vow of poverty.
That poverty refers first and foremost to ourselves, that is, we shouldn’t consider ourselves as anything great. This is why poverty of spirit is proper to the humble. Secondly, poverty implies great confidence in God, because the poor person doesn’t place their confidence in material goods, but rather in God, as He is the one who gives us material things in the measure that we need them. This is why today, as was the case yesterday and will always be, seeing a truly poor priest is a great motivation for men.
When the Franciscans went to evangelize Mexico, they chose twelve of the best of the order: these were the 12 apostles of Mexico. Among them, there was one at whom the natives used to shout “Motolinía, motolonía” whenever they saw him. This friar asked his translator what motolinía meant, and he replied, “It means poor.” The natives of that age were astonished at the poverty that Franciscan friar lived, who now has one of the largest universities in Mexico named after him.
The priest must trust completely in God, and he must have all of his attachments to material things properly ordered, as these things are certainly inferior to him. Indeed, he must have the disposition to live poverty to a heroic degree, especially those who have professed a vow of poverty as religious priests.
II
The second Beatitude of our Lord is: Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land (Mt 5:5).
Blessed are those who reject all anger and rage within themselves. Happy, blessed, privileged are they, because it costs a great deal to conquer anger; it costs a great deal to be truly meek. However, this is precisely what Christ teaches us, what He asks of us, and what He demands from us. The Second Vatican Council teaches: “By their state in life, religious give splendid and striking testimony that the world cannot be transformed and offered to God without the spirit of the beatitudes.”[1] Regrettably, in our days there is an abundance of anger, agitation, protests, fights, rage, all of which show that meekness is wanting. It is this meekness, lived in a heroic degree, as the saints have lived it and as the Church asks us priests to live it, which will be able to truly witness to Jesus Christ.
The story is told of Saint Luis Orione who, as a seminarian, was cleaning the dining room (he used to eat the bread that had fallen from the table) when one of his companions spat in his face. He simply cleaned off the spit, and continued eating bread off the floor. That is meekness. Likewise, Saint Francis de Sales remarked that: “You will catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel of vinegar.” You can put just the tiniest drop of honey on the table, and soon the flies will appear; you can coat the table in vinegar, and yet not a single fly will come. This is why people who are truly meek are people who have a great appeal: they are people who are capable of listening. They are people who don’t get nervous about anything. We know the saying: “The shepherd who whistles, the sheep follow. The shepherd who howls, the sheep flee.” I enjoy seeing so many people here, because it shows that the shepherds here call for their sheep, because the sheep recognize the voice of the good shepherd.
III
The third Beatitude: Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted (Mt 5:4).
Who are the ones that cry? Those who do penance.
Why is it that, generally speaking, parents cry or suffer when their sons decide to enter the seminary, or their daughters to enter the convent? It is because they are older, and they know what their children are getting into. They know that their children are on their way to the cross, that they are headed for sacrifice; they know that the religious life will not be an easy one. So, regrettably, sometimes parents make their child stray from their priestly or religious vocation. Who doesn’t know that it is a life of sacrifice to live celibacy according to what Holy Mother Church commands us? If it were easy, there wouldn’t be a vocations crisis. This is even true for the clergy of the Eastern Rites, where they can marry before ordination; even there, there is a crisis of vocations. Certainly this crisis is in large part because of the great sacrifice that renouncing a good as honest and as holy as having a family; there are other sacrifices, such as the renunciation of one’s own will, of being available to do whatever one’s legitimate superior asks, even though it costs a great deal, even though we might not like it. When the vocation is to the missionary life, it means renouncing one’s homeland, one’s own people, sometimes renouncing one’s language, renouncing one’s friends, to the point of seeing them only once every so often. Nevertheless, Jesus calls those who cry happy, and happy are those who do penance. Woe to the priest who seeks his own comfort, to have a good time, the one who is not penitential!
At one point, the great saint Pedro de Alcántara, who was very penitential, appeared to Saint Theresa of Jesus and told her, “Blessed be the penances which earned me such glory!” Many of us will be full of regrets on that morning when we present our-selves in front of our Lord Jesus Christ, because we did not take advantage of this life in order to do a little more penance, to bear our pains without complaint, in order to embrace the cross with love; if this was the path that our Master took, then we must also take this path; there is no other that leads to heaven.
IV
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied (Mt 5:6).
The blessedness of Our Lady, blessed are you who believed (Lk 1:45), and the blessedness she applied to herself, from now on will all ages call me blessed (Lk 1:48), can probably be reduced to this beatitude.
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are those who hunger and thirst for holiness. They are the men and women who hunger and thirst to act according to a right conscience in God’s sight; they are those who desire to do good and to always do it. They are the men and women who have the honor, for example, that no one can call them liars. They are those of whom it can be said, “They walk with their heads held high.” They give God what belongs to Him; they have faith, hope, and charity. They are disposed to give to each person what corresponds to them.
In this sense, the priest must always have a great hunger and thirst for justice, both for himself and for others. The priest, among other things, must often be the voice for those who have none. He must be help for those whom no one helps. He must be the one who seeks to give comfort to those to whom no one draws near; he must draw near to those from whom everyone distances themselves as though they were rotting and, sometimes, because they really are rotting. This is what Saint Francis of Assisi did when he heroically kissed the purulent wound of a poor sick man.
Among those of you who are here, there are certainly some who recall the famous criminal: Maté Cocido, they called him. He was in a high security cell in Sierra Chica, in the province of Buenos Aires. He would rush at anyone who came close to him in order to grab their throats to strangle them. Once, a great priest, Father Monterroso, went to see him in jail. Upon arriving, the men in charge of security insisted:
– You have to enter with two guards, because he’ll kill you if you don’t.
– No, I won’t enter with two guards; I’ll go in alone.
– Look! He throws himself at everyone who goes in there in order to strangle them.
– I’ll go in alone.
So, Father Monterroso entered and, as was expected, Maté Cocido, that great criminal, seized him by the neck and began to strangle him. Father Monterroso began to hug him, noticing that, little by little, the hands that held his neck stopped holding him so strongly. He then heard, from the lips of Maté Cocido: “Can it be that there is someone in this world who still loves me?” In that moment, he began to cry. Father Monterroso finally told him, “Get on your knees, because you need to confess.”
This is what the priest must be. If he really hungers and thirsts for righteousness, he is going to seek out those sheep that are the most lost, those who have gone the farthest astray. He is going to treat them as our Lord Jesus Christ did, which His enemies even threw in His face: Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Mt 11:19). But Christ didn’t come to the world for any other reason than to save sinners, and we are all sinners.
V
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy (Mt 5:7).
The priest must live out mercy in a truly heroic manner. He shouldn’t care what people say, because there will always be someone who criticizes him. If he’s thin, they’ll say, “Look at that starving face; you can tell that they never gave him anything to eat at home.” If he is fat: “Look at how he eats.” If he is bald: “Poor guy.” If he has lots of hair: “Well, hasn’t he just made himself a handsome fellow.” We could make an unending list of all these sorts of commentary. In small towns, the situation gets even worse, because it’s enough for a little breeze to blow, and everyone starts to dally around.
However, we must be merciful; we must forgive. They treated Christ the same way. Why shouldn’t we have to experience that ourselves? We must learn to forgive from our hearts.
They tell a story about Cura Brochero[2] that once he said something that caused offense to one of the political leaders of that time. He didn’t say it with the intention of offending the leader, but that didn’t matter; the Cura went to go see him. “Mr. So-and-so, I’m coming to see you.” The man didn’t want to receive him. “Mr. So-and-so, I’m coming to see you, and I’m coming to ask your forgiveness.” At that, Mr. So-and-so poked his head out; Father Brochero knelt before him, and said, “I ask your forgiveness; I didn’t want to say what they told you I said, but nevertheless I ask your forgiveness, because I don’t want you to be my enemy but rather my friend, because I am a priest, and Christ died for everyone.” That is heroic mercy.
Heroic mercy should be manifested in a particular way in hearing confessions, that great sacrament of mercy that implies hours upon hours and great fatigue. At some point it comes to be something boring for the priest who, after so many years, is always hearing more or less the same things, with their more and less, with some little thing added (sins have been pretty much the same from the time of Adam until now). Rather, we must have the disposition that comes only from a merciful heart. All of the great saints were confessors, like Saint John Marie Vianney and Saint Leopold Mandic, among others. Father Bonifacio de Ataun came to mission many times in this area. He was a great confessor; he was accustomed to get up before 6 every morning in Pompeya, Buenos Aires, and he would sit in the confessional and hear confessions until ten to eleven, because he would have the 11 o’clock Mass. He preached, and then, once Mass was ended, he would make his thanksgiving and then continue confessing until one or two in the afternoon. I met him while we were on mission together in Quebrada. He asked me:
– “How many souls do you confess a month?”
– “I don’t know, I never count them; they seem like a lot to me,” I told him.
– “Everyone thinks that they hear a lot of confessions, but if they were to count them, they would realize that they don’t hear as many confessions as they think they do. Count them. I don’t have a month where I drop under 2,000 penitents . . . and I count them. Take a head count, and then you’ll know how many penitents you confess. When you give absolution to one, mark it down. In the end you’ll know how many you confessed. There are many priests who think that they dedicate long hours to hearing confessions, when they in fact give few hours to it.”
The priest is often very busy, but he must learn how to busy himself in the primary things of ministry, and not in accidental or secondary things. Souls need to speak with a priest, and they need to tell him their problems, because the priest is also a doctor of souls.
VI
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God (Mt 5:8).
A priest who doesn’t have personal problems, a priest who is clean of heart and who surrenders himself totally and only to God, is a priest who is available to give himself to others. In contrast, a priest who always walks around with personal problems, and who lives centered on them, oftentimes mistreats his neighbor; he has neither plans nor desires to take on serious tasks. He easily throws the guilt upon his parishioners, but the consequence is that he doesn’t call, and so the sheep don’t come.
Blessed are the clean of heart. We priests must be extremely careful in this area, especially with the use of mass media and means of communication, such as the internet, television, video, and movies. All of these things are not God and can dirty hearts; they are things that can impede us from seeing God. In this pan-sexualized world (as some call it) that we must live in, we must be especially prudent.
VII
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God (Mt 5:9).
Peacemakers are those who seek peace, and the priest must always seek peace with everyone. This is because he must make peace between everyone and God, as well as living in peace with himself and, as Saint Paul says, with everyone else if possible (Rom 12:18). Although someone might try to make our lives impossible, we must make every effort to live in peace; we must be peace-makers and respond in a peaceful way.
VIII
Lastly, we find the Beatitude that is the confirmation of all the others: Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely, as the television, radio, and newspapers calumniate–because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you. The Church, as Blaise Pascal said, “is in agony until the end of time.”
The priest–and the Christian, but with greater reason the priest–will always be a sign of contradiction. Thus, because he is a sign of contradiction, he will always suffer persecution, just as the Church suffers persecution in all parts. At this very moment, our brothers and sisters in mainland China are imprisoned, and others are being killed in Indonesia. In East Timor, they continue killing hundreds of Catholics. They killed missionaries here in the Americas. Not too long ago, they killed the Cardinal of Guadalajara, Mexico. There will always be persecution because ultimately the Church makes her pilgrimage “amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God.”[3]
3 Saint
Let us ask our Blessed Mother, whom we call blessed and happy in a special way today, because she merited being assumed into heaven, body and soul, to obtain the grace for these young priests to live the Beatitudes each day of their priestly ministry. Amen.
[1] Ecumenical Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, Lumen Genti-um, 31.
[2] Venerable José Gabriel del Rosario Brochero, an Argentine priest, also known as “El Cura Gaucho” for his work with the gauchos and the poor.
[3] Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XVIII, 51, 2
