Today’s Priests – An Unending Mission

Today’s Priests – An Unending Mission

by Gerald M. Costello, The Christophers

June 28, 2010

One moment made all the difference in the life of Maryknoll Father James Keller, founder of The Christophers, and as this remarkable Year of the Priest draws to a close it’s worth keeping in mind.  I’m not thinking of 1945 and the start of the organization itself, as significant an event as that was.  It goes back further, to when 17-year-old Jim Keller had temporarily withdrawn from St. Patrick’s Seminary in California, and was working in his family’s store while he thought things out.  As he recalled it in his 1963 autobiography, To Light a Candle, Father Keller said he spoke to a priest who stopped by there one evening, “a Father Ryan”, about his tentative decision not to return, hoping to find a sympathetic listener.

“No,” Father Ryan replied instead, “I’m not going to take it on my conscience to tell you not to go back to the seminary!  After all, in God’s plan there may be thousands of people whose salvation depends on what you may do for them as a priest.”

How prophetic those words were.  Father Keller indeed touched lives, millions of them, with the inspiration he offered people both in person and through the ministry of The Christophers.  Father Keller knew it, too.  As he wrote: “I began to see that failure on my part to be an instrument of the divine plan could, in a minor way at least, deprive others of blessings that rightfully belonged to them and that were to be sent through one person like myself.”

I thought of this moment recently as I paged through another of Father Keller’s many books, this one about the priesthood itself.  In The Priest and a World Vision, the Maryknoll missionary – for so he considered himself right up until his death in 1977 – wrote of the need to understand the priestly role as one of converting the world.  The priest, he wrote, “is to be found ministering to souls in our parishes, teaching in our seminaries, colleges and high schools, and engaged in the official work of our dioceses.  Without ever leaving the particular environment to which he is assigned, he can do much to step up the spread of Christianity over the world.  For the priest is the key. The people must get a world vision from him.”

Whether he realizes it or not, this is a role that every priest can fulfill.  He can do so dramatically, as did the hero-chaplain of Vietnam, Maryknoll Father Vincent Capodanno.  It can be done humbly, in the style of the saintly Capuchin, Father Solanus Casey.  Terence Cardinal Cooke, Archbishop of New York, did so with charismatic and steady leadership.  And in parishes across the country and across the world, countless priests fill their missionary roles by simply inspiring people, day after day, to live better Christian lives.

The Year of the Priest recognizes all this.  It honors a rare commitment, given freely, to devote an entire life to the mission of Jesus Christ.  At the same time, it recognizes a challenge, one never far from sight.  It was the challenge that Father Ryan presented to young Jim Keller, and the same challenge that Father Keller, in turn, presented through The Christophers.  “We live in one world,” he said.  “We have one faith to spread, both around us and in fields afar.”  The key to it all, he concluded, lies in the person of the priest, the true missionary who will lead us on.

(This essay is this week's "Light One Candle" column, written by Gerald M. Costello, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)

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Prayer For Priests (attributed to Saint Therese of Lisieux)

O Jesus,
I pray for your faithful and fervent priests;
for your unfaithful and tepid priests;
for your priests laboring at home or abroad in distant mission fields;
for your tempted priests;
for your lonely and desolate priests;
For your young priests;
for your dying priests;
for the souls of your priests in Purgatory.

But above all, I recommend to you the priests dearest to me:
the priest who baptized me;
the priests who absolved me from my sins;
the priests at whose Masses I assisted and who gave me Your Body and Blood in Holy Communion;
the priests who taught and instructed me;
all the priests to whom I am indebted in any other way.

O Jesus, keep them all close to your heart,
and bless them abundantly in time and in eternity.
Amen