Pope John Paul II: Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Part 32

In 2003, on Holy Thursday, 2003. Pope John Paul II issued what would be his final encyclical: Ecclesia de Eucharistia, "On the Eucharist and Its Relationship to the Church." This encyclical contains much to prayerfully ponder/meditate on. The encyclical's Chapter Three, The Apostolicity of the Eucharist and of the Church, continues as follows:

"32. All of this shows how distressing and irregular is the situation of a Christian community which, despite having sufficient numbers and variety of faithful to form a parish, does not have a priest to lead it. Parishes are communities of the baptized who express and affirm their identity above all through the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. But this requires the presence of a presbyter, who alone is qualified to offer the Eucharist in persona Christi. When a community lacks a priest, attempts are rightly made somehow to remedy the situation so that it can continue its Sunday celebrations, and those religious and laity who lead their brothers and sisters in prayer exercise in a praiseworthy way the common priesthood of all the faithful based on the grace of Baptism. But such solutions must be considered merely temporary, while the community awaits a priest.

"The sacramental incompleteness of these celebrations should above all inspire the whole community to pray with greater fervour that the Lord will send labourers into his harvest (cf. Mt 9:38). It should also be an incentive to mobilize all the resources needed for an adequate pastoral promotion of vocations, without yielding to the temptation to seek solutions which lower the moral and formative standards demanded of candidates for the priesthood."