Chrism Mass Homily      

 

Thursday, April 13, 2006
 
Bishop William E. Lori's Chrism Mass Homily

Saint Francis of Assisi Parish, Weston

by the Most Reverend William E. Lori
Bishop of Bridgeport
April 16, 2003

(Editor’s note: Bishop Lori delivered this homily before 125 priests and 20 deacons during the Chrism Mass on Holy Wednesday, April 16, at Saint Francis of Assisi Parish in Weston.)

Dear brothers in the Lord, The Chrism Mass is a time for us to give thanks for the gift of the priesthood. But I would be remiss were I to thank the Lord for the priesthood only in the abstract, as a kind of intellectual construct. Instead, I want to thank each of you for who you are and for what you do each day.

By ordination, you and I truly share in the priesthood of Christ as Head, Shepherd, and Spouse of the Church. We are given this share by the Spirit of God so that, like Jesus, we can “proclaim glad tidings to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.”

And you do this each day – baptizing thousands of people each year, celebrating hundreds of thousands of Masses, preaching innumerable homilies, evangelizing the unchurched, the lapsed, and the searching. You spend untold hours as ministers of mercy in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. And how often in your ministry do you encounter human suffering and death, as you anoint the seriously ill and prepare the dying to meet the living God? Only the Lord knows how many funerals you celebrate each year, and how much time you spend reaching out to comfort grieving families.

Truth, Consolation, Common Sense
Each of you knows the hard work of preparing couples for marriage and helping them to maintain their commitment in a challenging culture. How often you find yourselves offering words of truth, comfort, consolation, and common sense in pastoral counseling, not to mention the task of fielding the complaints that often come our way.

Your ministry brings you to schools; to youth groups and activities; to religious education; and face-to-face with poverty and injustice. You exercise your priesthood in close collaboration with deacons, with the laity, and with religious, sharing your own ministry and encouraging them in theirs, always drawing strength from their wisdom, talent, and generosity. And your days usually include more meetings than you’d care to count, not to mention the burdens of administration so many of you bear.

In the midst of all this, you find the time to be men of daily prayer who seek comfort in the Psalms, inspiration in the Scriptures, and instruction in the writings of the learned and the holy. Above all, you draw abundant life and strength from the very mysteries you celebrate and the divine mercy that you dispense.

Challenging Times
My thanks to you is redoubled because these are not easy times for priests and for the priesthood. We have been in the spotlight and under the microscope. We are living in times when what divides is often more apparent than what unites, times that strain the unity of the Church and the fraternity of the priesthood. In the midst of all this and more, including the stress of war, economic uncertainty, and the increased challenge of serving those in need – you live and love the priesthood. Even as I ask God’s pardon and yours for my sins, errors, flaws, and shortcomings, so also I stand before you as one who is honored to say to you – my brother priests joined with the deacons – a word of heartfelt thanks and a word of hope.

The hope we depend on isn’t merely a wish that suddenly everything will be better. The hope we depend on is precisely what we celebrate during Holy Week – the death and resurrection of Christ. The very real suffering of the year just past – and the suffering that is an inevitable part of every person’s future – has meaning and redemptive power only to the degree that it is joined to Christ.

Our priesthood is all about offering the One Sacrifice of Christ; it is also about offering ourselves and enabling the people we serve to offer themselves to the Lord of life and love. Only when we are truly joined to Christ and the One Sacrifice that brings salvation to all the world can we find light in darkness, truth in uncertainty, peace amid conflict, forgiveness in the place of anger, unity instead of division, grace overcoming sin, life triumphing over death.

Christ is Our Unity
In his new encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Pope John Paul II says this: “The seeds of disunity, which daily experience shows to be so deeply rooted in humanity as the result of sin, are countered by the unifying power of the body of Christ.”

Christ abides with us and we, with Christ. This is the source of the unity and strength of the whole Church; this is the source of our unity and strength as bishop joined with priests and deacons in the service of the Church.

Because we are rooted in Christ, we are called to be men of hope, who live our vocations with reconciled hearts, difficult as that often is. We are called to be men of hope who live our vocations faithfully, prayerfully, and in a spirit of joyful gratitude to the Lord and to the Church, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. We are called to be men of hope who dare to imagine that the People of the New Covenant, united with Christ the Redeemer, might model the communion, the unity, the world so badly needs.

Not a Job but a Way of Life
We are men of hope who tirelessly foster that unity and generosity of spirit which is salt and light for the world; that unity, integrity, and generosity of spirit which enables people everywhere to repent and believe in the Gospel. We are men of hope who dare to imagine that many others will sense God’s call to follow in our footsteps, embrace the ideals that led us to the altar, and carry forward a priestly ministry which is not a job but a way of life. Indeed, many of them are here with us today, the seminarians of the Diocese of Bridgeport. We owe it to them to be men of hope, men of the paschal mystery.

Pledge Anew
To all those who have joined in this Chrism Mass, a word of thanks to you – for your prayers, for your love for priests and for the priesthood, and for your prayers, for your love for priests and for the priesthood, and for your service to the Gospel. Please continue to pray for us, as we pledge anew to serve the Lord and you as priests of the New Covenant.

To Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His Blood, who has made us into a Kingdom, priests for His God and Father, to Him be glory and power, forever and ever. Amen.