Celebrations with Meaning and Fruits

For a meaningful and fruitful celebration of the Year of the Clergy and Consecrated Persons, several diocesan bishops, heads of institutes of consecrated persons, lay ecclesial movements and communities are have been preparing conferences, symposia, recollections, prayer sessions, and liturgical rituals to renew and strengthen the life of faith and service the ordained clerics and those in the so-called vowed life. The wish and prayer of everyone is the importance of meaningfulness and fruitfulness. This is quite difficult to expect. There are, of course, excellent speakers and facilitators. But the ordinary priest and consecrated persons brought up in different seminaries and houses of formation will certainly experience difficulties and pain.

It is really difficult, and at times painful, to follow Christ as a diocesan priest and consecrated person. The reasons for this are the “many levels of ‘leaving behind’ – family and friends, the familiar and secure, emotional baggage and unresolved anger, a certain control of one’s surroundings and one’s future. To follow Jesus entails multiple ways of dying to oneself” (May 29 Tuesday, Bible Diary 2018, commenting on Mark 10:28: ‘Peter spoke up and said, “We have given up everything to follow you”’.

His successor Pope Francis has his own down-to-earth and colorful words like giving up one’s “comfortable lifestyle” and “going to the peripheries” and “to get dirty… because the Church is a “field hospital” in a war-like zone. This too is difficult.

A new Pentecost is needed. For, nothing is impossible with God.