Spanish (Español) Version
Letter of the Holy Father
Pope John Paul II
to Priests
for Holy Thursday 1999
Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Vatican City
"Abba, Father!"
Dear Brothers in the priesthood, my Holy Thursday appointment
with you in this year which immediately precedes the Great
Jubilee of the Year 2000 focuses on this invocation in which, the
exegetes tell us, we hear the ipsissima vox Iesu. It is an
invocation which encloses the unfathomable mystery of the Word
made flesh, sent by the Father into the world for the salvation
of humanity.
The mission of the Son of God reaches its fulfilment when,
offering himself, he brings about our adoption as sons and
daughters and, by giving the Holy Spirit, makes it possible for
human beings to share in the very communion of the Trinity. In
the Paschal Mystery, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, God the Father stoops down to every man and woman, offering the
possibility of redemption from sin and liberation from death. By grace we are the ministers of this reality.
- In the Eucharistic celebration we conclude the Opening Prayer with the words: "Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you, and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever". He lives and reigns with you, Father! This conclusion, we may say, has the nature of an ascent: through Christ, in the
Holy Spirit, towards the Father. This is also the theological
outline behind the three-year period of preparation, 1997-1999:
first the year of the Son, then the year of the Holy Spirit and
now the year of the Father.
This ascending movement is rooted, as it were, in the descent
described by the Apostle Paul in the Letter to the Galatians. We pondered this text with particular intensity in the liturgy of
the Christmas season: "When the fullness of time had come, God
sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to
redeem those who were under the Law, so that they might receive
adoption as sons and daughters" (Gal 4:4-5).Here we find expressed the descending movement: God the Father
sends the Son to make us, in him, his adopted children. In the
Paschal Mystery, Jesus accomplishes the Father's plan by giving
his life for us. The Father then sends the Spirit of the Son to
enlighten us with regard to this extraordinary privilege:
"Because you are sons and daughters, God has sent the Spirit of
his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father! So through God you
are no longer slaves but sons and daughters, and if sons and
daughters, then heirs" (Gal 4:6-7).
How can we fail to notice the uniqueness of what the Apostle
writes? He declares that it is precisely the Spirit who cries
out: Abba, Father! Historically in fact, through the mystery of
the Incarnation and Redemption, the witness to the fatherhood of God has been the Son of God: it was he who taught us to turn to
God and call him "Father". He himself invoked God as "my Father",
and he taught us to pray to God with the affectionate name of
"our Father". Yet Saint Paul tells us that it is through the
inner instruction of the Holy Spirit that the Son's teaching
must, in a certain sense, be brought to life in the soul of those
who listen to him. In fact, only through the work of the Spirit
are we able to adore God in truth, invoking him as "Abba,
Father".
- I write these words to you, dear Brothers in the priesthood,
with Holy Thursday in mind, picturing you gathered round your
Bishops for the Chrism Mass. It is my earnest wish that, as you
meet in the communion of your local presbyterates, you may feel
united with the whole Church as she lives the year of the Father,
the year which is the prelude to the end of the twentieth century
and, at the same time, of the second Christian millennium.
In this perspective, how can we fail to give thanks to God as we
think of the hosts of priests who, in this vast span of time,
have spent their lives in the service of the Gospel, sometimes
to the point of the supreme sacrifice of life itself? In the
spirit of the coming Jubilee, while confessing the limitations
and shortcomings of past Christian generations, and therefore
also of the priests of those times, we recognize with joy that
a very significant part of the Church's inestimable service to
human progress is due to the humble and faithful work of
countless ministers of Christ who, in the course of the
millennium, have been generous builders of the civilization of
love.
The immensity of time! If time is always a movement away from the
beginning, it is also, when we think of it, a return to the
beginning. And this is of fundamental importance: if time did no
more than take us ever further from the beginning, and if its
final orientation — the recovery of the origin — were not clear,
then our whole existence in time would lack a definite direction.
It would have no meaning.
Christ, "the Alpha and Omega ... the One who is, who was and who is to come" (Rev 1:8), has given direction and meaning to our
human passage through time. He said of himself: "I came from the Father and have come into the world; now I am leaving the world
and going to the Father" (Jn 16:28). Thus the Christ-event
pervades the passage of each one of us. It is with Christ that
we pass through time, going in the same direction that he has
taken: towards the Father.
This becomes even more evident during the Sacred Triduum, the
holy days par excellence during which we share, through the
mystery, in Christ's return to the Father through his passion,
death and resurrection. Faith assures us that this journey of
Christ to the Father, his Passover, is not an event which
involves him alone. We too are called to be part of it. His
Passover is our Passover.
So then, together with Christ we journey towards the Father. We
do so through the Paschal Mystery, reliving those crucial hours
when Christ, dying on the Cross, cried out: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (Mk 15:34), and then: "All is
accomplished" (Jn 19:30), "Father, into your hands I commit my
spirit" (Lk 23:46). These expressions from the Gospel are
familiar to every Christian and in a particular way to every
priest. They speak of our living and of our dying. At the end of each day, we say in the Liturgy of the Hours: "Into your hands,
Lord, I commend my spirit", to prepare ourselves for the greatmystery of our passage, our own personal Easter experience, when
Christ, by virtue of his death and resurrection, will take us to
himself in order to present us to the Heavenly Father.
- "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have
hidden these things from the learned and clever and revealed them
to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your gracious will.
All things have been given to me by my Father; and no one knows
the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the
Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Mt
11:25-27). Yes, the Son alone knows the Father. He who "is in the
bosom of the Father" — as Saint John writes in his Gospel (1:18)
— has brought the Father close to us, has spoken to us of him,
has revealed to us his face and heart. At the Last Supper, when
the Apostle Philip asks, "Show us the Father" (Jn 14:8), Christ
replies: "Have I been with you so long and yet you do not know
me, Philip? ... Do you not believe that I am in the Father and
the Father in me?" (Jn 14:9-10). With these words, Jesus bears
witness to the Trinitarian mystery of his own eternal generation
from the Father as Son, the mystery which is the deepest secret
of his divine Person.
The Gospel is a continuous revelation of the Father. When the
twelve-year-old Jesus is found by Joseph and Mary among the
teachers in the Temple, he replies to his Mother's words, "My
son, why have you done this to us?" (Lk 2:48), by referring to
the Father: "Did you not know that I must be about the things ofmy Father?" (Lk 2:49). Even at the age of twelve he already has
a clear awareness of the meaning of his own life, of his mission,
which, from the first moment to the last, is wholly dedicated to
"the things of the Father". This mission reaches its high point
on Calvary, with the sacrifice of the Cross, accepted by Christ
in a spirit of obedience and filial devotion: "My Father, if it
be possible, let this cup pass from me! Yet not as I will, but
as you will ... Your will be done!" (Mt 26:39, 42). And the
Father in turn accepts the sacrifice of the Son, for he so loved
the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that man might not
die but have eternal life (cf. Jn 3:16). Yes, the Son alone knows
the Father and therefore he alone can reveal him to us.
- "Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso ...". "Through him, with
him and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and
honour is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever".
Spiritually united and visibly gathered in our Cathedral Churches
on this special day, we give thanks to God for the gift of the
priesthood. We give thanks for the gift of the Eucharist which
we celebrate as priests. The doxology with which the Canon ends
has a fundamental importance in every Eucharistic celebration.
In a certain sense it expresses the crowning moment of the
Mysterium Fidei, of the central core of the Eucharisticsacrifice, realized at the moment when, by the power of the Holy
Spirit, we effect the changing of the bread and wine into the
Body and Blood of Christ, just as he himself did for the first
time in the Upper Room. When the great Eucharistic Prayer reaches
its climax, the Church, at that precise moment, in the person of
the ordained minister, addresses these words to the Father:
"Through him, with him and in him, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, Almighty Father".
Sacrificium laudis!
- After the assembly has responded with the solemn acclamation
"Amen", the celebrant intones the "Our Father", the Lord's
Prayer. The succession of these two moments is very significant.
The Gospel relates that the Apostles, marvelling at the Master's
inner recollection in his dialogue with the Father, asked him:
"Lord, teach us to pray" (Lk 11:1).Then, for the first time, he
spoke the words which would become the principal and most
frequently used prayer of the Church and of individual
Christians: the "Our Father". When we, as the liturgical
assembly, make these words our own during the Eucharistic
celebration, they take on a particular eloquence. It is as though
we were professing at that moment that Christ taught us his own
prayer to the Father in the fullest and most definitive way by
explaining it through his sacrifice on the Cross.
It is in the context of the Eucharistic Sacrifice that the "Our
Father", recited by the Church, discloses its whole meaning. Each
of its invocations acquires a special ray of truth. On the Cross
the name of the Father is supremely "hallowed", and his Kingdom
irrevocably comes; in the "consummatum est" his will is
definitively done. And is not the petition "Forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive those ..." perfectly reflected in the
words of the Crucified Jesus: "Father, forgive them; for they
know not what they do" (Lk 23:34)? Asking for our daily bread
becomes more meaningful than ever when, under the species of
"broken bread", we receive the Body of Christ in Eucharistic
Communion. And does not the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil", attain its greatest efficacy at the very moment when the Church offers to the Father the ultimate
price of our redemption and our deliverance from evil?
- In the Eucharist the priest personally draws near to the
inexhaustible mystery of Christ and of his prayer to the Father.
He can immerse himself daily in this mystery of redemption and
grace by celebrating Holy Mass, which retains its meaning and
value even when, for a just reason, it is offered without the
participation of the faithful, yet always for the faithful and
for the whole world. Precisely because of this indissoluble bond
linking him to the priesthood of Christ, the priest is the
teacher of prayer, and the faithful can rightly put to him the
same request which the disciples put one day to Jesus: "Teach us to pray".
The Eucharistic liturgy is a pre-eminent school of Christian
prayer for the community. The Mass opens up a wide variety of
possibilities for a sound pedagogy of the spirit. One of these
is Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, which is a natural
prolongation of the Eucharistic celebration. Through Adoration,
the faithful can enjoy a particular experience of "abiding" in
the love of Christ (cf. Jn 15:9), entering ever more deeply into
his filial relationship with the Father.
It is precisely in this context that I exhort all priests to
carry out with confidence and courage their duty of guiding the
community to authentic Christian prayer. This is a duty which no
priest may ever forsake, even though the difficulties caused by
today's secularized mentality can at times make it extremely
demanding for him.
The powerful missionary impulse which Providence has inspired in
the Church in our time, especially through the Second Vatican
Council, is a challenge above all to her ordained ministers,
calling them first of all to conversion. They themselves must be converted in order to convert others or, in other words, they
themselves must experience intensely that they are children of
God in order to help all the baptized to discover the dignity and
joy of belonging to our Heavenly Father.
- On Holy Thursday we shall renew, dear brothers, our priestly
promises. In doing so, we desire that Christ may somehow enfold
us once more in his holy priesthood, in his sacrifice, in his
agony in Gethsemane and his death on Golgotha, and in his
glorious resurrection. Retracing, as it were, the footsteps of
Christ in all these saving events, we discover his profound
openness to the Father. And it is for this reason that every
Eucharist in a way repeats the request of the Apostle Philip in
the Upper Room: "Lord, show us the Father", and, in the Mysterium
Fidei, Christ seems to reply each time: "Have I been with you so
long, and yet you do not know me? ... Do you not believe that I
am in the Father and the Father in me?" (Jn 14:9-10).
This Holy Thursday, dear priests throughout the world, as we
recall the anointing with chrism received on the day of our
Ordination, we shall proclaim with one voice and with renewed
gratitude:
Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso,
est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti,
in unitate Spiritus Sancti,
omnis honor et gloria
per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen!
From the Vatican, on 14 March, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, in the
year 1999, the twenty-first of my Pontificate.
VATICAN PRESS
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