The priesthood was born at the Last Supper

In Brazil, August is kept as Vocations Month, and its first week is given to the priesthood. It is worth beginning where the thing actually began — not at a seminary, not with a cassock, not in a parish. It began in a borrowed upper room in Jerusalem, on the eve of an execution. There, on the same night and in the same gesture, two things were born that the Church has never since managed to separate: the Eucharist and the priesthood.

One sentence, two sacraments

St Luke records the moment with an economy that almost hides what is happening:

“And taking bread, he gave thanks and brake, and gave to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you. Do this for a commemoration of me.” (Lk 22:19)

Look at that last clause. It is not a comment — it is a command, given to particular people, about a particular action. Jesus did not say “remember me”. He said do this — and “this” was what He had just done with the bread.

The Church has always read that sentence as the moment the apostles were made priests. The Council of Trent, in its twenty-second session, put it in terms that leave no room: whoever says that by those words Christ did not constitute the apostles priests, or did not order that they and other priests should offer His Body and Blood, stands outside the faith of the Church.

One priesthood, two ways of sharing in it

There is usually confusion here, and the distinction is worth half a minute. Every baptised person shares in the priesthood of Christ — that is doctrine, not a courtesy. St Peter writes to ordinary faithful that they are “a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood” (1 Pet 2:9).

But the Second Vatican Council, in Lumen Gentium, is careful to state that the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood differ in essence and not only in degree. They are not the same thing in different doses. They are distinct orders of sharing in the same reality.

• The common priesthood belongs to the baptised: it offers God one's own life, work, suffering and prayer — and that is genuinely priestly.
• The ministerial priesthood belongs to the ordained: it consecrates the Eucharist, forgives sins in Christ's name, anoints the sick, shepherds the people.
• One serves the other. The ministerial exists so that the common can be exercised — the priest does not stand above the people, he stands at the service of the whole people's priesthood.

God does not call the capable

On 4 August the Church celebrates St John Mary Vianney, the Curé of Ars, patron of parish priests. His life is a whole argument against the idea that a vocation is for the brilliant.

Vianney was judged incapable of study. Latin defeated him repeatedly. He was at one point sent away from the seminary. He was ordained in the end more through the insistence of those who saw something else in him than through any academic merit — and for a good while he was not even permitted to hear confessions, because his formation was not trusted.

That man ended up spending sixteen and eighteen hours a day in the confessional, with queues arriving from across France to a village of two hundred souls. And he summed up what he was doing in a sentence that ought to be carved over every presbytery door:

Vocations are not a seminary matter

Here is the uncomfortable part. Faced with a shortage of priests, the common reaction is to treat it as a management problem — not enough promotion, not enough vocations ministry, not enough strategy. Perhaps. But the simplest fact tends to go unnoticed: vocations are born in families that pray.

No seminary produces a vocation. It forms someone already called. And the call almost always comes in a setting where God was treated as real long before any decision was taken — a house where prayer was said aloud, where Mass was not negotiable, where the priest was received as a priest.

And there is one prayer almost nobody makes, out of fear: parents asking God to call one of their children. It is worth saying what the Church's experience has shown for twenty centuries — no one ever lost a child by giving him to the Lord. That account has never once come out that way.

Three concrete things for this week

• Pray for your parish priest by name. Not “for priests” in general — by his name, which you know. The generic prayer costs little and arrives nowhere.
• Thank a priest. If one has ever heard you out in a dark hour, write him a line. They live on a great deal of weight and very little acknowledgement, and almost never hear that it was worth it.
• Ask, if you are a parent. Once will do. And then do not get in the way of the answer.

This week's prayer

Two lines of Latin, both from Scripture. The first is the command that gave the priesthood its birth; the second is the verse the Church has sung for centuries over every man who has received it.