Holy Orders

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. May I speak to you, and may I tell you a story about a bishop and a priest, because these stories might be a very fitting introduction to a sacrament that has to do with the government of the Church, namely holy orders. This first story I am familiar with because it was told to me by a fellow prisoner of the bishop. This good bishop was put into a communist prison in China, and through persecutions and beatings, his weight fell to about 90 pounds. Covered with vermin, prison sewers, wearing a black stocking cap and a black kimono, he was unable to walk by himself. He always had to be supported by two fellow Chinese prisoners. Providentially, however, he was the only one in prison that was ever given bread and wine. The communists did not know why they gave it to him, but at any rate, he had it. If they knew that he was going to read Mass with the bread and wine, they certainly would never have given it to him. This person in prison with him told me that no Mass in a Gothic cathedral, with all the pomp and splendor of liturgy, could ever equal the beauty of that Mass that was said by the bishop as he leaned against the prison wall with the tin tray before him, moving his fingers, saying, over the bread, this is my body, and over the wine, this is my blood, and then secretly afterwards passing out communion to those who shared his faith. He was put in a death march, where later on he perished, and a communist colonel who was in charge of the march put a sack around his neck, it weighed about thirty pounds, it was so tied that as he marched the rope would gradually tighten, the sack would become heavier and the bishop would eventually be choked to death. As the march began, this fellow prisoner told me that he broke ranks and went up to the communist colonel and shouted at him, don't do that, look at the man, it was a kind of an he homo. The communist colonel looked at him as if for the first time in his life he really saw suffering, and then he said to the one who interrupted him, get back in line, you dog. The death march began, and this friend of mine who told me this narrative said that he tried to peer through the marching lines of the prisoners to see if he could catch a sight of the bishop supported by two fellow Chinese prisoners. After about a mile he saw him, the bishop was still standing, but the sack was not on his back, the sack was on the back of the communist colonel. I asked him what happened, he said the communist colonel put it on his own back, and why? He said I think he was edified by the patience and resignation of the good bishop. In any case, the communist was arrested for having done that service, and the last we heard of him was that he was in prison. The other story is about a priest. The communist told this priest to strip himself. He stripped himself to a point where he had left only his shoes and stockings. They started beating him about the head and the body with rods. He leaned over and began taking off his shoes and stockings, and they said leave them on. Why do you want to take them off? He said because I want to die like our Lord. Where do bishops and priests come from? They come from a sacrament. It will be recalled that there are two social sacraments, matrimony and holy orders. In the natural order, man and woman propagate the human species, and God has elevated this to a sacrament of matrimony. In the natural order, too, there must be government. In the divine supernatural order, in the mystical body of Christ, there must be government. And the sacrament of government of the mystical body is holy orders. In this government there are degrees, there's order, there's hierarchy, and the division of these orders is principally three, deaconship, priesthood, and episcopacy. Our blessed Lord, therefore, at the night of the Last Supper, and ordering his public life as a matter of fact, chose human instruments to mediate between himself and the world. The scripture says they are to be the ministers and dispensers of the mysteries of God. And again in the epistle of the Hebrews we read the purpose for which any high priest is chosen from among his fellow men and made a representative of men in their dealings with God is to offer gifts and sacrifices in expiation for their sins. But inasmuch as we are dispensers of the great mysteries of God, why did he not choose angels? Well, because sympathy, compassion, and suffering together with one who has already suffered would be lacking to an angel. An angel would not have that common denominator. Was not this the whole principle of the incarnation? Did not our Lord come down, take upon himself our human nature, become a kind of a slave? And the scripture said in order that he might have compassion on us, share our woes, share our wounds. No one from that point on could never say that God does not know what it is to be human. Even the very one thing that was lacking in his nature, namely the quality of femininity he compensated for by calling Mary to suffer alongside of him or rather at the foot of his cross in his passion. So our Lord therefore was able to lay hold of us simply because he shared something in common with us. That is why God chose us, weak creatures. So God chose us poor weak creatures, therefore, as Cardinal Newman has put it, for the sake of those with whom we deal. He has sent forth for the ministry of reconciliation not angels, but men. He has sent forth your brethren to you, not beings of some unknown nature and some strange blood, but of your own bone, of your own flesh, to preach to you. It is your brethren that he has appointed, no one else, sons of Adam, sons of your nature. The same by nature, differing only in grace and in power. Men like you, exposed to temptations, to the same temptations, to the same warfare within and without, with the same three deadly enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil, differing only as the power of God has changed and rules it. So it is, therefore, we are not angels from heaven to speak to you, but men whom grace and grace alone has made to differ from you. What a strange anomaly this is. All is perfect, all is heavenly, all is glorious in the dispensation which Christ has vows to us, except the persons of his ministers, his priests. He dwells on our altar, the most holy, the most high. The angels fall down before him, and yet the priests, so set apart, so consecrated, they with their girdle of celibacy and their maniple of sorrow are sons of Adam, sons of sinners of a fallen nature, which they have not put off, though it is renewed through grace. Every priest is a kind of a mediator between God and man, bringing God to man and man to God. This is the way he continues the priesthood of our blessed Lord. Our Lord was not a priest because he was eternally begotten by the Father. Our Lord was a priest because he had a human nature which he could offer up for our salvation. And so we too, continuing that priesthood, are something like Jacob's ladder, reaches up to the heavens, and yet at the same time it is placed on the earth. Therefore every priest is a kind of another Christ, having vertical relations to Christ in heaven, and horizontal relations to men on earth. First a word about bishops. Bishops are the successors of the apostles. When one reads sacred scripture, one finds our blessed Lord giving them many powers. Our Lord, for example, said that like him they are the light of the world, like him they are the shepherds of Christian people, like him they are the door through which the flock will enter into the holy city. A bishop is consecrated not just primarily for a diocese. He is consecrated primarily for the world, because our Lord said to his apostles, go ye into the world. It is only for jurisdictional reasons that a bishop has a diocese, but his primary responsibility is the world itself. Therefore the missions of the church are not foundlings on the doorsteps of a chancery office. All peoples of the world weigh upon his heart. What would you think, for example, of a person that was so very much concerned with his own heart that he tied a tourniquet around his arms and also around his legs? And if he were asked the reason for doing so, he might say, well, I find that my blood is going out to the extremities of my body. It is rather wasting its strength, and therefore, since I want to preserve my strength, I'm going to keep all the blood in my heart and near it. For a while the heart would not function. So too if a bishop cut himself off from the extremities of the mystical body of Christ from Africa and Asia and Latin America, speaking here of a bishop of the United States, by his own diocese, his own episcopacy, would suffer. The right and left side of the heart have no communion directly with one another. They have communion only because the blood passes through one side of the heart, traverses the entire body, and then comes up to the other side. So too every bishop, every diocese, and every parish has communion with itself only inasmuch as it has communion with the entire mystical body of Christ. Hence comes this call to the priesthood and to holy orders. Sacred Scripture tells us that we must be called by God, as Aaron was. No one takes this office unto himself. As we said before, God does not always choose the best. St. Paul says, not many wise, not many noble, because the power is actually not in us, the power is in Christ. That's why he can choose, and that is why he calls weak vessels, frail earthenware to be the bearers of his treasure. Now this vocation that comes to us is rather silent for the most part. God never comes down and shakes our bed and says to us, come on, get up, I want you to be a priest. It is rather a long, persistent calling. I can never remember a moment in my own life, for example, when I did not want to be a priest. That was the prayer of my first communion, that I would be a priest. But all the time that I was studying for it, I always felt very unworthy of it, and I feel more unworthy now. After all, the more we bring a painting to the sunlight, the more the imperfections are revealed, and the closer we look at ourselves in the light of the great high priest whom we are to represent, the more foul we see ourselves. We see the treasures that God has put into our hands, and the very little interest that we have drawn, the fright. Each and every one of us is something like Simon Peter. Remember Simon was the name that he had from his family. Peter was the name that our blessed Lord gave him. So in each and every one of us priests, there is this double nature. There is the Simon nature, that nature that we derive from our parents. Our poor, weak, human body and mind and will, this is what God uses. Then on the other hand, there is this Peter nature, the call from God, the infusion of divine powers to forgive sins, to be a priest to renew the sacrifice of Calvary, and all the while we feel our great powers, we feel our great weaknesses. We hope that people realize that the Simon nature in us must not blind them to the Peter power. It is interesting also to recall how St. Peter at the end of his life changed and became more humble. In the first epistle that he wrote just a few years before his death, he began his epistle by calling himself Peter, Apostle of Jesus Christ. The last epistle written very shortly before his death began, Simon Peter, servant and Apostle of Jesus Christ. See how at the end of his life, he came back to his poor, weak, Simon nature, and united in both his priesthood and his epistle the same, the union of the human and the divine, and ended by calling himself his servant. That's what we are, servants of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Our service is an arduous one. It involves labor not only in the field during the daytime, but also serving at night. There's no such thing as saying at the end of a day, well, I've done my duty for today. Rather, our Lord said, we have to call ourselves unprofitable servants. The matter of fact, the less there is of self-satisfaction in our lives, the more zeal there is in his service. If we count the converts that we have made, we're very likely to begin by thinking that we made them instead of our Lord himself. We cannot say, I built three rectories, now the bishop ought to make me a monsignor. He still has to keep in his mind that he is an unprofitable servant. Labor union rules are not sufficient for us. We belong to a different union where love, not ours, is the standard. When we think of all that our Lord has done for us, we really can never do enough. The word enough does not exist in love's vocabulary. Very much like telling a mother who spent all night alongside of the bed of her sick child that she has done enough. Oh yes, we know we are called the ambassadors of Christ, but we're also to be the victims of Christ. We know very well that our blessed Lord refused to distinguish between work and extra work. Between being on duty and standing by. Between walking one mile and another mile. Between giving our coat and giving our cloak. No airs of self-complacency are divinely permitted. No self-pity, no pluming ourselves on our administrative talent. We are worthless servants when we have done our best. To our dear Lord alone belongs the merit and the glory of our services. To us, to us belongs nothing but the gratitude and humility of being pardoned rebels. To sum it all up on the one hand, we are the ambassadors of Christ. We are the channels of his power. And our principle and great act, of course, is holy mass. When we read the mass, we, as it were, go to the hill of Calvary and with a giant hand take the cross with our blessed Lord upon it, lift it out of that locale, and then plant it down in Paris and Cairo and Tokyo in the poorest mission of the world. This is our work, to extend Christ's forgiveness of our sins, to give his blessing with our poor hands, and to see ourselves every day we mount the altar, wearing our chasuble as hanging on to that chasuble, the millions and millions of souls in the world who know not Christ himself. When we take a host into our hand, we have to see our fingers gnarled from slavery in the salt mines of Siberia. We have to see our feet as bleeding feet of refugees, tramping westward towards barbed wire beyond which lies freedom. When we look at the candles, we are to think of the glow of the blast furnaces tended by gaunt men who have had their very lives squeezed out of them by those who deny economic justice. When our eyes look at the host, we have to see them as wet with the tears of the widow and the suffering of the orphan and the stole that is about our shoulders, like the stole of the Old Testament priest. We see bearing the stones of the twelve tribes. We see them as living stones, the burden of all of the churches and the people of the world. So we drag the whole of humanity to the altar, and there we join heaven and earth together. We merge our hands into Christ's hands, for he lives on to make intercession for us. We say with Peter, I will follow thee wherever thou goest, and yet we do not. We see sunlit meadows, and then there comes alongside of those meadows our desolation, our weariness, and our loneliness. We feel tired, and our feet ache, and our bodies rebel, and our spirits waver. There are times that we want to sit down and pluck flowers and admire the view. We are tempted to lose patience with our Lord's calm, slow, and never faltering step. When we stumble, we are tempted to lie where we have fallen, complaining that we cannot go on any further. We tell ourselves that we were not meant to be saints, and yet we know that we are. We say with Peter, I will follow thee wherever thou goest, and yet we do not. We see sunlit meadows, and then there comes alongside of those meadows our desolation, our weariness, and our loneliness. We see sunlit meadows, and then there comes alongside of those meadows our desolation, our weariness, and our loneliness.