Fr. José Marcos Castellón Pérez / El Semanario de Guadalajara.- On June 12, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Pope Leo XIV sent a message on the occasion of the Day for the Sanctification of Priests. This message is grounded in God’s command to the chosen people: “Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2); therefore, holiness is not optional, nor an abstract ideal, nor a privilege earned by merit, but the participation of every baptized person in the life of the Risen One—especially priests, who are anointed by the Holy Spirit to sanctify the People of God.
The Pope recalls that holiness is not the crown of ascetic discipline or of willful effort, but participation in God’s holiness, which has been revealed in the human heart of His Son as a loving holiness, as a sanctifying love, because in the heart of Jesus the love of God reaches the very paroxysm of a love “that gives itself even to the point of being wounded and can therefore be a source of mercy and life.” For this reason, the priest is sanctified in union with the Heart of Jesus, where he can find safe refuge, comfort in his daily struggles, forgiveness in his falls, strength in his weaknesses, and light amid his darkness. The Pope affirms that the priest’s heart, like that of every human being, is not compartmentalized; it is at once a heart stained by sin and weakened by concupiscence, yet it is the same human heart that is reconciled by Christ’s redemptive blood and longs to transcend itself in love; it is the same sinful priestly heart that is sanctified by grace and empowered by the sacrament of Holy Orders to sanctify “in persona Christi.” It is for this reason that the wounded and sinful heart of every priest can find in the Sacred Heart of Jesus the proper place of his holiness.
It is from the wounded Heart of Jesus, pierced by Longinus’s lance, that the sacraments flow—especially the Eucharist, by which the priest is nourished, for he is the ordinary minister of this sacrament, sharing in the capital priesthood of Jesus. In the Eucharist, every priest nourishes his spiritual life, together with prayerful reading of the Word of God and pastoral charity, through which he “spreads the good fragrance of Christ’s holiness.”
The holiness to which the priest is called must, by that same pastoral charity, be a communal holiness—one that is nourished by the community and nourishes the community, that deepens and grows in priestly fraternity, whereby among brother priests there is always a heart that listens and a hand that sustains. The Pope concludes his message by quoting a profoundly striking phrase of St. John Mary Vianney, the Holy Curé of Ars: “the priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus.”