PRIEST AS MEDIATOR
It is the primacy of Christ makes the priest humble even while it frees him. It also points us in the right direction. It means that the priest must know in his heart that his place is on the side of the Church, of the people who stand outside before the Holy of Holies and rely on the intercession of him who alone can pass beyond the curtain …
The objectivity of salvation must make the priest objective. He preaches, not himself, but the faith of the Church and, in that faith, the Lord Jesus Christ …
The holiness of the priest consists in this process of becoming spiritually poor, of decreasing before the other, of losing himself for the other: for Christ – and, in Christ, for others: for those whom the Lord has entrusted to him …
When I go to church, it is not to find there my own or anyone else's innovations but what we have all received as the faith of the Church – the faith that spans the centuries and can support us all. Certainly, if it is to remain vital, the objective content of the Church's faith needs the flesh and blood of human beings, the gift of our thinking and willing. But it must be a gift, not just the sacrifice of a moment.
The priest always fails in his duty when he wants to stop being a servant: an emissary who knows that it does not depend on him but on what he himself can only receive. Only by letting himself become unimportant can he become truly important, because, in that way, he becomes the gateway of the Lord into this world – of him who is the true Mediator into the immediacy of everlasting Love.
CHRIST'S "I" AND THE PRIESTHOOD
The Eucharistic sacrifice facilitates communio with the divinity, and men receive back the divinity's gift in and from the sacrifice … it is God who gives Himself,, taking man up into his action and enabling him to be both gift and recipient …in order that what happened then may become present now, the words "This is my body ~ this is my blood" must be said. But the speaker of these words is the ''I'' of Jesus Christ. Only he can say them; they are his words.
No man can dare to take to himself the "I" and "my" of Jesus Christ ~ and yet the words must be said if the saving mystery is not to remain something in the distant past. So authority to pronounce them is needed, an authority which no one can assume and which no congregation, nor even many congregations together, can confer. Only Jesus Christ himself, in the "sacramental" form he has committed to the whole Church, can give this authority.
The word must be located, as it were, in sacrament; it must be part of the "sacrament" of the Church, partaking of an authority which she does not create, but only transmits. This is what is meant by "ordination" and "priesthood." Once this is understood, it becomes clear that, in the Church's Eucharist, something is happening which goes far beyond any human celebration, any human joint activity, and any liturgical efforts on the part of a particular community. What is taking place is the mystery of God, communicated to us by Jesus Christ through his death and Resurrection. This is what makes the Eucharist irreplaceable; this is the guarantee of its identity.
