Witnesses of the Faith | February 2025

New Priestly Ordination
Testimony from Fr. Claude Lombardo

This past December, I had a very special event that I will never forget. I had the grace of traveling to Argentina for the priestly ordination of Mariano, my nephew and godson.
As you may know, my family has been greatly blessed with vocations. My younger brother is also a priest, and now my nephew joins us. And Mariano’s sister has also entered the convent! So many undeserved graces. The chances of this happening are like one in 400 million!

Seven other young men were ordained together with Fr. Mariano. After the ordination, they all traveled to the hometowns of each newly ordained priest to celebrate a “first” Mass there. When they came to my mother’s town, I had the privilege of giving the homily. It was a very special moment, one that I don’t think will ever happen again.

I wanted to take this month’s newsletter as an opportunity to reflect with you on the priesthood, an immense gift from God that we sometimes take for granted.

The priesthood is the greatest dignity that can be attained in this world.
Even though this ministry is exercised on earth, it must be counted among the heavenly things.

We should not be afraid to say the word “dignity”! First, because becoming a priest is not a personal decision but a particular calling from Christ. But also because we do not use this word as the world does, where it evokes honors, success, or glory. The priest is someone who has been made a participant in the same anointing and mission of Christ; he has become a sacrament of the presence of Jesus in the world. That is the source of his dignity. It does not come from his own talents or abilities.

In the life of every priest, we can read the very mystery of Christ. This is his incomparable dignity. The dignity of the priesthood consists in the truth of his being and his priestly actions as “other Christs.”

“Only through long years of faithfulness to the gift they have received will the priests gradually come to understand more and more the wonder and significance of this event,” said Pope John Paul II to priests. “Indeed, a whole lifetime is not enough to fully grasp what it means to be a priest of Jesus Christ.”

Above all, the priest is “alter Christus”: another Christ. The priesthood is not an abstraction. Christ is the center of the priestly life. There is no priesthood without Jesus. He is the source from which the Catholic priesthood flows.

The priesthood is the fruit of a personal calling. As the prophet said: “You, Lord, seduced me, and I let myself be seduced” (Jer 20:7). Through his consecration, the priest has mystically ceased to be merely a man and has begun to be another Christ. A kind of transubstantiation has taken place in him: the appearances are human, but the substance is Jesus.

The offerings of bread and wine, with their transubstantiation into the Body and Blood of Jesus, serve as a powerful reminder to the priest of his essential duty, his unique purpose, the very reason for his priesthood: to empty himself completely and be filled entirely with Jesus Christ.

Men deserve to find in the priest a man of God. As Saint John Paul II said on a Holy Thursday:

“The people from among whom we have been chosen and for whom we have been appointed want above all to see in us a sign of priestly identity, and to this they have a right. It may sometimes seem to us that they do not want this, or that they wish us to be in every way “like them”; at times it even seems that they demand this of us. And here one very much needs a profound “sense of faith” and “the gift of discernment”. In fact, it is very easy to let oneself be guided by appearances and fall victim to a fundamental illusion in what is essential. Those who call for the secularization of priestly life and applaud its various manifestations will undoubtedly abandon us when we succumb to temptation. We shall then cease to be necessary and popular…

“In practical terms, the only priest who will always prove necessary to people is the priest who is conscious of the full meaning of his priesthood: the priest who believes profoundly, who professes his faith with courage, who prays fervently, who teaches with deep conviction, who serves, who puts into practice in his own life the program of the Beatitudes, who knows how to love disinterestedly, who is close to everyone….

“Our pastoral activity demands that we should be close to people and all their problems… but it also demands that we should be close to all these problems “in a priestly way”.

Let us take this reflection as an opportunity to thank God, who chose to leave us the gift of the priesthood, and let us pray earnestly that the Lord may continue blessing His Church with abundant and holy vocations.