Priests, a Sign of Hope in the World

To the People of God and to all men of good will,

In this month of November, we pray for priests, that they may be a sign of hope in the world.

We begin the month with two days that point us to our destiny. On the first, the Church celebrates All Saints, those who have already attained eternal life; on the second, she prays for all the faithful departed. We were not created for death, but for life with God, who formed man to be imperishable (cf. Wis 2:23). Death entered the world through sin, but Christ conquered it by his resurrection, and that is why Saint Paul can ask: “Where, O death, is your victory?” (1 Cor 15:55). United to him, we hope to attain eternal beatitude, certain that nothing, neither death nor life, will be able to separate us from the love of God (cf. Rom 8:38-39). In the face of death, the Church responds with hope. To the Thessalonians, the Apostle writes: “We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope” (1 Thes 4:13). The Christian is no stranger to the pain of separation. What distinguishes him, Benedict XVI teaches, is knowing that his life will not end in emptiness (cf. Spe Salvi, 2): it is hidden with Christ in God (cf. Col 3:3).

This hope, however, has become distant for many people in our time. Benedict XVI observed that the present-day crisis of faith is, above all, a crisis of Christian hope (cf. Spe Salvi, 17). When eternal life with God ceases to be the end for which we live, everything narrows to what can be attained in this world, and the lesser hopes, such as success, comfort and recognition, soon prove insufficient to sustain an entire existence (cf. Spe Salvi, 30-31). We have never been so connected through the use of technology, and yet loneliness and a lack of meaning weigh upon so many people; the Pope himself noted that, in recent decades, mental suffering has increased (cf. Spe Salvi, 36). Little is said about death, and when it comes it finds many without words and without consolation to pass through it. Where God is forgotten, Benedict XVI warns, man is left without hope (cf. Spe Salvi, 23). This wound is not answered with an idea, but with a presence, the presence of God. Saint Augustine confessed that his weaknesses were many and grave, but greater was the power of God’s medicine (cf. Spe Salvi, 29). This medicine is Christ, Redeemer of man, and the priest is the minister through whom the grace of the sacraments reaches each one of us.

When death draws near to one of our relatives, acquaintances or friends, it is the priest we call to hear his confession, give him the Anointing of the Sick and Viaticum, commend his body and offer Holy Mass for him. He is present in the hours when human words run out, and his presence proclaims that death does not have the last word. In the encyclical on Christian hope, Benedict XVI wrote that the true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives: “They are lights of hope” (Spe Salvi, 49). Christ is the light of the world (cf. Jn 8:12); the saints reflect his light and help us find the way to him. Let us contemplate, then, three priests who were such a sign amid leprosy, extermination and imprisonment, in different times and places: Saint Damien of Molokai, Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe and the Venerable Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan.

In the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hawaii gathered from all the islands those sick with leprosy, then considered incurable, separated them from their families and banished them to the Kalaupapa peninsula, on the island of Molokai, which many called the cursed island. In 1873, there were about seven hundred people with leprosy, and for them Kalaupapa was a place where one went to die. The sick lived, in the words of Benedict XVI, abandoned by all. Bishop Louis Maigret knew that the sick needed priests, but did not wish to impose on anyone this mission, which could cost one’s life; he asked for volunteers, and four offered to take turns. The first to set out was Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian missionary of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, who arrived on 10 May 1873 and, at his own request and that of the sick themselves, remained there. He tended their wounds, helped the sick build their houses, enlarged the small church of Saint Philomena, administered the sacraments and dug graves, so that no one would die without assistance or be buried without prayer. He contracted the disease and, as the same Pope recalled when canonizing him, lived the last four years as a leper with the lepers. Until his death, on 15 April 1889, at the age of forty-nine, he bore witness by word and deed that God had not forgotten those sick people.

In 1941, the Franciscan priest Maximilian Mary Kolbe was a prisoner in Auschwitz. After a prisoner escaped, the camp command chose ten men to die of starvation in a bunker. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, lamented that he would leave behind his wife and children. Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place. For two weeks, in the starvation bunker, he prayed and sang hymns with the condemned and accompanied them, one by one, until death. On 14 August, the eve of the Assumption, being the last still alive, he was killed with a lethal injection. Pope Saint John Paul II canonized him in 1982 as a martyr of charity, and Franciszek was present at the ceremony. In the camp built to kill, a priest made the confinement cell a place of prayer and hope.

On 24 April 1975, a few days before the fall of Saigon, Pope Saint Paul VI appointed Bishop Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan coadjutor archbishop of the city. The new government saw in the appointment a conspiracy and, for that reason, arrested him on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption. He spent thirteen years imprisoned, without trial, nine of them in solitary confinement. The faithful managed to get a few hosts to him and a little wine, sent as medicine for his stomach, and he celebrated Mass, as he later recounted, with three drops of wine and one drop of water in the palm of his hand. In the re-education camp, he slept on a common bed with other prisoners, in groups of fifty. After the lights went out, he celebrated from memory and passed Communion to the Catholics beneath the mosquito nets. With paper from cigarette packs, they made small wrappers to keep the Blessed Sacrament, which his companions secretly carried to other groups, and at night they took turns in adoration. Many recovered the fervor of their faith, and some who were not Christians converted. He also treated the guards with kindness, and some of them, touched by his example, embraced the faith. Benedict XVI wrote that, during those years, being able to listen and speak to God became for him “an increasing power of hope” (Spe Salvi, 32). Released on 21 November 1988, he was called by Pope Saint John Paul II to preach the Spiritual Exercises for the Roman Curia in the Great Jubilee of 2000 and chose as his theme “Witnesses of Hope”. He died in Rome in 2002 and was declared Venerable in 2017.

None of these priests could change the place in which he found himself: the peninsula of isolation, the starvation bunker, the prison. But within those places, they did not cease to be priests. They celebrated, absolved, prayed and cared for the dying, and for that reason they were a sign of hope. Christian hope is not the expectation that everything will turn out well, but the certainty that Christ has conquered death and awaits us. The priest makes this hope visible because, configured to Christ through the sacrament of Holy Orders, he is the instrument through which God continues to set free, to heal and to save. When he absolves, he reopens to the sinner the way of grace; when he anoints the sick person, he unites his suffering to the Passion of the Lord; when he celebrates the Eucharist, he offers the faithful the pledge of future glory. The world needs such priests, and priests need people to pray for them, that they may stir into flame the gift of God they received through the imposition of hands (cf. 2 Tm 1:6) and bring the Gospel and the sacraments to so many hearts that have lost hope.

On 24 November, the Church celebrates Saint Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions, martyrs of Vietnam, the same land from which, more than a century later, Cardinal Van Thuan would come. Among them is the priest Saint Paul Le-Bao-Tinh, killed in 1857. In a letter written in prison, which Benedict XVI cites in his encyclical, he describes the chains, the torments and the contempt he suffered, and concludes that, in the midst of the storm, he cast his anchor towards the throne of God: the lively hope that was in his heart (cf. Spe Salvi, 37). This is the anchor that sustained Damien, Maximilian and Van Thuan, and that sustains today, far from the eyes of the world, so many faithful priests.

All Souls’ Day reminds us that love is not interrupted by death. Benedict XVI teaches that our prayer for the dead can play a small part in their purification, and that “it is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain” (Spe Salvi, 48). Therefore, this month, let us pray for deceased priests, for those who baptized us, who gave us our first absolution and first Communion, who blessed our marriage or celebrated the funerals of our relatives. They were, for us, a sign of hope, and now it is we who can offer Holy Mass and constant prayer for them. Let us also pray for Pope Leo XIV, Successor of Peter; for the bishops, who received the fullness of the sacrament of Holy Orders; and for the priests of our parishes and communities, that they may remain faithful and that no one may lack someone to bring them the sacraments.

As patrons and intercessors for this month, we have Saint Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions, to whom we entrust our prayers for priests and for vocations. Let us pray:

Divine Redeemer, who in your inexhaustible mercy sustained the priest Andrew Dung-Lac and his companions with your grace to live out martyrdom. Having been forced to trample on the cross to renounce the faith, they preferred death to denying you.
Through the intercession of these saints, grant your priests the grace to live the ordained ministry with fidelity and courage, and may the love they have for you lead them to shepherd your flock and to be, always and everywhere, a living sign of hope in the world. Lord, see how great is the multitude of those who still live without hope; grant to the Church of today and tomorrow the gift of numerous and holy priestly vocations.
Deliver deceased priests from the punishment due to their sins and grant them the reward of faithful servants, so that they may contemplate your face in heaven. Amen.

This November, I invite everyone to offer Holy Mass and Communion for deceased priests, and to visit a cemetery praying for them. From 1 to 8 November, the Church grants a plenary indulgence, applicable only to the souls in purgatory, to those who visit a cemetery and pray for the dead, under the usual conditions. Let us pray this month’s prayer every day, together with the Rosary, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, the Liturgy of the Hours, or on its own, as each one knows how and is able. Let us choose a priest and, until the end of the month, present him to God every day, calling him by name. Let us offer a hidden sacrifice, a fast or a renunciation that no one sees, for priests who today are going through weariness or discouragement. May the Virgin Mary, whom the Church greets as Star of the Sea and whom Benedict XVI called Star of Hope, lead priests and all of us to the harbor where the saints await us.

Fraternally in Christ,

Deacon Mario Cardoso