We urgently need God’s word today
Still hurting from recent impertinent attacks from secularist sectors but continuing to do his duty as Pope, Benedict XVI started a catechesis on the three offices or functions the clergy has to carry out “in persona Christi, capitis,” in the person of Christ, head of the Church.
These are the functions of teaching, sanctifying and governing that actually everyone else also participates in, though not in the way bishops and priests exercise them.
That’s because every Christian faithful, whether lay or cleric, by the mere fact that he is baptized and therefore conformed to Christ, cannot help but be involved also in carrying out Christ’s threefold mission of teaching, sanctifying and governing.
Of course, all these functions are carried out within the Church as one body, the mystical body of Christ, the people of God. The members share in the same mission in different ways, according to the order and hierarchy established by Christ for his Church.
Some are clerics, who with their Holy Orders are other Christs (alter Christus) but Christ as head of the Church, play a more active part, since they enjoy a certain authority other members do not have.
They understand their authority as irrenunciable service to the other faithful, to whom they are always bound. It’s not a title of privilege, but rather a call to service.
The lay faithful also play an active part, but always in union with the clergy. They have their own autonomy, but never separation from the clergy. They are conformed to Christ, they are also “alter Christus” but as members or faithful of the Church, always in need of the clergy.
They also do a lot of teaching, of sanctifying, especially themselves and the earthly realities they are involved in, and of governing, especially their own spiritual lives and in the other aspects of Church life.
In the catechesis of the Pope, he focused first on the mission of teaching. He underlined how important this mission is, since the world now is sunk in confusion and error.
There are many people who agree that the world indeed is drifting in the sea of life, since it uses only man’s own light, reflective at best like the moon’s and never original like the sun’s, as the sole navigational guide.
God’s word is the alpha and omega of everything that is true, wise and practical in this world. The huge challenge is how to make everyone realize this, in such a way that everyone not only appreciates and understands it but also lives it.
Certainly, this involves the effort to discover both the immediate and remote link God’s word has with our concerns and affairs, both big and small. It’s the apparent absence of such connection that make many of us think God’s word has nothing or hardly anything to do with our activities.
The Pope encouraged us, priests, to take the duty of teaching seriously and competently. A lot depends on the clerics, precisely because we are supposed to transmit the always-needed word of God to the world in its integrity. “Preach to all nations…,” Christ told his apostles.
For sure, the task of teaching and transmitting God’s word is not only a matter of ideas and words. It requires consistency to it in one’s personal life, incarnating it, no less, so that the teaching is not just by sermonizing but by giving a living and constant witness to it.
Two things can be noted here. One is that priests should realize we cannot invent things, but rather should always be faithful to God’s word always.
This requirement has its tricky part, since the distinction between God’s words and our own ideas can be blurred sometimes. Our philosophizing, theologizing or simply articulating God’s word may already deviate from it.
Two is that though we preach not our own words, but God’s, neither are we just a spokesman of God. We, priests, need to identify ourselves truly with God’s word. In the words of a saint, we need to be not only “alter Christus” (another Christ), but “ipse Christus” (Christ himself).
I’d like to remit the Pope’s words on this point. “The teaching that the priest is called to give, the truth of faith, must be internalized and lived in an intense personal spiritual journey, so that the priest really enters into a profound, interior communion with Christ himself.
“The priest believes, accepts and tries to live, first of all as his own, all that the Lord has taught and the Church has transmitted.”
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
