My thoughts of becoming a priest came early in my youth. I used to be an altar boy and I would emulate my parish priests. I wanted to be like them celebrating Mass. My chalice was a converted lamp base, my host a piece of bread cut out of a slice of bread, my communion hosts Necco candy wafers, my altar server my sister, acting before her time.
As I grew older and went on to high school, my thoughts of priesthood became a thing of the past. Like other teen-agers, I became interested in enjoying my teen-age years with dancing and dating. As graduation grew near, thoughts about the future became more serious and uncertain. I asked myself, “What am I to do?”
My decision was to enlist into the U.S. Navy for three years. I figured that I would find an answer to my quest, and “see the world.” During my enlistment the Korean War broke out and all enlistment was “frozen” for the duration of the war. No one knew how long the war would last. As time went on, however, I began thinking more and more of a religious vocation.
I really did not think myself qualified or worthy of becoming a priest — as I had no college education — so my thoughts turned to becoming a religious Brother. I wrote to the Holy Cross Brothers seeking advice. My thoughts persisted toward the religious life.
Time went on and so did the war. I began to feel the pressure and stress of discernment. What was I to do? When would the war end? One day while making a chapel visit to the Blessed Sacrament, my eye caught sight of a pamphlet rack containing a booklet by Father Daniel A. Lord entitled, “Why do they call me Father?”
Father Lord compared his vocation of priesthood to the life of a natural father. Through the sacraments of baptism, Eucharist, and confirmation, as with penance, the priest initiates and begets new life to his recipients. He continues to nourish them, provide for their good and spiritual welfare. He helps to educate them in a knowledge and love of God, and aids them to grow and develop in their Christian life. As a “Father,” the priest prepares his spiritual sons and daughters to give of themselves to the community of the Church and to society. With the administration of the anointing of the sick, the priest stands in paternal and fraternal vigil with the sick and the dying of his family. This book helped my calling toward the priesthood become clearer, more pronounced and definite.
The war ended. After due time and process, I talked with my parish priest and my bishop and entered into seminary training. I responded to my calling saying, “Here I am Lord; I come to do your will.” By the grace of God, I persevered and I followed him and have continued to do so to the present day, having served 49 years in priestly ministry.
Although I am retired from active parish ministry, I still actively go to the altar of God, “the God of my joy and my youth.” What a wonderful privilege it is to be a priest, but who more than the priest himself can appreciate and realize what it entails? How unworthy he considers himself and how inadequate. He can only find the consolation and strength for so exalted a calling in the truth that it is God who has called him.
The priest is truly a vessel of divine selection, a vessel of clay, a man but by God a priest. It is in this divine selection of a man by God to administer the things of God that we find the essence of the priesthood. “Every high priest,” we read in the fifth chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, “has been taken out of mankind and is appointed to cast for men in their relations with God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins and so he (priest) can sympathize with those who are ignorant or uncertain because he too lives in the limitation of weakness. That is why he has to make sin offerings for himself as well as for the people. No one takes this honor to himself, but each one is called by God as Aaron was.”
How well the priest recognizes the dignity of this priestly office and mission and how much more is he amazed by all it embodies as he considers the weak limited humanity to which it is joined. Yes, he is a vessel of divine selection, yet fashioned out of fragile clay.
Like Christ he is unique as a priest and victim, in the world, yet not of it. A man with the potential like other men to become a human father, but who promises his life to celibacy. He offers sacrifice to God for men, yet he must offer himself. So it is that the Lord works through this human instrument made up of flesh and blood. This bundle of emotions, this finite heart and mind inclusive of all its human limitations. As St. Paul said, “We are afflicted in every way, but we are not crushed” (2 Cor.4:7). Yes, Christ uses the humanity of the priest, as he himself did, but he does not dominate it, nor crush it out of existence at ordination. For this reason God has chosen men and not angels to be the dispensers of his mysteries. The priest can sympathize with others because of his very own limitations and weakness.
The priest can know the pain of suffering, cry tears of sorrow and joy, experience the gladness of a happy heart, want for love and compassion and also seek consolation and the forgiveness of his sins before God.
But ask the priest why he particularly was called, why he was chosen by God to share so intimately in a lasting relationship with Christ, he will not be able to give you an adequate answer.
Instead Christ will answer for him, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you that you should go forth and bear fruit, and our fruit should remain” (Jn 15:16).
Father Manuel P. Ferreira, ordained in 1960, is a retired priest of the Diocese living at the Cardinal Medeiros Residence.