Under gårsdagens audiens på Petersplassen, snakket pave Benedikt om prestens helliggjørende tjeneste, gjennom sakramantene, og sa bl.a.:
Today, in this catechesis, I would like to return to the specific tasks of priests, which, according to tradition, are essentially three: to teach, to sanctify, to govern. … …
Today I would like to reflect briefly with you on the second task the priest has, that of sanctifying men, above all through the sacraments and the worship of the Church. Here first of all we must ask ourselves: what does the word «saint» mean? The answer is: «Saint» is the specific quality of God’s being, that is, absolute truth, goodness, love, beauty … … Without a minimum contact with God, man cannot live. Truth, goodness, love are fundamental conditions of his being. The question is: How can man find this contact with God, which is fundamental, without dying, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the divine being? The faith of the Church tells us that God himself creates this contact, which transforms us little by little into true images of God.
Thus we return again to the task of the priest to «sanctify.» No man on his own, by his own strength, can put another in contact with God. An essential part of the grace of priesthood is the gift, the task to create this contact. This is done in the proclamation of the Word of God, in which He comes to meet us. It is done in a particularly profound way in the sacraments. Immersion in the Paschal Mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ happens in baptism, is reinforced in confirmation and in reconciliation, is nourished in the Eucharist, the sacrament that builds the Church as People of God, Body of Christ, Temple of the Holy Spirit.
Hence, it is Christ himself who makes us saints, namely, who attracts us to the sphere of God. But as an act of his infinite mercy he calls some to «be» with him (cf. Mark 3:14) and to be converted, through the sacrament of Holy Orders, despite human poverty, into participants in his own priesthood, ministers of this sanctification, dispensers of his mysteries, «bridges» of the encounter with him, of his mediation between God and men and between men and God.
In the last decades there have been tendencies oriented to having the dimension of proclamation prevail in the identity and mission of the priest, separating it from that of sanctification: It has often been affirmed that it would be necessary to surmount a merely sacramental ministry. But, is it possible to genuinely exercise the priestly ministry «surmounting» the sacramental ministry? What does it mean exactly for priests to evangelize, in what does the so-called primacy of proclamation consist?
As the Gospels state, Jesus affirms that the proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the objective of his mission; this proclamation, however, is not only a «speech,» but includes, at the same time, his very action; the signs, the miracles that Jesus does indicate that the Kingdom comes as a present reality and that it coincides in the end with his very person, with the gift of himself, as we have heard today in the reading of the Gospel. And the same is true for the ordained minister: he, the priest, represents Christ, the One sent by the Father, he continues his mission, through the «word» and the «sacrament,» in this totality of body and soul, of sign and word. … It is necessary to reflect if in some cases this undervaluing of the faithful exercise of the munus sanctificandi did not represent, perhaps, a weakening of the faith itself in the salvific efficacy of the sacraments and, in short, in the present action of Christ and of his Spirit, through the Church, in the world. … …
As I reminded in the Holy Chrism Mass of this year: «At the centre of the Church’s worship is the notion of ‘sacrament.’ This means that it is not primarily we who act, but God comes first to meet us through his action, he looks upon us and he leads us to himself. (…) God touches us through material things (…) that he takes up into his service, making them instruments of the encounter between us and himself» (Holy Chrism Mass, April 1, 2010). The truth according to which in the sacrament «it is not we men who do something» also affects, and must affect, the priestly awareness: Every presbyter knows well that he is a necessary instrument of the salvific action of God, but always as an instrument. This awareness must make one humble and generous in the administration of the sacraments, in respect of the canonical norms, but also in the profound conviction that one’s mission is that of making all men, united to Christ, able to offer themselves to God as a living and holy host agreeable to him …