I have a letter in front of me that stopped me cold. Here are some passages: "Among the luminous memories of this striking gathering, one moment stands out—the joy radiating from hundreds of priests who, alongside young people, surrounded handicapped persons and their parents… I found myself asking why, faced with such poverty, struggle, and difficulty of every kind, these priests were so deeply at peace. They seemed literally to walk on water, carried by an unspeakable joy…" Why? Perhaps because priests love misery or suffering?
No. These are evils. When you know people with intellectual disabilities, what strikes us as priests is not their suffering but the way they welcome us. It is a mark we see in many of them: "Hi, what's your name?" The joy of meeting us—not for what we do, but for what we are: a priest, Francis or Peter.
For nearly twenty years, many priests struggled to define their role, their identity. They became skilled in many fields, searching for their place and trying to prove they were useful. At the same time, they had to renew the liturgy and invent new ways of speaking. The results were not very encouraging.
At heart, a priest is a poor man, equipped with equally poor means: bread, wine, water, a cross conquered by a risen man who is God. The message of Jesus is so simple, so poor, and by the eyes of the wealthy world, so ineffective.
At Lourdes, priests could be what they are: men of God in utter simplicity. We are formed for this—yet often we sense that people ask other things of us.
To hear confessions on Holy Saturday, to offer the Lord's forgiveness, to place communion in thousands of open hands reaching for the Savior—all of this gave us confidence. It restored us to full consciousness of our priestly identity.
This is the deep reason for our joy: we lived our vocation, the task the Lord entrusted to us. We felt ourselves instruments of Christ.
God, through the poorest, shows us the place we must occupy and gives us the wellspring of joy and hope.
Jorgen Hviid, priest
international assistant, Fede e Luce