Tuesday 11 April 2006

At this Mass for the blessing of the oils we give thanks for the anointing we received in Baptism and in Confirmation. That anointing gave us a task. We are sent to bring good news, to bind up broken hearts. We are also sent to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord – in other words to proclaim a time of peace and rest, of freedom and forgiveness. And we are to transform pain and loss of hope not just into rejoicing but into thanksgiving, that is into acknowledgement of God’s infinite love for us – instead of despondency we are to bring praise.

The first reading tells us that all of us will be named ‘priests of the Lord’. That means two closely related things: we are to be witnesses to the Good News and full of the Good News ourselves, we are to offer our whole lives in praise to God.

Today we recognise and give thanks for the many ways in which the anointing of Baptism and Confirmation bears fruit in our community. It happens in the love of families; it happens in the courage of those who carry a weight of sorrow or anxiety; it happens when we try to love others as Jesus loves us; it happens when people can see in us something of the love and the hope that comes from the promise of God’s year of favour and something of the joy that comes from knowing that Jesus has made us ‘a line of priests and kings to serve his God and Father’.

The oil of Chrism which is used in Baptism and Confirmation is intended, as the Confirmation ceremony puts it, to make us ‘more like Christ the Son of God’. Indeed Chrism and Christ are basically the same word. Christ means the Anointed One.

We are witnesses, and we offer our lives to God, united to Christ and anointed like him. That is more important now than it has ever been. If the Gospel of Christ is to be seen and heard in a world that pays less and less attention to the deep questions about God, about the meaning of life, about faith, it will have to be seen and heard in the lives of believers.

That does not mean forcing our faith on other people. But it does mean allowing it to be clearly seen that we derive strength and hope and joy from our faith. If each of us does not take really seriously the task of living out our anointing then the new generation will be the first in this country to grow up in a world in which faith has little or no place. It is an inescapable challenge.

The seriousness of that challenge is summed up in one simple fact. For the first time at this Chrism Mass I cannot look forward to the chrism we consecrate being used in the ordination of a priest for the diocese this year. And at least for the next seven years, far more often than not, the situation will be the same. In ten years time we are unlikely to have even half the number of priests in this diocese that there were ten years ago – and their average age will be a great deal higher.

The very heart of our lives as followers of Christ is when we, individual members of his Body, come to celebrate the Holy Eucharist. Then all our lives are gathered up, not by us but by Christ, the Head of the Body. They are gathered into his offering of himself to his Father.

There can be no celebration of the Eucharist without a priest. That is not because of any particular merit on the part of priests. It is because we have received the sacrament of priestly Ordination. Some years before he became Pope, the present Holy Father said in this context: “Sacrament means: I give what I myself cannot give; I do something that is not my work; I am on a mission and have become the bearer of that which another has committed to my charge”.

The priest in celebrating Mass is doing what he has been ordained to do. He is acting in the name of Christ the Head of the Body – in other words he is a sign to all of us, including himself, that what is happening is more than just the efforts and prayers of this group of people. What is happening is the offering of the whole Body of Christ, and the offering is being made by Christ the Head who gathers our lives into his sacrifice of himself on the Cross.

On Thursday we will celebrate the beginning of the ordained priesthood, when Jesus told the apostles to celebrate the Eucharist in memory of him. He is saying that through them his sacrifice and his entry into glory would be made present to his people until he comes again.

It is important to understand why this Chrism Mass has always been closely associated with Holy Thursday. Our lives, our efforts, our struggles, our pain, our joys, our hopes and prayers that Christ the Head gathers into his own offering through the action of the priest are the fruit of the anointing we received in Baptism and Confirmation. They are our attempts to live out our baptismal calling to follow Christ.

That is why today is also a day for us to pray for vocations to the priesthood, so that the Eucharist may continue to be offered all over our diocese and our country. The fact that ten years from now the number of priests will have dropped by half in a twenty year period iis a sharp reminder that we must not take things for granted.

The challenge to ensure that God’s call to the priesthood will be heard and responded to is not just a matter for priests to be concerned about. Everyone who has been anointed in Baptism and Confirmation has a responsibility for the future of the Church in our diocese. Everybody has a responsibility to ask what we can do to ensure that the present serious decline in numbers does not continue and that years like this one, where there is no prospect of an ordination for the diocese, do not become the norm for decades to come.

We are all members of Christ’s Body. That is not like being a member of a club. It means that we, priests and people, are called to be in a living, loving relationship with Jesus. If that relationship is not the very heart of our lives, we do not need to look any further for an explanation of the decline in vocations or of how secular the world has become. He asked us to be ready to lose our lives for his sake, to take up our cross and followed him, to love him more than anything or anybody else (Mt 10: 37-39). Does that describe our lives?

That is the heart of the challenge that the liturgy puts before us today. Pope Benedict recently described the apostles and first disciples as having been called, “not to announce an idea, but to be witnesses to a person”; “On that basis”, he went on, “preaching the Gospel is nothing other than an announcement of what (they had) experienced and an invitation to enter into the mystery of communion with Christ”.

If each of us as individuals, and also in groups, can find ways to deepen our relationship with Jesus, there will be a rich future for faith in this diocese. If we do not take up the challenge, we risk being the generation that fails to pass on the torch of faith. As we journey with Christ through his suffering and abandonment and the desolation of Calvary this week, it will be an occasion for reflecting on our call to follow him and to bear witness to him. It will also be an occasion for renewing the hope he preached in Nazareth, the hope of good news and liberty and new sight and of the Lord’s year of favour. And as we hear the word of God and reflect on his suffering and death, and on his glorious entry into the new creation at his Father’s side, we will also know the truth of what he said in the synagogue “This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen”.

RATZINGER, J., Called to Communion, Ignatius Press, 1996, p. 115.

BENEDICT XVI, General Audience, 22 March 2006.

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick