Fr. Soc to priests: “Return to our first love”
LINGAYEN-Dagupan Archbishop and Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) president Socrates Villegas cautioned his fellow priests in his archdiocese whose lifestyles he noticed have changed not to be influenced by citations heaped on them.
He told them not “to allow the awards and titles, the position and the experience to blur our memory of our wretched and wicked roots”.
In his meditation for priests on Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday at the St. John The Evangelist Cathedral here titled “The Joy of Remembering”, Villegas said, “If we are fragrant it is because we have axed the Lord. If we have sweetness it is not us, it is the Lord. Dominus est!”
“Ano ang nangyari? Bakit naging ganito? ” Villegas asked referring to changes in the conduct and behavior of some priests.
“I have only one answer. We have forgotten,” Villegas said.
“The branded shirt is preferred to the Roman collar. What was once a gift we have now considered as our right! Christ is in the back burner and vanity is in the front stage,” he added. “We have forgotten. We have compromised. We have invented excuses.”
On Holy Thursday, Villegas said his thoughts bring him back to the fragrant sweet scent of sandalwood, a tree that thrives in India known for its fragrant oil and sweet smelling timber.
Saying that said the sandalwood leaves a lasting fragrance on the ax that strikes, he said priesthood is the fragrance of God’s love that He has left on the men who have hurt him—“that is all of us,” he said.
He told the priests, “Our first love is lost and replaced by the idolatry of convenience and comfort.”
He observed that to some, giving Holy Communion tires them and they ask the laity to do it for them so they can sit back and relax.
“We are too busy to go to confession and so we also get too busy to sit down and wait for God’s prodigal children,” he added. “This is the heavy price of forgetting that we are priests of the mercy of God. We become like employees of God rather than his grateful servants,” he said.
“We feel entitled to Church money because of our advanced age and higher academic degrees. We have forgotten our first love, we have lost our first fire; we have blurred our vision with comfort and jumbled our priorities to accommodate our whims,” he added.
He exhorted the priests to “return to our first love and remember our first fire.”
(Tita Roces)
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