Ordaining priests is the greatest privilege that I have as a bishop. Period. When, at the high point of the ceremony, I place my hands on the head of a deacon and call forth the Holy Spirit upon him, I stand in the tradition of the Apostles, who similarly laid hands on those to whom they imparted authority. I can testify that nothing in my life has ever made me feel more humble and more grateful.
There are three great promises that a man makes when he accepts ordination as a deacon and then as a priest, and each one of them is a marvelous countersign to our culture today. First, he promises to recite faithfully the Liturgy of the Hours, that wonderful compilation of psalms, hymns and prayers offered at five points throughout the day. I have been engaging in this prayer for the past 38 years of my priesthood, and I can testify that, though sometimes challenging, it has been a tremendous source of spiritual strength. It involves, to put it simply, the steady and conscious consecration of time.
Prayer: rejection of soul-killing secularism
As so many studies have shown, younger people today in the West are rapidly secularizing themselves and disaffiliating from the institutional churches. They constitute the first generation in human history that is coming of age without a keen sense of the transcendent. This emptying out of the sacred has wreaked havoc in the minds, hearts and souls of this generation, among whom the numbers measuring anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts have been spiking.
Therefore, when a young man makes a solemn promise before God and his community that he will, for the rest of his life, pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, he is standing opposite this soul-killing secularism. He is declaring that God exists and that God matters.
Celibacy: A path to freedom for service
The second promise that a man makes is to live celibately. I know it has been said a thousand times, but it bears repeating: Celibacy is not a denigration of sex and marriage! We ought always to avoid a dualistic interpretation of celibacy, in which the renunciation of marriage is construed as a sort of judgment on physicality or pleasure.
So what is the right way to think of celibacy? It is, first, a path of freedom. Without a spouse and children – and all of the responsibilities that come with having a family – a celibate man can dedicate himself entirely to God and the people he serves.
As I type these words, I can see my bishop’s ring, which is not simply a sign of my office but also a wedding ring, for it signifies my devotion to the people the Lord has entrusted to me. St. Paul clearly teaches: “The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided” (1 Cor 7:32-34).
Even now, celibacy provides a witness as to the way we will love in heaven, where, as Jesus said, “we neither marry nor are given in marriage.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that heavenly love is less than married love here below; on the contrary, it is greater, more intense, fuller and richer. How indispensable that, in a society practically obsessed with sex and sexual freedom, there should be, living among us, men who embody a spiritualized form of love.
Obedience: Letting go of my agenda
The third and final promise a man makes at his ordination is to obey his bishop. “I promise obedience to you and your successors,” he says as he places his hands, in the manner of a feudal vassal, in the hands of the ordaining prelate.
I vividly remember when I did this on the day of my ordination, placing my hands in those of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, whom I barely knew, and vowing to do, within the limits of law and morality, whatever he or his unnamed and unknown successors would ask me to do. At that moment, I surrendered my “career” – which is to say, any plan or trajectory that I would set for myself. I put my life in the hands of my bishop, trusting that, through his will, the Holy Spirit would direct me.
Once more, how strange this move seems today! One of the most fundamental values for people now is self-determination – not only about the direction of one’s life, but the very meaning of it. I have often referred to ours as “the culture of self-invention.”
Whereas the default position of most young people today is that their lives belong entirely to them, the priest, on the day of his ordination, says that his life does not belong to him at all, but rather to God and for God’s purposes.
Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota.
Beyond our own happiness
“While a vocation does bring us joy and should be something that we are good at, it is not primarily concerned with either of these things. As the word indicates, a vocation – from the Latin vocare, “to call” – is something that comes from outside and for the sake of something other than ourselves.
Against the values of the world that tell us to never do anything we do not like and to think of our own happiness first, someone with a vocation is concerned most with the needs of the caller rather than their own, willing to sacrifice their own immediate happiness and comfort for the sake of the call.
For them, there is a mission much greater than themselves at stake and they are willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill it. Sometimes, this means accepting that what we want to do and what we are good at is not what the world needs.”
— Franciscan Father Casey Cole in “Called: What Happens After Saying Yes to God”