Priestly Role Quotes

You are priests, not social or political leaders. Let us not be under the illusion that we are serving the Gospel through an exaggerated interest in the wide field of temporal problems.

It is not the man who is responsible for the offerings as they become Christ's Body and Blood; it is Christ Himself who was crucified for us. The standing figure belongs to the priest who speaks these words. The power and the grace belong to God. 'This is My Body,' he says. And these words transform the offerings.

Being a Catholic in any way is great, but I feel particularly blessed to have served at the altar, where the work of Christ through the priest can be seen up close.

I am very much looking forward to being a parish priest.

There is a kind of thinking in the Church that wants to reduce the priest to a mere functionary, a managing director, where administration rather than doctrine and worship are to determine the form of the Church.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Most of the early monks were not ordained. It was the pastoral work they undertook with the faithful that, over the centuries, gradually led to the present situation in which most monks are ordained priests.

Every day He humbles Himself just as He did when from from His heavenly throne into the Virgin's womb; every day He comes to us and lets us see Him in lowliness, when He descends from the bosom of the Father into the hands of the priest at the altar.

Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world.

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that?

If there were no ministers and no priests, how long would there be any churches?

To understand the power of the priesthood, we must know its limitations.

It's not just being called to the ministry that counts.

Priesthood is forever and does not cease when a priest cannot carry out that priestly ministry.

Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.

Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion.

A priest is the God-bearer or Christ-bearer, a living Eucharist of the divine presence, bringing a sympathetic ear and a compassionate heart in which people find God's consolation, understanding and love.

The theatre is your pulpit - it is your church - and you want to be a priest in your church, and that's what I believe in.

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god.

As God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children - to be the spiritual leader of your family - you're acting as a priest. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately, in too many Christian homes, the role of the priest is assumed by the wife.

Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.

The priest comes. . not as an obscurantist, but wearing the intelligible vestments of living faith, divine but positive, ministering in Word and Sacrament that which is humanity's hope and salvation, the divine energy in which he lives with Christ in the Father through the Holy Spirit, identified but not accommodated to the world Christ seeks to save.