Bishop Koenig homily, Chrism Mass, 2024, Church of the Holy Cross, Dover
As we gather this evening as clergy and lay faithful from throughout our diocese, I begin by looking back with an immense sense of gratitude.
I am so very grateful for the many people who are here today as well as the other 240,000 people who make up our diocese and are with us in our thoughts and prayers.
I am grateful for our seminarians who, in a world where freedom is often defined as license and the voice of individualism and materialism continually bombards us, they are listening to the loving voice of our Lord as they discern a call to and are formed, God willing, for the priesthood.
In this vein, permit me to thank Father Norm Carroll and Father Rich Jasper and for all the priests and people who support and encourage those who are discerning a call to the priesthood and religious life.
As I have traveled throughout our diocese over the past two and a half years, and visited the cities and towns of the Delmarva Peninsula, I have been privileged to encounter the beauty of our Catholic faith as it is lived in our diocese. In a little while the Holy Oils that will be used in the coming year to call down God’s Holy Spirit will be blessed and consecrated. In gathering this evening, let us be especially grateful for the many ways that the effects of the Holy Spirit are experienced in our diocese.
Tonight will also be the annual opportunity that we priests have to renew our priestly promises.
I especially thank Bishop Malooly and my brother priests for your witness and generous service to the People of God. I thank you for the ways that your “yes” to come and follow our Lord as a priest did not only occur on the day of your ordination but is lived day after day, week after week, month after month. You do this as you faithfully pray the office, preside at the Eucharist and proclaim the Word of God; as you bring the balm of healing through the sacraments of reconciliation and anointing of the sick to the infirm; as you help prepare people for the sacraments, celebrate the sacraments of initiation and officiate at marriages; as you selflessly pastor parishes or serve as parochial vicars; as you generously serve in diocesan leadership positions, as deans and as members of diocesan committees; as you work with deanery leadership teams in making parishes even more vibrant.
As we renew our priestly promises this evening, I especially invite you, my brothers, to continue to entrust yourself to God’s will as you did on the day of your ordination. The prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, “not my will but thine will be done,” is prayed daily in the words of the Our Father. We are invited to live it out in our priesthood as we accept new assignments and respond to new situations and needs that arise around us. In the Gospel of St. Mark that was proclaimed this past Sunday, we heard of how Jesus, at the conclusion of the Last Supper, goes to pray at the Garden of Gethsemane. Up until this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus had always gone off by himself to a deserted place in order to pray to his heavenly Father. This time, however, is different. As he is about to face his greatest trial, he chooses Peter, James and John, three of his closest disciples to be with him. It is a good reminder to us of how we as a presbyterate can and do support one another as we pray with and for one another, as we help one another meet pastoral needs or through our fraternal friendship encourage and strengthen one another.
That being said, the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane relates another detail about Jesus and his prayer that is also particularly instructive for us. In the words of St. Mark: “[Jesus] advanced a little and fell to the ground and prayed.” Falling to the ground in prayer is the posture of Abraham when, at 99 years of age, he falls prostrate in prayer after God reveals that he will establish a covenant with him and multiply his offspring. It is the posture assumed by Peter, James and John when Jesus is transfigured on the mountain. It is the posture that each of us will assume at the beginning of Good Friday’s Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion. It is the posture that each of us assumed at our ordination. It is a posture, in the words of Pope Benedict, that “express, in prayer, corporally too, complete entrustment to God, trust in him” (2/1/2012).
Today’s readings remind us that like the prophet Isaiah and Jesus, we have been anointed to bring glad tidings to the poor and proclaim liberty to captives. I have little doubt that there are days, my brothers, in which the demands of following in the footsteps of Isaiah and Jesus are so great that lying prostrate would probably result in you quickly falling asleep. At those times, may God give you peaceful rest.
Even more important, however, than the rest that comes from a good night’s sleep, is the peace that comes from entrusting our lives and our priesthood into the God’s loving care. When we allow God to use us, amazing things take place. Francis Trochu relates, in his biography of St. John Vianney, that after serving for two years as a newly ordained priest in a prosperous parish in a suburb of Lyons, France, St. John Vianney was called in February 1818 to the vicar general’s office and informed that “there’s a little place in … the village of Ars, that’s in need of a priest. “Ars,” he continued, “is not more than chapel of ease with about two hundred ten souls. We’ve decided to send you there, to replace a young priest who was only twenty-six … and who has just died there only a few days after his appointment.” Perhaps sensing a look of astonishment on the face of John Vianney, the vicar general then said, “‘Come, my dear boy, don’t be disheartened … There’s not very much love of God in this village. It is for you to teach it [to] them.’” And, as you know, the rest is history.
The Cure of Ars labored until his death 41 years later, celebrating Mass, preaching, hearing confessions and that humble village of Ars became, again in the words of Brochu, “one of the holy places of France, and indeed of Christendom” as people flock to pay homage to “the uneducated farmer’s son who, with a hundred obstacles to fight against, won his way to the priesthood … and whom we invoke today as St. Jean Marie Vianney.”
I dare say that the spiritual state of the village of Ars 200 years ago that St. John Vianney faced presented challenges far different from what we face today. However, the means by which the Cure of Ars lived out his priesthood is not at all different. His was a priesthood lived in prayerful trust and priestly charity. May we, like St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, entrust ourselves to the will of God our Father and to Jesus Christ, the Eternal High Priest. St. John Vianney, pray for us. Mary, the mother of priests, pray for us. All Saints of God, pray for us.
