Vatican official urges world’s priests to conversion

(March 07, 2011) With Lent about to begin with Ash Wednesday this week, a Vatican official issued a message to the priests of the world urging them to conversion. “Conversion, for us priests, means first and foremost increasingly adapting our life to the preaching which has been given us to offer daily to the faithful, thus becoming ‘passages from the living Gospel’, which everyone can read and take on,” wrote Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy in his message released in the Vatican on Monday. The Italian cardinal exhorted priests to adapt their hearts, their minds, their attitudes “to the image of Christ, the Good Shepherd, which has been engraved in us through the sacraments”. Focussing on the task of “new evangelisation”, Cardinal Pacenza said, “A de-christianised world calls for a new evangelisation, but a new evangelisation calls for ‘new’ priests, certainly not in the sense of a superficial race after every short-lived, ephemeral fashion, but in the sense of a heart deeply renewed by every Holy Mass”. He particularly urged priests to conversion from noise to silence, from the bustling ‘activism’ of ‘doing’ to ‘being’ with Jesus. Among other things, Cardinal Piacenza also called on priests to faithfully celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation, sought for themselves and generously offered to their brothers, along with spiritual guidance. “Unless we convert, we will be fewer and fewer, because only a renewed, converted, ‘new’ priest becomes the tool through which the Spirit calls new priests,” Cardinal Piacenza added.