May 18, 2025 - Pastor Message
June 7, 2025JUBILEE 2025 LUMEN GENTIUM (cont.)
JUBILEE 2025
LUMEN GENTIUM (cont.)
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may announce the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his own marvelous light. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:9-10).
Continuing our reflection on the Constitution on the Church from Vatican Council II, Lumen Gentium (LG), we look this week on the different kinds of priesthood in the Church. Christ established a universal priesthood in the Church, to which all the faithful are called and into which all the faithful are consecrated through baptism: “The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, that through all their Christian activities they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the marvels of him who has called them out of darkness into his wonderful light” (LG 10). This priesthood of the baptized is carried out ordinarily by offering our daily lives in the service of Christ, loving others as he loves us in witness to him. It is carried out sacramentally through our full and active participation in our worship of Christ, through prayer and the sacraments, especially in the celebration of the Eucharist.
This universal priesthood of the baptized differs substantially from the ordained priesthood, yet nonetheless is an authentic and essential expression of the one priesthood of Christ in which his whole Body, the Church, shares in his own self-offering: “The ministerial priest, by the sacred power that he has, forms and governs the priestly people; in the person of Christ he brings about the Eucharistic sacrifice and offers it to God in the name of all the people. The faithful, by virtue of their royal priesthood, share in the offering of the Eucharist. They exercise that priesthood, too, by the reception of the sacraments, by prayer and thanksgiving, by witness of a holy life, self-denial and active charity” (LG10). We will reflect more deeply on the nature and importance of the sacraments when we look at Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, but, for now, it is sufficient for us to recognize the sacramental distinction between the universal priesthood of the baptized and the ordained, or ministerial, priesthood.
Vatican II’s statement that we all share in the priesthood of Christ was not new, but it was revolutionary in that it awakened the laity to the sacred importance of their active role in the Church and in the world. Lumen Gentium further called all the Christian faithful to their prophetic vocation, by which we witness together faithfully to Christ and his Word: “The holy people of God shares also in Christ’s prophetic office: it spreads abroad a living witness to him, especially by a life of faith and love and by offering to God a sacrifice of praise…The whole body of the faithful who have received an anointing which comes from the holy one cannot be mistaken in belief. It shows this characteristic through the entire people’s supernatural sense of the faith, when, ‘from the bishops to the last of the faithful,’ it manifests universal consensus in matters of faith and morals” (LG 12). This proclamation of the “sense of faith” is the foundation of today’s synodal movement, which recognizes that the Holy Spirit moves through each of us who have received him in baptism and confirmation, though in different ways, and we need to listen together to how the Spirit is moving. Contrary to popular criticism of synodality, this does not mean that the Church is a democracy. As St. Paul (and Lumen Gentium) notes, our participation in the Spirit is different: “And he gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, and others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the Body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11-12; LG 12-13). It is the ordained priesthood, particularly through the bishops in union with the Vicar of Christ, the pope, who have the special gift and task of making the final judgment on matters of faith and morals, but synodality calls them “to listen to what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2:17), and so embody more fully the universal priesthood of the baptized and the unity of the Church.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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