During this last year, Catholics across the country and around the globe have celebrated the Year For Priests. The year concluded in Rome with an international gathering of priests with the Holy Father from June 9-11, 2010.
In the final edition of this series, Catholic Leadership Institute shares a reflection from Archbishop Thomas Wenski. His ministry, touching the lives of millions each day, was influenced and inspired by good leaders and good shepherds who awakened in him God’s call to the priesthood.
One of my earliest memories about priests and the priesthood was the wake service for Msgr. James Cann, pastor of my home parish of Sacred Heart, in Lake Worth, Florida. He was the priest who baptized me and he died in 1958, a few months before my First Holy Communion.
My parents took my sister and me to the wake. Although I was still quite young –just seven years old I remember Monsignor reposed in the casket dressed as if to celebrate Mass. My mother explained to me that priests are buried in their Mass vestments; she also explained another detail–that, unlike a lay person who would be brought into Church feet first, a priest’s body is placed in the opposite orientation precisely because of his priestly role mediating between Christ and his people.
I cannot say that this was precisely the seed of my own priestly vocation but given the vividness of my memory this wake service certainly had to have played a part in awakening in me the thought of becoming a priest. It brought home even to my very young, but impressionable mind, that the priest is a man apart and that the priest lives for and lives from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Here was a man who even in death evoked from the people great honor and respect for the simple reason that he was their priest.
St. John Eudes once said: “...the greatest effect of God’s mercy, the most precious grace He bestows upon mankind, is to send worthy priests, men after His own heart, seeking only His glory and the salvation of souls.” As priests we touch and influence people–for good or for ill–in ways that we may never be aware of, at least on this side of eternity. Msgr. Cann was one of those worthy priests and I hope that from his side of eternity he is aware of the influence for good that he had in my life.
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