Tuesday in the Seventh Week of Ordinary Time, May 21, 2024

Mark 9, 30-37

Jesus and his disciples left from there and began a journey through Galilee, but he did not wish anyone to know about it. He was teaching his disciples and telling them, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.” But they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to question him.  They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house, he began to ask them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they remained silent. For they had been discussing among themselves on the way who was the greatest. Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them, “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” Taking a child, he placed it in their midst, and putting his arms around it, he said to them, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.”

Like the patent medicine salesmen of the Old West, driving their wagons full of alleged panaceas from town to town, we are accustomed to talk in vagaries and to misuse words.  A common example involves the word “power”, as in, “Use you power” and “Take back your power.”  The speaker may actually mean something like, “Be confident” or “Give it your best effort”, but many people do seem to think that a certain “power” resides within each person, ready to be awakened and applied.  They are mistaken — unless they mean grace.  Politicians sometimes talk about power too.  They mean power in a legal sense.  The word that usually fits their meaning, though, is “authority”.  

St. Mark recounts for us, in this Gospel reading, how the Apostles argued about power.  As they understood it at that time, the Lord Jesus was leading a movement not unlike other movements of the time, which had as their goal the reform of religion or the overthrow of the Romans.  With this in their minds, “office politics” were bound to arise: the struggle to be second-in-command, or to gain the notice and favor of the leader, to make others look less competent, to take over duties.  The Lord strove throughout the three years of his Public Life to teach the Apostles that theirs was a different sort of movement, and that authority is different from power.  

“If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.”  In his movement, his Church, the leader is the head servant, patterned after the Lord himself, who came to die on the Cross not for his own glory but for our salvation.  He came to serve, not to be served, and so shall his members serve, in him.  “Power” is only the ability to serve in different ways.  “Authority” means having the means to direct one’s fellow servants.  In the end, our desire for power is a sign of our own insecurity.  We want to clap our hands and make ourselves safe or punish those who seem to threaten us,  but if anything, the Lord teaches us that the safety we most often crave does not lead to salvation.  It is an impediment to it if it keeps us from living the Gospel.  The Lord came to lay down his life for us.  He rejected safety and the use of power to make himself safe, as we see in the temptations he endured in the wilderness.  

In living the Christian life and in spreading the Gospel, as we are told to do, we must think how we might serve God, and let our service to him be the reward we seek.

The fortieth article in our continuing series on the Holy Mass: The Education of Men Studying for the Priesthood

For most of the history of the Church, young men apprenticed themselves — or were apprenticed — to older priests, who taught them how to do the work of the priest.  Especially in the Church’s first three hundred years, the local bishop would carefully instruct candidates for the priesthood.  It was at this time that we see the development of major and minor orders through which a man would rise on his way to the priesthood.  Following the persecutions and large numbers of conversions and an increasing number of church’s to staff, bishops found themselves hard-pressed to know or to train candidates while also governing the church of their territory — and sometimes governing the territory itself due to the disorder of the times — and this work began to be relegated to parish priests.  With the spread of religious orders beginning in the sixth century, men religious were chosen by the abbot for training and they would study with the priests in their monasteries.  The training of religious priests surpassed the training of the secular clergy, but until the founding of the universities no system for the education of men for the priesthood existed and much depended on the individual instructor.

As part of the reforms inaugurated by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, the seminary was created and a standard curriculum was established.  Now numbers of men lived and prayed and went to school together in a house under the control of the local bishop.  All the men in a territory would learn the same things from the same teacher, and the teaching could be scrutinized for orthodoxy as well as effectiveness.

These days, a man may enter a college seminary or complete four years of a regular college.  Normally after four years of college seminary the candidate advances to a four year program at the seminary’s school of theology where he may attain higher degrees.  A man who enters after obtaining his bachelor’s degree at a non-seminary college would enter a one or two year “pre-theology” program at the seminary.  Some seminaries additionally require finishing a one year “spirituality” program, often called a “spiritual year”.  These post college programs help prepare a man who has passed through a secular education for the formation that will take place in the school of theology.  The four years of theology feature regular college load semesters, but many seminarians take extra classes as well.  Classes are given on the books of the Bible, on moral theology, and on Church doctrine.  Among classes in the latter field are those on the Holy Trinity, on Jesus Christ (Christology), on the Blessed Virgin (Mariology), on Church History, and on the Sacraments.  There is also an emphasis on the spiritual growth and development necessary for a man to think, act, and pray like a priest.  After three years of theological studies, a man may be called by his bishop to ordination as a deacon, and then after four years, to the priesthood.  

This will conclude our continuing series on the Holy Mass, but if anyone would like to see a subject covered that I have not talked about, please let me know.  I will be happy to help with it.