Heart of the Church

With this week's issue of The Catholic Missourian, we resume our weekly visits. I have to admit that the biweekly summer schedule spoils me. This column is a joy to write, but it seems like every time I turn around, it's time for another one! In the summer the living gets easy even for this amateur columnist. In fact at one point this summer I was one column ahead.

The downside of the biweekly schedule is that you can't cover everything as well as you can when writing on a weekly basis. For instance, I was very conscious of the International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec, Canada, earlier this summer, but opted to wait until this week to talk about the importance of the Holy Eucharist and eucharistic devotion.

The Holy Eucharist is at the heart of our lives as Catholics. Some of you may still remember the public witness that we gave to this fact in our eucharistic celebration in August of 2000 in Columbia. It is something that I still remember with fond gratitude.

It is also a fact of our Catholic faith that the only way in which we can share this precious treasure of the Eucharist is through the ministry of the Sacred Priesthood of Jesus Christ. In this we are presented with a very serious challenge. One of the most critical aspects of the shortage of vocations to the priesthood is the specter of parishes in the future having to "share" a priest and move from place to place in order to participate even in the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist. With great sacrifice we are generally able to provide for the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist in all of the parishes of our Diocese of Jefferson City. The simple mathematics of the numbers of priests that we have and their advancing age makes it inevitable that this situation will be changing in the very near future.

That is the fact and we will simply deal with it on a case-by-case basis. However, the opportunity that we do have, and should avail ourselves of right now, is to launch a massive effort to turn this situation around as quickly as possible. The mystery of the Holy Eucharist, our devotion to the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist, our hunger for the Holy Eucharist - the solution to our quandary lies here at the eucharistic heart of the Church.

We have not ordained a priest in the Diocese of Jefferson City since Father Frank Bussmann and Father Joe Shetler were ordained in 2006. God willing, we will ordain two transitional deacons for the Diocese of Jefferson City next spring. Altogether, 18 seminarians will be studying for the priesthood for our diocese this year.

I'm here to tell you we have to do more. And what it takes is something within the grasp of each of us. Jesus said it, "Pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into His harvest." And don't pray "in general"; pick out a likely candidate and pray for him. More importantly, tell him that you are praying for him. And the closer that individual is in your family, the better. And the best place to pray for priesthood vocations is in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. This crisis will not be addressed until we are eager for our children, our brothers, our classmates to approach the altar of God as a priest for the sake of the whole community.

We have 95 parishes and 15 missions in this diocese. If one fourth of them could find just one priesthood candidate for the diocese this year, if each of them could identify just one seminarian to come forward sometime in the next four years, we could put this whole crisis behind us. And forget all of the objections and excuses. The Lord has need of us. Not only should we hunger for the Lord in the Eucharist, we should realize that, more importantly, the Lord hungers for us.

During World Youth Day in Denver, Pope John Paul II, encouraging the young people gathered there to spend time praying before the Blessed Sacrament, told them that Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament had two special messages for them, "Be not afraid!" and "Come to me."

Our Vocation Office, under the leadership of Father Joseph Corel, has been involved in an important project preparing two special publications. One is a book of prayers, readings and reflections that can be used by people of all ages in visits to our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. This book focuses in a special way on the mystery of God's call to all baptized Christians. The other is a guide for teachers and catechists to help introduce young people to this important devotion and opportunity for prayer.