Last January, Leo XIV took up an invitation from the Spanish saint John of Ávila when he wrote to the presbyterate of Madrid: “Be wholly His.” Do not be good. Do not be efficient. Do not be presentable. Be His. In those three words, compressed into a single phrase, lies Robert Francis Prevost’s entire vision of the priesthood. Everything else — fraternity, mission, the credibility of one’s life — comes afterwards. Or rather, it can only flow from there.
One year on from that event — his election — which radically changed the Church, I would like to dwell on one aspect of this pontificate which is particularly important for us, and whose absence we had felt keenly in recent years.
The young priest and the climate that receives him
If it is true that there are many difficulties a priest must face every day, it is equally true that today many young men are being ordained and are happy — yes, happy — to give their lives to God and to the Church. They are the same young men who are often misunderstood and who, as soon as they are ordained, find themselves having to deal with the old Sixty-Eighter parish priest who tries to fit them into his own categories and labels them: modernists, traditionalists. They are the same men who, full of energy and eagerness, find themselves in ageing presbyterates, made up above all of elderly priests or, at times, of relatively young figures who were ordained through troubled personal histories and circumstances and who, within an already suffering presbyterate, create division rather than foster unity. They are the ones who take out their unhappiness on food, the ones who wear a purple cassock while still young because that garment is their only reason for living. They are the ones who spend their time on social media, rolling from one profile to another in search of their eternal enemy — usually the person who has pointed out all these critical issues and who had already, in the past, shown how such people were more harmful than helpful in a particular Church, especially a small one short of new vocations.
