Sixty Years a Priest

Sixty Years a Priest | On the 60th Anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's Ordination | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | August 16, 2011 | Ignatius Insight


"What is friendship? Idem velle, idem nolle—wanting the same things, rejecting the same things: this was how I was expressed in antiquity. Friendship is a communication of thinking and willing.... Friendship is not just about knowing someone; it is above all a communication of the will." — Pope Benedict XVI, June 29, 2011, Homily on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (60th Anniversary of His Ordination to the Priesthood)

"Dime con quien andar y te dire quien eres. --Tell me with whom you walk and I will tell you who you are." -— Old Spanish Saying

I.

When he began his famous walk from Toul in France to Rome in 1901, the English writer Hilaire Belloc vowed that he would reach Rome by foot and go to Mass at Noon at St. Peter's on June 29th, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. He actually made it to Rome by walking, with one or two exceptions, but dithered away the time and did not make it to Mass. In the meantime, on his walk he described most of Europe with its faith and its sanity. Belloc thought that if you want to see a place and understand it, you had to stand on it, look at it, talk to the people there, drink their vino and eat their pasta.

It was on this 1901 walk, a propos of the Holy Father's ordination that took place exactly a half a century later in 1951, that Belloc reflected in these moving and amusing words:

All you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good endings are but shining transitions. Then will come a sharp moment of revelation when you will bless the effect of time. But this divine moment—it is not on the Emilian Way in the rain that you should seek it.

I suspect Benedict would enjoy that touching passage from Belloc's walk to Rome on the Emilian Way, to St. Peter's on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, a hundred years before his ordination to the priesthood.

Whether Benedict has ever read this marvelous book of Belloc, I doubt, but one never knows. Germans have the reputation of having read everything. And Joseph Ratzinger seems to have read more than most and in many languages. (Benedict does cite Chesterton.) This year, the 110th year after Belloc's walk, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul was the 60th Anniversary of Joseph Ratzinger's ordination to the priesthood in Freising in 1951 by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber. Joseph Ratzinger's elder brother, George, was ordained the same day.

L'Osservatore Romano notes that Benedict is the first pope since the long-lived Leo XIII, who died in 1903 at the age of 93, to celebrate his 60th anniversary as a priest while also being pope of Rome. Ratzinger was 24 years old at the time of his ordination. He was ordained with 42 other men, three of whom were present in Rome for the occasion, along with the pope's brother.

A certain divine irony can be found in that this pope, who writes so well on the papacy and the theology that supports it, should not only celebrate his own priestly ordination on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul but on the following day confer the pallium, the sign of office, on 41 Metropolitan archbishops from around the world, including the archbishops of Seattle, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Oklahoma City. The pallium is made of wool from sheep blessed on the Feast of St Agnes, a sign that a shepherd of the New Testament, like Christ, is to be both protector and victim.

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