The Priest at Prayer, June 5

Second Part
The Priestly Ministry

The Second Priestly Duty: The Holy Eucharist

Fourth Meditation - The Sacrilegious Mass: The Celebrant's Guilt

I. Cursed be he that taketh gifts to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say: Amen. (Deut. xxvii, 25)

All Christian people, the whole human race, down through the ages have kept on repeating these words of Deuteronomy in their thundering denunciation of the traitor-disciple who delivered the blood of the Just One for a handful of silver: a curse on him! Amen!

Judas! . . . But why should he be considered the greatest of villains? It is true he sold his Master for a few coins, and it is certain that there was not even the semblance of a motive for doing so; but how quickly and with what terrible anguish he repented! Such anguish of mind, that Judas was driven with the violence of a hurricane to retract before his accomplices in the treacherous deal; he went so far as to call them unjust and murderers, like himself: I have sinned in betraying innocent blood. An admirable confession worthy of the most sincere penitent: concise, swift: a few words of burning lava; a lapidary inscription, as it were, engraved on the conscience and the brow of the new Cain by the Hand of God! I have sinned! I acknowledge the infamous deed, I have no excuse! I have sinned! Like David, like the prodigal son. With cunning and treachery I have betrayed the Blood, the life, of the Innocent One, the Just One who has a better right to live than anyone else, whose life is more precious than all other lives together!

Not satisfied with such a sincere avowal, Judas returns the money, which was the chief if not the only motive of his crime. He throws it at them when they decline to accept it, because it seared his hands and his inmost soul. And that was Judas, the miser, the thief. He was a thief and, having the purse, carried the things that were put therein. (John xii, 6) In fine, his fearful remorse drives him to undergo a penalty that to the poor wretch seems but the adequate punishment of his crime, the penalty of suicide. A criminal penance indeed, but also a hard one!

A greater crime than Judas's, perhaps there is none; but is there none still more repugnant? Who knows! Let us consider that of the sacrilegious priest.

II. Take the case of a priest - would to God no such thing were possible! - who every day for a whole month, a whole year or more, barters away our Divine Lord by celebrating unworthily, perhaps for the sake of some generous stipend, or perhaps for no special reason at all, just because he cares not what he does. He delivers His Master up to Satan, the master of his own corrupt heart; he does it hundreds and thousands of times; but does he ever entertain the idea of putting a halter round his neck and putting an end to his ignomi­nious existence? Far from throwing away his ill-gotten gains, the price of his sacrilege and treachery - pretium sanguinis - perhaps he never feels even the slightest tremor of horror, not even the faintest chill or stirrings of remorse.

On the Day of Judgement, on the Day of the great Reckoning, Tyre and Sidon, the Supreme Judge tells us, will confront Bethsaida and Corozain; Sodom and Gomorrha will stand in accusation against Capharnaum, the chosen but ungrateful city; and may we not add that Judas will confront the sacrilegious priest, his disciple? Fixing his hellish, vulture gaze on the dark conscience of the profaner of the Holy Victim, probing the inmost depths of the priest's perversity, he may well spit into his face and snarl with contempt: You were a greater villain than myself!

III. And already on the threshold of eternity, if the priest in meeting with Christ should ask: "Who art Thou, Lord?" Jesus may reply, not in the words He spoke to Saul, but with a look which could be transcribed: "For thee, I am a nobody; even my Name thou tookest from me; for while my Bride, the Church, kept on repeating every day from the first words of her liturgy to the Last, kept on repeating through thy lips, with ecstatic self-­abasement: 'My Lord and my God!' thou, with the voice of thy lewd concupiscences over-mastering thy heart and memory and imagination and every atom of thy foul being, didst declare: 'Impossible! How could I behave like this towards a real God? No, God is not here: this is nothing but a parody, a means of liveli­hood; the most I am doing is pretending; I'm a good actor on the stage.' And therefore, to thee I have been a nobody, whereas thou, at my profaned altars from the first word to the last that came out of thy infamous mouth, thou in all thy movements and at every step wast a cynical hypocrite, a poisonous viper." "The hour is come now to tear away every mask, to light up every dark corner, and to restore to each one his proper name."

Resolution
If avarice blinded Judas, perhaps the one thing that will blind me, to the point of profaning the Sacrifice of our Altars, is lust.

Out of every hundred sacrilegious Masses will not lust account for over ninety?

O Jesus! Thou who didst choose a Virgin to be Thy Mother, grant me absolute purity of body and soul, even though miracles be needed to curb my sensual cravings. I promise Thee that, by Thy grace, I shall always keep winning that noble battle fought by hearts that are pure, through the wielding of those weapons human and divine which have always been in the hands of the glorious self-conquerors who put their trust in Thee;
_________________________
Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

###
Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!