The Next Pope by George Weigel

Author:George Weigel [Weigel, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781642291285
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2020-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Next Pope and the Church’s Priests

“For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”

—Luke 17:21

The next pope must intensify the reform of the priesthood and the consecrated life.

The Gospel challenges believers in every time and place to recognize that the promised transformation of all things, which the New Testament calls the “kingdom of God”, has begun among us. The Kingdom is present in the person of the Risen Lord Jesus in the communion of the Church, Christ’s Mystical Body in the world. The Kingdom is present where the Beatitudes are lived and the power of God is made visible in those whom the world deems of little or no account. Through the grace of the sacraments, the radically converted disciple lives the life of the Kingdom every day and offers those who have not yet met the Lord Jesus the possibility of a share in his life.

Christians thus live in a unique time zone, a Kingdom time zone. For what Christians believe will be manifest in glory at the end of history—the fulfillment of Christ’s promise to “make all things new” (Rev 21:5)—is in fact unfolding now, in history. So when the Church follows the Lord’s instruction and prays several times each day “thy kingdom come”, the Church is praying for the fuller manifestation of a reality that Jesus proclaimed to be breaking into history in his own person and mission. That proclamation was vindicated by the Resurrection, in which the truth about human destiny was revealed in such a powerful way that the friends of the Risen One went out and began the conversion of the world by the preaching of the Gospel.

Over two millennia of Christian history, different vocations in the Church have developed to make this Kingdom dimension of the Church’s life visible in a heightened way, and to give concrete expression to the Lord’s assurance that the reign of God is not just “future”, but is also “present”. Such vocations manifest an individual’s desire to be entirely possessed by God. Those vocations also have an important ecclesial function, for their radical witness to the “present” of the Kingdom of God among us serves to call the entire Church to a more complete configuration to Christ and to a more vigorous proclamation of the Gospel.

These radically Kingdom-centered vocations include the priesthood of the New Covenant and the vowed religious life consecrated by the evangelical counsels or counsels of perfection (poverty, chastity, and obedience). The priesthood and the consecrated life function as a kind of spiritual reactor core in the Church, from which radiates the energy that empowers evangelization and mission throughout the entire communion of disciples. The health of the priesthood and the consecrated life at any moment in history are thus indices of the vitality of the Church of that time, for it is through the priesthood and the consecrated life that the Church experiences in a more radical way the truth that the Kingdom of God is among us.

The reform of the priesthood and the consecrated life is an essential component of the New Evangelization.

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