St. John Paul II’s Letter to Priests on Holy Thursday, 2004

Nearly every Holy Thursday of his pontificate, spanning over a quarter-century, St. John Paul II wrote a “Letter to Priests.” These may well be called epistles, given the heartfelt depth of exhortation to his brother priests.

We lay faithful can also derive great benefit from reflecting upon JPII’s insights into the priesthood, an inestimable gift from the Lord to the men He calls, and to the Church they are ordained to serve.

Here are just a few excerpts from his letter of Holy Thursday 2004:

At the Last Supper, we were born as priests…We were born from the Eucharist.

If we feel moved before the Christmas crib, when we contemplate the Incarnation of the Word, what must we feel before the altar where, by the poor hands of the priest, Christ makes His Sacrifice present in time? We can only fall to our knees and silently adore this supreme mystery of faith.

“Mysterium fidei,” the priest proclaims after the consecration. The Eucharist is a mystery of faith, yet the priesthood itself, by reflection, is also a mystery of faith.

The same mystery of sanctification and love, the work of the Holy Spirit, which makes the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, is at work in the person of the minister at the moment of priestly ordination. There is a particular interplay between the Eucharist and the priesthood, an interplay which goes back to the Upper Room: these two Sacraments were born together, and their destiny is indissolubly linked until the end of the world.

As He pronounced the words “Do this…” Jesus’ thoughts extended to the successors of the Apostles, to those who would continue their mission by distributing the food of life to the very ends of the earth. In some way, then, dear brother priests, in the Upper Room we too were called personally, each one of us, “with brotherly love” (Preface of the Chrism Mass), to receive from the Lord’s sacred Hands the Eucharistic Bread and to break it as food for the People of God on their pilgrim way through time towards our heavenly homeland.

Let us pause in the Upper Room and contemplate the Redeemer Who instituted the Eucharist and the priesthood at the Last Supper. On that holy night He called by name each and every priest in every time. He looked at each one of them with the same look of loving encouragement with which He looked at Simon and Andrew, at James and John, at Nathanael beneath the fig tree, and at Matthew sitting at the tax office. Jesus has called us and, along a variety of paths, He continues to call many others to be His ministers.

You can find all of his letters (manually clicking year by year) on the JPII page at Vatican.va, or a more user-friendly collection of his Letters to Priests (from 1990) at clerus.va.

Addendum: These have also been compiled in a book, Letters to My Brother Priests, published by Midwest Theological Forum.