Topic of the week – Priests walk in Christ’s footsteps

To say “There were no priests in the early Church, just faithful baptised Christians” (“Do we need priests?”, Letters, 18 April) ignores the effectively contemporaneous institution and total interdependence of the Church, the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Holy Orders in and at the Last Supper.

The Church is not a common effort to grasp God on its own, but rather a surrender to the gratuitous embrace of his merciful grace, and to a share in his divine life, dispensed above all through the priesthood of Christ.

This priesthood was given by him first to the Apostles, shared then, virtually in its fullness, by them with bishops, who in turn co-opted priests and deacons to partial grades of the exercise of this ministry.

Karl Rahner, in his Shape of the Church to Come, is firm in stressing that “official powers in the Church are conferred by a special rite which we call the Sacrament of Holy Orders”. But priests and bishops exercising these restricted “official powers” need an institutional Church to underpin their eucharistic, sacramental and prophetic ministry.

There is ample opportunity here for all Christians to work together on equal terms, not in the person of Christ, but most certainly in the name of Christ, sharing a synodal process of decision-making and ecclesial co-responsibility.

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