"I have cancer,” the elderly woman announced from her hospital bed high above York Avenue in Manhattan. “But cancer is not the sickness. Cancer is the cure. Because cancer brings you close to God.”
A Catholic priest is ordained to give God. The priest exists to mediate in the name and power of the one Mediator—to be an instrument who gives glory to God in sacrifice and the grace of God to souls. At every ordination, each new priest, just moments after being ordained and clothed in priestly vestments, kneels before the bishop, who slathers the priest’s palms with perfumed chrism and exhorts: “May the Lord Jesus Christ, whom the Father anointed with the Holy Spirit and power, guard and preserve you, that you may sanctify the Christian people and offer sacrifice to God.” Such became the ambit of my activity henceforth. Such became the concerns of my heart.
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