By: Jose Mario Bautista Maximiano
1. During priestly ordination, priests are configured in Jesus Christ in aeternum, and therefore he is called SACERDOS IN AETERNUM.
2. Our Holy Father, our bishops, and priests have become a witness of a time without end (aeternum), which is the opposite of time and space.
3. Our ordained minister is the ALTER EGO of our dear Lord, and he cannot assume that role, it occurs to me (a sinner), unless he is a strong advocate of another reality beyond this earthly life.
4. A worldly priest is a contradiction and, according to Archbishop Socrates Villegas, “it is a scandal for a priest to die a rich man” (January 2, 2015).
5. OUR SHEPHERDS CANNOT STOP TALKING ABOUT THE LAST THINGS: ESCHATOLOGY
6. Our shepherd aspires something more than finally seeing our cathedrals and basilicas repaired after the earthquake or the main altar refurbished with gold.
7. The Holy Father, our bishops, and priests are teachers of eschatology. They are prophets of the mystery of death, judgment, and the reality of heaven and hell (cf. Pius XI. Ad Catholici Sacerdotii, 1935).
8. As teachers of eschatology, they can’t stop talking and witnessing about those unseen realities.
CELIBACY AND THE SPLENDOR OF HEAVEN.
1. Immersed and yet transcendent, rooted on earth and yet yearning for heaven, our priest prepares himself and God’s faithful people for the parousia, the second coming of Christ, the end of all things visible.
2. Priestly celibacy, for one, is a singular sign of that witnessing, a sign of heaven, “in which the children of the resurrection neither marry nor take wives” (Luke 20:35).
3. Heaven is where the just are relieved from all physical evils, and no trace of “death, tears, crying, or pain” will remain, nothing “unclean” (21:27) will survive, neither night nor darkness will reign (Revelation 7:9-17