Dear Colleagues – and colleagues is what we all are here this afternoon, ordained or lay, men or women, old and (I was going to say young) but I’ll replace it with “less old”
We have gathered as one of our Jubilee events to mark our Jubilee Year of Hope. This event is our Jubilee of Priests, a celebration and a thanksgiving for all that God has done in the generous lives of those who chose the path of priesthood and who continued to travel on it despite the many challenges that life presents. This beautiful Pugin chapel is and was central to your discernment of vocation. The first mornings and evenings as a seminarian, the unfamiliar soutane, the unfamiliar prayers of the psalms. These were followed by discernment as you questioned your vocation and choices and the final saying yes – at Diaconate and Priesthood. And for those of us for whom it happened elsewhere, the emotions, the nervousness, the newness of it, was very much the same.
Pope Francis, used the phrase “Time is greater than Space” in two of his encyclicals. And we can see the wisdom of it when we remember the confined space of our seminary formation, the structured day and the familiar buildings. Your ministry, our ministry has with God’s power become much more that what we were taught. The time since our ordination, this seall, thuas seall – good times and bad times has been much more significant that what we imagined it would be. The years have been our lecturers, our formators if we have the wisdom to see what God did and continues to do in the bits and pieces of life.
We celebrate today what God has done with us over the years. We have been supported by colleagues, many gone to their eternal reward, by parents and family, by friends and by great people working with us in the vineyard of the Lord as teachers, nurses, youth ministers, care staff in nursing homes and family carers who might even have put us to shame by the unstinted generosity of their lives. We have seen Christ at work all around us and we give thanks on this Jubilee of his Incarnation that he still walks with us.
The themes of this Jubilee Year however call us to look forward. We are Pilgrims of Hope in a Jubilee Year of Hope. Hope is always forward looking, Pilgrims face forward – as somebody said to me recently having been on the Camino – it’s one step after another. The Hope that we bring to this celebration, to this Holy Year, to this threshold of an emerging church has it’s source in Christ, who walked with the outsider, the outcast, the untouchable. When we use the word Hope in daily life, it has a definite desired outcome. A win for our team, an amount of money fundraised or saved, a gathering of a certain number of people, a cure for a loved one or indeed ourselves.
Christian Hope does not have a decided outcome, a goal that we must reach, other than the great goal of eternal life with God. It is rather a belief that God is always with us in every event of daily life, those that challenge us and those that nourish us. As priests and ministers, we are invited to see past the obvious and to wonder what God is saying to us and to the world through what we are witnessing. It is a commitment to each step each conversation rather than a commitment to a goal set by ourselves. When we consider that journey of faith that passed through this College Chapel – it did not begin here nor will end here – it is possible to name this place as a Cradle of the Hope that is within you.
The Jubilee offers us priests an opportunity to reflect on our vocation in light of contemporary challenges. In a letter to clergy issued in November 2024, Pope Francis acknowledged the burdens priests face, including declining vocations, administrative demands, and societal skepticism toward faith. He encouraged them to find hope in their “fiat”—their yes to God’s call—and to trust in the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It’s a powerful thought, that our “Yes” is the source of divine energy from which we will draw throughout our lives no matter how long they are. The Christ that we said “yes” to will never desert us or leave us without the spiritual resources to be Lighthouses of faith , just like the Hook Lighthouse which continues to be a beacon of Hope for all who cross the seas. May the lives of everyone here this afternoon, representing ministry in all its forms in the Diocese of Ferns, continue to both receive and give Hope all the days ahead.
ENDS