Jean Khoury

Summary: This chapter proposes a single thesis and traces its consequences into the concrete shape of priestly formation: the fruitfulness of a man’s future priesthood is not primarily a function of his intelligence, his competence, or even his generosity, but of the degree of his union with Christ — and this union is not something that begins at ordination and grows thereafter almost by accident. It is, or ought to be, the very substance of the years of formation that precede ordination. Drawing on the doctrine of growth in love mapped by St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross, on its application to the apostolate by Bl. Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus, and on the Church’s own theology of priestly configuration to Christ, this chapter argues that the seminary years exist, at their deepest level, to close in advance the gap between the mission a man will receive whole on his ordination day and the charity that mission presupposes. Formation, rightly structured, is itself a graced ascent — carried by a distinct grace of preparation that God gives to a man precisely in view of the priesthood he is to receive — so that by the day of his ordination he does not merely know what a priest does; he has already begun, in some real and tested measure, to abide in Christ as a priest must.

Introduction

A man is ordained on a Saturday, and by Sunday he sits in the confessional, anoints the dying, and stands at the altar in the person of Christ. Nothing in what he has been given depends on what happened to him in the years before that Saturday. Ordination confers what it confers, wholly and at once, whatever the state of the man who receives it. But everything in whether that gift bears fruit — whether it heals rather than merely functions, whether it feeds souls rather than merely serves them — depends enormously on those prior years. This chapter is concerned with those years: the years of seminary formation, and the question of how they should be structured so that the gap between the instantaneous gift of ordination and the gradual gift of charity is not left to open on ordination day, but is substantially closed, or at least brought safely within reach, before it arrives.

Catholic tradition has never doubted that ordination confers something real and complete: the man configured to Christ the Head is truly priest from the moment of his ordination, however young, however unfinished his interior life may still be. But tradition has been equally insistent, especially in its great masters of the spiritual life, that the fruit borne through that priesthood is proportioned not to the character received but to the charity possessed. This is not a reason to delay ordination indefinitely, waiting for a sanctity few men reach before middle age. It is a reason to take with full seriousness what formation is actually for. Formation is not principally the accumulation of theology, canon law, and pastoral technique, useful as these are. Formation is the time given by the Church, and by God who inspires her discipline, for a man’s charity to be drawn forward to meet, as nearly as it can, the mission that awaits him at the altar.

What follows is an attempt to think this through with the help of the Carmelite doctors of growth in love. St. Teresa of Ávila mapped the soul’s journey toward God as a passage through seven successive mansions; St John of the Cross described the same journey from the side of its purifications. In the twentieth century, Bl. Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus drew out, mansion by mansion, what this map means for anyone charged with giving to others what they have not yet fully received themselves — a study to which the present chapter is deeply indebted for its governing structure (Bl. Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus, “I Am a Daughter of the Church”, pp. 1053–1077). He wrote chiefly for religious engaged in active ministry. But his teaching applies with peculiar exactness to the years before ordination, because it is precisely there — in the seminary, not principally afterward — that a man’s love for Christ ought to be led, stage by stage, toward the stability his future mission will require. This chapter takes up that teaching and asks what it means, concretely, for the structuring of the years of formation, and for the grace proper to those years.

I. The Purpose of Formation: Closing the Gap Before It Opens

Every apostolic vocation in the Church carries some version of a mismatch between grace received and grace required. But the priest’s case is the sharpest, because his configuration to Christ at ordination is total and instantaneous, while his charity — like anyone else’s — can only grow as charity always grows: slowly, through purification, through prayer, through the ordinary and extraordinary workings of grace across years. This is not a flaw to be regretted; it is the logic of a sacramental economy in which Christ, not the minister, is the principal agent of every sacred action. But it means that the years before ordination cannot be understood merely as a period of academic and practical preparation, after which a man’s spiritual life will somehow take care of itself once he is busy with ministry. If the gap between mission and charity is not substantially addressed before ordination, it will simply be inherited by a young priest who is, from his very first week, exposed to the full weight of what only a soul advanced in union with God can safely carry.

This is why formation must be understood, from its first day to its last, as a journey toward union — not merely a course of studies punctuated by spiritual exercises, but a coherent ascent in which each stage is designed to bring the seminarian’s interior life into closer correspondence with the mission that awaits him. St Paul offers the model here, though in reverse order to the priest’s own case: he received his mission whole on the road to Damascus, and only afterward, across years including a hidden sojourn in Arabia, did his charity grow to match it. The seminary has the opportunity the young Paul did not: to do this growing beforehand, deliberately, under guidance, before the mission is conferred rather than in a scramble to catch up with it afterward. A formation that fails to use this opportunity — that treats the years before ordination chiefly as an obstacle course of requirements to be satisfied — squanders precisely the grace those years were given to hold.

II. Without Union, No Fruit

There is a danger, however, that we understand the priesthood in a way that unintentionally separates the priest’s sacramental ministry from his personal union with Christ. We rightly insist on the ex opere operato efficacy of the sacraments. The Church teaches that the sacraments are efficacious because Christ himself acts in them, and that their efficacy does not depend upon the personal holiness of the minister. As the Catechism puts it, “the sacrament is not wrought by the righteousness of either the celebrant or the recipient, but by the power of God” (CCC 1128). This truth is fundamental and must never be compromised. Christ remains faithful to his Church, and the grace of the sacrament does not become dependent upon the virtue of the priest who celebrates it.

But this truth can be misunderstood if it leads us to imagine that the priest is therefore merely an inert instrument in Christ’s hands. The priest is not a lifeless object through which grace passes while his own humanity remains somehow external to what Christ is doing. The ex opere operato concerns the objective sacramental efficacy of the sacramental action; it does not tell us that the personal holiness, charity and union with Christ of the priest are irrelevant to the fruitfulness of his whole ministry. Indeed, the very fact that Christ has chosen to associate a human being with his priestly action reveals something much deeper: Christ does not merely use the priest; he seeks to configure the priest to himself and to make his whole humanity increasingly available to the movement of his own love.

This is where the words of Jesus in the fifteenth chapter of John become decisive: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” And then Jesus gives the principle in its starkest form: “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:4–5). The priest may be able to perform many actions without a deep interior union with Christ. He may preach, organise, administer, celebrate, teach and govern. But supernatural fruitfulness is another matter. Fruit comes from the life of the vine flowing into the branch. The priest’s deepest fruitfulness therefore cannot be separated from his abiding in Christ.

This is particularly important for understanding the meaning of in persona Christi. Through the Sacrament of Holy Orders, the priest is sacramentally configured to Christ and receives the power to act in his person. The Second Vatican Council teaches that priests, “by the power of the sacrament of Orders,” are consecrated to preach the Gospel, shepherd the faithful and celebrate divine worship; they participate in Christ’s own priesthood and mission. But in persona Christi should not be reduced to the idea that Christ simply replaces the priest whenever he performs a sacramental action. The mystery is more profound. Christ acts through the priest, but he also seeks to transform the priest so that his mind, heart, affections, body and entire humanity increasingly become instruments of Christ’s own love.

The priest is therefore not an inert tool in the hands of Jesus. He is a living member of Christ’s Body. He has been taken from among men, consecrated to God, configured to Christ and sent back into the midst of humanity. His humanity is not an obstacle which Christ must bypass in order to act; it is precisely the humanity that Christ desires to take up, purify, transform and employ in the service of his Body. The more deeply the priest is united to Christ, the more his own humanity becomes transparent to Christ’s humanity, and the more his actions can become expressions of the charity of Christ himself.

Here we touch something essential about the priest’s place within the Church. The Church herself is, in Christ, the “sacrament of salvation” (Lumen Gentium 1 and 48; Ad Gentes 1 and 5; CCC 774-776), “a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of the unity of the whole human race.” The priest does not stand outside this mystery as a technician who administers sacred things to the Church; strictly speaking, it is the Church, not the priest, who is called the sacrament of salvation, and this distinction must be kept clear. But because the priest is a member of the Church and is himself configured sacramentally to Christ through Holy Orders, his humanity becomes a privileged locus through which Christ’s life is communicated to his Body, he is in a way himself also a “sacrament of salvation” for his flock. His own sanctification therefore has an ecclesial dimension. The grace working in his humanity is not merely for his personal perfection; as he becomes more deeply united to Christ, that transformation becomes a gift for the Body of Christ.

This is why the holiness of the priest cannot be regarded as something merely private, as though it were an optional perfection added to the fulfilment of his ministerial duties. The priest’s humanity itself is involved in his mission. His way of praying, speaking, looking, suffering, loving, listening, preaching and giving himself becomes part of the way in which Christ’s love reaches his people. The grace of God working in the priest’s humanity becomes, so to speak, a transformative key within the Body. Christ’s life is not merely announced by the priest; it seeks to become visible and communicable through him.

This helps us to understand something of the mystery contained in St. Paul’s extraordinary words: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24). Paul does not mean that Christ’s redemptive sacrifice was deficient or that something was lacking in its objective saving power. Rather, the Passion of Christ seeks to reach the members of his Body through the suffering, charity and self-gift of his members. Paul’s own flesh has become a place where the love and suffering of Christ continue to be communicated to the Church.

This is precisely the mystery of fruitful priesthood. The priest does not merely perform actions which Christ has authorised him to perform. He is invited to allow Christ to live his priesthood through him. The sacramental character makes it possible for him to act in persona Christi; union with Christ enables his whole person to become increasingly conformed to the One whose person he sacramentally represents. The sacrament gives him a participation in Christ’s priesthood; charity progressively makes that participation alive in him.

Thus, ex opere operato does not diminish the importance of priestly holiness. Rather, it protects the absolute primacy of Christ: the sacrament works because Christ works. But precisely because Christ is the source of the sacramental action, the priest is called to go further than being merely the valid minister of sacred rites. He is called to become united to the One who acts through him. The question is not simply whether Christ can act through the priest despite his weakness; he certainly can. The deeper question is whether the priest will allow Christ to transform his weakness, his humanity and his whole person into an ever more living instrument of divine charity.

This brings us back to the words of Jesus: “Apart from me you can do nothing.” The priesthood is fruitful to the extent that the priest abides in the Vine. The more deeply he lives in Christ, the more completely Christ’s own life can pass through his humanity into his Body. The goal, therefore, is not simply that Christ should work through the priest, but that the priest should become so united to Christ that his entire life becomes an expression of Christ’s own self-giving love.

Without union, no fruit.

And if this is so, then the whole task of forming a man for priesthood cannot be reduced to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, or even virtue in the ordinary sense. Formation must be, first and centrally, formation in union with Christ — since it is this union, more than anything else taught in a seminary, that will determine whether a man’s future ordination bears fruit or merely functions. What follows traces how such formation might be structured, stage by stage, as a genuine ascent toward that union.

III. Vatican II: Holiness and the Fruitfulness of the Priesthood

This understanding of priestly fruitfulness is not a private spiritual intuition. It is deeply rooted in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the Council’s teaching on the priesthood is its insistence that the priest’s personal holiness and his ministerial fruitfulness cannot be separated. The priest is not simply called to perform a ministry whose effectiveness is guaranteed independently of his spiritual life. He is called to become holy precisely within the exercise of his ministry, and his holiness becomes itself a source of fruitfulness for the Church.

The Council states this with particular clarity in Presbyterorum Ordinis. Speaking of the priest’s call to perfection, it teaches that priests are directed to perfection in their lives by the sacred actions that are theirs daily, as well as by their entire ministry, shared with the bishop and their fellow priests. It then adds the striking statement: “Holiness does much for priests in carrying on a fruitful ministry” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 12).

The Council therefore refuses to place holiness and ministry in two separate compartments. The priest does not first have a spiritual life and then, as something external to it, exercise a ministry. His very ministry is intended to become a path of sanctification. At the same time, his sanctification makes his ministry more fruitful. There is consequently a profound reciprocity: the priest is sanctified through the ministry he exercises, while the holiness he acquires gives greater fruitfulness to that same ministry.

This is developed even more beautifully in Lumen Gentium. Speaking of priests, the Council teaches that they should grow daily in their love of God and neighbour through the exercise of their office, in and through Christ the eternal and unique Mediator. Their ministry is therefore not simply something they perform for others; it is itself the place where their love of God and neighbour is to grow. The Council goes on to say that they should abound in every spiritual good and thus present to all a living witness to God (Lumen Gentium, 41).

This is an extraordinary vision of priestly ministry. The priest is not a functionary who can remain spiritually unchanged while carrying out a function that belongs to Christ. He is a living member of the Body of Christ, called to grow in charity precisely through the exercise of the office he has received. His ministry is meant progressively to transform him, and his transformation in Christ is itself intended to become a gift to the Church.

The Council goes further in Presbyterorum Ordinis when it speaks of pastoral charity as the complete gift of priests to the flock committed to them. It teaches that in the very exercise of this pastoral charity, priests discover the bond of priestly perfection that draws their life and activity to unity and coordination. The Council immediately roots this pastoral charity in the Eucharist, describing it as the root and centre of the whole life of a priest, and adds the necessary interior condition: this cannot be achieved unless priests, through prayer, continue to penetrate more deeply into the mystery of Christ (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 14).

Here we find the same movement that Jesus gives us in John 15. The priest must abide in Christ because his fruitfulness comes from Christ. The Eucharist is the source and centre of his life; prayer leads him more deeply into the mystery of Christ; and from this communion grows pastoral charity, which gives unity to his life and makes his ministry fruitful. The priest does not manufacture pastoral charity through his own efforts. He receives it from Christ and progressively allows it to take possession of his humanity.

This is why the Council’s teaching cannot be reduced to an exhortation to priests simply to be good. Something much more profound is at stake. The priest is configured to Christ through the sacrament of Holy Orders, and the grace of that configuration calls for a corresponding transformation of his life. The more deeply he lives in Christ, the more his priestly ministry becomes an expression of Christ’s own charity.

This connection was taken up and developed explicitly by St John Paul II in Pastores Dabo Vobis. He identifies an intimate bond between the priest’s spiritual life and the exercise of his ministry, recalling the Council’s own teaching that priestly holiness itself contributes very greatly to a fruitful fulfilment of the priestly ministry (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 24).

But John Paul II goes further still. In section 25 he explains that the priest is chosen by Christ not as an object but as a person, and is therefore not inert and passive, but rather a living instrument. This language is particularly important for our reflection. The priest is an instrument of Christ, certainly, but he is a living instrument. His intelligence, freedom, affections, humanity, history and body are not bypassed by grace. They are taken up and transformed by grace.

John Paul II then states the consequence with extraordinary directness: the greater or lesser degree of the holiness of the minister has a real effect on the proclamation of the word, the celebration of the sacraments and the leadership of the community in charity. He recalls the Council’s teaching that the very holiness of priests is of the greatest benefit for the fruitful fulfilment of their ministry, and adds the necessary qualification: while it is possible for God’s grace to carry out the work of salvation through unworthy ministers, God ordinarily prefers to show his wonders through those men who are more submissive to the impulse and guidance of the Holy Spirit and who, because of their intimate union with Christ and their holiness of life, are able to say with St Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 25).

This passage provides an exceptionally precise theological balance. The Church does not deny the efficacy of God’s grace when the minister is unworthy. On the contrary, the sacramental action remains Christ’s action. But the Church also refuses to conclude from this that the personal holiness of the priest is therefore unimportant. Quite the opposite: John Paul II says explicitly that the greater or lesser holiness of the minister has a real effect upon the proclamation of the Word, the celebration of the sacraments and the leadership of the community in charity.

Here, then, we can properly understand ex opere operato. It safeguards the primacy of Christ. The sacrament does not become efficacious because the priest happens to be holy; Christ acts in his sacrament. But ex opere operato does not mean that the priest’s personal union with Christ has no bearing upon the fruitfulness of his ministry as a whole. The Council’s teaching points in the opposite direction. The priest is a living instrument, and the more docile he becomes to the Holy Spirit, the more deeply united he becomes to Christ, and the more his humanity can become an instrument of Christ’s charity.

This is why Vatican II’s teaching on priestly holiness should not be read as an appendix to its teaching on ministry. It belongs to the very heart of its vision of the priesthood. The priest is configured to Christ in order to build up Christ’s Body. He is sanctified through his ministry, and his sanctification makes that ministry fruitful. The sacramental gift he receives at ordination does not render his personal transformation superfluous; it creates the possibility and the obligation of that transformation.

The Council teaches in Lumen Gentium that priests should grow daily in their love of God and neighbour through the exercise of their office. The point is not merely that a holy priest is a better example. Something deeper is occurring: Christ’s own pastoral charity is progressively taking possession of the priest’s humanity. His ministry becomes more deeply conformed to the Good Shepherd because the Good Shepherd is becoming increasingly alive in him.

This is why the priest must not be understood as an inert tool in Christ’s hands. A pen does not need to be united to the hand that uses it. A lifeless instrument does not need to become holy. But the priest is not a lifeless instrument. He is a person, a member of Christ’s Body, configured sacramentally to Christ the Head and Shepherd. The grace of Christ seeks therefore not merely to pass through him but to transform him. His humanity itself becomes increasingly capable of expressing, communicating and embodying the charity of Christ.

The Council’s vision consequently brings us back with greater depth to the words of Jesus already considered above: whoever abides in Christ and Christ in him bears much fruit, for apart from Christ he can do nothing. The priest’s fruitfulness cannot be separated from his abiding in Christ. The sacrament makes him capable of acting in persona Christi; union with Christ enables his whole person to become progressively conformed to the One whose priesthood he shares.

The fundamental law of priestly fruitfulness is therefore not activity but communion. The priest does not bear fruit because he does more. He bears fruit because the life of Christ is increasingly alive in him. The more deeply he abides in Christ, the more deeply Christ’s charity can inhabit his humanity; and the more Christ’s charity inhabits his humanity, the more his ministry can become a living communication of Christ to his Body.

This is precisely why the Council can hold together two truths that must never be separated: Christ acts through the sacrament independently of the holiness of the minister, yet the holiness of the minister profoundly affects the fruitfulness of his ministry. The first truth protects the sovereignty of grace; the second reveals the dignity of the priest’s vocation. He is not merely someone through whom Christ acts. He is called to become, through grace, a living instrument in whom Christ himself can increasingly live and love.

The priesthood therefore reaches its deepest fruitfulness when the words of St Paul become increasingly true of the priest himself: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). This is the priestly fulfilment of the command of John 15 with which this chapter takes its title: abide in me, and bear fruit. It is also, for the man still in formation, the very grace toward which the years before ordination are meant to lead him.

IV. The First Years of Formation: The Grace of the Threshold

A man entering the seminary, in the propaedeutic and early philosophy years, typically possesses genuine and even ardent love for Christ. What he does not yet possess is a charity purified of the self-love, the need for approval, the restlessness and the half-governed passions that still move in every young soul, however generous. He has not yet been given any share in priestly power; he cannot yet celebrate, absolve, or preach in the name of the Church. But he is already receiving something real and distinct: a preparatory grace, given precisely in view of the priesthood toward which he is walking, that begins the slow work of purifying and stabilising a love still, in Teresa’s phrase for beginners, taking its first human stammerings.

These first years exist to protect and feed that still-unweaned love, not to test it against ministry it cannot yet safely carry. This is why the classical instruments of the early seminary years — silence, a fixed order of prayer, community life, real human formation, a spiritual director seen regularly and obeyed — matter more, not less, than the theological curriculum that will come later. St Teresa’s counsel to her own beginners applies almost without adjustment here. Warning souls newly touched by God’s favours against abandoning the life of prayer, she writes that such a soul is like a child beginning to suck the breast; if it be taken from its mother, what can it be expected to do but die?  (St Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, Fourth Mansions, ch. 3) and, still more directly, she counsels those responsible for such souls to let them remain near those Divine breasts; and, when they have sufficient strength, the Lord will take care to lead them on farther.  (St Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, Fourth Mansions, ch. 3)

A seminary that exposes its first-year men to heavy apostolic responsibility before this foundation is laid, however well-intentioned the exposure, risks exactly the danger Teresa warns against — a young and ardent love spent before it has grown strong enough to bear the cost.

It is worth recalling here how Christ formed his own apostles, because the pattern maps directly onto these early formation years. He did not send the Twelve to convert the world the day he called them. He kept them close to him, teaching them privately what he did not always explain to the crowds, and only gradually, and always with a fixed point of return, did he begin to send them out at all. The first years of seminary formation are, in this sense, the Church’s structured memory of that same withholding: a deliberate keeping-close, before any sending-out, so that the interior life has time to take root before it is asked to bear weight.

The First Sending and the True Apostolic Mission

There is an illuminating distinction in the Gospel between the first sending of the Twelve during Jesus’ earthly ministry and the definitive apostolic sending that takes place after His Passion and Resurrection. A superficial reading of Matthew 10 might lead us to think that the Apostles have already received their full missionary mandate and that Jesus is simply sending them out to begin the apostolate. But Matthew’s account suggests something more limited and preparatory.

At the beginning of the chapter we read: “And he called to him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction” (Matthew 10:1). Jesus then sends them out, but with very precise restrictions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Their proclamation is equally specific: “As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matthew 10:5–7).

This is certainly a real sending. Matthew deliberately says that Jesus “sent out” the Twelve. But it is not yet the universal apostolic mission that will belong to the Church after the Paschal Mystery. The Apostles are sent to Israel, and they are sent to announce that the Kingdom is near. They are, in a profound sense, announcing what is about to happen in Christ. They are not yet preaching the completed Paschal Mystery, nor are they being sent to establish the Church among all nations.

The difference becomes unmistakable after the Resurrection. The risen Christ gives the Apostles a radically expanded mandate: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). The mission is now universal: not merely Israel, but “all nations”; not merely the proclamation that the Kingdom is near, but the making of disciples, baptism into the Trinitarian name and the transmission of Christ’s complete teaching.

The Gospel of John makes the decisive moment even clearer. It is only after the Resurrection that Jesus says to the Apostles: “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And immediately afterwards, “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:21–22). The definitive sending of the Apostles is therefore inseparable from the gift of the Holy Spirit. They are not simply given a task; they are given a participation in the very mission of the Son and are empowered by the Spirit for that mission.

Luke-Acts makes the same point with particular force. Even after His Resurrection, Jesus tells the Apostles not to begin their universal mission immediately. “Stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). And in Acts, immediately before His Ascension, He tells them: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

This distinction is important for understanding the nature of Christian mission. The Apostles did not receive the fullness of their mission simply by being told to go. They first had to remain with Christ, witness His Passion and Resurrection, and receive the Holy Spirit. The definitive apostolate emerges from the Paschal Mystery and from the gift of the Spirit. The sequence is therefore profoundly significant: Christ gathers them, forms them, unites them to Himself, passes through His Passion and Resurrection, gives them His Spirit, and then sends them.

This sheds light on the principle of priestly fruitfulness. Christian mission is not first a matter of activity. The Apostles’ definitive mission does not begin with a programme of apostolic action but with a deeper participation in Christ’s own life. The risen Christ breathes His Spirit upon them before sending them. The mission proceeds from communion.

This is why the command of John 15 belongs so profoundly at the heart of every theology of apostolate: “Abide in me, and I in you… Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:4–5). The true apostolic fruitfulness of the Church does not arise simply because the Apostles have been given something to do. It arises because they have received the life of the One who sends them.

Matthew 10 therefore should not be read as though Jesus had already given the Apostles the full missionary mandate of the Church and they simply needed to put it into practice. It is better understood as a preliminary sending within the earthly ministry of Jesus, ordered towards the fuller mission that will become possible only through the Paschal Mystery and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Apostles are sent before Easter, but the Church is sent from Easter and Pentecost.

This distinction is not merely chronological. It reveals a law of mission: the definitive sending flows from communion with Christ and from the reception of His Spirit. The Apostles must first receive what they are subsequently sent to communicate. They must first be with Christ, receive His Spirit and become witnesses of His Paschal Mystery; only then can they become, in the full sense, instruments through whom the risen Christ continues His mission in the world.

V. The Years of Growing Configuration: Diaconal Exposure and the Test of Fruit

As formation advances — through the theology years, into supervised pastoral placements, and finally into the ministries and the diaconate itself — a seminarian begins for the first time to see real fruit connected to what he does: a catechesis that visibly lands, a hospital visit that clearly consoles, a homily preparation exercise that moves those who hear it, a deacon’s ministry of the Word or of charity that people genuinely receive. This is not illusion. God does communicate himself, even at this still-unfinished stage, through gifts that exceed the seminarian’s own resources — and this is precisely the moment formation becomes delicate.

The danger of this stage is its success. A seminarian who is praised for his preaching, sought out for his kindness, or visibly effective in his pastoral placements can easily conclude that he has essentially arrived — that because grace is clearly working through him already, the remaining years of formation are a formality to be endured rather than a work still to be done in him. This is, spiritually speaking, exactly backwards. Teresa describes precisely this illusion in a soul that feels itself near to God: confident that it could not now turn back to anything base, it lets down its guard, and it runs into many dangers, and in its zeal begins to give away its fruit without stint, thinking that it has now nothing to fear.  (St. Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life, ch. 15) She is careful to add that this is not a matter of pride, for the soul truly understands its own poverty; it is, rather, an excess of confidence in God that has stopped being accompanied by discretion. The gifts operating in a seminarian at this stage are, in Teresa’s own image, still intermittent visitations rather than a settled possession; the source that renews them is not yet under his own control, still less at his permanent disposal. A seminarian who begins, even in small ways, to trade on his own effectiveness rather than remain under formation is spending capital he has not yet earned.

Concretely, this is the seminarian who starts to resent the ordinary structures of formation — spiritual direction, community life, correction — because his pastoral placements already make him feel like a priest. The remedy is not to withhold all apostolic exposure during these years, which would be its own distortion, but to hold it firmly within a formation that continues, undiminished, alongside it: real fruit received with real gratitude, and real humility about how much of the man himself has not yet caught up with the grace already visibly at work through him.

VI. The Turning Point: When a Vocation Becomes a Sealed Mission

Somewhere in the later years of formation — not fixed to a single date, though the Church gives it ecclesial expression in admission to candidacy and, above all, in diaconate ordination — there occurs, in a man genuinely advancing, what the mystical tradition calls the union of the will with God: a stable, habitual hold of God upon the soul’s deepest faculty of loving, no longer merely visited by grace but beginning to be possessed by it. Teresa treats this stage with unusual solemnity, precisely because she considers it decisive: a soul held this closely by God has, for that very reason, become the object of a correspondingly serious spiritual combat. She recalls, with evident dread, that many are called by the Lord to apostleship, as Judas was, and enjoy communion with Him, or are called to be made kings, as Saul was (St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, Fifth Mansions, ch. 1) and are afterward, through their own fault, lost. Even souls admitted this far, in other words, can still fall through an infidelity that grows, almost imperceptibly, out of small unwatched compromises.

For the man preparing for priesthood, this stage is where a vocation, until now held and tested, becomes something closer to a sealed mission. It is often marked by a new stability of desire — he no longer serves God by repeated acts of effort against contrary inclination, but out of a settled orientation that has become, in a real sense, his second nature. Diaconate ordination itself is the Church’s own sealing of this interior movement: a real sacramental configuration to Christ the Servant, conferred exactly at the point in formation where a man’s own charity, if formation has done its work, is beginning to be equal to carrying something entrusted rather than merely learned.

But the gravity of the stage lies exactly where Teresa places it: nowhere is presumption more dangerous than here. A deacon nearing ordination to the priesthood, sensing this new stability, can be tempted to think himself now safe from the ordinary precautions — from watchfulness over occasions of sin, from the discipline that protected him as a beginner — precisely because his union with God feels, for the first time, unshakeable. It is not yet unshakeable. Teresa’s own admonition to her daughters applies word for word to the man at this threshold: I beseech you, for His sake, not to be negligent, but to withdraw from occasions of sin — for even in this state the soul is not strong enough to be able to run into them safely.  (St Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, Fifth Mansions, ch. 4) The months before priestly ordination are not a time to relax formation; they are the time in which its fruits are most at stake.

VII. Ordination Day: When the Grace Awaited Meets the Mission Given

It would be unrealistic, and no part of this chapter’s argument, to expect a man in his mid-twenties or early thirties to have reached, by ordination, the transforming union that Teresa and John of the Cross describe at the summit of the Interior Castle — the union of the sixth and seventh mansions, which even great saints reached only after decades, and some not until the years just before death. That is not the readiness formation must aim at and setting it as the bar would either delay ordinations indefinitely or produce a despair equally harmful to true formation. What formation should aim at is more modest and, for that very reason, entirely attainable: that by ordination day, a man has reached, through the graced ascent of his seminary years, a genuine and tested stability of will — the union of will proper to the turning point described above — sufficient that the mission he receives whole does not simply outstrip a man still fundamentally unformed.

This is the true meaning of readiness for ordination, and it is why readiness cannot be measured by academic completion or canonical age alone. A man ready for ordination is one in whom prayer and action have already begun, during formation itself, to draw toward each other rather than remaining two competing claims on his day. Teresa asks exactly this convergence of her most advanced daughters: Martha and Mary must work together when they offer the Lord lodging, and must have Him ever with them.  (St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, ch. 4) And the standard by which she measures the summit of this whole ascent is not extraordinary favour but simple conformity of will: the highest perfection consists not in interior favours or in great raptures… but in the bringing of our wills so closely into conformity with the will of God.  (St. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, Seventh Mansions, ch. 3)

A seminarian who has learned this rhythm before ordination steps into priesthood not as a beginner suddenly handed impossible power, but as a man already walking the road whose direction he now simply continues at a new depth and with new authority.

Understood this way, ordination is not the finish line of the interior journey but a graced launching point from a foundation genuinely laid. The growth toward the full transforming union described by the Carmelite doctors continues, as it must, across the whole of priestly life. St John of the Cross describes what that further summit looks like in a soul fully surrendered to it: All that it does is of God, and its operations are Divine… the operations of the soul in union are of the Divine Spirit and are Divine.  (St. John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, Stanza II, comm. 34)

That summit remains, for a newly ordained priest, still largely ahead of him. But he now advances toward it on secure ground, rather than in the dangerous scramble of a man trying to build his interior life at the same time as he is already expected to give it away. This is precisely what the years of formation, rightly structured as a journey toward union, are for: not to manufacture instant sanctity, which no seminary can do, but to ensure that a newly ordained priest can, in the fullest sense the phrase allows, actually handle what he has been given.

Practical Consequences for the Structuring of the Years of Formation

Several concrete consequences follow directly from this doctrine, and a seminary or a bishop responsible for ordinations would do well to make them explicit rather than leaving them implicit.

1. Readiness for ordination is not chiefly an academic or even a moral judgement; it is a spiritual one.

A candidate can be doctrinally sound, morally upright, and pastorally gifted, and still not yet possess the stability of will that priesthood presupposes. Formation directors need the courage — and the spiritual discernment — to distinguish real, if modest, stability of prayer and self-mastery from mere good conduct under supervision, and to be willing to postpone ordination, not only refuse it, when that stability is not yet present.

2. The pattern of Christ with the Twelve should govern the sequencing of formation, not merely its length.

The first years should reproduce sustained closeness to Christ in prayer and community, largely protected from heavy apostolic exposure; only later years should introduce real but supervised pastoral responsibility, increasing in step with the seminarian’s own interior stability rather than with the calendar alone. A formation that grants apostolic exposure by year of study regardless of interior readiness inverts Christ’s own method.

3. The years around diaconate ordination deserve a formation of their own, proportioned to their gravity.

This is the stage at which Teresa places her gravest warnings, and it should receive, correspondingly, the closest accompaniment: an intensified rhythm of spiritual direction, retreat, and fraternal accountability precisely when the deacon’s new sense of stability might otherwise tempt him to think himself past the need for it.

4. Formation should teach seminarians to expect, and not be alarmed by, the sequence described above.

A man who knows in advance that early fervour is not yet stability, that early apostolic fruit is not yet arrival, and that even the settledness of the final years is not yet the summit, is far less likely to be undone by the ordinary trials of each stage when he meets them. Naming the map in advance is itself a formative act.

5. Formation does not end at ordination, but its success is measured by what it has secured before ordination.

A diocese’s continuing investment in a young priest’s spiritual life — a director, fraternity, protected time for prayer — remains essential after ordination. But this cannot substitute for what should already have been substantially built during the seminary years; a formation that quietly defers its real work to “after ordination, when he settles in” has misunderstood what those years are for.

Practical Light for the Newly Ordained

For the man who has passed through this formation and now begins his priestly ministry, the same doctrine yields a number of concrete, daily consequences.

1. Guard the rule of life formation gave you as the very thing that makes ministry safe, not as a rival to it.

The fixed hour of prayer, the real recourse to confession, the spiritual director actually obeyed rather than merely consulted: these are not seminary habits to be outgrown but the structure that keeps priestly duty from becoming self-consuming. Pastoral urgency will always argue for cutting them; the argument should be refused as a matter of settled policy, not renegotiated case by case.

2. Do not measure your ministry, or your own worth, chiefly by visible fruit.

Real fruit can and does appear even now, before charity is mature enough to sustain giving it without cost to oneself. A priest should rejoice in fruit and remain, at the same time, unimpressed by it as a verdict on his own holiness — confusing the two is the specific trap that formation, at its best, will already have named for him.

3. Treat the stability formation has given you as an invitation to greater, not lesser, vigilance.

The closer a soul comes to God, the more, not less, is at stake in its remaining fidelities. A young priest who feels his union with God is settled should take this as reason to renew his watchfulness over occasions of sin and compromise, not to relax it, exactly as he was taught in the months before ordination.

4. Continue letting prayer and ministry draw closer together rather than competing for the day.

What formation began — the practice of bringing prayer and pastoral action into the same interior attention — is meant to deepen across a lifetime of priesthood, not stop where formation left it. Martha and Mary are meant to converge ever more fully, not merely to have been introduced to each other in the seminary.

5. Receive priesthood, from the first day, as friendship, not only as function.

A priest can spend a lifetime discharging real, valid, necessary functions without ever crossing into the friendship Christ offered his apostles on the night before he died. That crossing is not automatic and not guaranteed by years of service; it is the fruit of the growth in love this whole chapter has traced, a growth that formation was meant to begin and priesthood is meant to complete.

Conclusion

The doctrine drawn together here yields a single, demanding, and ultimately consoling law: a priest’s power to act sacramentally is given whole and given at once, but his power to bear lasting fruit through that action grows only as his charity grows, stage by stage, and this growth can and should begin long before ordination, in the years the Church deliberately sets aside for it. This is not a discouragement to ordaining men in their twenties and thirties; it is a summons to structure the years leading to that ordination as what they are meant to be — a graced ascent toward union, carried by a grace proper to formation itself, so that the day of ordination finds a man not merely certified but genuinely, if still imperfectly, ready.

A seminary that remembers this law will form its men as Christ formed his own apostles — patiently, closely, with real years of withdrawal before the real sending of ordination — and will not mistake early fervour, or even genuine early pastoral fruit, for the settled readiness that alone allows a newly ordained priest to receive his whole mission without being undone by it. And a man who has been formed this way will step to the altar for the first time neither presuming on gifts not yet fully his own nor despairing at the smallness of what he still lacks, but trusting that the same Christ who called his apostles friends before they had proved themselves such will, across the years of formation and the years of priesthood together, make that friendship entirely true. Abide in me, and I in you: this was Christ’s word to the Twelve before their mission, and it remains the Church’s word to every man she forms for the altar.

Read Also:

– “Apostolate and Growth of Love” from “I Am A Daughter of the Church”.

– The Perfect Contemplative Prayer of Christ, chapter from “Where the Spirit Breathes, Prayer and Action”. (see the video  of the talk on this chapter)