Pastoral Authority and Spiritual Warfare | Deacon James Keating | Homiletic & Pastoral Review | November 2011
In sharing in the priesthood of Christ, the pastor upholds his own fatherhood (governing), receives his teaching authority, and can uphold his own ministry of healing and holiness (sanctifying).
“Draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens.” (Eph 6:10-12)
Christ wants to share his authority over malevolent powers with his priests. He wants to encourage and teach a man how to be with a person when that person is being tempted, struggling with faith, hope or love: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, Therefore and make disciples of all nations….And behold I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:18, 20). This desire of Christ to share his authority is fulfilled when a man is ordained to the priesthood. Each priest, however, has to subjectively cooperate with Christ, receiving his authority, over and over again, with each day of ministry. This receptivity can be hard to sustain as so many tasks present themselves to a priest, tasks that threaten to take from him the essential aspect of priesthood: it is a spiritual mission flowing from a heart captured by Christ’s own. A priest’s pastoral authority flows from his own being, his being after ordination.
The priest’s pastoral authority, in other words, flows from the character of ordination. This character consists of a man’s permanent availability to the priestly mission of Christ, as Christ is sharing it through ordination in the context of apostolic succession and tradition. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “Beloved, through ordination, you have received the same Spirit of Christ, who makes you like him, so that you can act in his name, and so that his very mind and heart might live in you. This intimate communion with the Spirit of Christ—while guaranteeing the efficacy of the sacramental actions which you perform in persona Christi—seeks to be expressed in fervent prayer, in integrity of life, in the pastoral charity of a ministry tirelessly spending itself for the salvation of the brethren. In a word, it calls for your personal sanctification.”1
The character of priestly ordination, then, is not simply something given to a man to conserve the truth and worship of the Catholic Church. The character of priestly ordination is an intimacy with Christ, an intimacy seeking expression in self-gift, in the pastoral charity of ministry. The priest, in other words, is commissioned to receive the tradition of the Church, in her holy teaching and liturgy by virtue of ordination, and in so doing, receive the path to his own holiness as well.2 The individual will in a man to receive the tradition over and over again, his openness and vulnerability to be affected by the Paschal Mystery, is crucial to his governing and authority in the spiritual realm.
Priestly authority exercises power only when born in truth: the truth of what Christ is doing through priestly ministry (the objective part of ordination), and the truth of a man’s intimacy with the Paschal Mystery (the subjective reality) within an ecclesial context. It is the ‘work’ of a man in Holy Orders to receive the Spirit who labors to keep this beautiful calling from disintegrating into either an emotionally distant “work of God,” or an ego-ladened emphasis upon personal gifts and personality. For the priest, to live in the Spirit, who integrates all things, who is peace itself, is to live in effective pastoral authority.
Out of such grace-filled authority, the priest assists God in the battle to save and heal people from evil. Out of both the objectivity of his ordination, and his own personal love of God, the priest resists the work of Satan’s counterfeit “authority” who attempts to disintegrate everything that is done in the realm of divine healing. Satan disintegrates the work of the Spirit by attacking hope in parishioners, and by trying to undermine what they know to be true in faith: they are of inestimable worth and dignity. Satan assaults the people’s memory. He tempts them to question the truth of the holy teachings of the Church, especially this one: “The dignity of man rests, above all, on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love, continues to hold him in existence” (CCC §27). ....
Comments