Community of The Faithful: The One Priesthood of Christ

 

25. My faithful cohort

November 1, 1973

Feast of All Saints

“I want every Priest of my Movement and every Priest who has consecrated himself to Me to pray, suffer and work in order to bring Me back once again into the midst of my faithful.

Today more than ever, he who finds Me will have found life and will receive salvation from the Lord. My Adversary fears only this. He will make every effort to remove Me even further from the hearts of my faithful, in order to keep Me even more Obscured in the Church. He is now engaging in his greatest battle against Me, the decisive one, in which one of us will be defeated forever.

At the moment, from many indications, it seems as though my Adversary is the victor; but the time of my greatest return and of my total victory is at hand. In the decisive battle, I want my Priest-sons to be with Me. They will be led by Me, they will be docile to my orders, obedient to my wishes, responsive to my requests. (…) I will manifest myself in them and through them I will act to strike at the heart of my enemy and to crush his head with my heel.

But these Priests must now begin to act; through them I want to return to the midst of my faithful , because it is with them, gathered about my Priests, that I want to form my invincible cohort.

Of the faithful, who are supporters of my Movement, I ask:

That they consecrate themselves in a special way to my Immaculate Heart, without being concerned for external or juridical bonds, but only for giving themselves completely to Me, so that I may dispose freely of their whole being and arrange their whole life according to my plans.

They must let themselves be led by Me, like little children. They must begin again to pray more, to love Jesus more, to adore Him more in the Mystery of the Eucharist, so that He become the Sun which illuminates their whole life. What JOY and what a gift of love will Jesus in the Eucharist communicate to these faithful who are consecrated to Me! Let them recite the Holy Rosary every day so as to hasten my great return.

That they be faithful to the Pope and to the Church united with him, by a total obedience to his commands, anticipating and seconding his desires, spreading his teachings, defending him from every attack, ready to fight even to the shedding of their blood in order to remain united to him and faithful to the Gospel.There will soon come a time when only those who are with the Pope will succeed in keeping the faith of my Son and being preserved from the great apostasy that will be spread everywhere.

That they must observe the Commandments of God and carry out everything that my Son Jesus has taught so that they may be his true disciples. Thus they will be a good example to all. Let them be just that especially by an austere manner of life, by repudiating styles which are ever increasingly provocative and indecent, by opposing in every way possible the spread of immoral literature and entertainment and this continual flooding from a sea of filth that is submerging everything. Let them be a good example to all by their purity, their sobriety and their modesty. Let them flee all those places where the sacred character of their person is defiled.

Let them form about the Priests myfaithful cohort, my great ‘White Army.’ Through them my light Will once again shine in the midst of the great darkness, and my immaculate whiteness in the midst of so much corruption of death.

These faithful children of mine will be called by Me and formed for this great task: to prepare this world for the great purification which awaits it, so that at last a new world may be born, completely renewed by the light and the love of my Son Jesus, who will reign over all.


Some Thoughts:

The laity doesn’t have a lower calling or responsibility than the ordained, just different. As such, our pope, the head of the Community of the Faithful, has his proper role as well. He may err, or have severe frailties for which we must pray for, but he is still our pope. We just experienced an immense split here in the US, where some people’s loud retorts of  ‘Not my president’ left us dumbfounded. We have one president for all here, and the same with the pope, and to not acknowledge that just throws a deeper wound into the body of Christ. Does this mean we have to agree with everything he says? Of course not, and we have an obligation to teach truth whenever we feel it’s missing. That’s our calling as lay people and participants in the one priesthood of Christ. We don’t have have to bring a huge focus to all the negativity around us, we are light bearers , meant to bring light to a darkened world. Let’s work together to focus on THAT!!!


Two participations in the one priesthood of Christ

1546 Christ, high priest and unique mediator, has made of the Church “a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.”20 The whole community of believers is, as such, priestly. The faithful exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king. Through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful are “consecrated to be . . . a holy priesthood.”21

1547 The ministerial or hierarchical priesthood of bishops and priests, and the common priesthood of all the faithful participate, “each in its own proper way, in the one priesthood of Christ.” While being “ordered one to another,” they differ essentially.22 In what sense? While the common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace –a life of faith, hope, and charity, a life according to the Spirit–, the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians. The ministerial priesthood is a means by which Christ unceasingly builds up and leads his Church. For this reason it is transmitted by its own sacrament, the sacrament of Holy Orders.


The vocation of lay people

898 “By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will. . . . It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be effected and grow according to Christ and maybe to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer.”431

899 The initiative of lay Christians is necessary especially when the matter involves discovering or inventing the means for permeating social, political, and economic realities with the demands of Christian doctrine and life. This initiative is a normal element of the life of the Church:

Lay believers are in the front line of Church life; for them the Church is the animating principle of human society. Therefore, they in particular ought to have an ever-clearer consciousness not only of belonging to the Church, but of being the Church, that is to say, the community of the faithful on earth under the leadership of the Pope, the common Head, and of the bishops in communion with him. They are the Church.432

900 Since, like all the faithful, lay Christians are entrusted by God with the apostolate by virtue of their Baptism and Confirmation, they have the right and duty, individually or grouped in associations, to work so that the divine message of salvation may be known and accepted by all men throughout the earth. This duty is the more pressing when it is only through them that men can hear the Gospel and know Christ. Their activity in ecclesial communities is so necessary that, for the most part, the apostolate of the pastors cannot be fully effective without it.433