Vatican City, Aug 6, 2008 / 08:33 am
In a pastoral letter sent to the priests of the world on the feast of St. John Maria Vianney, the prefect for the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, said, “The Church rejoices and is proud of the vast majority of her priests, who are good and extremely praiseworthy.”
According to Vatican Radio, the cardinal explained that the Church knows she can count on her priests because “she knows and explicitly recognizes that the vast majority of our priests, despite their human weaknesses and limits, are decent priests who give their lives every day to the Kingdom of God, who love Jesus Christ and the people entrusted to them. They are priests who are sanctified in the daily exercise of their ministry, who persevere until the end in the harvest of the Lord.”
“It’s true there is a small percentage of priests who go astray, sometimes gravely, but the Church desires to repair the evil they have done,” he noted.
Recalling the feast of the Cure d’Ars, the patron of parish priests, Cardinal Hummes underscored the urgency of embarking upon missionary work “in the regions and environments where the Christian faith was preached centuries ago.”