A couple of years ago, I receive a letter or email from a
young friend who was considering a vocation to the priesthood.
The missive let me know about some of the decisions he had made,
including the acceptance to high school teach Latin in New England. It was his closing sentence that gave me
pause. He said something to the effect
of “let us each continue to grow in holiness”.
This young man is less than half my age, and until I read
that sentence, I had not thought about living a holy life. Yes, a good life, a life filled with virtue,
one that loves God first and then neighbor, but a holy life? That would be far
beyond what I could even imagine.
I was reminded of this letter on Thursday which was the
feast of Anthony Mary Zaccaria. This
priest was a contemporary of Martin Luther.
And like Luther, he believed the Church needed to be reformed. His solution was to work within the
Church. He founded the Society of
Clerics of St. Paul. They strove to
imitate St. Paul in every way.
It was by living a life of holiness that St. Anthony was
able to contribute to some reform of the Church. In one of his
more well known sermons he said, “Spiritual life demands that you never turn
back or stop going forward; but rather that, as soon as you taste it, you make progress
day by day and, forgetting what lies behind, strain forward to what lies ahead.”
The homilist at Mass on Thursday urged each of us to live
lives of holiness in our own efforts to be Disciples of Christ. I think my young friend, who is completing his Novitiate Year with the Dominicans, may know of this
second quote by St. Anthony:
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