HOLY THURSDAY LETTER TO PRIESTS FOCUSES ON GOD THE FATHER

VATICAN CITY, MAR 25, 1999 (VIS) - Following are excerpts from Pope John Paul's Letter to Priests for Holy Thursday 1999, dated March 14 and made public this morning in Italian, English, Spanish and French:

"'Abba, Father!'

"Dear Brothers in the priesthood, my Holy Thursday appointment with you in this year which immediately precedes the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 focuses on this invocation ... which encloses the unfathomable mystery of the Word made flesh, sent by the Father into the world for the salvation of humanity."

"God the Father sends the Son to make us, in him, his adopted children. ... The Father then sends the Spirit of the Son to enlighten us with regard to this extraordinary privilege: 'Because you are sons and daughters, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father!"
"How can we fail to give thanks to God as we think of the hosts of priests who, in this vast span of time, have spent their lives in the service of the Gospel, sometimes to the point of the supreme sacrifice of life itself? In the spirit of the coming Jubilee, while confessing the limitations and shortcomings of past Christian generations, and therefore also of the priests of those times, we recognize with joy that a very significant part of the Church's inestimable service to human progress is due to the humble and faithful work of countless ministers of Christ who, in the course of the millennium, have been generous builders of the civilization of love.

"The immensity of time! If time is always a movement away from the beginning, it is also, when we think of it, a return to the beginning. And this is of fundamental importance: if time did no more than take us ever further from the beginning, and if its final orientation ' the recovery of the origin ' were not clear, then our whole existence in time would lack a definite direction. It would have no meaning.

"It is with Christ that we pass through time, going in the same direction that he has taken: towards the Father."

"The Gospel is a continuous revelation of the Father. When the twelve-year-old Jesus is found by Joseph and Mary among the teachers in the Temple, he replies to his Mother's words, 'My son, why have you done this to us?', by referring to the Father: 'Did you not know that I must be about the things of my Father?' Even at the age of twelve he already has a clear awareness of the meaning of his own life, of his mission, which, from the first moment to the last, is wholly dedicated to 'the things of the Father'."

"The Gospel relates that the Apostles, marvelling at the Master's inner recollection in his dialogue with the Father, asked him: 'Lord, teach us to pray'. Then, for the first time, he spoke the words which would become the principal and most frequently used prayer of the Church and of individual Christians: the 'Our Father'.

"In the Eucharist the priest personally draws near to the inexhaustible mystery of Christ and of his prayer to the Father. He can immerse himself daily in this mystery of redemption and grace by celebrating Holy Mass, which retains its meaning and value even when, for a just reason, it is offered without the participation of the faithful, yet always for the faithful and for the whole world."

"The Eucharistic liturgy is a pre-eminent school of Christian prayer for the community."

"It is precisely in this context that I exhort all priests to carry out with confidence and courage their duty of guiding the community to authentic Christian prayer. This is a duty which no priest may ever forsake, even though the difficulties caused by today's secularized mentality can at times make it extremely demanding for him."

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