Trinity Sunday

Admission to Candidacy for Ordination as Deacons and Priests

 My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, our brothers Ross and Anthony stand here today in the presence of the Church, recommended to us and to you for admission among the candidates for holy orders.

As you will see, the ceremonial of this rite of Admission to Candidacy is relatively simple and low key This simplicity, however, belies the importance that Candidacy has in the lives of these seminarians, Ross and Anthony.

In this college, seminarians are admitted to Candidacy a year before they are ordained to the Diaconate. Diaconate is the first grade of the Sacrament of Orders, which also includes the priesthood and the episcopacy. The Diaconate is accompanied by the promise of life-long celibacy.

For seminarians, the Diaconate, then, is rightly regarded as the point of no return on the road to the priesthood. And so, Candidacy, coming a year before Diaconate, is very much the ante-chamber to Sacred Orders. So, without prejudging anything either on their part or on the part of their superiors, yes to the first of these is very close to yes to both.

So psychologically, spiritually, and vocationally, Candidacy is quite a serious and significant moment for seminarians. Ross and Anthony know that. Their companions know it. Their superiors know it. We should all be conscious of the importance of this moment, and we gladly accompany them and pray for them as they offer themselves for diaconate and priesthood by this formal step.

Today is Trinity Sunday. We believe and profess that there is one God in three divine persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is love, says the 1^st Letter of John. The triune God is love, we can say. The Trinity is a msystery of divine love, we can say. We begin to be admitted to that mystery in the God of the covenant whom Moses, as we hear in today’s first reading, invoked as “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness.” The experience of God of the chosen people is the experience of the God who is love. And that continues to be the faith experience of the the Church and, I think, of ourselves.

The disciples of Jesus were all firm and convinced believers in the one God, Yahweh. But it stands out like a beacon in the New Testament that when these same disciples spoke about their experience of faith, they began to talk about the Father of Jesus, about Jesus himself as Son, and about the Holy Spirit. The apotheosis of this development would be the commission to teach and baptise in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So the mystery of the one God as threefold in person, as triune, as Trinity, unfolds in the New Testament as the record of the religious experience of the first Christians. So, in professing today the mystery of the Trinity we have the confidence that we do so in faithfulness to the revealed word and in communion with the whole Church from the beginning, always and everywhere, which is the test of the authentic development of faith.

Meanwhile, as we heard in today’s second reading, Paul has saluted the church in Corinth with words that have become a familiar greeting for us at Mass, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” Again, we begin to see that self-giving love is at the very core of the mystery of God, at the mystery of the three divine persons in one God.

And as Jesus, in the profound words of today’s Gospel, opens to us more clearly his identity within the Holy Trinity as Son of the Father, he shows us that the God who is love is the God who does love, the God who acts with love for the people and for the world he created. “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.” In these words too, we cannot help catching an echo of the cross in which Son “is given” from the abundance of the Father’s love, the ultimate proof of just how far God is prepared to go to communicate to us his divine love.

Ross and Anthony, you will know that many people do not know that the God we profess as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the God of love. They think or suspect or fear that God is a God of anger and of condemnation who will take away their freedom, and so they can dismiss Him as at worst malevolent or at best irrelevant. If they knew this God as love and the source of love, they would not dismiss Him, for they cannot dismiss love, which is the guarantee of all freedom and human fulfilment. And this is something of the task you can look forward to as deacons and priests: to show that pastoral charity in your lives which reaches out to every human being with God’s love shown to us in the face of Jesus, and gives both spoken and lived witness to the Trinitarian God you believe in and who calls you to do his work.

As we all know, Ross and Anthony are now well advanced in their formation, and it will not be long before they are called to ordination by their bishops. In the coming months they will continue their preparation here. It is our hope and prayer that their vocation and their commitment to Christ and the Church will continue to deepen as they progress towards ordination to the diaconate and priesthood.

Called by the Father, urged on by the love of Christ and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, Ross and Anthony are here to declare in public their desire to bind themselves to the service of God and of mankind. Ross and Anthony, when you are called by name, you should come forward and declare your intention before the Church assembled here.

 Pontifical Scots College Rome

18^th May 2008