Eugene became a priest as a response to his awareness of God’s indescribable love for him. Here, in his retreat in preparation for his priestly ordination he prays to be able to make his priestly ministry a response of total love:
And so I am convinced that I have never really loved you. But whom did I love in your place? The devil. Yes, it is the devil who has been my god, it is to him I have prostituted my whole being! See then how I have fulfilled the end for which I was created: I have hated my Creator, or at least I have acted just as if I hated him, and I have delivered myself over to the devil as his slave. And it is a monster like this, O my God, that you wish to claim as your own and have admitted into your sanctuary, whom soon you will invest with your priesthood.
My God, what language is there to express what this infinite, incomprehensible goodness means to me? My head is prostrate in the dust, my lips press the earth, my soul is emptied, I can do no more.
My God, double, triple, increase my strength a hundredfold that I may love you, not merely as much as I can, that is nothing, but that I love you as much as did the saints, as much as your holy Mother loved and loves you.
Notes made during the retreat in preparation for ordination to the priesthood,
December 1811, EO XIV n. 95
In Mary, the new priest saw a model to imitate to learn to love God and be an example to him of a total giving of self through his ministry.
“Let us pray in particular for the new priests of the Diocese of Rome who I had the joy or ordaining this morning. … And let us call upon the intercession of Mary, who is the Woman of the ‘Yes’. She said ‘Yes’ her entire life. She learned to recognize Jesus’ voice from when she carried him in her womb. May Mary, our Mother, help us to always know better Jesus’ voice and to follow it, to walk in the path of life.” Pope Francis
I started this day with Richard Rohr – not my usual starting point and found myself looking at the true mystery of God and God’s love. No walls or limits, no neat and tidy definitions, simply a mystery that is and will always be. I am utterly incapable of getting my mind around it, of understanding it. In truth all I seem to be able to do is to stand in it and not try to figure it out (for to try that would somehow lessen and dilute that very love). In standing before it, standing in this mystery I become so very aware of how small (not a lessening small, just small) I am in this cosmos of love.
Not entirely a comfortable place to start from. But it was thus I arrived here to hear Eugene’s plea to ‘let me love you as much as your holy mother loved and loves you’. And it struck me that Eugene was stating on his own he was incapable of loving as he wanted to. He had to ask God even to give him the gift to love as Mary had loved and continues to love. Again his giving his all for God, to God. Let me love you as your holy mother loved and loves you. Mary, mother of God, prototype of all; ‘let it be done to me according to your word’. There is a greatness that is beyond my grasp. I can but stand in awe.
I feel curiously empty and small, quiet and reflective, unable to even think properly and most certainly unable to plan or set forth in any direction. l find myself straying to the prayer that Frank shared with all of us, O Jesus living in Mary, which seems to bring a small point of comfort for it is the most that I can manage. I repeat it over and over and thus begins my day.