CAPG's Blog 

God might have redeemed the world by a manifestation of His glory; but He chose to do it by shame. Jesus was rejected of men, and they hid their faces from Him as if ashamed to own Him. This lot He has bequeathed to us. Jesus was falsely accused. No man ever more so. He was called a Samaritan, and told that He had a devil. He was “a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” He was a deceived, and a seducer, and seditious; stirring up the people, feigning to be a king and a prophet, being a pretender and a blasphemer. He suffered all the penalties of sin, its guilt only excepted.

 False accusations was hateful to Him, because of His perfect holiness. To be baptized as if He were a sinner was an act of divine humility. The eyes of all were fixed upon Him. He was counted as one of the sinners of Jerusalem. It was bitter to be even suspected. But to be accused as a sinner was an infinite humiliation. The bitterness of sin entered into His sinless soul. He tasted the horror and the shame even of those who are justly accused. Innocent men arraigned at the bar, and though falsely yet skillfully accused of atrocious crimes, have afterwards told us that, for a time, they had the horrible sense of guilt upon them. And, in the measure of their innocence, their hatred of the evil laid to their charge will be more acute. To the sinful it brings little pain; for sin deadens the perception of the baseness, the grossness, the deadline of sin. The agony of our Divine Lord in the Garden came from the vision and the contact of the sin of the world. The sins of mankind before the Flood, the sins of the tribes of Israel, the sins of the Christian world, and, above all, the sins of His own priests, these wrung from Him a sweat of blood. The sanctity of God in contact with the sin of the world cause a sorrow “unto death”. For though God cannot sorrow as God, God Incarnate sorrowed by the suffering of His sinless humanity in this world of sin.

In the measure, then, of the innocence and purity of a priest’s life and heart will be his suffering when falsely accused. They who accuse him little know the pain they inflict. They have not his delicacy of conscience, or the purity of his heart, or his jealousy for the priesthood and for the Name of our Divine Master. So far “they know not what they do.” The coarse, and the rude, and the vindictive, and the malevolent, and even the foolish and the reckless in speech, with no ill-will, perhaps, but with great want of caution, often inflict woulds upon a good priest which are never healed. They would care little if it were said of themselves; and that is, perhaps, their only excuse, and a very mean one.

By Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892)

Source:The Eternal Priesthood 1884

The Priest should be like those angels whom Jacob saw in a vision ascending to Heaven and descending therefrom on a mystical ladder. He is expected to ascend by prayer and to descend by preaching. He ascends to Heaven to receive light from God; he descends to communicate that light to his hearers. He ascends to light his torch at the every-burning furnace of Divine Love; he descends to communicate the flame to the souls of his people.

Beacon Lights: Maxims of Cardinal James Gibbons, 1911