Pope asks priests to be signs of reconciliation in the church and world

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In a church and a world divided and fractured, priests are called to be witnesses of God's love and forgiveness, which reconciles people and makes them one community, Pope Leo XIV told new priests.

Leading Christian communities not as "lords" but as stewards, "we will rebuild the credibility of a wounded church sent to a wounded humanity within a wounded creation," he told the 11 men he was about to ordain to the priesthood May 31.

"It is not important to be perfect, but it is necessary to be credible," the pope said in his homily at the Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.

The 11 men had been scheduled to be ordained May 10 by Pope Francis, but the ordination was pushed back when the pope died April 21.

Seven of the new priests studied at the Rome diocesan seminary while four of them attended the Rome Redemptoris Mater Seminary, which is run by the diocese and the Neocatechumenal Way.

Pope Leo told the men, who ranged in age from their late 20s to early 40s, "You bear witness to the fact that God has not grown weary of gathering his children, however diverse, and of constituting them into a dynamic unity."

The ministry of a priest, like that of the pope and the bishops, is to gather all people in the church, the pope told them. "Make room for the faithful and for every creature to whom the Risen One is close and in whom he loves to visit us and amaze us."

"The people of God are more numerous than we see," he said. "Let us not define its boundaries."

God will place many people in their paths, Pope Leo told the new priests. "To them consecrate yourselves, without separating yourselves from them, without isolating yourselves, without making the gift you have received some kind of privilege."

An ordination obviously is a joyful occasion for the church, he said. But "the depth, breadth and even duration of the divine joy we now share is directly proportional to the bonds that exist and will grow between you ordinands and the people from whom you come, of which you remain a part and to which you are sent."

While the identity of the ordained priest "depends on union with Christ the high and eternal priest," the pope said, the church's ordained ministers must recognize and encourage the exercise of the common priesthood of all believers that flows from baptism.

"We are the people of God," he said. "The Second Vatican Council made this awareness more vivid, almost as if anticipating a time when a sense of belonging would become weaker and the sense of God more rarefied."

Being part of the people of God and called to lead them, he said, means the priests always must try to be role models of Christian living with the transparency of their lives, "lives known, readable lives, credible lives!"

"We stand within God's people, so that we can stand before them with a credible witness," Pope Leo said.

Like the still-visible wounds of the risen Jesus, the flaws of individuals and the fractures within humanity are also signs that God's love transforms everything and everyone, he said. "Everything that to our eyes seemed broken and lost now appears to us in the sign of reconciliation."