The Priestly Life

God has no need for anything, proclaims St. Paul in the midst of the Areopagus. God has no need for mankind: He creates men and women out of pure generosity. The priesthood, remarks Monsignor Ronald Knox, is similarly the fruit of the Divine largesse: God “could have done without [priests], but he preferred to have, once more, a kind of tool through which his action should express itself. Tools in his hand, that is what we priests were to be.” Comprising sixteen retreat talks, The Priestly Life meditates upon the character and purpose of the priestly office. The priest is an essential instrument in the economy of salvation; “he lends his hands, to be Christ’s hands, his voice, to be Christ’s voice, his thoughts, to be Christ’s thoughts; there is, there should be, nothing of himself in it from first to last, except where the Church allows him, during two brief intervals of silence, to remember his own intentions before God.”

Delivered with the rhetorical poise and spiritual substance typical of Knox’s preaching, The Priestly Life is a spirited affirmation of the dignity and duties of the priesthood, one certain to lend support and inspiration to those men called to be alter Christi.