A Call for Priests to Live as Christ, Priest and Victim
The Lord desires to raise up an army of holy “priest-victims”; martyrs of love who are willing to be transformed as ONE with Christ Crucified. It is they who will stand strong during the times of darkness as the “apostles of light” protecting and defending the Bride of Christ, the Church.
The Lord speaks of His desire for priests to the Love Crucified Community:
My daughter….My covenant with each of them calls them to love as I have loved; to love with My Heart. My love is sacrificial, My love is gentle and patient but above all my love is crucified. I came upon the earth desiring only the cross; My sons must have the same love of the cross I had. It is only though crucified love that their lives will bear abundant fruit; It is only through their crucified love that they will be transformed by the fire of the Holy Spirit into Me. It is only through crucified love My priests will become the fortified wall of bronze protecting My Church from the principalities of death. This is what you must tell My priests. If they do not listen to My Words they will perish during the time of great darkness.
—3/30/10 See full message🔗
I am raising up My army of holy priests, My Green Berets: Men of fortitude, men of courage, holy men, men willing to lay down their lives for their God. It is these holy priests that will be My apostles of Light during the time of great darkness that is approaching. The time is at the horizon.
—3/11/10 See full message🔗
The Church has a clear vision for a transformed priesthood. This vision of priestly victimhood is witnessed by the life of saintly priests like St. John Vianney, Padre Pio, and St. Maximilian Kolbe. They were not just good men who served God and offered sacrifice, but men transformed into alter-Christus, forged to be priest-victims of love by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary and in the power of the Cross. Men consecrated to Mary and the Eucharist.
In order to fully realize his priestly vocation of being priest and victim, he must uncover his identity as victim. The crisis in the priesthood is reflected in the absence of this identity. Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen in his book, The Priest Is Not His Own, stresses the crucial need for priests to embrace their victimhood:
"We who have received the Sacrament of Orders call ourselves “priests”. The author does not recall any priest ever having said, “I was ordained a ‘victim’”, nor did he ever say, “I am studying to be a victim.” That seemed almost alien to being a priest. The seminary always told us to be “good” priests; never were we told to be willing victims. And yet was not Christ, the Priest, a Victim? Did He not come to die?
Pagan priests, Old Testament priests, medicine men, all offered a sacrifice apart from themselves. But not Our Lord. He was Sacerdos-Victima. This being so, just as we miss much in the life of Christ by not showing that the shadow of the Cross cast itself even over the crib and the carpenter shop as well as over His public life, so we have a mutilated concept of our priesthood if we envisage it apart from making ourselves victims in the prolongation of His Incarnation.”
Urgent Messages to Priests
Blessed Conchita received messages from the Lord concerning the priesthood from September 1927 to January 1931. The Lord stressed the urgency for priestly sanctification. He reveals His total love as an unconditional offering to the Father in the Holy Spirit through a full immolation of Himself. He explains to Conchita the importance of His priests living as victims as ONE with Him, The Victim, as the means of their transformation into Love.
The priestly souls indispensably have to be victims; they have to become a gift, offering themselves pure to My Father, in union with Me and giving themselves up for souls, as I did. —The Priesthood of Christ and the Ministerial Priesthood in the Experience and Message of Concepcion Cabrera de Armida, Juan Esquerda Bifet, 11.
Jesus reveals to Conchita His Sacred Heart and how His Heart loves. He desires for every priest to be one heart with His, loving as He loves, in total immolation:
Love which does not crucify is not love… How did I love? It was with a universal love of charity, as the Word knows how to love: all charity, with a love of sacrifice, immolating Myself, forgiving, forgetting and attaining graces for them with My sorrow; with a most pure divine intention; with a sublime goal of charity for souls and for Divinity, of giving Him glory. My expiatory love is incomprehensible to all human intelligence. (Ibid. 11)
The spiritual and apostolic value of priestly life depends on his willingness to be crucified with Christ. In a message to a Mother of the Cross of the Love Crucified Community, Christ emphasizes the importance of all priests being a witness to the Gospel message of the Cross:
I am the High Priest. I am the perfect unblemished holy sacrifice of the Father for the redemption of mankind. The priests that came after Me were born of My Pierced Heart; were born of My crucified love. As a woman labors to give life, My priests were conceived in My crucified Heart and were brought to life through the passage in My side created by the spear. Therefore, every priest is called to be ONE with the Word of the Cross. Of themselves they can do nothing and are nothing, but united as ONE to Love crucified they are the power of God. The mission I desire is to bring all My priests to union with Love Crucified. It is here that lies the power of God I want them to possess…. 9/21/10
When priests fail to embrace their victimhood by not becoming ONE with Christ Crucified, they fail to be transformed by the Holy Spirit and live a disordered priesthood with serious consequences for themselves and their flock.
Tell My sons that they have gone astray from the path I set before them. They have gone astray from the narrow path that leads to life. Their hearts have grown cold and hardened because they seek their fulfillment in themselves. It is only through a life of penance and mortification that the flesh can be purified. Tell them, My daughter, to gaze at My love crucified and to allow My Mother to bring them to the foot of the Cross with those that love Me (I felt St. John and Mary Magdalene). 5/24/10
Without this transformation into alter Christus their vocation runs the risk of bringing scandal and turmoil to the Church and world. These priestly scandals pierce violently the Heart of God as Jesus laments to Conchita:
And the sins of scandal of my priests, what immensity they encompass! What glory they remove from me and how deep an extent they pierce My Heart! The radius those sins of scandal of my priests encompasses is incalculable for man; and only in eternity in the vision of that great light will they come to see the almost infinite evil that they produce with those innumerable sins. And I say innumerable because a sin of priestly scandal is multiplied and extends to generations.... [These hidden sins] attack the faith, blind hope and kill charity. —To My Priests, Concepción Cabrera De Armida 20.
Encouragement To Live This Call
In the following letter a priest encourages his spiritual son/priest to live his vocation as a victim with Christ. His council reflects the anointing of God’s wisdom for all priests:
My Dear Spiritual Son Priest ,
You have made it to the 10th Station of your Priesthood, stripped of a lot of this world with more to shed in the future.
The Universal Church and the Priesthood of Christ into which you were ordained ten years ago today has also been stripped of its holiness, dignity and even Episcopal unity by the exposure of its sinfulness.
The Temple is being cleansed, shaken and persecuted. Eventually all that will be left is the Bruised Face of the Suffering Servant, and the more you resemble Him in this way, the closer your Heavenly Mother will enfold you in her arms.
Resolve to increase your time before the Blessed Sacrament to console Him and to become a Living Host in the eyes of His People.
Many of His People and Ministers are still clinging to tradition, customs, incense, Latin liturgy, even the Communion altar rail, like passengers clinging to the rail of the Titanic thinking that this will give them safety and comfort. But only till we let go of everything and become ONE with the VICTIM will we truly be His Body, the Church, not in the nostalgia of the past, but in the reality of the POWER OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED IN THE PRESENT.
You are very learned, my spiritual son, in Theology, Cannon Law, even languages and carry within you a hidden false pride in all of this, hidden from yourself, but not from me who loves you as Paul loved Timothy. But someday in the future you will see more clearly that the PRIESTHOOD you received 10 years ago today is not in the grandeur of your status, wisdom or earthly knowledge, but solely in the SACRIFICE OF THE LAMB OF GOD.
And someday when you allow yourself to be stripped of everything—health, prestige, reputation, knowledge, connections, earthly wisdom and pastoral power you will achieve the joy and fullness of the Priesthood you celebrate today. This is my Prayer, Prophecy and Gift to you today.
It was a privilege and an honor to support you financially, and be in those moments your earthly father, not only for who you are today, but for who I trust you will become in time.
With heartfelt love and gratitude on this milestone of your 10th Ordination Anniversary,