Find out How Jesus Acts through Priests and Why you Need to Know

When Priests administer the Sacraments or celebrate Holy Mass, it is literally Jesus Himself who does so.

Newsroom (12/19/2025 8:42 AM, Gaudium Press) “All the churches on the face of the earth could be destroyed, but wherever there still remains a priest, we will still be able to have the Mass, we will still be able to have the Holy Eucharist.”

If this statement already surprises us by its depth and beauty, perhaps our surprise is even greater when we discover its author and, above all, the reasons that led him to pronounce it.

It is a phrase spoken by Card. Van Thuan, who spent thirteen years confined in terrible prisons in communist Vietnam. With what emotion he celebrated Holy Mass clandestinely, while behind bars! A priest of the Most High God and a prince of the Holy Church, he knew that, although a prisoner, he possessed a power that is not given to the Angels: through the Consecration, Our Lord Jesus Christ made Himself present in his cell, as once in the Grotto of Bethlehem.

“What angelic or human tongue could explain such unlimited power? Who could imagine that the word of a man […] would receive from grace the prodigious strength to bring down from Heaven to earth the Son of God?”

The Vietnamese cardinal was well aware that “the ordained minister is the sacramental link that connects the liturgical action to what the Apostles said and did and, through them, to what Christ said and did”, and that, therefore, as a successor of the Apostles, he acted in the name of Jesus and in His Person.

Indeed, when sacred ministers baptize, when they attend the faithful in Confession, when they celebrate Holy Mass, it is literally the God-Man Himself who does so through them!

For this reason, how great is their responsibility to conform their lives to that of Our Lord! Saint John of Ávila calls them reliquaries of God, house of God, and, in a certain sense, creators of God. And Saint John Eudes, in turn, affirms that “the priest is Jesus Christ living and walking on the earth.”

But at the same time that we consider the sublimity of the priesthood, it is also fitting that we reflect on how great must be the admiration and respect of the faithful for the ministers of the Lord. If we were granted to see what mystically takes place when the priest administers the Sacraments and if we were to delve into the august mystery of the Liturgy, we would leave each celebration with our soul “rejuvenated” for having come into contact with God Himself!

Before such a marvelous and divine presence of Our Lord, perhaps we understand better that phrase spoken by His divine lips:

“Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:20).

Article taken from the Heralds of the Gospel Magazine, December 2025.
Newsroom.

Compiled by Gustavo Kralj

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