"You are a Priest forever..."

I was just thinking of how it's been nearly a year since the Fr. Corapi scandal blew wide open. There was the initial leave of absence during lent of last year, and then things went quiet. Quiet, that is, until last year's Trinity Sunday when Corapi announced, on the twentieth anniversary of his ordination, that he was leaving the priesthood. A little while later he, sort of, began a minstry under the title "the Black Sheepdog."

The Black Sheepdog has folded. Last labour day was the last known activity. Then at the beginning of January (2012) the websites, twitter pages etc. all came down. No one knows why. If I had to speculate, it would probably be due to lawsuits being filed back and forth regarding petty things (copyright this, infringement of rights that). Yet, to this day there are still a few private blogs that carry on the conversation of last year. There are those who proclaim along the lines of:

"Corapi brought me back to the faith 15 years ago! This is just a conspiracy by those evil bishops who are taking out God's loyal servant. How dare people judge! They are sinning! Why, I once heard a talk by Corapi and he said he loved Mary! How dare people accuse him of bad things. May Our Lady of Medjugorie protect him! We miss you Father, er, Blacksheepdog..."

... and so on. Yes, many people actually talk like this on blogs.

For me, the whole thing came crashing down when he gave an initial explanation for leaving the priesthood. He said that, at the wish of the Church, 90% of his ministry was preaching, and that the performing of the Sacraments was only a small part of what he did. Therefore, in a sense, leaving the priesthood is not that big of a deal, because his main calling has been to preach and teach the faith.

Wrong. Dead wrong.

Let's first understand the primary role and responsibility of the priest. Going back to the Old Testament, the priest's primary task was to offer sacrifices and prayers to God on behalf of the people. The whole temple was set up in the structure of the priest leading the prayer, and offering a sacrifice on the altar. The sins of the people would be burnt up in the offering, and the offering smoke would rise up to God and be pleasing to him. Yet, in Genesis, God promises Abraham (after the near sacrifice of Abraham's only son Isaac) that God Himself would supply the sacrifice to be offered (God's only Son, instead).

The New Testament priest, who finds his priestly ministry in the great high priest, Jesus Christ, still has the primary role of offering sacrifices and prayers to God on behalf of the people. But the sacrifices are not of animals, the sacrifice is the re-presentation of Christ's true sacrifice. The Mass is the sacrifice of Calvary. Therefore, the priest's number one responsibility, role, duty, calling, whatever you want to name it, is to say Mass. A priest should not wake up in the morning and say: "what should I do today?" Rather, he should wake up and say: "what should I do today, after I have said Mass?"

And so, when Fr. Corapi stated that his leaving the priesthood was no big deal, alarm bells started to ring. Preaching is great, but it is not the primary duty of a priest. This would be like if I were to start a teaching job (Deo-volente), and become successful (Deo-volente), and say to Becca: "I spend most of my time teaching, I'm successful at it, therefore I'm not going to be married to you anymore so that I can devote all my time to teaching."

That sounds absurd. And so it should.

Alas, we continue to pray for Fr. Corapi, even though we don't know where he is, or what he's doing. It would be nice to know that he's gone back to his SOLT Order. I mean, really, the last image I ever saw of him was with him doing some strange interview, talking about himself while using the analogy of crossing the rubicon. There was this image of him, dressed in a black shirt. Yet where the white Roman Collar used to be at his neck, instead a white UnderArmour logo appeared:

A picture says a thousand words. So we pray for Fr. Corapi.
And for all priests.
Especially when we go to Mass.