Some Cardinal Suhard context.....

Here are a couple more thoughts from Cardinal Suhard (Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard), with the second being the actual quote which I guess I more or less paraphrased the other day. It is something that I saw and memorized years ago and didn't quite remember it fully. Anyhow, both of these thoughts are from his major work "Priests Among Men." It seems to me like the guy was really a mystic in his own right. Beautiful and inexplicable stuff.........

On the mystery of being a priests:

“What a priest unites in himself is what tears him apart. At every moment of his life he must answer two callings and entirely satisfy each of them without ever sacrificing either . . .. Transcendent yet incarnate; here is that same fundamental dualism which . . . constitutes the mystery of the Church and the paradox of Christian humanism.”

On priests being witnesses

“So it is fitting for priests to become witnesses again, not so much to convince people as to serve as a sign to them. It has been truly said, that to be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life wold not make sense if God did not exist. To be a witness is much less a matter of external changes in one’s way of living than of firm determination to establish a real community of destiny with the disinherited masses.”