Pope Francis' homily for this morning's Chrism mass for priests. Wasn't sure where he was going with this at first, but it's lovely. He likes to invent terms, and here he coins "inclusive preferentiality." He means that when Christ heals or interacts in some way with one person in the crowd, that person receives grace for everyone in his or her "category," for lack of a better term. One widow receives grace meant for all widows, one blind person for all blind persons, etc.
He uses this to talk about what a priest is: someone called from the crowd for a singular grace from Jesus, and sent back to the crowd to share that grace.
dear brother priests, we must not forget that our evangelical models are those “people”, the “crowd” with its real faces, which the anointing of the Lord raises up and revives. They are the ones who complete and make real the anointing of the Spirit in ourselves; they are the ones whom we have been anointed to anoint. We have been taken from their midst, and we can fearlessly identify with these ordinary people. Each of us has our own story. A little bit of memory will do us much good. They are an image of our soul and an image of the Church. Each of them incarnates the one heart of our people.
We priests are the poor man and we would like to have the heart of the poor widow whenever we give alms, touching the hand of the beggar and looking him or her in the eye. We priests are Bartimaeus, and each morning we get up and pray: “Lord, that I may see”. We priests are, in some point of our sinfulness, the man beaten by the robbers. And we want first to be in the compassionate hands of the good Samaritan, in order then to be able to show compassion to others with our own hands.
