The Archbishop of Arequipa, Mons. Javier del Río Alba, ordered five new priests in southern Peru, whom he encouraged to be holy presbyters who give their lives for others and defend them from the devil, of the dragon.
This was indicated by the prelate at the Mass he presided on September 29, Fiesta de los Santos Arcángeles, in the Arequipa Cathedral.
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In his homily, the prelate referred to the fight of Los Angeles against the devil, the dragon of the book of the Apocalypse who wants the condemnation of men, which he referred to as “a fight that continues to be given and will continue to be given until the end of time” against “humanity and especially against the church”, because the demon does not support that men and women have the possibility of reaching heaven.
The end of that struggle, the archbishop continued, is the victory already obtained by “the blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ”, to which the new Junior priests René Alanoca, Martín Adán Bernales, Emmanuel García, Gino Elías Michelli and Luis Anthony Tellez are added.
“This is a great beauty: you will be constituted by participating ministers of the priestly ministry of Christ, constituted presbyters servers,” he said.
Certainly, the prelate added, “we trust that, little by little, they will discover the indescribable beauty of what is the priestly service, what it is to be shepherds grazed by the supreme pastor and at the same time shepherds who give their lives” for others.
The Archbishop also stressed that it is God himself who entrusts the priests “the beauty of that love that resonates so much in us that makes it out of the deep of our being the desire to serve, the desire to occupy the last place, the desire to wear out our life gram to gram, all our energy, our years, our whole being and our work in service to God, serving the brothers”.
When the priestly life, he said, does not live holy and has no intimacy with the Lord in prayer, it becomes merely functional, which leads to boredom, something for which the priest is not made.
That boredom, the archbishop warned, can make priests fall in “the jaws of that dragon that is still in this world making war to women’s children.”
After encouraging the five new priests to be saints, the Archbishop of Arequipa reminded them that “the Holy Church of God needs shepherds such as Jesus Good Shepherd, who defends them from the dragon and defends them from the empire of death.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.