March 6, 2013 By Father Joseph Giroux During my studies for the priesthood at the Pontifical North American College (the United States’ Catholic seminary in Rome), I had the unique privilege of being ordained a deacon with thirty of my classmates at Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican on October 7, 1999. The ordaining Bishop went by a different name back then: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Even before his 2005 election to the papacy, it was pretty intimidating that this man was the one before whom I first made my promise of obedience, given his previous role as the Church’s “grand inquisitor.” I'll never forget the moment in the rite when he turned to the seminary rector (then Msgr. Timothy Dolan, now the Cardinal Archbishop of New York) and asked in his German accent, "Do you judge them to be worthy?" Even though his manner was so genuine and gentle, the question still had us all shaking in our boots! The future Pope's homily at the ordination was (not surprisingly) quite powerful, and still provides me with much food for thought today. "We understand authority and service in the Church only in the light of the mystery of the incarnation and the Cross,” then-Cardinal Ratzinger said. “If we truly wish to be follow Those were powerful words, indeed, from one who would later (unbeknownst to either him or me) bear the papal title of “the Servant of the Servants of God.” And what a credible witness to such self-emptying humility His Holiness Benedict XVI, now the Church’s Pope-Emeritus, has given the world in the final days of his pontificate. I remember well the excitement I felt on April 19, 2005, when on the TV screen I saw a familiar face emerge out onto the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica - a face I had seen up close inside that same majestic church only few years before. Now, along with fellow Catholics the world over, I anxiously await the news of the election of the 266th Bishop of Rome…knowing the chances are really rather slim that I’ll have such a personal connection with our next Pope, too. Father Joseph Giroux, now pastor of the Malone Catholic Parishes, was ordained a transitional deacon by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Oct. 7, 1999, five years before the cardinal was elected pope.
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ers of the Lord and his ministers in the Church, we must seek to imitate his example of service, his example of self-emptying. “We must want to imitate the one who came not to be served but to serve, the Incarnate Lord who in the silence of Nazareth lived and worked as a humble carpenter, who at the Last Supper knelt as a servant before his disciples to wash their feet, and who dies on the Cross condemned as a criminal,” he told us. “And that is why the credibility of the Church's ministers - that which makes them truly convincing to others especially in today's world - is found above all in the radiance of their desire to take the lowest place, to truly follow in the footsteps of Christ." 