The Christ Witness of the Priest

......What is the first condition for bringing Christ to others? Bringing a real man or a real woman. Bringing Christ to others implies bearing witness to them that, in my experience, he responds to my humanity: Christ is the response to the needs of our humanity.

     For the priest, a lived belonging to Christ as the one Sent by the Father (John 20:21) is the exhaustive definition of his own personality (Galatians 2:20). "[The priest's ] life and ministry" - I said in a communique of the 1995 international symposium of the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome - "are thus a response to a real, historical, and existential Event: he is consumed  by the love of Christ, crucified and risen (2 Cor 5:41 ff.)." This consuming love makes us participate in the mission for which he came, died and rose again: that everyone who lives no longer lives for himself, but for him who died and was raised for them. This urgency of Christ's love, that ensures the memory of God's love for human persons, is the goal toward which all our desire and all our activity tend. 

   quoted from the "Afterword", by Luigi Giussani, in Together on the Road, by Massimo Camisasca,  pp. 118,9