Fr. Raphael Mary Arteaga, O.P. (left) and Fr. Pius Mary Henry, O.P. (right)

On Saturday, May 23rd, Fr. Pius Mary Henry, O.P., and Fr. Raphael Mary Arteaga, O.P. were ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Robert McElroy, preached the homily from the pulpit of St. Dominic Church, a Dominican led parish.

“We give thanks to God with great joy for the ordination of our brothers. Their ordination is a profound moment of grace not only for the Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph, but for the whole Church, as these men offer their lives in service to the Gospel and the salvation of souls.

I look forward with great hope and confidence to the many ways God will work through their priestly ministry in preaching, the sacraments, evangelization, and the countless encounters through which Christ will reach His people through these new priests.

We are also very grateful for the sacrifices, prayers, and steadfast support of their parents, families, friends, benefactors, and all those who have accompanied them throughout their years of formation. The vocation of a priest is never lived in isolation; it is nurtured within the life of the Church and sustained by the generosity of many faithful people.

May their priesthood bear abundant fruit for years to come. Thanks be to God for the gift of these new Dominican priests.”

Very Rev. Allen Moran, O.P.
Prior Provincial, Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph

The full text of Cardinal McElroy’s ordination homily is presented here:

Today’s gospel, from the Gospel of John, focuses on the central gift of the risen Lord: profound, unshakable, and joyous peace. This peace is not rooted in denying the sufferings of this world, nor in minimizing the challenges that suffering brings to every believer. On the contrary, the peace of the resurrection is rooted completely in the passion and death of Jesus Christ, which brings human suffering into its proper perspective in the mystery of our salvation and of our relationship with God.

The disciples of Jesus Christ came to a profound sense of peace in the resurrection because in their formation four pillars had marked their journey.

The first pillar was enduring prayer with the Lord Jesus, culminating in the celebration of the Last Supper. Jesus had to teach the disciples ever more deeply how to pray, and to place their lives of prayer within the context of the salvation that Christ was revealing in his public ministry. Haltingly, grudgingly, gradually, they became profound men of prayer for whom the peace of the risen Lord was a natural sequence.

The second pillar, preparing the disciples to receive the peace of the resurrection, consisted of the three years they spent coming to know Jesus and his proclamation of the kingdom of God. Surely this was the greatest studium in human history. One could see the trajectory in the life of Peter. So often in the Gospels, Peter’s headstrong streak leads him to misunderstand the mission of Jesus. But gradually he recognizes the pathway to which the Lord is pointing and integrates it into his life in a heroic and evangelizing manner.

A third pillar for the disciples in receiving the peace of the resurrection was the community that they had formed together during their time with Jesus, and the enrichment and finalization of that community in the coming of the Holy Spirit. The peace bestowed upon the apostles was not meant to be a personal or a solitary gift. It was a gift for and within the community of apostles, and it was nurtured throughout the early history of the Church by the continuing and deepening of that community.

And the fourth pillar for sustaining the peace of the resurrection in the life of the disciples came in their preaching to the whole of the world the salvation that had come in Jesus Christ. This fourth pillar turned the disciples outward into the world to carry out the mission in our first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah: to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the brokenhearted, and announce a year of favor from the Lord.

These four pillars, so central to the apostles and to the Dominican way of life, have been your anchors, Raphael and Pius, as you have followed the Lord’s call. Both of you approach your ordination to the priesthood today already rooted firmly in your Dominican identity and charism. And in that intertwined grace of religious and priestly identity, you bestow upon the Church today a unique and uniquely rich gift of prayer, mission, and sacrifice.

When I asked you whether there was a particularly crystallizing moment in your vocational journey that had led you to dedicate yourself to consecration and priesthood, both of you pointed to a profound moment of contemplation in which God seized hold of you and invited you to go deeper and to choose.

For you, Pius, it was a time after college when you went backpacking in Wyoming, just by yourself. The beauty of God’s creation surrounded and captured you, and in the silence God definitively beckoned you to go deeper in giving your life over to service of the Church. Just after this, you experienced and roamed this same pole of silence and contemplation, leading you to find God in consecration and service.

For you, Raphael, the call to the priesthood came at the age of nine years old, and the pattern for that priesthood came in college when a biography of St. Dominic revealed to you the joy that preaching of the Gospel can bring to the world, and how that same preaching in the Dominican tradition became your dream and your commitment in all of the years since.

Today, precisely as sons of St. Dominic, you receive the ordained priesthood of Jesus Christ. For this reason, the second reading that you have chosen, from the first letter of Peter, is so appropriate. It is addressed to the priests within the early Christian community. It calls them to tend the flock in their midst, and it sets forth the image of the Good Shepherd as their paradigm for understanding their ecclesial vocation.

The Shepherd has a constant and self-sacrificial love for his flock. It is a tender and a personal love, which knows them each by name and understands the unique personality, talents, and needs of every member of the flock entrusted to his care. The love of the Good Shepherd is modeled after Jesus Christ himself and seeks to reveal the glory of God in the midst of daily life, of personal crises, and finding enduring anchors in the world.

We join with you and your family and your friends and the whole of the Dominican community today, precisely because we know that you are embracing this very vision of the Good Shepherd as the centerpiece of your priesthood, and indeed the whole of your life.

May grace surround you from this day forward and forevermore.

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