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Today we celebrate, as we do every year, the founding of the priesthood. We celebrate therefore the birthday of each priest as we call to mind in a special way the words of Jesus Christ Our Lord, “Do this in memory of me”. And so we gather together as priests of this Diocese, joined by the Deacons and the faithful.

We gather around the table of the Lord – we meet as a Church and as a Diocese to eat a meal together. This meal is the centrepiece of our gathering. We gather in prayer to share in the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

This Eucharist is the hallmark of being a Catholic; this Eucharist is the source of our identity as Catholics, as Christians. For us Christians this is a sacramental meal. This meal gives us spiritual power.
This meal is the Flesh and Blood of God Himself and therefore this morning we gather, as we do always, to eat and drink the Flesh and Blood of God himself.
As we gather, like in any other meal, each time we gather to break bread and share the cup together we create a bond amongst us, we create a community of believers. We renew our bonds as brothers and sisters; we renew our bonds of friendship.
This social bond, this community we build as we gather, has also its ethical obligations.

Yes, sharing is a value, but that sharing is a sharing of the children of God who are equal before God. Equal before God and equal before each other. Unlike in the olden days when the rich reclined as they dined today we all have the same posture before God and all are included – the rich and the poor, black and white, the outcasts, the insiders and the outsiders, for before God we are equal, created in His own image. It is these values that the Gospel and the First Reading refer to and the responsibility has been given to the priests to defend these values, to ensure that we are all equal before God, that we share the same values before God, that we are brothers and sisters and friends before God.

Indeed tensions are inherent in our midst, just as much as they were inherent at Antioch, in Jerusalem and in Rome during the times of St Paul. We will continue to experience tensions and suspicions amongst us but this in no way discourages us from considering ourselves equal before God; so the Eucharist creates this bond, this community of friends.

In a country that is in transition - in a country that seeks to bury its own past, the priest is expected to lead in reconciling the different communities, the different cultures, and people coming from different social strata. This is the command of the Gospel. As much as Christ came to proclaim liberty to captives, freedom to prisoners and declare the Year of the Lord, so too, today, the priest is called upon to continue in that mission of Christ. It is the Eucharist therefore, the sacrament that symbolises our unity, that ought to facilitate the breakdown of social barriers among us, of freeing us from the ghetto mentality that we seldom speak about but live out in our actions.

The Eucharist reminds us that we are a family, that we belong to one Father and therefore that we want to recognize each other as persons and accept each other for what we are. The biggest challenge amongst others, the biggest challenge we see for the priests of today: how do we carry our parishioners, how do we lead them to grasp the mystery of the Eucharist as a mystery of faith? How do we enable our faithful, the people we serve, to enter into the mystery of the Eucharist? How do we make them accept the Eucharist as the source of life in their daily lives? How do we make them accept the presence of Christ in their lives as a source of life, of light, so that their entire lives may be saved by the power of Christ they received in the Eucharist? This is the greatest challenge of all.

In the African communities and since we are on the African continent where we as Catholics, as Christians are in the majority, one constantly hears the refrain that African Christians experience schizophrenia and so to the ideology of the return to Africa, return to the African roots has freed many to openly, to defiantly declare that their faith is in the spirit of the ancestors and that Christ dictates a second place.

And indeed Christ himself is the source of the schizophrenia.
Certainly in the near future this is going to be the greatest challenge, to proclaim the Gospel of Christ and to proclaim Christ as the Alpha and Omega.

It is Christ whom we experience in the blessed Eucharist.

This is the challenge we see and place before the priests and that we cannot assume that the people we lead necessarily believe in the presence of Christ; truly believe in the power of Christ to direct their lives. But that there many other forces that compete with our master in claiming the lives of Christians.

And so many leave and come back to the Church in search of light and this light is present in our midst but we fail to see it.
The challenge therefore is to bring many to see Christ as the Light of the world.

This is the Year of the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is not a myth, the Eucharist is not a tale, told and retold.
The Eucharist is Christ’s presence in our midst.

We ask that where possible each church should have a chapel where individual Christians can come on their own to adore Christ Himself, so that this becomes part of our Christian tradition, part of our edification in the Church of God.