What do you do with bad news?
And what do you do with good news?
I'd say the answer probably lies with how you take the priesthood of the Christian people.

During the past two decades nearly half a million Americans have been murdered. An additional 2.5 million have been wounded by gun-fire — more casualties than the U.S. military has suffered in all the wars of the past 200 years.

The U.S. murder rate today is — 8 homicides per 100,000. About 70% with firearms. 90% by men. This murder rate among men is 5 times the same in Canada, 11 times the rate among men in Germany, 20 times the rate in Ireland or Japan.  Among young men 13 to 24 in the U.S. it has tripled since 1960 and is now about 35 times as high as the murder rate among young men in England

A convicted murderer in the U.S. is released after spending, on average, just 6 years in prison. At the moment there are about 100,000 convicted murderers locked up in America and perhaps 800,000 living free in American society. Granted the fallibility of figures, it does seem we are a violent society.

A survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs looked at all TV programming in Washington D.C. April 7, 1994 and tallied 2,605 acts of violence that day, the majority in early morning when kids were most likely to be watching. By the reckoning of the Cultural Indicators project, the average American child will have witnessed more than 8,000 murders and 100,000 other violent acts on TV by the time he or she leaves elementary school.

Another study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1992, found that the typical American child spends 27 hours a week watching TV and will witness 40,000 murders and 200,000 other violent acts by the age of 18. "Never was a culture so filled with full-color images of violence as ours is now," says one authority.

It would seem our children are exposed to a great deal of violence. There are social critics who say its effects on society are not evident — that violence on TV does not lead to actual violence. One hopes so. In any case, by any norm, we are violent.

I think a priestly people would respond to this situation.

While infection with AIDS has begun to decline in the western hemisphere, it flourishes in Africa and Asia. Of 6 million estimated infected worldwide, 2 million are in sub-Sahara Africa, 3 1/2 million in southeast Asia. AIDS flourishes when health conditions are poorest, facilities and finances lacking, remedies unavailable.

Last year God's Love: We Deliver, a volunteer organization, prepared and delivered 540,393 meals free of charge to house-bound men, women and children with AIDS in the five boroughs of New York City, and across the river in Hudson County, New Jersey. They also recruited and trained 1,192 new volunteers to work in kitchen, deliver meals, help with events: total active, 2,131. In eleven years they have never turned away an eligible client and put no one on a waiting list.

A priestly people would turn to God with thanks for such people, such love.

For Tertullian asks: Are we lay people not priests also. It is written: He has made us kings and priests.

And Origen: Do you not recognize that the priesthood has been given to you also, that is to the whole Church of God and the nation of believers? You have therefore a priesthood, being a priestly nation.

And John Chrysostom: The entire people of God gathered in prayer constitute the fullness of priesthood.

And St. Augustine: As we call everyone Christian, so we call everyone priests, because all are members of one priesthood.

The whole community of believers is, as such, priestly. The faithful exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ's mission as priest, prophet, and king. Through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful are consecrated to be a holy priesthood. — The Catechism.

It would seem, then, that our response to the world scene as much as we know it, would be a priestly one. If the sacramental priesthood makes articulate and explicit the priesthood of all, all follow Christ as priest, prophet, and king. Priest by the sacrifice of the Cross entered into by our own sacrificial  love as vowed lay people, celibate and married, a single person united to God. Prophet by the teaching our life is, the love we are witness to, the sermon we preach by who we are and what we do. And king by our being responsible for our lives and exercising the dominion we have been given over the world in a manner pleasing to God. And as members of community — local, national, global, we take our place with a sense of obligation before God.

It is primarily and most effectively in prayer that we are involved in the Christian mystery. Here we are at our noblest as human, it is our finest hour.

Prayer is adoration and thanks. Prayer is petition and atonement.

And the heart of this cross is Christ. All is in Him, through Him, for Him. We walk with Him, suffer and die with Him and for Him. And with Him love the world. And pray for it, with it. Sing Him thanks for goodness everywhere and so promote good. And beg mercy and pardon and healing for all sin and so fight the powers of darkness and evil.

And so we all live priestly lives in Christ, the eternal High Priest.  Amen.

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