Uphold Your Priests

A while ago, I was offering condolences to a friend in the hall of a sister Church. I overheard two priests, the age of my two sons, talking about the growing neediness in our country. It shocked me that both of them shifted from talking about people’s neediness to their own! The two priests are young, married, and each has one or more children. This, in our country, has become a great problem! Do not consider it discrimination if I said that it shocked me that priests are complaining of their poverty. The poverty of the priests, which goes beyond them to their families, literally means to me the poverty of the parish, financially or in consciousness! So, my call, which appears in the title of these lines, is not motivated by the fact that I believe that the life of priests is more valuable than the life of any human being in the world, but rather by its frightening connotations or frightening solutions! I have often heard priests talking together about their distress. However, I have never heard any one of them openly complaining, in a public place, of his neediness! It is a single word that I say publicly both to the leaders of the Churches and to the brethren: “uphold your priests”!