Popes on Priesthood

It Does Make Sense to Become a Priest When in December 1944 I was drafted for military service, the company commander asked each of us what we planned to do in the future. I answered that I wanted to become a Catholic Priest. The lieutenant replied: "Then you ought to look for something else. In the new Germany priests are no longer needed." I knew that this "new Germany" was already coming to an end, and that, after the enormous devestation that madness had brought upon the country, priests would be needed more than ever. Today the situation is completley changed. In different ways, though, many people nowadays also think that the Catholic Priesthood is not a "job" for the future, but one that belongs more to the past. You, dear friends, have decided to enter the seminary and to prepare for priestly ministry in the Catholic Church in spite of such opinions and objections. You have done a good thing. Because people will always have need of God, even in an age marked by technincal mastery of the world and globalization: they will always need the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, the God who gathers us together in the universal Church in order to learn with him and through him life's true meaning and in order to uphold and apply the standards of true humanity...God is alive, and he needs people to serve him and bring him to others. It does make sense to become a priest: the world needs priests, pastors, today, tomorrow, and always, until the end of time. (Pope Benedict XVI - Letter to Seminarians, October 18, 2010)