As Archbishop Julian Porteous marked 50 years of priesthood this month, he reflected upon his many and varied experiences over five decades, keenly aware of the work of God’s abundant grace and mercy in his life. Source: Hobart Archdiocese.
“There’s a phrase from the Letter to the Ephesians, which I think summarises my life and my priesthood and my role as bishop,” Archbishop Porteous said.
“It simply says, ‘It is by grace you are saved through faith’. I’m just very conscious of grace. I’m very aware that I need salvation and I want to place myself under the mercy of God, under the grace of God.”
His understanding of the nature of the priesthood has deepened and matured over the years.
“Now, after 50 years a priest, I think that, more than anything else, the priest is one who stands in the presence of God for the people and really with the people. And invokes God’s grace and mercy upon the community of believers, but more broadly the world.”
Born in Sydney in 1949, he first sensed a call to priesthood as a young boy in grade five or six at school.
“I distinctly remember one morning going into the chapel and kneeling down at the altar, really just to say a brief prayer. And the words came into my head very simply, very clearly; ‘One day you will be a priest’. And those words just stayed with me … I accepted them and had no resistance to them.
“Now, subsequently, I can look back and understand this was the moment when God did actually call me.”
He entered the seminary in 1969, fresh out of secondary school, studying first at St Columba’s College in Springwood, and later at St Patrick’s College, Manly.
He was ordained on September 7, 1974, by Cardinal James Freeman at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney. He remembers little of the actual day other than a sense of being overwhelmed by the momentous occasion.
“As I look back, I’m deeply conscious that it changed my being,” he said. “I am now a priest and I’m conscious of that identity that is now absolutely integral to who I am.”
FULL STORY
In the stream of Grace: 50 years of priesthood (By Catherine Sheehan, Hobart Archdiocese)
