11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Installation Mass of Fr Carmine-John (CJ) Millen

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Sunday 14 June, 2026
St Augustine Church, Rivervale

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The formal installation of a new Parish Priest is a very important occasion, not just for the priest himself of course but also for the whole parish community. It marks a new chapter in the life of the community and provides an opportunity for both Father CJ and the whole parish community to reflect on what it means to be a community of faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, and what role the Parish Priest plays in the life of the community.

For a few moments then, I want to reflect on this question and to do so by referring to a phrase from this morning’s first reading. At the end of that reading we hear a promise which God made to His chosen people through His servant Moses. I will count you as a kingdom of priests, a consecrated nation. This promise, which occurs in other places in the Old Testament, is always a promise which looks to the future:  I will make you a kingdom of priests. You will be a holy nation and a priestly people.

We also hear a similar expression in the New Testament; in one of the letters of Saint Peter, it is no longer a promise for the future - you will be a royal priesthood - but a statement of the present reality - you are a royal priesthood and a holy nation.

As we formally commission your new parish priest this morning, we might wonder, in the light of this, why we need a priest at all if we are already, as a Christian community, a kingdom or community of priests. This question becomes even more challenging when we remember the New Testament teaches us that there is in fact only one priest, Jesus Christ. Why, then, does the Church speak of our leaders as priests? Why does it not, like some other Christian churches, speak instead of pastors or elders?

A good way, I think, to understand all this is to recall the feast we celebrated last Sunday: the feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord. We know that when we receive the Eucharist, as so many of us will do this morning, we are united with Christ whose body and blood we receive. We become one with him and, of course, also one with each other because we all receive the body of Christ and in that way all become together the body of Christ which we call the Church. We are a kingdom of priests because we are all drawn into communion with Jesus who is the one and only priest: He shares everything with us, including and especially His priesthood.

But then, of course, we must ask ourselves what it means for Jesus to be a priest - and as we come to understand what this means, we will come to understand what it means for us together to be a priestly people because Jesus shares that priesthood with us.

As a faithful Jew, Jesus understood that the role of priests was to offer sacrifice as a way of demonstrating the desire of God’s people to be united in faith and love with Him. And because people so often fail to live in faith and love, the offering of a sacrifice was a sign of repentance, of turning our backs on all that is separating us from God. In the Jewish tradition of Jesus’s time, what was offered was a burnt offering of a lamb or a calf or the first fruit of the harvest. Jesus transformed this into a new kind of sacrifice when He offered Himself. We see the culmination of this self-gift when Jesus dies on the Cross, but in reality, his whole life was a self-offering, a self-giving for the sake of others. It is this self-offering, lived out in every moment of his life, and ultimately in his death, which makes Jesus a priest, and because we share in His one priesthood, the Lord is asking the same from us: to live our lives each day as a gift for the sake of others. This is the heart of a priestly life; it is the heart of a priestly attitude to others; it is the essence of Christian discipleship.

This is a high calling. It is a demanding vocation. It is a call to live in such a way as to be able to say, as Saint Paul once said, I no longer live for it is Christ who lives in me.

In asking us, as His disciples, to live this way, the Lord seems to be asking the impossible - except that the Lord in asking this of us gives us everything we need, and which we can’t create for ourselves, to respond faithfully to Him. And it is here that the role of the ordained priest, the role in the case of this parish of Father CJ, becomes clear. Our priests are called to put themselves totally at our service in order that through them the Lord can enable us to be faithful to all he is asking of us. Priests do this in three key ways: firstly, by celebrating the sacraments through which the grace of Christ flows steadily into us, strengthening and healing and renewing us, so that even when we stumble and fall we are picked up again through God’s sacraments of love; secondly, by being, in the daily living of their lives with generosity and fidelity,  living signs of the presence of Jesus among us as our Good Shepherd; and thirdly, by devoting themselves completely and unreservedly to this mission in the Lord’s Church, even to the point of choosing a life of celibate chastity, of gospel simplicity and of obedience to their bishop and, through him, to God.

This is what we are celebrating today. This is what we are grateful to God for this morning: the gift of faith which opens our hearts and our lives to God and fills us with hope; the gift of our brothers and sisters in faith which reminds us that we do not journey to God alone but always in company with all those who, like us, are doing our best to be faithful to the Lord in the midst of our challenges and difficulties; and the gift of Jesus Himself who, through those whom He calls to the ordained priesthood, remains present with us as our Good Shepherd, keeping us safe and enabling us to be all that, without our Good Shepherd, we could never hope to be.

Thank you, Father CJ, for your own faith, your own generosity, and your willingness to put yourself at our service so that together we can all be the people God is calling us to be.