Pope Francis celebrated 51 years as a priest on Sunday, December 13, days before his birthday on the 17th of this month.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future pontiff, was ordained a priest on Dec. 13, 1969. In various interviews, he said he discovered his vocation in on Sept. 21, 1953, feast on St. Matthew.
The then-17-year-old Bergoglio passed by the parish church he normally attended in Buenos Aires and felt the need to go to confession.
In the church, he found a priest he did not know. That confession changed his life.
“For me this was an experience of encounter,” Pope Francis later said.
“I found that someone was waiting for me. Yet I do not know what happened, I can’t remember, I do not know why that particular priest was there whom I did not know, or why I felt this desire to confess, but the truth is that someone was waiting for me,” he said.
“He had been waiting for me for some time. After making my confession I felt something had changed. I was not the same. I had heard something like a voice, or a call. I was convinced that I should become a priest,” added the pope.
A report by the Vatican News said the young Bergoglio “experienced the loving presence of God in his life, felt his heart touched and felt the outpouring of God’s mercy, which, with a look of tender love, called him to religious life, after the example of St Ignatius of Loyola.”
The report noted that the 1953 episode of his life inspired the pope’s choice of his episcopal, and later papal, motto “Miserando atque eligendo,” taken from the Homilies of St Bede the Venerable, who, commenting on the Gospel episode of the vocation of St Matthew, writes: “Jesus saw the tax collector and, because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him, he said to him: Follow me.”
In various addresses, Pope Francis always urges priests to be wise, far-sighted, and committed and challenge them “to develop a capacity for listening in a way attentive yet filled with hope, serene yet tenacious, persevering yet not fearful.”
