Oh Eternal Jesus ang High Priest I pray to you:

- for your faithful and fervent priests;

- for your priests unfaithful and lukewarm priests;

- for your priests who labor at home or abroad in mission fields;

- for your dying priests;

- for the souls of your priests in purgatory.

But above all I commend you:

- the priests who are dearest to me;

- the priests who baptized me;

- to the priest who absolved me of my sins;

- to the priests whose Masses I attended, who gave me your Body and Blood in Holy Communion;

- to the priests who taught and instructed me or encouraged and helped me;

- to the priests to whom I owe something in any other way. Especially ...

O Jesus, keep them all close to your Heart and Bless them abundantly, both in time and eternity.

Amen.

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE JOHN PAUL II FOR THE XXXVII WORLD DAY OF PRAYER FOR VOCATIONS (2000)

The Eucharist constitutes the culminating moment in which Jesus, in His Body given for us and in His Blood poured out for our salvation, reveals the mystery of His identity and indicates the sense of the vocation of every believer. In fact, the meaning of human life is totally contained in that Body and in that Blood, since from them life and salvation have come to us. In some ways, the very existence of the human person must be identified with them, so that this existence is fulfilled in so far as it can, in its turn, make of itself a gift for others.

In the Eucharist all this is mysteriously signified in the signs of bread and wine, the memorial of the Passover of the Lord: the believer who is nourished by that Body given for him and with that Blood poured out for him, receives the power to transform himself, in turn, into gift. As Saint Augustine says, "Be what you receive and receive what you are." (Discourse 272, 1: On Pentecost)

In their encounter with the Eucharist, some men discover that they are called to become ministers of the Altar, other people, that they are called to contemplate the beauty and depth of this mystery, others that they are called to pour out again its impelling force of love on the poor and weak, and others again that they are called to grasp its transforming power in the realities and gestures of everyday life. Each believer finds in the Eucharist not only the interpretative key of his or her own existence, but the courage to actualise it, indeed to build up, in the diversity of charisms and vocations, the one Body of Christ in history.

In the account of the disciples of Emmaus (Lk 24, 13-35), Saint Luke lets us glimpse what happens in the life of the person who lives the Eucharist. When "in the breaking of bread," done by the "stranger," the eyes of the disciples are opened, they realise that their hearts were burning in their breasts while they were listening to Him explaining the Scriptures. In those hearts that burn we can see the history and the discovery of every vocation, which is not a transient emotion, but an ever more certain and strong recognition that the Eucharist and Passover of the Son must become ever more the Eucharist and Passover of His disciples.