A Man of Prayer
The Priest must be a friend of Christ as a man who speaks with him in prayer, acts from that prayer and brings others to Him in prayer.
As Pope Benedict XVI said at his Chrism Mass Homily in 2006:
I no longer call you servants but friends. This is the profound meaning of being a priest: becoming the friend of Jesus Christ. For this friendship we must daily recommit ourselves. Friendship means sharing in thought and will. We must put into practice this communion of thought with Jesus, as St Paul tells us in his Letter to the Philippians (cf. 2: 2-5). And this communion of thought is not a purely intellectual thing, but a sharing of sentiments and will, hence, also of actions.
This means that we should know Jesus in an increasingly personal way, listening to him, living together with him, staying with him. Listening to him - in lectio divina, that is, reading Sacred Scripture in a non-academic but spiritual way; thus, we learn to encounter Jesus present, who speaks to us. We must reason and reflect, before him and with him, on his words and actions. The reading of Sacred Scripture is prayer, it must be prayer — it must emerge from prayer and lead to prayer. The Evangelists tell us that the Lord frequently withdrew — for entire nights "to the mountains", to pray alone. We too need these "mountains", they are inner peaks that we must scale, the mountain of prayer.
Only in this way does the friendship develop. Only in this way can we carry out our priestly service, only in this way can we take Christ and his Gospel to men and women. Activism by itself can be heroic, but in the end external action is fruitless and loses its effectiveness unless it is born from deep inner communion with Christ. The time we spend on this is truly a time of pastoral activity, authentic pastoral activity. The priest must above all be a man of prayer. The world in its frenetic activism often loses its direction. Its action and capacities become destructive if they lack the power of prayer, from which flow the waters of life that irrigate the arid land.
I no longer call you servants, but friends. The core of the priesthood is being friends with Jesus Christ. Only in this way can we truly speak in persona Christi, even if our inner remoteness from Christ cannot jeopardise the validity of the Sacrament. Being a friend of Jesus, being a priest, means being a man of prayer. In this way we recognise him and emerge from the ignorance of simple servants. We thus learn to live, suffer and act with him and for him. Being a priest means becoming an ever closer friend of Jesus Christ with the whole of our existence.
The world needs God — not just any god but the God of Jesus Christ, the God who made himself flesh and blood, who loved us to the point of dying for us, who rose and created within himself room for man. This God must live in us and we in him. This is our priestly call: only in this way can our action as priests bear fruit.”