Ministerial Consciousness: A Biblical-spiritual Study

The question of this study consists in three elements: spirituality, the priest and service. The task at hand is to relate these three terms to see how service enters the spirituality of the priest. If one were to tag the over-all type of work, evidently it must be called a work of spirituality, a theological work on the spiritual life of the priest viewed under the aspect of service. But the decision to treat a question as a question of spirituality does not, as in other theological fields, allow for an immediate inception of the work. The question of method in spirituality must be raised briefly, since a universally accepted notion of the task and therefore the method of spirituality does not exist. Spirituality means first of all, apart from its use to describe a scientific or theological field, a living reality. Considerable discussion has been raised precisely on this point in the last dozen years: what is an adequate notion of spirituality?