Homily for the Thanksgiving Mass of newly ordained Fr Huy Tran – 30 April 2026
In recently commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s decree on education, Pope Leo encourages us all “to cultivate a heart that listens, a gaze that encourages, and an intelligence that discerns.”[1] Wonderful attitudes for each us to develop but especially for those who are beginning a life of ministry – a heart that listens, a gaze that encourages and an intelligence that discerns.
These attitudes of heart and mind are especially important, too, as we approach some of the primary questions of our time. One of those is the question of personhood. What is the human person? How do we define the nature of personhood? It is a question that has urgency today given that in different ways our society is asking: Is identity primarily self-defined, or received? How do body, biology, and personal experience relate to one another?Consequently, the early twenty-first century has become a time when we are rediscovering the importance of anthropology—the question of who we are.
For me, one of the key contributors to the question has been the Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray, one of the more original British philosophers of the 20th century. Born in 1891, Macmurray’s most important work was his two-volume The Form of the Personal: In these works, he developed his central thesis that the human person is fundamentally an agent-in-relation, not an isolated thinker. His philosophy can be read as an attempt to recover the primacy of personal relations, trust, and community in a fractured world.
Following one of the definitions of personhood given by the medieval philosopher Boethius, the self, for Macmuury is constituted in relation. Our personhood arises through our relationships of mutual recognition, trust, and love. To be a “person” is to live in what he calls the personal mode—a way of being that is open, responsive, and oriented toward others as ends in themselves, not as objects to be used. Authentic human life is grounded not in utility, but in communion. Our emotions, especially love, are not, then, irrational forces to be controlled, but essential to our knowing and being. In short, for Macmurray, personhood is not something we have as individuals—it is something we become, together. As he wrote, “the relation of persons is constitutive of their identity. They can only be themselves and realise their freedom as agents through their relations to one another.”[2] To put it simply, we are our relationships. We exist in relationship or not at all.
Macmurray’s relational account of the person fed into a number of important streams of 20th century thought, especially in theology, ethics, education, and social philosophy, in theologians of the Trinity such as John Zizoulas and Jürgen Moltman, in thinkers such as Paulo Freire and Charles Taylor, and in ecclesiologists such as Joseph Ratzinger. All of them, in different ways, emphasise dialogue, mutuality, and the transformation of persons through relationship rather than by the mere transmission of information.
Why is this foray into philosophical anthropology significant for what we celebrate with Fr Huy today? Surely not simply to indulge Fr Huy’s personal passion of things philosophical! No, rather because what we celebrate in the ordination of a new priest can only be understood properly through the relationships by which ministerial priesthood is defined.
For St Pope John Paul II, this was absolutely key. In Pastores dabo vobis of 1992, he declared the ecclesiology of communion as, “decisive for understanding the identity of the priest, his essential dignity, and his vocation and mission among the People of God and in the world.”[3] The pope stressed that the ministry of the priest is entirely on behalf of the Church. It aims at promoting the exercise of the common priesthood of the entire people of God and at empowering the community of ministries that ensue in the common priesthood.[4]
So significantly, this intrinsic inter-relationship is not one of mere juxtaposition. As the pope wrote, “It is not a question of relations which are merely juxtaposed, but rather of ones which are interiorly united in a kind of mutual immanence.”[5] A kind of mutual immanence. In other words, the priesthood of the baptized and the priesthood of the ordained minister exist in one another, they are to live in each other’s heart and very being. The priest is persona Christi, the one who stands in the person of Christ, only because at one and the same time he is persona ecclesiae, the one who stands in the person of the Church.
As Tillard remarks, the priest’s ministry is to be a “ministry of transparency, its aim is to reveal and radiate the priesthood of the risen Christ” as it lives in the community.[6] “It is not something that belongs to us personally; it is not something that increases our personal value,” as Albert Vanhoye would write, but rather something entirely directed to the community of the baptised.[7] The one ordained is reconfigured in his very being because his primary relationship now has become sealed to the living, sacramental body of the Risen One, the community of the Church. This Body is not particular glamorous; it is a field hospital to use the analogy of Pope Francis. This Body is full of paradox: holy and sinful; divine and earthly; risen and wounded, transparent and opaque. Yet we are to see ourselves in and through that community, and now only in such a way. Its hopes are my hopes, its wounds are my wounds, its struggle is mine; its joy is mine. This is the bold affirmation of the newly ordained.
Fr Huy, it is only through the heart of this community, and not apart from it, that Christ has called you and most importantly will continue to call you. Perhaps it adds a new dimension to the significance of your priestly motto, miserando atque eligendo – “by having mercy and by choosing” – which you draw from the famous painting, The Calling of St Matthew by Caravaggio. There, in the interplay of light, attention, hesitation and recognition, Jesus waits in the shadow drawing forth and awakening Matthew’s identity away from the figures surrounding him who are absorbed in counting coins, still enclosed within the logic of possession and self-referentiality. He calls Matthew forth into a new relationship, signified by the figure of St Peter, so that Matthew’s conversion is not simply a personal encounter but rather equally an ecclesial act. Jesus’ call brings Matthew into the Church. The call, coming through the world, awakens something both personal and ecclesial at one and the same time.
Fr Huy, the community of the Church to which you are reconfigured in a new way by your Ordination now becomes the source of your identity. Love it with passion, learn from it with humility, serve it with grace. Make its beauty and its pain your own, so that it may likewise see itself in you. Never cease to cultivate a heart that listens, a gaze that encourages and an intelligence that discerns. Then both you and the community of the Church will grow together to discover our shared identity in the One in and through whom we are given our future, Christ Jesus our Lord.
[1] Pope Leo XIV, “Drawing New Maps of Hope”, Apostolic Letter on the 60th Anniversary of the Conciliar Declaration Gravissimum educationis (27 October 2025), n 5.2.
[2] John Macmurray, Persons in Relation, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 119.
[3] John Paul II, Pastores dabo vobis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Formation of Priests in the Present Circumstances (25 March 1992), n.12.
[4] Pastores dabo vobis, n. 17.
[5] Pastores dabo vobis, n. 17. See also John Paul II, Pastores Gregis: Shepherds of the Flock, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Bishop, Servant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the Hope of the World, (16 October 2003), n.9.
[6] Jean Tillard, “The Ordained Minister,” One in Christ 9 (1978), 238.
[7] Albert Vanhoye, Accogliamo Cristo nostro Sommo Sacerdote, (Vatican City, 2008), 175-176, cited in Brendan Leahy, “A Spirituality of Communion: Spirituality for the Diocesan Priest,” Spirituality 1 (January-February 2010), 28.
