I am getting my Religious Priesthood course ready for the Fall 2026 semester, and every time I open my lecture notes and PowerPoints for this class, I remember that it did not start out this way. I developed this course many years ago as a spirituality course. While I was away from Catholic Theological Union and working for the Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome, it was transformed into what it is now: “Theology and Spirituality of Religious Priesthood,” a required course for our MDiv students on the ordination track. But every semester, whatever its official name, I am really teaching the same thing: the priesthood we all share, ordained and non-ordained, religious and lay, by virtue of our baptism.

Last year's class was a good example of why I love teaching it. I had various religious men in simple or solemn vows seeking ordination. I had one man, an Augustinian in vows who was not seeking ordination at all. And I had one real seminarian, by which I mean a man seeking ordination for a particular diocese.

I know it is easier and more common to call all ordination-track students "seminarians." I do not like to do that with men in vows, and I have my reasons. Before joining the Sacred Heart Province of the Friars Minor, I was once a seminarian for the Diocese of Brownsville, so I know the word from the inside out. A seminarian can leave whenever he likes. He has no promises or vows binding him to a bishop, a local church, or a community. Religious are different. They cannot simply leave whenever they like. They are bound by some form of vow, simple, perpetual or solemn, and that binding is not incidental to who they are. It is the word itself.

This semester the distinction is not only theological for me. It is familia. I discovered last year that I have a nephew, "hijo de mi prima hermana," who is a seminarian for the Diocese of San Diego, preparing for ordination. He will be auditing my course this term. As his Tío I am delighted to have him in the room (virtually), even though he is not a religious and will profess no vows. I hope to be his Tío-logian for the semester. He belongs in a spirituality of priesthood course, and that itself is a small lesson. This course, like the priesthood it studies, is not a fence. It is an open table and has room for a diocesan seminarian, for religious in vows, for anyone, man or woman, the Spirit sends to learn how to serve.

Religious comes from the Latin religere, to bind together. This is why the Church calls men and women from the various forms of consecrated life "religious": they are bound to a monastery if they are monks or nuns, bound to a community if they are friars or sisters, bound to one another in ministry if they belong to a society, a congregation, an apostolic institute. The vocabulary is not decoration. It is theology wearing a habit and work clothes.

I like words. I know that a word can hold an entire reality and culture folded up inside it, which is why I nitpick the way I do. Seminarian is one of my nitpicks. It will not be the last. My students will soon enough learn that I nitpick the word priest as well, for the same reason: the word is doing more work than we usually let it.

Here is the nitpick. All my students are already priests. Not someday, not pending ordination: already, by virtue and grace of baptism. We all share in the royal priesthood of Jesus Christ through the waters we were baptized in. My own course names this distinction directly; one topic on the syllabus is simply Common and Ministerial Sacerdotium, sacerdotium commune and sacerdotium ministeriale, because the two need to be held together, not confused and not separated. Religious life does not add another priesthood to that common baptismal one. It is meant to be a more radical living out of the priesthood we already have in baptism.

I notice this most clearly when I read the Vatican documents since Vatican II in their original languages. Where the English translation gives us one word, priest, the Latin, Italian, and Spanish usually keep three ministries distinct: sacerdos, presbyteros, even curate. Traduttore, traditore, the Italians say: the translator is a traitor. Collapsing three words into one is not a small loss. It quietly removes the baptized from any share in the priesthood of Christ and hands the whole thing over to the ordained. And once priesthood belongs only to the ordained, it is a short step to thinking that ordination is about power and authority rather than about ministry and service exercised in partnership with the laity and with religious men and women.

That is exactly why the Augustinian friar who was not seeking ordination had every right to be sitting in that classroom. He was not there to prepare for something he lacked. He was there to learn how to exercise, more deeply and more deliberately, the triple munera of Christ, priest, prophet, and king, that Christian priesthood carries. He learned it as a lay brother, and he learned it well.

I long for the day when religious women sit in that same room. I want to hear how a woman in vows exercises her own share in this priesthood, what her munera look like lived out in community, in ministry, in the cotidiano of consecrated life. The course was built on the whole Church's imagination of Religious Priesthood, and right now half the witnesses who could teach it best are missing.

This semester we will also sit with the priesthood of Santa María herself, a priesthood that sustains the priesthood of the presbyters and models the priesthood of the baptized, both at once. The ordained offer bread and wine at the Eucharistic banquet. The non-ordained, and the Mother of our Lord before any of them, offer their own flesh and blood by doing the will of the Father in their cotidiano, as mothers, brothers and sisters of Jesus guided by the Holy Spirit. Hers is a priesthood that was never ordained and never needed to be. It was simply lived in a continual fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.

¿Y qué? Words like seminarian and priest are not fences to keep people out. They are keys, and if we use them carelessly, we lose the rooms they were meant to open and we keep the baptized from exercising their full potential as sharers in the Royal Priesthood of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Hermano.

Paz y bienestar,

Fray Gilberto