When I was in seminary a priest told me that “nothing can touch a man of prayer.” No real harm can come to a priest who is faithful to his prayer life, even when he doesn’t want to pray, or especially when he doesn’t want to pray.  John Paul II defined the “parish” as a “school of prayer” in his blueprint for the Third Millennium. 
   But how can a “faithful and wise servant”, of today’s Gospel, whether being a bishop, a priest or a parent, teach others to pray if he does not know how himself? It is hard to pray if you don’t know how. 
   We must make time for prayer, and continually work on our prayer life. 
   Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.” He is good because he knows the Father and the Father knows him. Only in knowing the Father can the good shepherd know his sheep. Only in knowing the Father can a priest know his people, and knowing, love them, and loving them, serve them. 
   The crisis of the priesthood, which began with Judas and will continue until the Second Coming—the crisis of unfaithful, scandalous priests, shepherds who eat their sheep, is fundamentally a crisis of faith. The crisis of vocations—the fact that the world has too few priests to meet the needs of the Church—is a crisis of faith, and nothing less. It is a crisis of priests who do not pray, and therefore know neither God nor their people. Not a few priests have been trained to be “activists” in seminaries—in bad seminaries—to consider prayer as something optional for those who like that kind of thing, but not essential to the priesthood. This is not true. A priest is essentially a man of prayer, as Jesus was essentially a man of prayer. 
   And so the key, it seems to me, to answer the question asked by The Good Shepherd, our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, on this Sunday: “Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his master has set over his household, to give them their food at the proper time?”, is priestly prayer. 
   Expect your priests to pray, to pray the Liturgy from the heart, to pray their breviaries faithfully, to make a daily holy hour, to go to confession every few weeks, to keep up their spiritual reading, to pray the rosary every day. In 12 years of serving this parish, today, no one has ever asked me if I’m faithful to my prayer life. A few good priest friends have asked me, but no one to whom I’m actually accountable—neither to my superiors nor the people I serve! Pray for your priests, yes, pray for vocations, but also expect and encourage your priests to pray as good shepherds, as Jesus, who knew the Father and the Father knew him through a consistent and intense interior life.