Hi, my name's Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down through

the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a year is brought to you by Ascension.

In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church discovering our identity in God's family as we journeyed together toward a heavenly home. This is Day 211. We're reading paragraphs 1539 to 1545. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the Foundations of Faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in a year reading plan by visiting

ascensionpress.com slash CIY. And also you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for your daily

updates and daily notifications. Today is day 211. We're reading paragraphs 1539 to 1545.

Yesterday, we started talking about these last two sacraments, the sacraments of service,

sacraments of vocation, sacraments of mission. You might want to call them all of those things.

The grounding for all of this, of course, is the fact that we've been initiated into the body of Christ.

We've been brought into the family of Christ. We've been brought into the family

of God. We've been transformed into God's sons and daughters through baptism, strengthened by

confirmation and fed by the Eucharist. Of course, here we are trying to live this out. So yesterday,

we started talking about these two sacraments of mission, these sacraments of service called

Holy Orders and Matrimony. And yesterday, we further talked about how Holy Orders is divided into essentially three degrees, the

Episcopate, which means bishops, the presbyterate priests, and the deaconate deacons.

And here we are today.

We're looking at how was that priesthood realized in the old covenant and how is it fulfilled in Jesus Christ? It's pretty straightforward today, which is pretty amazing. But also there's some beautiful prayers here, a prayer from the ordination of bishops, a prayer from the ordination of priests, and the prayer from the ordination of deacons that we're

going to look at. And then, of course, everything culminates. Everything goes back to the Old

Testament because that's how God began calling his people in the priesthood of the Levites,

remember tribe of Levi. But it gets fulfilled. Everything gets fulfilled in Jesus and in the

establishment of his church.

So we're talking about that today.

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