​Dear brothers and sisters, dear Fr. Ben, it is a joy to be with you today as we celebrate your first Mass, a Mass of thanksgiving for your priestly ordination, offered up through the intercession of our Blessed Mother Mary, Immaculately Conceived.  
 
It is an especial honour for me to preach at this Mass.  Fr. Ben, you were one of my dear students who came to our Catholic chaplaincy and, with the passing of time, we became friends.  Yesterday, you became my brother in the priesthood of Our Lord Jesus Christ and I am delighted to have you as a companion in this fullest of ways in the Kingdom of God.  I seem to remember that, even before you began frequenting our chaplaincy, you had your sights set on the priesthood, having been raised in the Church of the Motherwell diocese and inspired by the fine example of your local priests.  Formed by your natural family and the family of the Church you brought to our chaplaincy the infectious happiness of faith and a characteristic generosity towards me as chaplain. Going off to seminary in Rome you have been ever obliging when I needed something doing or a friend hosted and I have longed for some opportunity to return the thanks to you.  I pray for you today, as I have done regularly in my daily Rosary, for Our Blessed Mother to look after you as Her beloved son.
 
It is no surprise to me that you have chosen to give thanks to God for your priesthood, first of all, by honouring Our Blessed Mother Mary, the Mother of priests.  In honoring Her as the Immaculately Conceived, you offer your first Mass as a priest celebrating the great truth of our faith in the Virgin Mary conceived without original sin. 
 
In doing so, of course, you affirm the awful reality of sin and the havoc it has created, which is plain all around us to see; in our distance from God, our broken relationships with each other and Creation, and the dark wound we experience, each one of us, lurking within our hearts.  Blessed John Henry Newman shrewdly observed how the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin is the most immediately obvious and convincing to us of all the truths of our faith because we experience its disappointing and undermining effect every day in our lives.  The good we want to do we all too often leave undone, while the evil we resolve so definitely to avoid we find ourselves succumbing to all too readily.  It is obvious that something has gone wrong with humanity that does not seem to be the case with any other creature.  At one and the same time we find ourselves so clearly masters of Creation and yet so irredeemably enslaved to our own selves.  Left unchecked Original would obliterate the human race, so pernicious it is, except for the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His name alone, to stop it in its tracks.
 
Thanks be to God, Our Heavenly Father intervened and sent His Only Begotten Son to interrupt and end this history of sin as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world.
 
It is wise for you to begin your priestly ministry with this basic doctrine because only in terms of this primordial battle between human sinfulness and God’s grace can we understand anything about our world and its situation, or about our faith, or about humanity’s absolute need for Our Lord Jesus.  To destroy sin and set us free He died on the Cross and in His rising destroyed the world’s enemy and restored our life.  So the Sacrifice of Calvary is the meaning of everything, the axis around which the world and every age revolves. From that moment on the Devil and his legion of spirits are ‘done for’ but we know all to well how they have redoubled their efforts to gather crumbs of comfort in distracting every possible human soul from reaching this saving grace.  Thus is set the drama of the world and the life of every human soul on it till the end of time.
The Virgin Mary comes to be in this context of sin and the Fall.  She arrives as the beginning of its end, as the first fruits of Her Son's definitive victory over the Devil.  The moment of Her conception is the moment of Our Heavenly Father’s decisive intervention to do something new, to change the game, to restore to humanity the holy and spotless state He had chosen for us before the world began   Where every human person till then had inherited the defect of Original Sin the Virgin Mary is now preserved from its stain and any claim of the Devil upon Her, in anticipation of the arrival of Her Son, to provide for Him a worthy Tabernacle on Earth, and to be the foretaste of Salvation He will bring to all mankind.  In Her Immaculate Conception God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, has blessed Her with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ and claimed Her for His own.  Her appearance is the dawning light of humanity’s hope in Christ before He came, that we would live again for His greater glory, as new songs in praise of His grace.
 
This is why your first Mass in honour of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary is so fitting and full of promise because your priesthood is the same priesthood of Her Son, Jesus, and continues His reversing of the sin of Adam till He comes again in glory.
 
At the heart of your priesthood will be your daily offering of Holy Mass and there you will raise the Host and say to Our Heavenly Father, ‘ The woman you put with us gave us this fruit to eat’.   Yes, for this food is the fruit of the New Eve’s womb, the Body of Her Son and so the Body of Christ.  As you, in your turn, pass it on to your people to eat you will watch them become robed in garments of Salvation, wrapped in the righteousness of God and adorned with Heavenly gifts, where once another food had only divested them of all grace.   Dear Fr. Ben, try to offer your daily Mass for your people as attentively and prayerfully as you can. On many days you will come to the altar tired and distracted with the cares and burdens of your ministry but may you never lose your astonishment at this so precious fruit of the Virgin’s womb that you cradle in your priestly hands, nor ever doubt its power to save your soul, the souls of your people and bring about the salvation of our world.
 
The same applies to your ministry of the Sacraments where you show yourself, above all, as a loving father and shepherd to your people, giving them new life in baptism, healing their weary souls in confessions, blessing their marriages and, at the last, commending them to God and their eternal reward.
 
Ever accompanying your priestly ministry will be your preaching of the Word of Life to your people so that they hear your words as Mary heard the words of the Angel Gabriel.  So let your words always arrive as a greeting that causes your people to rejoice that the Lord is with them, filling them with grace.  You should know that our people attach great importance to our homilies, which they see as a sort of touchstone of our closeness to them and their daily lives.  Though we might not always be aware of it our words often bring them some happy experience of the Holy Spirit, or a consoling encounter with God’s mercy, and they find in them a constant source of renewal and growth in their journey of faith.  So try to take care with and have confidence in your preaching, convinced that God Himself somehow reaches His people through your voice and shows His power to renew all things by means of your words.  Do preach every day and do not to be silent, remembering how it was more by the drip-drip of His wise and gracious words than by those one-off spectacular miracles that our Lord won the hearts of many who came from all parts to hear Him, amazed at his teachings.  They sensed how, in a world that often sounded like a cacophony of noise, they were now listening to the authority of God Himself. By their preaching the apostles, the first priests, brought all nations to the threshold of the Church, and so will you. 
 
Fr Ben, in a world saddened by sin, your priesthood arrives to us as full of God’s grace and, in a world troubled and perturbed at its future, He sends you to us as a Son of Mary, cause of our joy and hope for the world.  Through Her blessed intercession may God, Who has begun this good work in you, bring it to fulfilment.