Father John Hardon, the Eucharist and More

He was ordained to the priesthood on June 18, 1947, his thirty-third birthday. Reflecting on the grace of his ordination and the pastoral mission which lay ahead, Hardon writes,

After being ordained to the priesthood in 1947, I still had several years of preparation for my final ministry. Unexpectedly, I was told that my vocation would be to prepare men to train priests. Never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate what this would mean. It would mean long preparation in understanding the Catholic faith, and I mean understanding the Catholic faith. Not only that, but the price that had to be paid in defending what had become the most trying century of Catholic Christianity.[5]

After his ordination, Fr. Hardon was sent for two years of special doctoral studies in theology to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Hardon was appointed director of the graduate library as well. He suffered greatly when asked by his superior to personally retrieve all of the heretical volumes which had been borrowed by graduate students. Hardon writes, “Before I had retrieved one-half of the heretical books, I had become the agent of orthodoxy and therefore the sworn enemy of the modernists, who were updating the Catholic faith to its modernist theology. I had doors slammed in my face. I lost friends whom I had considered believers,”