In Persona Christi (In the Person of Christ) means that, a priest acts for Christ in conferring Grace when presiding over a Sacrament. In this sense, it is Christ, working through the Priest, that, for example, turns bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, or forgives the sins of a penitent during the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Pope Paul VI, in Inter Insignores writes, The Church's constant teaching, repeated and clarified by the Second Vatican Council and again recalled by the 1971 Synod Of Bishops and by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its Declaration of 24th June 1973, declares that the bishop or the priest in the exercise of his ministry, does not act in his own name, in persona propria: he represents Christ, who acts through him: "the priest truly acts in the place of Christ', as St. Cyprian already wrote in the third century.

It is this ability to represent Christ that St.Paul considered as characteristic of his apostolic function (2 Cor. 5:20; Gal. 4:14). The supreme expression of this representation is found in the altogether special form it assumes in the celebration of the Eucharist, which is the source and centre of the Church's unity, the sacrificial meal in which the People of God are associated in the sacrifice of Christ: the priest, who alone has the power to perform it, then acts not only through the effective power conferred on him by Christ, but in persona Christi, taking the role of Christ, to the point of being his very image, when he pronounces the words of consecration.

View all: Christian Questions