"And the word of the Lord came to me, Son of man! prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them shepherds, Thus saith the Lord God, Woe unto the shepherds of Israel, who have shepherded themselves. Should not shepherds feed the flock? You ate fat (the most delicious part of the animal) and dressed yourself in waves, you slaughtered fattened sheep, but did not graze the flocks. The weak were not strengthened, and the sick sheep were not healed, and the wounded were not bandaged, and the stolen were not returned, and the lost were not sought, but they ruled them with violence and cruelty. And they were scattered without a shepherd, and when they were scattered, they became food for every beast of the field. My sheep are wandering in all the mountains, and in every high hill, and my sheep are scattered over all the face of the earth, and no one searches for them, and no one seeks them" (Ezekiel 34:1-6).

"Woe to the worthless shepherd who forsakes his flock! a sword on his hand and on his right eye! his hand shall be utterly withered, and his right eye shall be utterly dull" (Zech. 11:17).

"The mouth of the priest must keep knowledge, and the law is sought from his mouth, because he is a messenger of the Lord of hosts" (Mal. 2:7).

Advice to Young Priests by Father Alexander Elchaninov (+1934)

Pastoral work should be individual and creative. A method often practiced becomes a routine.

Any word or instruction has meaning and value only when it comes from one's own spiritual experience and knowledge. Every word spoken only with the lips is dead and false, and always those who hear it unerringly discern it.

"Pastoral" texts (I subscribe for guidance):

"We have been quiet among you, as a nurse tenderly treats her children" (1 Thess. 2). "I have become all things to all, that I might save some" (1 Cor. 9).

It is necessary to teach people to confess. How often, instead of confession, you hear completely mundane conversations, boasting about yourself, quoting good reviews about yourself, complaining about loved ones and about the difficulties of life. This is partly due to ignorance, from the lack of church culture, partly from sinful confusion, weakness, when a person does not know how to see himself and does not try to see himself, when he has neither the skill nor the desire to understand his soul, there is no aversion to sin, there is no desire for light and thirst for purification.

Try to make sure that all those who come to confession take away at least one good habit from each retreat – for example, obligatory prayer twice a day, non-condemnation, etc.; persistently inculcate, check — then it becomes a necessity itself.

It happens that, preparing for confession, the person who is fasting at times experiences fear of sin, sincere repentance to the point of tears, and when he comes to the priest, he feels nothing, has no fear and contrition. Is it possible to expand the limits of the sacrament? Is it not possible to consider that the sacrament of repentance includes all communion, prayers, and feelings of repentance, and that the moment of confession itself is only the final, albeit the most important, moment?

Every priest must be well informed in the field of nervous and mental illnesses – this is absolutely necessary in the practice of spiritual fatherhood.

It is a common case when the confessor, and with him the confessor, mistake a phenomenon of a purely nervous nature for religious experiences, or when the priest is unable to determine the hysterical background of many phenomena and thus only worsens the situation. And often the opposite is true: a serious state of the soul, burdened with sin, confused and overshadowed by unresolved conflicts, is mistaken for a nervous disease. There are cases when confession alone cured old and severe, supposedly nervous diseases, against which all medical means were powerless.

A person who confesses often, who does not have deposits of sin in his soul, cannot but be healthy. Confession is a grace-filled discharge of the soul. In this sense, the great importance of confession and of life in general in connection with the grace-filled help of the Church is enormous.