I gave this homily this evening at a Mass opening the veneration of the heart of Saint John Vianney here at the Cathedral.
Day after day this crippled man was carried to the the “the Beautiful Gate,” where he would beg money from everyone coming to pray. And when Peter and John came by, he expected to get something, but not what he got. He wanted a twenty money, but they gave him Jesus.
When the two disciples were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus they encountered a stranger along the way. They expected to get a sympathetic ear, but not what they got. They got Jesus.
And each time people go looking for a Priest, they expect to get something. And what do they get?
Hopefully they get Jesus, for it is from the hands of the Priest that the Church receives Christ’s own Body and Blood. “How great is the priest!” the Curé once wrote. “If [the priest] but realized what he was, he would die…” (1)
The priest, he taught us, is “a Good Shepherd, a Pastor after God’s own heart…” (2) For “who put [Christ] there in the tabernacle? The Priest. Who welcomed your soul at the beginning of life? The Priest. Who feeds your soul and gives it strength for the journey? The Priest; and who will prepare your soul to appear before God…? The priest, ever the priest.” (3)
What a glorious description of who the Priest is. Or rather, who the Priest is supposed to be.
For, sadly, in every generation, the Curé reminds us some Priests “grow tepid.”(4)
Sometimes, seeking the approval of the masses, they preach themselves and not Christ Jesus. Sometimes, unfaithful or neglectful of the flock, they abuse the very ones they have been called to nurture and protect.
Sometimes they have been corrupted by the world, blinded by the cataracts which have clouded their eyes of faith, eyes which on the day of ordination saw the Lord and his Church and his beloved people with such loving clarity: On the day when, Chrism still wet on his hands, all he wanted to do was give his life to Christ and to his Church. But then, slowly, something happened, and now he no longer sees so clearly.
I like that analogy, if I do say so myself, as last fall I had cataracts quite literally removed from my eyes. The lenses in both of my eyes had slowly yellowed and calcified through the years, to the point where glasses could no longer compensate for my deteriorating vision. And, you know, it happened so slowly, that I was barely able to detect that I could no longer see as once I could.
The same happens in life, and even in the priesthood, as little compromises degrade our ability to see. Priests, even priests, stop praying the Liturgy of the Hours, stop going to confession and stop spending time before the Blessed Sacrament.
And before you know it, their hearts become calcified by the refusal to find the Lord in prayer, in the Mass or in the poor. His first pure love has become clouded by his desire for worldly gain, reputation, or comfort, until life becomes no longer about the giving of his heart, but compensation for past sacrifices and rewarding himself for how good he is.
Which is why, in every age, God, in his mercy, raises up prophetic voices to lead us out of the shadow of death and confusion into the light of his truth. Men like the pastor of Ars, whose heart we sit and pray before this night.
And, fortunate for us, the blessed little Curé offers us three prescriptions for every Priest who is tempted or who has lost his way. Three ways to remove cataracts that keep him from seeing with the same crystal clear vision which he knew so many years ago.
First, the Curé tells us: Teach Christ by being Christ for others. Be an alter Christus, imitate and reflect him in all that you do. For evangelization is always better accomplished by example than by even the most eloquent exhortation. Or, in the words of Pope Saint Paul VI, “modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” (5)
Like the old priest I was fascinated by when I was a child. I remember how every time he would come into Church before Mass, he would kneel in front of the tabernacle and put his head in his hands for a good long time. And I would wonder: what is he doing? and what is he saying to Jesus? I marveled at the intimate relationship he seemed to have with God, and I knew, way down deep inside that I too wanted that same kind of relationship, that familiarity, that same kind of being in love with God.
Like the young Father Rueger, the new curate at Our Lady of Lourdes in Millbury. In second grade I can still remember my mother and father commenting on how earnest this young Priest was to be when he celebrated the Mass, and how happy he seemed whenever he would give out Holy Communion. And as I look back, I wonder whether maybe he had once read the Cure’s words: “How good it is for a priest each morning to offer himself to God in sacrifice!” (6)
And when he offered himself in Sacrifice, he became one with the great High Priest, who offered the perfect Sacrifice upon the Cross for our salvation, and when they looked at the new curate they saw Christ crucified out of love for them. And that, in a post-revolutionary secularized French Society, is how John Vianney turned even empty confessionals into “great hospitals of souls." (7)
Secondly, the Curé tells us: Never take the credit. All the credit belongs to God. For it is neither the confessor nor the penitent who deserves the credit for getting someone to go to confession, “but God himself who runs after the sinner and makes him return to him.” (8) It is God who does the work, and we, often reluctantly and imperfectly, play our very small part.
Such a confessor, who knows that he is but the unworthy channel of God’s mercy, acts with humility, compassion and understanding. He is the kind of confessor that makes it easy for every penitent to confess eagerly and without fear.
Such a confessor calls the lukewarm and indifferent to authentic contrition by hjs own sorrow, for he demonstrates that he is one of them. “I weep,” (9) the Curé would tell penitents, “because you don’t weep.” And he had but one recipe for being a good confessor: “I give sinners a small penance,” he says, “and the rest I do in their place.” (10)
Which leads us to the last lesson the Curé has for Priests today: Sacrifice yourselves for your flock the way Christ sacrificed himself for you. “Souls have been won at the price of Jesus’ own blood,” he advises, “and a priest cannot devote himself to their salvation if he refuses to share personally in the precious cost of redemption.” (11)
Here too, I think of our beloved and recently departed brother, Bishop Rueger, who more than anything else is remembered as a good Priest. A good Priest who, upon receiving a gift, would in the next moment give it away. Who never had much money, because he gave it to those who needed it more. But who spent something more than cash. He spent himself for all those whom God would send to him.
Bishop George Rueger and the Curé of Ars would have understood Father Otto Neururer, a timid priest from a small Austrian farm town, who became famous for baptizing babies in Dachau, where he was first sent, but even more so in Buchenwald, where he was explicitly forbidden to administer any of the sacraments. But the child had been born in the camp and needed to be baptized before she died and he was a priest. So he baptized her, and was sent to the punishment block, where they hung him by barbed wire, upside down, until he died at the age of 49.
As they would have understood Father Ragheed Ganni, who refused to close his Church in Mosul, despite threats from Islamic extremists a few years ago. He was just seven years ordained when they stopped his car after Mass and asked him why he did not respond to their threats. He looked the gunman in the eye and asked him "How can I close the house of God?” So they shot him and tried to burn his body.
And they all would have understood Father Thomas Byles, when he refused to get into the lifeboat. He was leading the people from steerage up onto the decks of the Titanic, when, as a survivor later wrote, ‘One sailor warned the priest of the danger and begged him to board a boat. Father Byles refused [to] leave while even one was left.” Wrote another woman: ”After I got in the boat, which was the last one to leave, and we were slowly going further away from the ship, I could hear distinctly the voice of the priest and the responses to his prayers. Then they became fainter and fainter, until I could only hear the strains of 'Nearer My God, to Thee' and the screams of the people left behind.”
That’s why the priest who first inspired you, probably a lot like the Curé of Ars, gets up to pray for the dying man at 2:30 in the morning and why he takes the assignment no one else wants, because that’s what the Church needs him to do. It’s why he gives away his last dollar and last coat to the one who shivers. It’s why he loves them so much that he continues to patiently speak the truth, even while they scream in his face. It’s why he forgoes the world for the Cross. It’s why when others look forward to retirement at the beach, his only ambition is to give his final breath in service to the Lord whom he has promised to love unto death.
And that’s why we pray before that heart tonight. A priest’s heart. Which looks a lot like the Sacred Heart, which is our hope and our salvation.
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1 - "Jean-Marie Vianney, cure d'Ars, sa pensee, son coeur presentes par l'Abbe Bernard Nodet, editions Xavier Mappus, LePuy, 1958, page 97.
2 - Ibid., page 101.
3 - Ibid., pages 98-99.
4 - Ibid., page 102.
5 - Pope Saint Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi, 41.
6 - Ibid., page 104.
7 - MONNIN, A., op. cit., II, page 293.
8 - NODET, page 128.
9 - Ibid., page 27.
10 - Ibid., page 189
11 - Pope Benedict XVI, Letter Proclaiming a Year for Priests on the 150th Anniversary of the Dies Natalis of the Curé of Ars. 16 June 2009.
