Praises be Jesus Christ.
Carissima Familia, my dearest family, today is the beautiful feast of the patron of parish priests, St. Jean Vianney. As a parish priest, I often get to sit with people and listen to their stories, and it is a great blessing. This morning I was with a young man, and was reminded – as he was telling me about where he lives and how he lives – that every time that I meet someone, I encounter some place I have never been to before. I really do not know the dwelling places of every person. Peter Kreeft comments that there is at least one fact about another person that we do not know. This is especially true of the young people of our community. And this leads me to remember the story of Saint Jean Vianney journeying to his first pastoral appoint in Ars.
Seminary was difficult for Jean. He was terrible at Latin and so they thought him not the most promising priest …. he was actually quite brilliant. So they sent him out to a really backwater parish, Ars, thinking that “What harm could he do in such a disastrous parish?”, he can’t do any wrong there because it’s just a disaster, sort of like Holy Spirit parish. Off to Ars he went, not really knowing quite where it was. On his way there, he met a young boy, and so he asked, “Do you know where Ars is?” When the boy answered positively, Fr. Vianney said, “Well, you show me the way to Ars, and I will show you the way to heaven”. And that is essentially what is to be the life of a priest. When you show me the way to where you are in your life, my job as a priest is to show you the way to heaven. Show you the way to heaven… not to make you feel good, not to tickle your ears, not to get you to love me, not for you to put money in the collection. My service is not to sound exactly like you wish me to sound so that you can settle into a safe, mediocre, life in which you control everyone – including God – just like the Pharisees bossily trying to tell people everyone what to do and to put people in neat categories. That’s not what my job is. The job of a priest is to show people the way to heaven. That simple. That beautiful.
That challenging. Why because we live amidst the results of our willful rejection of God. The Lord says through Jeremiah, “I have dealt you the blow of an enemy, the punishment of a merciless foe, because your guilt is great and your sins are numerous” (Jer. 30:14). Is this God’s initiative punishing us in anger? God is a good parent, a good parent who says:
‘These are the consequences of your actions. I’m not going to lie to you. You’ve been smoking all the time. You’re going to get sick, right? You’ve been ignoring me. You’ve been turning away from me. You’ve been addicted to materialistic things. You’ve put your hope in technology. You’ve let yourself be led by people who are just simply using you, and you are distracted from what is true. You’re angry and you’re bitter. You just want everything to be about you. Here are the consequences. I’m not going to hide you from them. And my priests. I want them to be those who lead you to heaven, like Jeremiah, who bring the good news that I have let this happen and I am building you up.’
‘Their children shall be as of old; their congregation shall be established before me, and I will punish all who oppress them… And you shall be my people, and I will be your God.” (Jer. 30:20,22), says the Lord.
We haven’t listened to that for the longest time. We asked our priests to be fat Vestal Virgins. You know what a Vestal Virgin was? At the center of Rome, the sacred center of Rome, was the fire of Vesta. Vesta was the goddess of the hearth. Everything would be happy if that fire burned, but if it went out, Rome was in for a crazy difficult time. So, they would get young women to become vestal virgins who would tend the fire so that it was always glowing. And if these virgins were fat, if they were healthy, if they kept the fire going, then everything was ‘fine.’ But most of the time this was simply pretence because everything was not fine in the Roman Empire, as we well know. The fire of earthly power keeping people content serves only to obscure the truth.
Is this what the Church of the last decades has found itself doing? We had – hah, I should talk! – fat, well-shaven, comfortable, powerful priests that reminded everyone: Do not worry, “it is all good”. We priests found it easy to do this and maintain the institution and keep the fires burning. And what happened? There are no priests. The replacement of priests in service is just not possible at all.
Yet this is God’s work … and I think there are priests coming. See these young lads that are here? That’s why here in this parish, we don’t have altar girls. Not because we don’t like women, but because its not their vocation to become priests. The vocation of the Church is to lead people to heaven, not to keep the fires of earthly standards which really say: ‘oh, it’s all okay, let’s be nice, let’s not challenge everything’. The Vocation of the Church and her priests is to be what St. Jean Vianney modeled and what Jeremiah proclaimed. We are to speak saying “You know, things are out of whack, but God is here. He will save his people. And the fire that burns is the fire of the heart of Jesus”
In His Heart lies the adventure of loving, not the adventure of being loved and tending the feelings of the flock, being pastors who take care of those who feeling bad are resigned to having some momentary happiness in their life. This is priestly adventure of being part of the fire of Jesus that burns away all that is broken in this world and allows us to see heaven bursting into our midst. This is the fire most clearly burned for St. Jean Vianney in the confessional.
Sadly, with the modernization of the Church, it was the confessional that died because we didn’t want to confront the consequences of our sins. We gave in to a desire that our Church and our priests pat us on the head and make us feel good, even though we were dying to a living relationship with God. Now the Lord is doing something new. The Lord is at work in His Church. Oh, it will be small sparks. But we don’t worry about that since we began with the Heart of one Man, that set on fire twelve men, that set on fire the women who walked with the Lord and tended and kept the disciples strong. Not vestal virgins, but strong Apostles in the Lord. These few women and these few men changed the world. And that is what’s happening today. I see it.
So Let us pray the Lord of the harvest, that he gives us the strength to encourage in the life of our boys (for on the Feast of a priest I am reflecting on priests) the desire for adventure not for be comfort. Is this a challenge? I remember, oh 35 years ago, a woman coming in to see me because her son wished going into the seminary and she didn’t want him to because she thought that that was the way of suffering, of not having enough money. She was upset. And she wanted me, a priest, to talk him, a seminarian, out of being a priest! I didn’t. Today, he’s a holy priest.
Let us bring that fire of encouragement. Don’t force anyone, but not be those who are afraid like the Pharisees and want to control everything. Let us be confident that the way that the Lord gives to us is the way to heaven, and let us pray that He might send us priests, holy men, who will say to each of us, ‘where do you live? Show me where you live, and I will show you the way to heaven’.
Let us be holy. Let us be saints.