St. John Vianney and the Challenge to Today’s Priest: “What Shall I Do?”
Rev. Albert J. DeGiacomo, M.Div. Ph.D
Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky
Priests of the Diocese of Boise
St John Vianney Society,Boise, ID
October 1, 2009
Memorial of St. Therese of Lisieux
For Fr. Ron Knott, Institute for Priests and Presbyterates, St. Meinrad Archabbey and Seminary
St. John Vianney: we know the stories: Our Lady appeared to him. The devil set fire to his bed. The French government opened a special train line to Ars to accommodate all who wanted to see him. He told the widow of a suicide that, between the time her husband jumped from the bridge and his body hit the water, he had made an act of contrition and she would see him in heaven. He told penitents their sins -- especially the ones they had forgotten or were keeping from him. He sent an acolyte off with a candle to walk in front of an early mass-leaver to remind him that, having just received Holy Communion, he was a tabernacle. And then there is the famous exhortation to would-be penitents: that they were un-nailing Christ from the Cross when they confessed their sins. These vignettes illustrate Vianney’s holiness of life.
Holiness of life and the Year For Priests: To renew the holiness of the life of the priest; Pope Benedict says: “to deepen the commitment of all priests to interior renewal for the sake of a more forceful and incisive witness to the Gospel in today’s world” (Letter 1). That is the intention of this year for the priest as we well know. And St. John Vianney is our patron. Msgr. George Rutler, one of Vianney’s biographers, tells us that in the 1980s a group of French priest asked Pope John Paul II not to visit Ars because he was not an appropriate role model for today’s priest. John Paul, on the contrary not only went to Ars, but also made a stirring defense, “strongest assertion,” of the priesthood represented by Vianney (65). So St. John Vianney is to be an example to us. The implication is we need examples to remind us of the holiness to which we are called.
I was raised in Boston. In 1983 Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, Archbishop of Boston, died. Unlike most of the archbishops and bishops of Boston, Medeiros was not Irish, in this most Irish city in America. He was Portuguese. He was never really accepted by his priests, it was said at the time. When he died, the intention was to wake him in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross of course, the cathedral closing each night at 11:00. But the crowds were so vast and the lines so long that archdiocesan officials needed to keep the Cathedral open round the clock to accommodate all the Catholic faithful and all the people of good will who wished to pay their last respects to Humberto Medeiros. The comment was made in the Boston press: “The people knew a holy man when they saw one.” The clergy were amazed.
I remember, too, the death of Pope Paul VI in 1978. After the pontificate of the troubled, pained-looking Paul, the cardinals, it was announced in the international press, were looking for “a hopeful, holy man who smiles.” It was adjudged that was what the times needed. The cardinals elected a man with a magnificent smile who the people immediately recognized as hopeful and holy. They had elected Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I. The people immediately called him “Gian Paulo.” I still recall the headline in The Boston Globe: “To the people, another John” [XXIII]. He reigned for only thirty-three days. At his funeral, the cardinal who eulogized him [his former professor, Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri] said, “He only had time to be loved,” a most beautiful comment it seemed to me then -- and it still does. Noting the driving rain at this outdoor funeral, he commented “even the heavens weep.” All this in thirty-three days. He was not considered an intellect, not even to himself. In fact, at one of his Wednesday audiences, as the academic year was beginning, he said to the children present: “Boys and girls, if I had known as a school-boy that I was going to be pope one day, I would have studied much harder.” He never expected to be pope. He said “You don’t make gnocchi out of this dough.” So he was no intellect. Yet the people of Rome and the world embraced him. The lesson, of course, is that as far as the people are concerned, it is not how much you know, but how holy you are. And how hopeful you are, as the smiling ‘September Pope’ taught us.
We have further examples: Padre Pio whose memorial we just celebrated last week and Pope John Paul II. The people flocked to Padre Pio and wouldn’t leave him alone. Then at the funeral of Pope John Paul II, the people cried spontaneously, “Santo subito!” -- “Sainthood, soon.” Again, the people knew holy men when they saw them. These men are examples of what Pope Benedict, in his Letter Proclaiming a Year for Priests, calls “generous pastors…insightful, patient spiritual guides” (2).
Of course this was true of Saint John-Marie-Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859). The people recognized his holiness and clamored after him. His first scholarly biographer, Abbe Francois Trochu, relates the comment of Pierre Oriol a presumed eye-witness who contributed to the canonization investigations: “‘During the last year of his life, at least one hundred thousand strangers visited his church.’” (qtd. in Proces de l’Ordinaire in Trochu 546). Trochu continues: “People flocked to Ars with all haste, for they felt the end of the holy man’s life to be drawing near all too quickly. Everyone wished to see him, to hear him, and, if possible, to go to confession to him” (546).
The story is well-known that he, too, was no intellect. He almost did not get ordained. His mentor, Pere Balley said: “He is good.” The Vicar General, acting for the cardinal Archbishop of Lyons, said “Let him be ordained. The grace of God will do the rest” (Gheon 25). Finally, a Bishop said: “I do not know whether he is learned; but a heavenly light shines in him” (Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia 15; Gheon 87). But even at that, the priestly faculties granted him were limited, and it is ironic that the ministry for which he became most famous, reconciliation in the confessional, was denied him upon his ordination.
Pope Benedict has put St. John Vianney before us as a model to ponder. He says: “Let us ask the Lord Jesus for the grace to learn for ourselves something of the pastoral plan of St. John Mary Vianney” (2). John Vianney had a keen sense of his priestly identity. He knew what he was about. He told the young boy who greeted him at the outskirts of Ars upon his arrival: “You will show me the way to Ars. I will show you the way to heaven.” Yes, Vianney had a very high sense of the priest: “O, how great is the priest!...If he realized what he is, he would die…God obeys him: he utters a few words and the Lord descends from heaven at his voice, to be contained within a small host” (qtd. Benedict XVI Letter 2). He was determined in preparing for his duties. Blessed John XXIII says that Vianney prepared diligently for preaching. Rutler says “he often read in bed until overcome by sleep….books were among the few items on which he was willing to spend money” (68). His sizable library of 400 volumes in Ars (Rutler 68) attests to the fact that he took ‘continuing education’ seriously. Blessed John XXIII concludes: “His abilities…were not quite as limited as is sometimes believed, for he had a clear mind and sound judgment” (Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia 15). We are aware today of different intelligences and Vianney’s was what the world today calls emotional intelligence or spiritual intelligence. Henri Gheon, in “The Secret of the Cure of Ars,” says: “It is beyond dispute that he had a very considerable fund of natural intelligence, and his supernatural intelligence knew how to draw on it easily and with advantage”(115). Gheon cites “countless of his retorts – pleasant, humorous, cutting very deep” (115).
Pope Benedict says that Vianney can “serve as a significant point of reference for us all” (Letter 2). St. Ignatius of Loyola illustrates how reading the lives of the saints in his autobiography led him to conversion. He read about St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic and asked: “If this is what St. Francis did, what shall I do? If this is what St. Dominic did, what shall I do?” In his Spiritual Exercises Ignatius offers reading lives of the saints as a way to grow in holiness, a way to be inspired and to grow in our on-going conversion. The question is what are we to take from the example St. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Vianney “to deepen the commitment of all priests to interior renewal for the sake of a more forceful and incisive witness to the Gospel in today’s world” (Letter 1) which will in turn affect our people? Blessed John XXIII, in his first encyclical The First Days of Our Priesthood (Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia), written on the 100th anniversary of the death of St. John Vianney, 1959, reminds us: “The eternal fate of many men is bound up with his [the priest’s] pastoral interest and care and the example of his priestly life. Is not this thought powerful enough both to stir up the lackadaisical in an effective way and to urge on to greater efforts those who are already zealous in the work of Christ” (14)? Vianney’s example reminds us that the people know. Gheon says that in his first assignment in Ecully: “Wherever he went, simple people guessed what he was sooner than the learned and instinctively offered him special reverence” (Gheon 26). The following anecdote made an impression on me: a year ago I met Archbishop Joseph Kurtz in his cathedral in Louisville. I brought him greetings from a priest, a mutual friend, in another diocese. When I mentioned his name, Archbishop Kurtz remarked, “He’s a great athlete.” When I related the Archbishop’s remark to our mutual friend, he said, “I wish he had said, ‘He’s a great priest.’”
How do we priests today adapt St. John Vianney
for our own “interior renewal for the sake of a more forceful and incisive witness to the Gospel in today’s world.” How do we adapt his methods for our time to lead our people? St. John Vianney attracted people to God, but initially the people of Ars rejected him and attacked him. Might we not drive people away if we imitated him without adaptation? Would his “pastoral plan” (Pope Benedict. Letter 2) work today transplanted to 21st century USA? We can say: “This is what St. John Vianney did” and ask “What shall I do?”
I watched the opening ceremonies of the Year for Priests televised from Rome on June 19. I saw the relic of Vianney’s heart rolled down the central aisle of St. Peter's Basilica, and I thought ‘I'd love to go to Rome this year as part of the year for the priest.’ So I went to Rome last July. I got to St. Peter’s and looked around. I couldn’t find the relic of St. John Marie Vianney! I asked several guards where I could find it, and no one knew. Finally one of them told me: “It has gone back to Ars.” So I drew from this, that my own answer to the question ‘what shall I do’ would require more than this pilgrimage to Rome. Of course, it would.
So what is a priest today to do?
It might seem that a priest’s life may be more difficult to lead today. Yet I marveled when I read of St. Gregory the Great’s struggles in the excerpt from a homily by him in our breviary on his recent feast day [September 3]: “I recognize that I am slothful and negligent…Indeed when I was in the monastery I could curb my idle talk and usually be absorbed in my prayers. Since I assumed the burden of pastoral care, my mind can no longer be collected; it is concerned with so many matters. ….With my mind divided and torn to pieces by so many problems, how can I meditate or preach wholeheartedly without neglecting the ministry of proclaiming the Gospel?” (Liturgy of the Hours, IV. 1366).
Was it easier in Vianney’s day? Was the world more accepting of faith and of God? Vianney’s world had been challenged by the terror of the French Revolution. And the people of Ars at first resisted him and attacked his reputation. We, too, are at odds with our culture (Rutler 92). The abortion controversy is clearest example of the sign of contradiction that we are. We priests can also be caught up in our consumer society and the standard of the world, rather than the standard of God.
St. John Vianney told his bishop: “If you want the whole diocese to be converted to God, all the cures must become holy” (qtd. Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia 18). So what is a priest to do? What shall I do in my particular time and place so different in many ways from Vianney’s? Blessed John XXIII, writing in 1959, could be writing today. He observes: “For, at a time when you find flourishing everywhere the power of money, the allure of pleasures of the senses, and too great an esteem for technical achievements, they want to see in him [their priest] a man who speaks in the name of God, who is animated by a firm faith, and who gives no thought to himself, but burns with intense charity” (Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia 19). How do we do this? ‘What shall I do?: in a small country parish where I am alone except for few volunteers who count the Sunday collection or in a large city parish with a full staff of lay professionals or in a situation somewhere in between?
The Bishop of Providence, Most Rev Thomas Tobin, issued a pastoral letter to his priests for The Year for the priest. It is refreshing because it speaks honesty about how weak we priests are. We are after all human earthen vessels. He writes: “We are often aware of the human dimension of our priesthood. We frequently experience our own weakness, our limitations, our absolute need for God in our lives. Who among us hasn’t wrestled with his own sinfulness?....Perhaps you, like I, have failed to be completely faithful to the commitments we’ve made to God and the Church….How soon after Ordination Day we discover the immanence of our work and quickly find out that being a priest isn’t always exciting; that sometimes it’s very routine and in fact, just plain boring….In these and many other moments we know exactly what it means to be an “earthen vessel” (Tobin 3-4). He doesn’t leave it here though. He exhorts his priests -- and us -- that we must never give up and submit to discouragement, nor grow complacent, but that we should use “all the means at our disposal” to grow in holiness every day. When we are feeling overwhelmed by a crushing burden and might want to flee, we can pray to St. John Marie Vianney, who three times in his life fled his parish at Ars, so tired was he.
So again, “what shall I do?” Each priest is unique and he must answer this for himself. But the point is: he must answer it. The purpose of this year, as I see it, is to remind us of who we are and to whom we belong. The Holy Father is not prescriptive in what we are to do. He gives general directives of prayer, penance and renewed dedication to the sacrament of reconciliation. Pope Benedict XVI’s recent homily to men he was about to ordain bishop is apt for us as well. Pope Benedict’s remarks seem almost drawn from a portrait of Vianney. He cites three qualities a bishop must have: fidelity, prudence and goodness. “The fidelity of the servant of Jesus is that he does not try to adapt the faith to the fashions of the time.” Christ’s words “must lead the people…..The master rebukes the servant who had hidden the goods delivered to him underground in order to avoid all risk” (From B16). On prudence, Pope Benedict says: “Prudence requires humble, disciplined and vigilant reason” (From B16). Finally, he says “Goodness presupposes above all an intense communion with God, a growing interior communion with him….[Only] if His being, His characteristics penetrate and mould us, can we really become good servants”(B16). All these gifts St. John Vianney possessed and exercised. Now all of these are gifts of God, but they can be cultivated as virtue can be cultivated, practiced, as Aquinas says, like a habit – and thereby brought to a certain perfection. We must continually and habitually think and act with the Church as St. Ignatius Loyola says.
Regarding prayer: Two weeks ago I was at St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana attending the Recently Appointed Pastors Institute. During it, I came to the conclusion that the most important things I do as a priest each day are: praying, preaching and presiding: praying faithfully each day because my preaching flows from my praying; my homilies come from my praying over the texts; and presiding at the Eucharist; offering the sacrifice of the mass reverently. Preaching is vital. Paul says to Timothy: “Do not neglect the gift you have, which was conferred on you through the prophetic word and the imposition of hands by the presbyterate. Be diligent in these matters, be absorbed in them, so that your progress may be evident to everyone” (4:12-16). Our people look to us to be examples of holiness, that is men absorbed in the things of God as models of holiness, that is men who are enveloped in God. Gheon says Vianney “prayed enormously much, because he lived in prayer, was enveloped in prayer -- like a fish, which is unconscious of the water wherein it lives” (118). Gheon continues: “From the day when M. Vianney could no longer ‘reserve’ for God alone more than the time he took to say mass and read his Office, he made that orientation, that choice of direction, in virtue of which every act is an act of praise and adoration” (118).
It seems to me that we must also manifest joy, gentleness and patience as did the ‘Smiling Pope’ of 33 days. Pope John Paul II also radiated joy, especially in the earlier years of his pontificate. “John Paul Superstar” proclaimed the cover of Newsweek on his first visit to the United States in 1979.
Regarding penance: We know a great deal about Vianney’s penances -- hair shirts, whipcords, severe fasting, time spent in the confessional (fifteen hours per day). He slept only two hours per night. He harmed his health. His hair fell out due to malnourishment. Doctors couldn’t understand how he was still living. Was this entirely prudent? St. Ignatius Loyola learned from his own severe fasts as did St. Francis, who was a model for St. John Vianney. Can we be holy and a model of holiness for others without these extremes? Could St. John Vianney have been just as holy had he slept a few hours more each night? Are we not taught if not exhorted from the days of our seminary formation to exercise self-care in our ministry? Gheon says: “The cure’s pitiless asceticism had brought him [in 1824-25] to the point of death” (95) during a period when he was tormented by the devil, and he was ‘tempted’ to flee his parish to join the Trappists or the Carthusians (Gheon 103). He did flee and his parishioners came after him and brought him back. It is almost a comic scene. Gheon says “M. Vianney submitted; but he was not cured” (108), and it happened twice more in his life (Gheon 108-113). Gheon says, “He never knew a worse temptation – for it had worn the disguise of love for God” (113). Gheon continues: “We are driven to say that his efforts at flight were less the work of the Evil Spirit than the sheer weariness of the flesh. M. Vianney was a poor man with a poor body – and his poor body could hold out no longer. A few years later came a villainous cough to rack him and to keep him from sleep even when the devil has given him up as a bad job” (114). We might ask: had he been more moderate, might he have been more steady, less erratic -- and just as holy?
I am challenged by Vianney’s extreme fasts and his doing penance for his penitents. He said: “I impose only a small penance on those who confess their sins properly; the rest I perform in their place” (Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia 16: ftn 91). I can cite two examples of fasting in my life: In the 7th grade in 1962, I was a devout 12 year old parochial school boy, fasting for God, Pope John XXIII and Vatican Council II. Much later, age 29, in 1980 I was making a cursillo. The first experience made me miserable. Perhaps I was too young. The second time was spiritually profitable and brought me closer to God. Perhaps the time was just right. But still, I find it difficult to fast beyond what is required by the Church on ‘fast days.’ And I take heart from the example of the now Blessed John XXIII who in his Journal of a Soul, berates himself for eating too much fruit, his great weakness. And photos from his days as Nuncio to France show that he enjoyed a glass of champagne!
Where are you challenged? At what point of Vianney’s life are you challenged? If St. John Vianney did this, what shall you do? St. Ignatius asked: ‘If St Francis did this and that, what shall I do?’ The newly ordained and installed Bishop of Allentown, Most Rev. John Barres issued a Pastoral Letter for The Year for the Priest the day after his episcopal ordination two months ago. At its end, he lists a series of suggested activities for his priests in “A Priest’s To-Do List for the Year for the Priest.” They include intentional praying, reading and studying the life and sermons of St. John Marie Vianney as well as papal documents on this subject, among other pious practices.
If St. John Vianney did this, what shall you do? And why? Whatever we do, we can take heart that we don’t have to be perfect. We just need to be on the way to perfection. The document on priests from Vatican Council II says priests are called to perfection and God gives priests the grace to reach perfection through ordination: “Even in their human weakness they [all Christians] have the power, and the duty, to seek perfection….Priests are obliged in a special way to acquire this perfection” (Presbyterorum Ordinis. qtd. In Liturgy of the Hours IV: 1760). We well know how weak we are. It can be very helpful to recall the words of Pope John Paul II who says in his autobiographical Gift and Mystery: “Saint John Marie Vianney astonishes us because in him we can see the power of grace working through human limitations” (qtd. Trochu. Back cover. Gift and Mystery 57).
On Monday of this week Pope Benedict observed in the Czech Republic: “[W]e ask ourselves: in our day, is holiness still relevant? Or is it now considered unattractive and unimportant? Do we not place more value today on worldly success and glory?….Today there is a need for believers with credibility…. It is not enough to appear good and honest: one must truly be so. And the good and honest person is one who does not obscure God’s light with his own ego, does not put himself forward, but allows God to shine through” (Homily). He says this call to holiness is true of all Christians. Certainly it is true us. So, given our limitations, what shall we do? What shall I do? What have I done? What am I doing? If St. John Marie Baptiste Vianney did all this, ‘What shall I do?
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