+ St. John Vianney is a saint of God par excellence. This
poor French priest was declared by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 the patron saint
of all priests because of the absolute
clarity in the saint’s mind of what the mission and life of a priest of Jesus
Christ is all about. An amazingly short summary that he gave is this: “The
priesthood (the priest) is the love
of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” This means that that when you see or hear a priest, you see and hear the sacramentally
transformed image and icon of Christ’s own self-sacrificially loving heart.
This puts the priest and the
people exactly in their proper place in regard to one another. The priest is
not superior to them because of this sacramental imaging and focusing: he is
rather made humble, kneeling at their
feet to wash them, and to serve their spiritual needs: to attend to their sanctification. When he first arrived at Ars, a
tiny village near Lyons, the new Cure stopped to ask a young lad the way to
Ars: the boy pointed and said: “Why, it is that way, Father.” Fr. John Vianney
then immediately responded, “now you come, and I will show you the way to
heaven.” This is the ultimate servant duty of the priest to “show all God’s
people the way to heaven.”
John Vianney’s entire theology
was based on the Cross of Christ on
Calvary. He saw the Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Sacrament of Penance as
inseparable, and ordered one to the other. Both apply the enormous merits of
Christ’s agony, and suffering and death. And both actually re-present the
events of that day on Calvary. The chief sacrament is Eucharist in which we
actually eat and drink the Body and Blood of the Lord unto our salvation and
future glory; but the Sacrament of Penance clears the way of grave sin, which
inhibits the flow of any grace at all in the Eucharistic celebration. Going to
communion with grave sin on the soul is not only pointless but it is also
sacrilegious and sinful in its own right. This only makes spiritual and
sacramental sense. Vianney invited all men and women to examine their
consciences and then following the grace of God’s lead to come to confession.
St.
John Vianney was the Confessor extraordinaire: he
could read hearts and was the St. Francis
of the Confessional: a true instrument of restoring the peace of God to
tormented souls: all within a matter of minutes. And it had to be so: as his
reputation grew as not only preacher and teacher, but also gentle yet firm
confessor, people by the hundreds and then thousands came to him to unburden
their lives and confess their sins. By the end of his 40-year ministry in Ars
20,000 pilgrims a year would come to be ministered to by this saintly priest of
God: the living icon of the love of Jesus’
Sacred Heart.
We thank John Vianney for
being but a simple, humble channel of God’s wondrous sacramental grace: not
only in the confessional, but also at his most favorite place, at the altar of
God, making present the true and real Body and Blood of his Lord and ours, his
healer and ours, his God and ours.
We pray today for priests –
all of them – that they may come home to the fact that their lives are meant to
image the love of Christ’s Sacred and
Pierced Heart. What an astounding vocation, to be
God’s-love-for-others-in-the-flesh!
St.
John Vianney, pray for us.
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