From a tiny corner of nothing

Some people at that time thought that the Church was dying. The “movers and shakers” in 18th Century France had decided that the Catholic faith had lost all influence. The proverbial “THEY” said that the Church had lost any ability to stir souls and win hearts. Not unlike our own day, a new secularization foolishly tried to claim victory over Jesus Christ.

It was in this environment in 1786 that a boy was born to a peasant family in a remote part of France. He would grow up in the shadow of the French Revolution. His family would remain devout Catholics, not an easy vocation at that time. At peril to their lives, they would attend Mass only when a priest, loyal to the faith, was available.

When no priests were available, the young boy would play out the role of the priest, teaching other children of the village their prayers and catechism, carving little statues of out of clay. This young boy helped his neighbors keep the faith, and in so doing, he himself found then what would be the center of his life: to be a priest; to work tirelessly for the salvation of souls.

That little boy became the Curé of Ars, Saint Jean Marie Vianney. He is the Patron Saint of Priests. This past week, the Church marked the 150th Anniversary of his death on August 4, 1859. That anniversary, but especially the similarities between Saint John Vianney’s world and our own, were the occasion for Pope Benedict to declare the Year of the Priest, begun on June 19, 2009 (the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus) through the same Solemnity in June 2010.

The focus of the Year of the Priest is to invite the faithful throughout the world to let the 400,000 priests of the world know how much they are valued, respected, loved and supported for celebrating the Sacraments, teaching the Gospel and, like the Curé of Ars, evangelizing by word and action a world that has grown increasingly secular.

In the Diocese of Pittsburgh, our goal is the same. We want to make a special effort to honor our priests during this Year of the Priest. In this special year, we all need to show all our priests all our support and prayers:

• our pastors,
• our new regional vicars,
• our parochial vicars,
• our chaplains,
• our retired priests,
• our priests serving in Pastoral Administration,
• our priests serving the Church outside the Diocese,
• our religious order priests who serve us here,
• our sons who are priests in religious orders throughout the world,
• our priests who have gone on to serve as bishops throughout the United States,
• our four newly-ordained priests for the diocese—Fathers Daniel Langa, John Naugle, Nicholas Vaskov and Michael Zavage.

We need to give them all a hearty and heartfelt thank you! More than anything else in this Year for Priests, we need to show our appreciation for our priests by showing through our actions that we are the Church Alive, working together with them to build God’s Kingdom.

The Curé of Ars was not—on the surface at least—a perfect candidate for the priesthood. With only a touch of formal education, he was totally unprepared for the rigors of study. He was dismissed from the seminary. When his pastor took him into his home for private study, it is said that a young man by the name of Matthias Loras—who would become the first Bishop of Dubuque, Iowa—was totally frustrated in trying to teach the simplest lessons to the young Vianney.

Nearly 29 years old, Vianney was finally ordained a priest though not allowed to hear Confessions. Early in his priestly life, he was sent to the little hamlet of Ars where it was believed he could do little harm.

In its own way, the little town of Ars had remarkable similarity to our own world. When the new priest arrived, he found people who had not so much rejected the faith, as much as they did not know the faith and had become simply indifferent. The new Curé decided that his responsibility was to bring every soul in his parish back to the faith they had forgotten. He tackled issues big and small. He preached against all the excuses that people used not to attend Sunday Mass. He rallied against small-town gossip, and the envy that corroded souls.

But there was more, much more to him. He begged and tirelessly invited people to return to Mass and the Sacraments. More than anything else, he became a priest of the Confessional. This priest once banned from hearing Confessions became a confessor to his entire parish. Hour after hour in the confessional, he would hear sins great and small, coaxing people to be embraced by God, forgiven in the name of Jesus Christ.

He converted his little hamlet of Ars back to the faith. But he also did much more! His reputation soon spread well beyond the hamlet. In time, hundreds of thousands would come to the Curé of Ars for Confession: the rich and the famous, Bishops and Archbishops, peasants and shopkeepers. And he would be there for them in the confessional 17 hours a day and more.

In a world that called the faith dead, a simple Curé “from a tiny corner of nothing” proved that the faith was alive, the Church was alive! By the time he died in 1859, the Church in France was rejuvenated. One very simple priest—almost never ordained, almost never allowed to hear Confessions—played an indispensable part in its rebirth. He is the patron saint of the 400,000 priests we recognize in this Year of the Priest.

John Vianney never sought the limelight. The limelight just sought him because of his holiness. John Vianney always saw a better example in the people he served rather than himself. He told the story of the simple villager who was at his chapel every day at noon sitting by himself. The Curé finally asked him what he was up to. The man said that he was visiting Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. “And then what do you do?” the Curé asked. “I look at Him,” the man responded. “And He looks at me.” In a profound way, the simple villager saw Jesus looking at him too through the eyes of John Vianney.

Like the simple villager, in this Year of the Priest, look for Christ in your visits to the Blessed Sacrament. Look at Him as He looks at you. Look also for Christ in your priest as you thank him, pray for him, support him. Ask Christ to call more men to the priesthood. And pray that they will answer and that all priests will continue to answer the call like the priest from Ars who often prayed:

“O my God,
I prefer to die loving you
than to live a single instant without loving you…
I love you, my Divine Savior
because you were crucified for us …
because you have me crucified for you.”