By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily while celebrating Mass with archdiocesan school principals gathered for a meeting before the start of the 2023-24 school year, Aug. 4, 2023. The principals met at St. Brendan High School and celebrated Mass next door, in the chapel of St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami.
Welcome to St. Raphael chapel, a place of prayer shared by St. Brendan’s High School and St. John Vianney College Seminary. We gather today on the feast day of St. John Vianney – a humble country priest who barely passed his seminary courses but ended up spurring a religious revival in France a few short years after the Terror of the French Revolution.
He would not have been chosen by his peers or singled out by his bishop as the “one most likely to succeed.” But succeed he did — for he succeeded in helping replant the faith where it had been uprooted because of revolutionary violence; he succeeded in restoring hope to hearts that had become hardened because of cynicism and despair; he succeeded in reenkindling, in his rural parishioners and the thousands that sought him out for confession, the fire of charity.
Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC
Archbishop Thomas Wenski speaks at St. Raphael Chapel at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami while celebrating Mass during the all-principals meeting held before the start of the 2023-24 school year, Aug. 4, 2023, at St. Brendan High School next door.
At any rate, St. John Vianney, discounted by some of his peers as being a bit dull and a lot ugly, shows us that Jesus does not call the qualified, but he does qualify the called.
He is the patron saint of parish priests. If you principals and or your teachers are having difficulties with your parish priest, say a prayer to St. John Vianney for him – and tell your priest that you are doing so.
As I said, St. John Vianney ministered in post-revolutionary France — a difficult time, but perhaps no less difficult than our own time. We are living as Pope Francis likes to say, not during an era of change but at the change of an era — history sometimes writes of the pre-war era and the post-war era; history speaks of the Old World and the New World. Salvation history is divided between the Old and New Testaments. And more recently we talk about our lives pre-COVID and post-COVID. In years to come we will be using 2020 and the pandemic as a marker to divide what came before and what will come after.
But we don’t know what will come after — and so, it might seem that there is no road map to follow. When John Vianney was sent by his bishop to a backwater village named Ars, he was not given a road map for his future ministry. In fact, on his way to Ars, he got lost and had to ask a young boy for directions. So, there’s a lesson here for all of us: Don’t hesitate to ask for directions! We are all in this together. So let us work together – as missionary disciples – bringing “good news” of salvation, sowing hope in a world that so often seems hopeless.
There are certainly a lot of uncertainties in the days to come – economic, political, cultural issues divide our nation and the world, wars in the Ukraine and elsewhere, threaten world peace. Globalization has made us neighbors but as Pope Benedict once observed, it has not made us brothers and sisters and what Pope Francis describes as a globalization of indifference explains the harsh attitudes seen toward migrants and refugees.
Among all these uncertainties that surround us, there is one certainty: following Jesus — that is, to associate with a Christ who will be rejected — means taking on an identity and a way of living that will always pose a threat to the world's corrosive ideologies and idolatries.
To proclaim that Jesus is the Christ of God requires more than just some short-lived enthusiasm. A faith without the cross is no faith at all; at least, it is not a faith that can save. Salvation will come through sacrifice, the sacrifice that awaits Jesus on Calvary. And for our part, self-denial and cross-bearing describes what it means to follow Jesus.
Various ideologies and idolatries continue to create very turbulent waters for the Barque of Peter and those of us who travel on this ship which is the Church. And sometimes it seems that we who are traveling on the ship are trying to scuttle it through our sins of commission and omission. Yet we should never give in to a spirit of pessimism. For Jesus has given the Church his Holy Spirit. “The gates of hell shall not prevail over her,” Jesus assures us. And so, for almost 2000 years, and here in the Archdiocese of Miami for 65 years, the Church sails on. Thanks to the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, neither her enemies nor the sins of her members have been able to destroy her.
The world still needs the good news of Jesus Christ, raised from the dead. The world still needs you to sow hope in a world that seems to have lost all hope.
To paraphrase St. John Paul II in speaking of today's youth, people today, whatever their possible ambiguities, still have a profound longing for those genuine values which find their fullness in Christ. “Is not Christ,” John Paul II asks, “the secret of true freedom and profound joy of heart? Is not Christ the supreme friend and the teacher of all genuine friendship? If Christ is presented to young people as he really is, they experience him as an answer that is convincing, and they can accept his message, even when it is demanding and bears the mark of the Cross.”
May we all strive both in word and deed to present Christ as he really is —to present him on his terms, and not on yours.
We don’t know what the future holds — and so, there is no road map to follow, except the one that points to the Way of the Cross.
May we undertake the challenges of this new year with humility — a virtue that John Vianney had in a heroic degree. Humility is not thinking less of ourselves but thinking of ourselves less. Humility teaches us that we are not as self-sufficient as we sometimes think; we are not in charge of our lives as we sometimes pretend to be. And so we trust in the Lord, Jesus, who nourishes and sustains with his Body and Blood.
May we imitate the humility of St. John Vianney, of the Blessed Mother and her spouse, Joseph. May we always look to Jesus — meek and humble of heart — when we seem lost.
Without humility we cannot evangelize; and without humility we certainly will not be evangelized.
St. John Vianney’s rule of life was “Do only what can be offered to the Lord.” Do only what can be offered to the Lord, what would be pleasing in his sight. May all that we say, do or think be a worthy offering to the Lord.
St. John Vianney, pray for us.
