By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily at the annual convocation with seminarians at Saint Thomas the Apostle Catholic Parish on Aug. 1, 2024.
I only tried my hand at ceramics once – when I was a kid at summer camp. I made an ugly ash tray that only my mother liked, and she didn’t smoke.
If you have ever tried a potter’s wheel, you see how a lump of brittle clay can with some water and the skilled hands of the potter be molded into beautiful objects that are fired in a kiln for a variety of uses.
Perhaps there’s a lesson here for you as you begin another year of seminary formation. Jeremiah uses the image of the potter to warn Israel that if the form of the clay was defective, the potter would just smash up the clay and start again. But I think we can take the Word as encouraging us to allow God to mold us into the vessels of grace that he may be calling us to be as his priests.
So being a seminarian requires, among a whole lot of other things, an openness to formation. In the college seminary, a lot of formation is what we would call human formation. Then in the theology the emphasis is on pastoral formation. We are to be formed so that we, in our persons, help people and not hinder people to encounter Jesus Christ.
But let me remind you that you are discerning a vocation to the priesthood and not to the seminary. The seminary is a means to an end. It is not the end. So, when you’re frustrated at seminary life – and it can be frustrating - remember that this is a means to something greater and better, but you need to cooperate with the program – and not just slide through. It should be hard work, and it is supposed to be, don’t shrink from the challenges of formation.
In the gospel, which is taken from Matthew, we come to the end of series of parables – and this particular parable is found only in Matthew. Basically, the parable indicates that all types of people are called to the Kingdom. God calls who he wills as he wills. And in the priesthood, just like in the Church, there are all types.
Jesus asks his disciples: do you understand the parables. They answered “yes” – and they probably were lying although they probably knew more about dragnets and fishing than we do. But Jesus then says that the disciple should be like the wise scribe that can bring out both the old and new.
The saint whose feast day we celebrate today was such a scribe. St. Alphonsus Ligouri was the founder of the Redemptorist; but more importantly – I think, at least – he is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest moral theologian – and his theology helped rid the Church of a certain rigorism that was the heresy of Jansenism.
He was neither too strict (which was the problem of the Jansenists -they taught that most people went to hell) nor was he so laxed as to say that no one could be lost.
In other words, he was the scribe who took from his storeroom the old and the new. And this, I would add, is what that “potter’s wheel” of seminary formation is about as well: we don’t want to form rigid “conservatives” or flaming liberals, but pastors of souls who are neither too strict nor too lax, pastors with the heart of the Good Shepherd.
St. Alphonsus, pray for us.
