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ST.
JOHN VIANNEY (AUG. 4)
The wonderful life of the French Priest, Jean Baptiste
Vianney, famous among modern saints as the Curé
of Ars, illustrates most forcibly the striking statement
of S. Paul that
It
is to shame the wise that God has chosen what is foolish
by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that He
chose what is weak by human reckoning. (1Cor.1:27)
Born on the 8th day of May, 1786, he was the son of a
peasant farmer living not far from the City of Lyons.
The intensely religious nature of the child early displayed
itself, so much so that neither his parents nor the village
priest had any doubt that God had called him to be a pastor
of souls. Great however as was his piety, his dulness
as a student was phenomenal. It seemed impossible for
him to master even the rudiments of the Latin language.
It was only after the most dogged perseverance both on
his own part and that of his patient teacher that he could
acquire enough learning to enter the seminary and at the
last he so completely failed to pass his examinations
for the Priesthood, that had not the vicar-general of
the diocese given him a special dispensation on account
of his aptitude for fasting and prayer, he would not have
been ordained. Yet in after life he became the counselor
and confessor of some of the most learned and distinguished
public men in France and people flocked to him for advice
and absolution literally by the tens of thousands, so
great became his reputation for saintliness and wisdom.
After having served a term of years as assistant to the
priest, who taught him in his youth, he was appointed
by the Archbishop of Lyons the parish priest or curé
of the little village of Ars, noted for the irreligiousness
of its people. Abbé Courbon in giving him his papers
said, “There is very little love of God at Ars; go
and put some there.” Never was the Apostolic commission
better obeyed.
The parish soon began to change its aspect under the influence
of the pastor’s holiness and zeal. His exhortations
were so ardent that the people said [of] him: “He
draws our souls to God whether we will or no.”
It was said that to see M. Vianney say Mass was enough
in itself to convert the most obdurate sinner. His whole
face appeared radiant at such times with a beauty almost
divine. Long hours he would spend in prayer and adoration
before the Tabernacle and there it was he fought his battles
for the conversion of his parish.
One of the hardest things the faithful priest had to contend
against in making his people truly religious was the universal
love of amusement. His particular horror was the annual
fete of the village. From time immemorial the villagers
had held high carnival on the feast of their patron saint,
eating and drinking during the day and ending up with
a big ball at night. This last named pastime had been
the ruin of many innocent souls and the Curé determined
to put a stop to it. Accordingly he persuaded the mayor
to issue a decree forbidding the ball, but the young men
appealed to the prefect and gained a higher ruling in
their favor. But the man of many prayers was not to be
thus defeated. The young men went forward with their preparations
and at the appointed time the fiddlers began to play,
but there were no girls for the village swains to dance
with. The Curé had captured the mothers and their
daughters and they were assembled with him in the church,
saying their prayers. The young men gracefully yielded
to defeat and the annual ball became a thing of the past
in the annals of the village. Another winning battle that
the gallant priest fought was for the reverent observance
of the Lord’s Day. Before his coming the shops were
kept open as on a week day and work was carried on in
the fields, but gradually under his teaching all this
was changed and worship took the place of work.
M. Vianney gave himself for his people without stint or
reserve, he rejoiced in spending and being spent for them
to the uttermost. He outstripped the poorest man in the
village in the coarseness and scantiness of the food he
ate and the raggedness of the clothes that he wore and
yet he distributed of his bounty to the orphan and the
needy with the prodigality of a prince.
In view of the wonderful faith and devotion of John Baptiste
Vianney it is not surprising that there should be attributed
to him several very notable miracles of healing the sick,
but by all odds the greatest triumphs of his ministry
were the miracles of conversion wrought by him in dispensing
to sinners God’s marvelous grace of absolution. (
Fr. Paul in The Pulpit of the Cross Feb. 27, 1897 pp.386-387;
Apr. 30, 1897 p.419)
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TRANSFIGURATION
OF THE LORD (AUG. 6)
My
Friends:
This is the beautiful Feast of the Transfiguration of
Our Lord Jesus Christ, which took place in the presence
of Peter, James and John on Mount Tabor. It is described
thus by Saint Matthew:
| Six
days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and
his brother John and led them up a high mountain where
they could be alone. There in their presence he was
transfigured: his face shone like the sun and his
clothes became as white as the light. Suddenly Moses
and Elijah appeared to them; they were talking with
him. Then Peter spoke to Jesus “Lord,” he
said, “it is wonderful for us to be here; if
your wish, I will make three tents here, one of you,
one for Moses and one for Elijah. He was still speaking
when suddenly a bright cloud covered them with shadow,
and from the cloud there came a voice which said,
“This is my son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favor.
Listen to him.”When they heard this, the disciples
fell on their faces, overcome with fear. But Jesus
came up and touched them. “Stand up,” he
said, “do not be afraid.” And when they
raised their eyes they saw no one but only Jesus.
(Matt. 17: 1-8) |
From
the day that Jesus was born in a stable at Bethlehem all
through the years of His childhood, His boyhood, His youth
and His manhood, most of the time His Divinity was veiled
and hidden without that outward form of which gave Him
the appearance in the eyes of men as one human among His
fellow humans.
But it was only on rare occasions that the Divinity within
shone forth in His external person. One of those brief
flashes occurred in Gethsemane at the time of His arrest,
when, turning upon the soldiers that came to take Him
prisoner, He addressed to them the question, “Whom
seek ye?” And when the officer made answer, “Jesus
of Nazareth,” he replied, “I am He.” And
at the same time the Divinity flashed from His countenance
and the soldiers went backward and fell to the ground
as we are told in the Holy Gospel. But upon Mount Tabor
we see His three highest Apostles, Peter, James and John,
chosen witnesses of His Divinity, when Moses and Elias,
the greatest Apostles of the Old Testament, descended
from heaven to converse with Him. And the Divinity within
Him shone through every pore of His Body until it assumed
the Splendor of the noonday sun, and His garments were
white as snow, glistening as burning coals in a furnace
to those who looked upon Him.
During our earthly sojourn, if we are in a state of grace
the Three Persons of the Adorable Trinity dwell in us,
and if they chose they could cause that glory to shine
through our bodies as the Divinity of Jesus Christ shone
through His body on Mount Tabor. But we must wait until
the final Resurrection and the Glory of God in heaven
– and then as we behold the glory of the Beatific
vision, we shall, ourselves be irradiated with the Divine
Light, and if Christ, Himself, shines as the Sun of Justice
in the Heavenly Glory, we about Him shall shine as the
stars. Let us, my dear brethren, hide ourselves in Jesus
Christ, as Saint Paul says: “Ye are dead and your
life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ Who is our
life shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him
in glory.” [Col.3:4] (Fr. Paul radio talk on St.
Anthony Hour August 6, 1939)
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ST.
DOMINIC (AUG. 7)
This
is the Rosary month. This is the month in which by command
of the Holy Father, in chapels, oratories and religious
houses, the mysteries of the Rosary are recited every
day together with the Litany of the Blessed Virgin and
the special prayer to St. Joseph. After all, the most
effective instrument of prayer that Divine Providence
has given us is the Rosary, given to us through Our Blessed
Mother and Saint Dominic originally. We as individuals
should make good use of the Rosary. Everybody is not gifted
in extemporaneous prayer. (Fr. Paul Sermon Oct. 3, 1926)
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ST.
CLARE OF ASSISI (AUG. 12)
It is well known, for example, that there was a certain
holy attraction between our Father Saint Francis and Saint
Clare, because of their vocation of being joint founders
of a great and wonderful spiritual family, but anybody
who knows anything at all about the history of Saint Francis
and Saint Clare knows how very chaste that relationship
was, that Saint Francis himself was so strict that he
would not even partake of a meal with Saint Clare and
it was only at an extraordinary time and under an extraordinary
request of all the Sisters and Friars that that famous
meal took place at Assisi down by the Portiuncula, as
recorded in the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, and even
that was of such a spiritual nature that it was simply
rhapsody in God. (Fr. Paul Retreat Conference Aug. 7,
1925)
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This is the Octave Day of the feast day of our Mother
Saint Clare and we sung that beautiful hymn at Mass in
her honor this morning, and while we are speaking of the
Blessed Sacrament we must not forget her own special devotion
to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Forty years she lived
her life of penance and a large portion of that time she
was confined to her bed, but when she could not do anything
else with her needle she would make linen into corporals,
purificators and other linens for the altar. They say
St. Francis used to send about irons for the making of
hosts.
There are two stories concerning that which first associated
the blessed Lady Clare with the monstrance. Which is true,
I am unable to say. The possible one is where she is standing
out on a balcony outside the convent and holding aloft
a monstrance in which is the Blessed Sacrament, as the
marauders are climbing the ladder scaling the wall of
the convent, and Our Lord present there manifested His
power in somewhat the same way as when they came forward
to arrest Him on the night of His betrayal. He cast one
glance at the soldiers and they fell backwards to the
ground, and only when He permitted it could they lay hands
on Him. The other is that she was confined to her bed.
She asked a Sister to bring the hosts to her in the ciborium
in the tabernacle and she knelt down before Our Lord and
said,
| You
know we have abandoned the world, we have abandoned
everything. You know how we hold our holy chastity
so sacred. We are ready to die for it. We have no
protector but you and you must protect us from these
wild marauders that are seeking to destroy us. |
She
also prayed for the city, and God answered her prayers,
drove the marauders back, and Assisi as well as St. Damian's
was saved from them.(Fr. Paul Retreat Conference Aug.
19, 1926)
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ASSUMPTION
OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN (AUG. 15)
My Radio Friends:
Next
Thursday we shall be celebrating the Feast of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven. You have already listened
this afternoon to the dramatization of that golden event
in the age-long history of Mary, the Mother of Jesus and
consequently the Mother of God, as Jesus is God. The belief
of all Catholic Christians in the assumption of the Blessed
Virgin’s body into Heaven is well authenticated.
It was foretold by the prophets of Jesus that His body
should not see corruption, neither in the grave nor afterwards.
On the third day he came triumphantly forth from the sepulcher,
His body transformed and glorified, and forty days afterwards,
in the sight of His apostles and a great number of the
faithful, ascended up into Heaven. It was fitting that
His mother, who never sinned, but being conceived without
sin by the special intervention of the Holy Ghost, was
kept all her life without committing even a venial sin,
that her body also should not see corruption in the grave,
but that she should anticipate that resurrection of the
body which shall take place for all the faithful at the
end of the world, even as we say in the Creed: “I
believe in the resurrection of the body and in life everlasting.”
(Fr. Paul radio talk on Ave Maria Hour August 11, 1935)
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ST
PIUS X, POPE (AUG. 21)
The
postmaster down in Venice, Italy, had a large family,
and he had not only to look after the postoffice, but
he had a little piece of ground. God gave him among his
children a son Joseph, and Joseph showed an aptitude for
study, and so he went to high school, and the father in
order to provide something for the son to pay this extra
charge, got up extra early in the morning and worked in
his garden in addition to working in the postoffice, and
he did it cheerfully and gladly. And the son, in order
not to make the burden heavier than was necessary for
his father, took off his shoes and walked barefoot in
order to save the shoe leather, both having the mutual
spirit of sacrifice, and that son finally became the great
Pope Pius X, who is called by those who visit his tomb
Il Santo, (the Saint). (Fr. Paul Sermon July 26, 1925)
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THE
PASSING OF PIUS X
In the passing of His Holiness Pope Pius X from the Papal
chair in Rome to the companionship of St. Peter and his
Successors in the great Assembly of the Church Triumphant,
the Catholic Church on earth mourns the death of a saint.
Perhaps we have not appreciated the fact sufficiently,
but it should be a reflection to fill the heart of every
earnest Catholic with thanksgiving to Almighty God, that
after the lapse of nineteen hoary centuries the Catholic
Church should have been ruled over by one whose faith
in the verities and power of the Catholic religion seemed
not one whit less virile and vivid than that of St. Peter
himself, and although the miracles performed by Pope Pius
X were not as numerous as those of the Church’s first
Vicar, concerning whom we read in the Acts of the Apostles
that “the people brought forth the sick into the
streets and laid them on beds and couches that the shadow
of Peter passing by might deliver them from their infirmities.”
(Acts 5:15), yet the miracles of healing performed by
Pius X while occupying Peter’s Chair are sufficiently
numerous to demonstrate that the hand of the Lord was
not shortened to work through Pius as He had worked through
Peter.
WHAT THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL OWES HIM
The whole Church owes a debt to the late Sovereign Pontiff
which is incalculable, and he will rank among the greatest
of the Successors of St. Peter by reason of the reforms
he has wrought in
the Curia; the revision he inaugurated of the Vulgate
and of the Breviary; the codifying of the Canon Law, a
gigantic labor; the death blow he dealt to Modernism,
the most subtle and dangerous of modern heresies; the
defense of the Church in France against the destructive
plots of her civil enemies; but more than any of these
things, because he has brought the Church of the twentieth
century nearer to the ideals of the first in the re-establishment
among the faithful of the practice of daily Communion
and the bringing of little children to Our Lord in the
Blessed Sacrament at the earliest age of spiritual perception.
The noblest title with which the name of Pope Pius X will
be handed down to posterity is that of the Pope of the
Blessed Sacrament.
WHY
GRAYMOOR’S DEBT IS GREATEST
Whereas the Society of the Atonement shares with all the
rest of Catholic Christendom in the benefits which have
flowed to the Church Universal through these far-reaching
reforms, Graymoor owes a debt of yet deeper gratitude
to the late Sovereign Pontiff, for he it was who opened
the door of Peter’s Fold and bade us welcome to its
sacred inclosure when we knocked for entrance. He might
have refused our petition to receive us in a corporate
body and to preserve our Name and Institute. There was
but a handful of us and he might have rejected our extraordinary
request and bade us make our individual submission and
be content with that.
The Society of the Atonement, therefore, owes its very
life as an Institute to him whom we must ever call in
a unique and special sense Our Holy Father. We know not
among the children of Pius X any who have greater cause
to love him out of sheer gratitude than the Children of
the Atonement. It has already become our prayer that God
will hasten the day of his Canonization, and we hope before
long to see Joseph Sarto as Pius X elevated to the altars
of the Church.(Fr. Paul in The Lamp Sep. 1914 pp. 387-388)
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ST.
LOUIS, KING OF FRANCE, PATRON OF THIRD ORDER OF ST. FRANCIS
(AUG. 25)
It is told of St. Louis, who, with St. Elizabeth, is the
patron of the Third Order of St. Francis, that on one
occasion the noblemen of the court rushed into his presence
and announced,
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Oh
King, your Highness, come into the chapel, people
are in great excitement, the priest is at the altar
and Christ is visibly present. The people are seeing
Him.
And the king, to their surprise, did not move, and
then he said,
That may be very well for the people who need some
evidence of that kind. As to the Real Presence of
Our Lord, I believe that He is always present in
Holy Communion. I do not have to see Him with my
eyes.
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So
confident and strong was the king's faith that he did
not go to the church to see the manifestation of a Presence
which he believed in so devoutly. (Fr. Paul Retreat Conference
Aug. 19, 1926)
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Queen of France, Blanche, so beautiful, so holy, so saintly,
drew close to her little son Louis, [and] putting her
arm around him, spoke to him of innocency. [She] told
him that as greatly as she loved him, she would rather
bury him than that he should ever defile his soul by mortal
sin. That glorious son of a glorious mother never lost
sight of his mother’s saying, and although the great
responsibility of ruling a great kingdom rested upon his
shoulders, and although he was surrounded by the many
temptations and difficulties of a court, he preserved
his childhood innocence. And after a life of fortitude
in the service of God, he was ultimately elevated to the
altars of the Church--Saint Louis of France and patron
of the Third Order of Saint Francis. (Fr. Paul Sermon
Dec. 29, 1924 )
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ST.
AUGUSTINE AND ST. MONICA (AUG. 27 AND 28)
We know by divine revelation how the heart of our heavenly
Father goes out in yearning for the return of prodigal
children to the Father’s house. That was graphically
told us by Our Blessed Lord in the parable of the prodigal
son, also in the parable of the lost sheep, how the Good
Shepherd left the ninety and nine safe in the fold and
went out at the risk of his life to seek the one sheep
that had wandered away and he declared that there was
more joy among the angels in heaven over one sinner that
repented than over ninety and nine just persons who need
no repentance.
How
fervently, therefore, ought we to pray for them who are
fallen away, that they may return to God and be saved.
We are reminded in this connection of St. Monica, mother
of St. Augustine, who for many years prayed incessantly,
storming heaven for the conversion of her wayward son
and how St. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, encouraged her,
saying it was “impossible for the son of such a mother’s
prayers to be lost.” How often heartbroken mothers
come to us priests to entreat us to pray for some wayward
son or wayward daughter who has drifted away from the
Church.
Many years ago I was preaching one evening on the steps
of New York City Hall and I was approached by a young
man who told me that he was sitting after supper in a
cheap lodging house on 34th Street and an interior voice
said to him, “Go down to the City Hall.” He
saw no reason why he should walk so far, yet the voice
was insistent and he came. Later on the same evening he
told me his story.
His mother, a pious Irish woman of the west, had designed
him for the priesthood and sent him with that in view
to the Jesuit university in St. Louis, but the wanderlust
seized him and he had been for years a dissipated prodigal,
a fallen away Catholic. “But every time my mother
meets a priest,” he said, “she gives him a dollar
to have a Mass said for my soul.” We took him back
to Graymoor that night. He was reconciled to God and died
in New York sometime afterwards, fortified by the sacraments
of the Church. His mother was telegraphed for and she
came and took his body back for its interment in the west.
We use this as an illustration of the power, particularly
of a mother’s prayer to bring to pass the conversion
of a soul and the return of one who has fallen away back
to the bosom of Mother Church. (Fr. Paul Radio Talk in
Jan.23, 1937)
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