A Time to Confess Christ in the Way We Serve Him in Others, 25th Friday (II), September 27, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Vincent de Paul
September 27, 2024
Eccl 3:1-11, Ps 144, Lk 9:18-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s first reading, the sacred author of Ecclesiastes says that there’s a time, a “kairos,” for everything under the heavens, and lists several of them. He shows time more or less as the undulating waves of opposites, from night to day, without end, without direction, almost in a circle of endless repetition. This is what life may seem to those who live their life without God: everything can seem pointless, where the human person accomplishes nothing from all his labors and sufferings in life, a vanity of vanity. But the author then shifts gears and says that God “has put the timeless into their hearts, without man’s ever discovering.” God has placed his eternal self within us in a way that far exceeds our knowledge or comprehension. That’s one of the reasons why Ecclesiastes is within the canon of Sacred Scripture because, through all its pessimism and cynicism of a life without God, there’s a recognition of a yearning within, a cor inquietum or restless heart like Augustine, for something lasting, meaningful, indeed eternal. It’s a longing for God and the things of God. That longing was fulfilled with the appearance of Jesus as the Messiah of God in the “fullness of time,” as St. Paul describes in his Letter to the Galatians.
• We see in some sense the revelation of that deep inner longing in today’s Gospel. Jesus asked a question about what the people were saying about him not because he was curious but because he wanted to lead them on a journey of faith to recognize that the long-awaited time had really come. After Peter, however, moved by God the Father, had courageously confessed his faith in Christ, Jesus announced the type of Messiah he would be and how that fullness of time would be manifested: he would suffer and die in order to bring us salvation, he would summon us to be co-redeemers with him precisely through entering into his suffering, his death, and his resurrection. This is the Messiah we are called in every time and in eternity to confess. In his Passion, we have a shift from death to life, from darkness to light, from sin to salvation, but one that is not cyclical but ultimately linear. There is a time to die but also a time to rise and the advantage that comes from all this toil is eternal reward. This happens, as the Psalm indicates, when we build our life on God as our rock, mercy, fortress, stronghold, deliverer and trustworthy shield. Even though man’s life is like a breadth and his days on earth like a passing shadow, the Lord notices him and takes thought of him, and comes to make his days not a passing shadow but an eternal life. There is indeed “an appointed time for everything,” but in birth and death, planting and uprooting, weeping and laughing, rending and sowing, silence and speech, God’s grace is given to unite those moments to God so that they may all enhance the way we build our life on God as a stable, secure Rock and thereby confess him to be the long awaited Messiah and Savior, the “same yesterday, today and forever.”
• Someone who confessed Christ and who lived constantly aware that it was the acceptable time to recognize and love him when he was poor, hungry, thirsty, naked, on the move, imprisoned or sick is the great saint the Church celebrates today: St. Vincent de Paul (1580-1660). His early years were a time of both acceptance and rejection. He was the son of poor farmers in southwestern France, the third of six children. His parents struggled simply to make ends meet, but when Vincent’s father recognized how precociously intelligent his son was, he and the family sacrificed many of their animals to provide him an education through the Franciscan Recollects and later the University of Toulouse. Vincent wasn’t particularly grateful, though. One day when his father made a long journey on foot to visit him in his tattered peasant clothing, Vincent didn’t even go out to greet him because he was so embarrassed by his father’s poverty. Vincent’s ambition at the time was to become a priest not fundamentally because he thought it was his vocation, but because he thought that it might bring him fame and notoriety; he knew that if he played his cards right, he might receive benefices for rich churches and abbeys that would provide him enough income to permanently get his family out of the poverty that embarrassed him so. Because of his genius and motivation, he raced through university and was ordained a priest at the shockingly young age of 19, even though canon law required one to be 25. He wasted no time vainly trying to climb the ecclesiastical ladder. He became a chaplain to Queen Margaret of Valois and moved to Paris. As a brilliant “baby priest,” he quickly earned the reputation as a talented preacher, which gained him further entrée into French high society.
• But the Lord gave him two experiences that led him to a time of conversion. The first happened in 1605, six years into his priesthood. After having gone to Marseilles to acquire an inheritance — another sign of where he was placing his treasure — he boarded a ship to Narbonne that was captured by African pirates who brought him to Tunis, where he was a slave for two years. God eventually arranged for his escape when he was able to persuade the wife of an ex-priest, who to preserve his own life had converted to Islam, to seek to convert her husband, give up their illicit arrangement and head back to France. And her conversion was an occasion of his. After his release, Vincent never forgot the misery these slaves were experiencing. He resolved to help them somehow, someway in the future. He would. There were about 25,000 poor slaves on the Barbary Coast, mostly Christian. He would send many priests and brothers to attend to their spiritual needs and never ceased to raise money to ransom them; by the time of his death, he had purchased the freedom of over 1,200. That’s more than Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust. The second experience was a further crucifixion of his ego and pursuit of the esteem of others. After he had returned to Paris, his roommate was robbed of 400 crowns. Convinced that Vincent was the thief, he maliciously accused him to the police and to everyone else. Whereas earlier Vincent may have trusted in his own abilities to defend his reputation and gone on the attack of his accuser’s credibility, now he trusted only in divine Providence, who had just freed him from slavery. “God knows the truth,” he said calmly, as he bore the calumny for six months until the true thief confessed. He recognized that then was a time of sanctity, of trust, of silence in which he was cured of the vanity of placing his treasure in human respect.
• From that point forward, he was free to seek God’s interests in everything, and even though he would continue to walk in and out of French high society, he lived it as a time of charity, with his heart firmly on what the Lord wanted, on God’s glory, rather than fleeting this worldly success. He began from that period to welcome Christ and his poverty fully into his life. He was recruited by the powerful Count of Joigny, Philip de Gondi, to become chaplain to his family and tutor to his children. This was the assignment of the former Vincent’s dreams, but it was now a task that he twice laid down in order to become a pastor in rural areas in great need of conversion. Both times, however, Count de Gondi — who with his family loved Vincent — prevailed upon him to return. The latter time Count de Gondi enticed him by promising that one of his tasks would be to teach the Gospel to the peasants throughout their expansive territory who were in ignorance and moral disarray. Count de Gondi, who was prefect of the French penal system, also arranged for Vincent to be named almoner and chaplain to the convicts in the galleys, which allowed Vincent to bring not just spiritual but material comfort to these prisoners across France. The more work he did among the poor and the outcasts, the more he became aware of how much work needed still to be done. He knew that organization was crucial. He began to recruit priests to help him in the work of preaching the Gospel to the poor; these clerics, drawn by Vincent’s example, became the first members of the Congregation of the Mission. With the help of St. Louise de Marillac, he established the Daughters of Charity, to work in the many hospitals he was founding to care for the sick, incurable, orphaned, aged and abandoned. To help in the relief of the indigent, he instituted the Ladies of Charity, a group of wealthy women who would use their social connections to raise the funds needed not merely for the immediate care of the poor, but for their long-term education and training. In Paris these Ladies helped to run a soup kitchen that fed a staggering 16,000 hungry people a day. For them, every day was a day of love, as it should be for every Christian.
• Vincent saw how much the Church’s urgent charitable mission in France had been frustrated by incompetent and often immoral priests and bishops, clergy who were scandals to people and led them often to reject what God was wanting them to accept through the Church Christ founded. Rather than preaching and healing, rather than confessing Christ by their words and deeds, they were scandalizing and wounding. At the time, it was still not required for candidates to the priesthood to go to seminary. So he began to work with the Archbishop of Paris, Count de Gondi’s brother, to ensure that before a man was ordained, he would need to participate in spiritual exercises with Vincent and the priests of his Congregation. At first these retreat courses took two weeks; they eventually extended to two years. Through them Vincent began to form most of the young priests of France. Later, the Vincentians established full-scale seminaries all over France to ensure both that priests knew the Catholic faith well enough to fight against Jansenism and other heresies, but lived it enough to care for the poor and the needy. His work with priests made him ever more aware of the difference between holy, competent bishops and ecclesiastical disasters. In these years after the Protestant Reformation, it was clear that great bishops were needed and bad appointees with inadequate spiritual qualifications could not be tolerated. He therefore used his considerable influence with the king, who at the time wielded enormous power in the appointment of bishops, to set up a Council of Conscience to ensure that those nominated for the episcopacy were worthy of the office. The king made Vincent the head of the Council and so Vincent had as big an impact on the formation of the French episcopacy as he did the French priesthood. It was a time of renewal for the Church throughout.
• After Peter’s confession as the Messiah in the Gospel, Jesus told the apostles “not to tell this to anyone.” It wasn’t the kairos yet for them to tell everyone they met directly about the Messiah’s coming. Later it would be the time for them to proclaim the Gospel to every creature. But both were done in obedient love of the one who entered time so that we might enter eternity. Today at Mass, as we prepare in time to receive within the “Timeless One,” we ask him for the grace to recognize, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation,” and seize this time to love and, like St. Vincent,  confess him with constant faith, hope and love.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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