Becoming Least to Become Great, 26th Monday (I), September 27, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Vincent de Paul
September 27, 2021
Zec 8:1-8, Ps 102, Lk 9:46-50

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Saturday, Jesus told us to pay attention because he was about to be betrayed to men. Today, immediately afterward, we see the disciples arguing about who among them was the greatest. At this point they were being motivated by worldly ambition, not by love for Jesus, for each other, and for all those Jesus had come into the world to save. But Jesus’ intention was to transform their worldly ambition into zeal for true greatness, so that they might become great in faith, great in hope, great in love, great in humility, great in becoming a servant of the rest, great in keeping the word of God and teaching others to do the same, as he emphasized throughout his three years of formation for them. In today’s Gospel, Jesus helps them and us to see that the path to greatness is first and foremost not a path so much of a achievement but of receiving and responding to the gifts God gives us by which he wants to help us to unite ourselves to him and, in him, to others. Jesus says the path to greatness is receive little children in his name, as we would receive him. Infants are not a symbol here of innocence but of the inability even to remember what you’ve done or to thank you. You cannot get into a quid pro quo relationship with an infant; their little hands cannot scratch your back, they cannot pick up the next dinner, they cannot inflate your ego with praise. By receiving them, we become smaller, humbler. To be great in God’s kingdom, we need to receive all people selflessly, most especially those who cannot repay. And once we get good at receiving children in this way, we can receive everyone better, including those who are exorcising in the Lord’s name who are not a visible part of the apostolic band. If one is seeking to advance himself rather than receive and serve others, that’s when he’ll be insecure at others’ doing Christ’s work. When people receive others in this way, that’s when the image of the Zion God wants after the purification of the exile can come about, when it can truly become a “faithful city,” where “old men and old women” and “boys and girls playing” can be present in its streets, because both are welcomed and embraced despite their lack of worldly usefulness. The Kingdom of God is not utilitarian, but loving.
• This conversion from worldly ambition and human vanity to Christian zeal and true greatness is seen very clearly in the life of the saint the Church celebrates today, one of the greatest saints of all time, St. Vincent de Paul (1580-1660). 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 vainly 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 not primarily for their sake but because their penury embarrassed him so. On account 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 helped him to convert from his vanity and his rejection of Christ to serve his own ego. 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 Tunisia, 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 had converted to Islam to preserve his own life 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 meets and never ceased to raise money to ransom them; by the time of his death, he had purchased the freedom of over 1,200. 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 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, 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. It cured him 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, his heart was set firmly on what the Lord wanted, on God’s glory, rather than the vanity of worldly success. He began from that period to welcome Christ in his poverty fully into his life and to help others to make the same exodus from rejection to welcoming. 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 an assignment 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 they enticed him by promising him 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.
• Vincent saw how much the Church’s urgent charitable mission in France had been frustrated by incompetent, frequently ambitious 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. At that 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 Committee and so Vincent had as big an impact on the formation of the French episcopacy as he did the French priesthood. The fuel for all this activity was the same that powered his prayer: deep love for the Lord and, with the Lord, for those for whom the Lord died. He had gone from vanity to sanctity, from worldly ambition to Christlike zeal. He had set his eyes on Christ and he found him in the faces of so many poor and needy. He received all of God’s children in Christ’s name as he wished to receive Christ. His work continues from heaven and that’s the grace he’s praying for us today to have a conversion just as profound from worldly categories to the categories of the kingdom.
• As we prepare to receive the same Christ St. Vincent used to hold in his hands, receive devoutly, and give to others, we ask through St. Vincent’s intercession for the grace so to transform us that we may become great through receiving those God sends. Jesus tells us today, “The one who is least among all of you is the one who is the greatest.” Here the Greatest of all becomes so humble that he becomes our food, so that in receiving him, we may receive the Father and learn how to receive everyone else. Through this reception of him in Holy Communion, he seeks to transform us in love so that we may make this,  our city, a faithful one in which not only seniors can sit and children can play but all are valued and loved.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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