Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Putting Into the Deep
April 30, 2010
One of St. John Vianney’s greatest priestly challenges came in the pulpit. He was not naturally eloquent or comfortable in front of crowds. He had not received much of a theological education or training in rhetoric, writing or teaching. Listeners said he was cursed with a high-pitched and somewhat grating voice. And he had a terrible memory, at a time priests were accustomed neither to reading sermons nor to extemporizing them. All of these handicaps combined to make preaching an excruciating exercise for him.
But he never used any of these oratorical disabilities as an excuse. Even though for him to preach effectively, he would need to put in far more work than most priests do, he was so convinced of the importance of preaching that he never shrunk from that arduous labor.
More than a century before the fathers of the Second Vatican Council taught that the priest’s “primary duty” is to proclaim the Gospel, the future patron saint of priests was already putting that teaching into practice. “In the beginning was the Word,” Vianney stressed, emphasizing that after the resurrection, “the first words of the Lord to his apostles were, ‘Go and teach.’” He also was precociously convinced of the intrinsic connection between the “two tables” of the Word and the Word-made-flesh that Vatican II enshrined and sought to help his people hunger for God’s word just as much as for Holy Communion. “Our Lord, who is truth itself,” he said, “does not value his Word any less than he values his body.” He even went so far as to proclaim that “the one who listens to the word of God with a true desire to profit from it is even more pleasing to God than one who receives Him in Holy Communion.”
Because he felt acutely the enormous disproportion between the importance of the sacred message and the inadequacies of the particular messenger, he put in heroic efforts to prepare his Sunday Sermons. At the end of each grueling day, filled with confessions, communion calls, work for the orphanage and so much more, he would head to the sacristy to work on his upcoming homilies. From his vesting case, he would pick up a few of his homiletic resources: the Bible, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, various folios of the Lives of the Saints, a theological dictionary and a some anthologies of sermons by the well-known preachers of his day. Standing, he would consult them and then begin to put pen to paper, using the mesa of the vesting case as his desk. He would often do this for seven hours at a stretch. When he was afflicted with writer’s block, which for him was practically perpetual, he would head into the Church, kneel at the foot of the tabernacle, and ask Jesus with his Father to send the Holy Spirit to help him. When he would be too exhausted to continue this work, he would sit down on the floor and lean his head up against the vesting table to try to catch a little sleep. On several occasions, the parishioners would find him there in the morning with his exhausted head resting against the leg of the vesting table. He would do this anywhere from five to fifteen nights in preparation for particular sermons. The final product would be between 30-40 pages of cursive writing.
That, however, was the relatively easy part.
The Saturday before he was supposed to deliver the sermon, he would spend all night in the Church trying to memorize it. Those passing by the Church would hear him pacing up and down the aisle repeating the parts that he was struggling to retain. No matter what hour of night they passed, they would find him practicing, and on Sunday morning, they would often see him still trying to jam the words into his “bad head.”
Each of his homilies lasted about an hour. Why so long, especially considering that he knew he wasn’t a gifted preacher? The reason is because he was convinced that he could not achieve the goal of a homily or sermon —to move all listeners to “conversion and holiness,” as Vatican II would reiterate— without adequate time to drill down spiritually to strike the well of living water in the hearts of his listeners. His insights about the length and purpose of priestly preaching are so important— and so divergent from common notions today — that I’ll dedicate a full column to them next week.
But for now, suffice it to mention a clerical aphorism from Fr. George Rutler, that there are two types of preachers: those who have to say something and those who have something to say. Fr. Vianney had a whole Gospel to announce. He spoke frequently of God’s merciful love for us and our response in faith, God’s presence in the sacraments and our receptivity, God’s desire to remain united to us throughout our life and our need to remain united to him to sanctify our actions, the beauty of the soul in the state of grace, the fruits of the Holy Spirit, the necessity and privilege of prayer, the happiness and joy of paradise, and the spiritual advantages of the cross. He didn’t shirk, however, from preaching on what people consider the “bad news”: the reality, ugliness and ingratitude of sin, the fact that by our sins we have chosen Barabbases of our own creation and crucified Christ, and the existence of Hell and the real possibility of being damned. He knew that without preaching on these unpleasant subjects, not only would his people be at risk of eternal separation from God, but they might also not appreciate how great and necessary is the good news announced and inaugurated by Christ. He never succumbed to the pastoral malpractice of failing to mention these distasteful subjects out of desire for human respect.
He poured himself totally into what he said from the pulpit. After an hour, he would descend the pulpit stairs so exhausted that the people of the parish encouraged him to moderate his predicatory zeal. He couldn’t help it, however. He preached with a passion that communicated that he realized that every homily may be his last and may be the last homily one or more of his people ever hear, so he refused to hold anything back. When some parishioners commented that he talked so softly when he prayed before the tabernacle but thundered at the top of his lungs each time he preached, he replied with a mixture of truth and humor: “When I preach, I speak to people who are either deaf or asleep, but when I pray, I speak to the good God who is neither deaf nor asleep!” The only way to plant the seeds in the Gospel in the hearts of those with hardened or rocky soil was through the impact of a loud hammer, he noted, and he succeeded in awakening his people from their spiritual slumber and selective listening.
Fr. Vianney did not seek to be “original” in the pulpit in terms of content. Often he quoted at length from the sermons and lives of the saints. What he did try to do, however, was to express, with sincerity and simplicity, the immutable truths of faith in new and original ways. Like the Lord Jesus who sought to teach the most sublime realities in terms that fishermen, vineyard workers and shepherds could all understand, so Fr. Vianney always sought to employ similar down-to-earth images that would make the faith intelligible. It worked. Overtime, the simple peasants of the village came to know the Christian faith so solidly, and live it so fervently, that fellow pastors and the Bishop of Belley were amazed.
The biggest impact from the pulpit of Ars was not so much the Curé’s words but the Curé himself. His whole life was a sermon that illustrated, amplified, and showed the beauty, truth and practicality of what he preached. The combination between his words and his witness helped lead his people to conversion and holiness and therefore made this self-professed ineloquent preacher with a shrill voice, bad memory and seemingly perpetual writer’s block, one of the most successful priests ever to mount the pulpit.